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Wow. My Twitter personality test site, Twanalyst, has been used 150,000 times since I launched it just four days ago! It’s all pretty overwhelming, especially as I’m  trying to concentrate on a shedload of ordinary work at the moment… Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s used it and helped spread the word.

I’m genuinely working on new features for it, and in fact although the personality thing is a bit of fun, I think the site will have serious uses to give it longer-term appeal. For one thing, it’s useful to see stats and a user profile all on one page anyway; in future I want users to see how their stats have changed over time. I’m also working on a system to suggest relevant users for people to follow. If you have more ideas, do let me know.

A single blog post by one person I admire greatly, John Crowley, about another, Coleridge, has brought back in a rush all the haphazard things I love about the latter (and it turns out I’ve written briefly about them both before here). Crowley quotes some of this passage:

You have not above 300 volumes to write before you come to it— & as you write perhaps a volume once in ten years, you have ample Time, my dear Fellow!— Never be ashamed of scheming — you can’t think of living less than 4000 years, & that would nearly suffice for your present schemes—/To Be sure, if they go on in the same Ratio to the Performance, there is a small difficulty arises/but never mind! look at the bright side always— & die in a Dream!

The “dear fellow” he is talking to is of course himself, mocking his own tendency to scribble endless ideas for books and other projects in his notebooks – something I can relate to dearly.

Here’s another quote from the same year, 1804, collected in Anima Poetae:

This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and filling the margins of Malthus. I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did I neglect it? Because I ought not to have done this. The same applies to the reading and writing of letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well worth a serious analysis, that, by understanding, I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm- and-oak-rooted. Is it love of liberty, of spontaneity, or what? These all express, but do not explain, the fact… From infancy up to manhood, under parents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our pleasures and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen because pleasant, and not originally pleasant because self-chosen) have been forcibly interrupted, and dull, unintelligible rudiments or painful tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all duty is felt as a command…

A time will come when passiveness will attain the dignity of worthy activity, when men shall be as proud within themselves of having remained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, whether in reading or in hearing or in looking, as they now are in having figured away for an hour…

His defensive stance on being allowed to dream is the tip maybe of an iceberg of agonies about his lack of output – but he still managed to outcreate most people, and much as some (far from all!) of his poetry is fantastic, I think it’s his prose which should be his lasting monument. He almost created a genre by himself – fragmentary reflections, allusions, digressions (all of which were what attracted him to Borges).

Some day I’d like to collect his thoughts of this kind into a ‘defence of dreaming’… But I probably won’t. And maybe that’s the point.

Vigornian has made some good comments about the whole social media/malarkey. I feel the urge to explain why I like Twitter so much.

The biggest reason for me is a slightly odd one: I’m obsessed with the idea of ‘formal constraints’ being a spur to creativity, hence an interest in crosswords, Oulipo, J-P’s “show me the way to go home” variations, etc etc. Having to write in 140 characters or less for me is a hugely liberating idea. I don’t use Twitter to keep up with friends per se – that’s what LiveJournal and Facebook are for (among other things) – though of course it’s great to see friends there, some of whom don’t use those other sites much or at all anyway. If you like, I use it to show off to strangers.

I have reasons for that, partly: I like creating oddball web quizzes and so on, and I’ve got plans for several Twitter apps that I hope could go viral. It’s a bit depressing to put it in such terms, but much of this is about marketing – I’m not interested in the whole “drive business with Twitter” tedium that’s everywhere, but I suppose I’m ego-brand building, which might lead to interesting work (I’m self-employed, remember?), but better still just leads to meeting interesting people. So, yeah, it’s all about me – but really that’s all about encountering all the myriad creative, interesting people out there I’ve never met before. I can gain an audience for my whimsies, and be the audience for others’.

Facebook is fantastic as a shared repository for friends’ experiences (tomorrow, I’m meeting a friend I haven’t seen for 15 years – thanks to Facebook); LiveJournal is best for discursive reflection and comment – but neither helps you meet new people much. I love LiveJournal because it’s all about writing, and that’s part of what I do in life; Facebook doesn’t offer much creative expression – other than the status update, which I loved until I found Twitter – so leaves me colder.

I also love the elegant simplicity of the Twitter concept. The way you connect to others through @ and to subjects through # is very simple, but has a lot of power (I’m not saying it’s without faults, mind).

Editor says he thinks Facebook would kill Twitter by allowing public updates. maybe he’s right, maybe he’s not – but I personally prefer the sites (as Cyclotronic says) to keep their separate strengths. Trying to be all things to all people might just end up being disappointing for everyone.

I like Twitter’s search facility: I find interesting tweets and people all the time through it, all well as skimming the thoughts of a zillion people. It’s like being telepathic. Many of those are dull as ditchwater, but with just 140 characters, gems shine out. Others on the web have written better than I can on how this “live search” concept is a big thing. It’s not Facebook that should swallow Twitter – it’s Google.

I couldn’t quite get all this into 140 characters.

Small edit: I should also have mentioned how useful Twitter is for news feeds, whether national or specific (eg BBC technology) – if headline writers are any good, you can get the gist, and lately (=baby) I’ve sadly little time to read full stories. Though I still prefer RSS feeds somewhat, as the timeline gets so cluttered.

Gosh. Years ago I did some subbing on The Lawyer. They ran an interview with Jack Straw, where da man was very grumpy: when he ordered a lackey to bring tea, he only ordered one cup. My headline was ‘One tea, no sugar’. (I think the pic of him might even have shown the tea – I have a copy somewhere.) Cos he was ‘no sugar’, right? I had to argue for ages to get them to keep it, ‘cos they didn’t get it. Eventually it stayed.

OK, so nothing very amazing, but I was Satisfied at the time. Today, I’ve just heard from a dear friend with an absurdly good memory that he met Straw today and they were discussing headlines. He told him mine – and Straw loved it, and then told it to the editor of The Guardian.

This is probably as famous as I’ll ever be.

There’s a reasonably interesting article here about how Twitter could bring Google to its knees (well, in some ways), but the best thing from it is this:

Today is an important occasion for me: it’s 10 years since I went self-employed. I’m dead chuffed that somehow I’ve blundered through all these years, slightly anxious about the year ahead (two clients falling off, one affecting some readers of this as they’ll know, the other alas my most lucrative in terms of pay-per-work; though in happier news at least two new clients secured and a possible Big New Project which would make everything much securer), and determined to carry on for as long as I possibly can, ie until I die. I’ve seen numerous people come and go in the self-employed arena, and very few seem to have the luck/disposition to stay a long-term course. I hope I do, but obviously we’ll see.
I think the two things that have made all this work for me are:
1. Diversifying. My disposition is to be an incurable generalist, and I’ve gradually persuaded people to let me do a variety of different stuff – I started as a writer, became an editor, then a designer, and now even occasionally a coder, and bluff my way through all four, thanks to some lucky opportunities, reliable contacts and I suppose some sort of facility for picking things up.
2. Loyalty. Although inevitably clients come and go, there are three or four people/organisations I’ve worked with from only about six months after I went freelance, and these people have been good to me – and hopefully I’ve been good to them too, sometimes putting business their way too, and trying to be dependable. This pays the bills, and allows time for doing other stuff as it comes up, and all the other daft stuff I get up to. I’m hugely grateful to these people, and the occasional boredom is a very fair price for years of work. Boredom, I think, is a factor in any job, and finding the right kind of tolerable boredom (at least if you have an attention span as piscine as mine) is a crucial strategy.

This year, as I say, I’m slightly anxious, but recently I’ve started looking around for extra work in a way I’ve not really done since I started – so it’s an exciting time for reboot, and a challenge to work out how to find new work (I have one particular new angle to help with that – more another time maybe). Luckily it’s driven by foresight rather than sheer necessity – so far.

Sometimes I think being a specialist is better than a generalist. So many people (writers, I’m mainly thinking of) identify an area of interest and nurture an expertise for which people then come knocking. Somehow that just isn’t me, so I’ll have to keep up this fly-by-night approach somehow instead. Wish me luck!

So, we did that thing, you know, where you take an ickle baby to church on Christmas Day. Unlike the carol service the other night, which we had to abandon after 20 minutes due to said ickle baby screaming his ickle bright red head off, he slept through it and all was well. We had a zillion people cooing over him. One dared to make some reference to the ickle baby Jesus. We winced.

Anyway, having sat next to two coughing old ladies swapping tales of their antiobiotics, I wasn’t dead chuffed about shaking their hands for the peace-be-with-you bit. However. It did give me a new theory about religion. It all makes sense now: religion has nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with epidemiology.

Shaking hands to share peace. Communion. Sharing the body and blood. It’s all about sharing germs. Your close-knit community of old shares its germs and raises its collective immune system. Except now we all only come together at Christmas. So steer well clear of the coughing old ladies.

In other news, we’re having Christmas just the three of us as a fambly [/Dickens]. Thanks to Louis this will almost certainly mean us eating in separate sittings like every other day. But anyway: thanks to a surfeit of Marks and Sparks vouchers I got in trade for some old mobile phones, our entire Christmas spread has cost us 82 pence cash. Beat that, Robert Peston!

MERRY CHRISTMAS, READERS!

As if having a baby wasn’t exhausting enough, the received wisdom on looking after the little blighter is a nightmarish minefield of theory and counter-theory. The chief debates are these:

1. ‘On demand’ vs ‘routine’. Theorists abound and create whole industries around their bestselling books. On the left, I give you attachment parenting: William Sears, Margot Sutherland et al. They say a baby should be given everything it needs when it wants it, and favour things such as co-sleeping (see below) and carrying them around everywhere in a sling. The debit side is that it can be very punishing on parents, and leaves their needs forgotten. On the right, the ‘controlled crying’ etc brigade, led by the dreaded Gina Ford, who advocates dividing your day into 10-minute chunks and forcing the baby to fit in with it, heedless of neurologists’ observations that night waking/feeding helps babies’ brain development.It’s notable that Sears has 8 children, and apparently Ford has… none. Tracy Hogg (‘the baby whisperer’) claims to tread a middle path, but is really a Fordite as far as I can discern.
2. Breast vs bottle. Paediatricians don’t seem to give a toss for the breast, and in hospital happily try to foist formula on anyone who isn’t producing milk, or whose baby is ill and needs extra feeding (we were lucky as Oxford has a ‘milk bank’ and a stern ward sister arranged for donated milk). Meanwhile midwives are ardent breastfeeding campaigners and it’s hard to get them to admit how miserable and gruelling it can be, or help you consider alternatives.
3. Dummy or no-dummy. Dummy use has been shown to be a preventative factor against cot death, but then again it can also lead to more ear infections, and in some babies seems to cause ‘nipple confusion’ making breastfeeding even more complicated than it already is.
4. Co-sleeping or separate room. Western cultures don’t like the former as it disrupts the mother-father relationship in bed, and there’s the fear of squashing the mite (though this is extremely rare unless alcohol or drugs are involved). There are potential cot death risks for either argument, and in practice most people have a cot next to their bed.

Oh, and a special note for Dunstan Baby Language, whose nice-little-earner-DVD identifies 5 different cries baby makes and claims that all their needs can be met by spotting them and responding appropriately. Yeah, right. (There does seem to be something in it – but babies need more than five things.)

There’s probably more I’ve temporarily forgotten, addled with sleeplessness as I am. Anyway: it’s all bloody depressing, and I suppose going with one’s intuition is as good as anything. Of all the books I’ve looked at so far, one called Fatherhood… The Truth, although somewhat melancholy, is by far the sanest I’ve read. It’s by Marcus Berkmann – yup, the one who used to write for Your Sinclair. Surely, surely, if you can program a Spectrum, you can raise a child.

has already broken the news (and spoilered my anecdote!), but I’m going to drone at you anyway…

The world won’t be the same without Ken Campbell’s drawling of the words ‘glossolalia’, ‘Neville Plashwit’ and ‘gastromancy’, and walking his dogs on the Walthamstow marshes.

Permit me to trot out a personal memory: and I were chatting to Ken (for it is he) in the bar before a show a few years ago and I speculated whether any of the material was the same as in the last show of his I’d seen. He replied in his remarkable nasal way: “As Newton said about Jesus, he was made of different stuff.”

As he said it, he was pathetically counting out dozens of pennies to see if he had enough for a drink, so I stepped in and got him one. It was, beloved readers, a coke. Ned Sherrin and Alan Coren never told stories like this, eh?

I can still remember some of Macbeth in Vanuatu pidgin thanks to Ken, and that’s a life skill to treasure – though remembers more than I do.

Actually, I’ve also stalked him along Green Lanes with another friend, but that’s another story.

I guess we’ll never get the History of Comedy Part Two now. Sniff.

Maybe if I keep working on my already prodigious eyebrows I can do the tribute act some day.

There’s an interesting article about G K Chesterton in the latest New Yorker (the article’s not online yet), which mentions in passing that GKC ‘must have influenced’ Borges – indeed he did. It sent me ferreting off to find some of the essays where Borges wrote about him, and I found one I hadn’t come across before, ‘The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton’.

Anyway, what caught my eye was Borges listing what he took to be the rules of classic detective fiction. Here they are (his words in italics, my comments afterwards):

A. A discretional limit of six characters.
B. The declaration of all the terms of the problem. This is basically Dorothy L Sayers’ ‘fair play’ rule – I’m sure I saw an essay of hers with a list of principles once, but I can’t track it down.
C. An avaricious economy of means. I’m not totally certain what he’s on about here (he only gives counterexamples, eg Conan Doyle regularly breaks B), though I think there’s a tone of Occam’s razor about it.
D. The priority of how over who. ie what happened is more interesting to deduce than who actually did it.
E. A reticence concerning death. (He adds that detective fiction’s “glacial muses are hygieve, fallacy and order”. I think he means it should be an elegant puzzle rather than a gore-fest.
F. A solution that is both necessary and marvellous. There’s only one solution, which makes the reader boggle – but has no recourse to the supernatural. Chesterton’s Father Brown is his model.

That was written in 1935 – only a few years after Ronald Knox came up with his ten commandments for detective fiction (1929) and SS Van Dine formulated his twenty rules (1929). (Side note to self: ooh, I must track down The Sins of Father Knox.)

Anyway, er yeah, not sure why I’m posting this – just interested me. I wonder if there are similar principles that make games work?