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Woo! Woo! My Harry Potter nonsense may be on the Today programme tomorrow (probably after 8.30)! Just had a call from them!

(Edit: BBC’s extract is here.)

Inspired by this morning’s discussion on Today between Prof. John Sutherland and Will Self about the merits or demerits of Harry Potter, I’ve taken the liberty of imagining a new Harry Potter story written by Self. You can listen to it here.

HARRY POTTER AND THE VISCERA OF KITTENS

By Will Self

Harry’s scar, like the brand of an adulterer, throbbed as he looked on with distaste at the shell-suited proles who fed him and longed for boarding school. As some weak, flapping archetype flew through the window and summoned him to Hogwarts, he cantered out onto Privet Drive in all its Ballardian glory with relief. He leapt onto the Knight Bus, only to see its ritually, colonially decapitated Jamaican helmsman steer it directly towards another coming in the opposite direction. “Wizard prang,” said Harry.

As luck would have it, in this Saturnalian world where children wield the wands heedless of Freud, the buses merely merged, and Harry found himself in the company of Ron and Hermione. Hermione’s grotesquely enlarged intellect pulsed as she summoned a spell to take them directly to Hogwarts in the blinking of a bat’s eye: Congestion chargium.

On the wuthering heights of the Hogwarts bridge of sighs, Voldemort dangled the flopping remains of Dumbledore over the edge of the abyss.

As the triumvirate arrived at Gryffindor, offered the password to the animated image on the wall and entered the warm incubator of their leatherine protectors that was the common room, they noticed an eerie silence in the place and sensed that darkness had come early this Christmas.

On the table was a baby cat, pinioned with a letter knife and accompanied by a note, which simply read: “Open me at the close. Sirius.” Ron’s face twisted into the rictus of a tractor-mangled squirrel in echo of the kitten’s plight. “It’s no good,” said Hermione as if suddenly blessed with the facility to ratiocinate, “we’ve got to do what must be done.”

Harry took the knife and weilded it from nose to tailtip, spilling the warm entrails in a single movement as swift as a Nimbus 2000. There upon the table, in the calligraphy of giblets, the augury was clear.

The trio flew at once to the bridge where Harry’s tritely externalised darker self held sway, and chanted together the incantation inspired by the kitten’s last sigh: Applicatum myxamatosis! The eyes of Tom Riddle, cypher, grew rheumy – but so did Harry’s as they merged into oblivion together.

The end.

A few weeks ago someone suggested to me what’s needed to make people really wake up to climate change and the root-and-branch alterations to daily life it will inevitably demand is a new religion. I think, in a sense, we already have it.

Last night we went to Tom Dyson‘s excellent talk on climate change, which neatly summarised the main issues, tackled some of the criticisms, and advocated personal carbon rationing. Sitting there in Ramsden Memorial Hall, a beautiful converted barn with ancient beams gnarling across the ceiling, not to mention aided by the local brewery’s imaginative stimulant, I half found myself back in the 1740s. The occasion reminded me (I say ‘reminded’ – I mean, I’m getting on, but I’m not 300 years old) of the early days of Methodism, where small village groups would assemble to hear the new message.

The meeting had a mixture of locals of all ages, plus a bunch of us loyally going to swell Tom’s crowd, where most were already receptive or indeed converted to the message. In the Q&A afterwards, a few theological niceties, as it were, were discussed; and there were only one or two voices of dissent, notably one from a chap who thought the whole thing was highly suspicious, but nevertheless led perhaps one of the least carbon-consumptive lives of us all. I bet John Wesley met people like him too – people already living ‘the Way’ but deeply sceptical of imported justifications for it. One or two in the audience were perhaps even leaning towards the temperance movement in spirit.

Ever since the age of 12 when I harangued our school chaplain with unanswerable questions, I’ve been on the side of unbelief. But now, suddenly, that seems to have changed. All round the country, likeable lay preachers such as Tom are spreading the word; further afield, there are charismatic prophets such as George Monbiot (let’s leave aside Al Gore’s messianic tone for now). The difference, of course, is that the ‘revealed truth’ underpinning this belief system is a set of 928 scientific papers, and not a book written by a motley collection of marketeers a couple of millennia ago.

(I’m going to stop now as I’ve just been invited to expand on this theme in a paid article!)

So, I’ve finally finished Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop. I is a strange loop. I am a strange loop.

This is something of an achievement for me as it’s the first time I’ve actually read all of one of his books – I’ve read most of Gödel Escher Bach, Metamagical Themas and Le Ton Beau de Marot, but never quite all of ‘em. Anyway, that’s enough italics for now.

It’s a funny sort of book – essentially it rehashes the core argument of GEB, and forms a defence of epiphenomenalism, which is not exactly a new position nowadays (and GEB itself was written in the late 70s). It’s as much an ‘intellectual autobiography’ as anything, bringing in many personal tales, particularly the death of his wife, albeit with a big and slightly confusing chunk in the middle about Gödel’s revolutionary overturning of Bertrand Russell’s endeavours to bolster the foundations of mathematics. DRH makes the same points over and over again, sometimes superfluously: that we work at the abstract level of patterns and defining physical phenomena in terms of tiny little particles is no hope in our quest to understand ourselves – but that ‘we’ emerge from those nonetheless; and that consciousness is a ‘strange loop’ of self-reference inevitable when a pattern-obsessed organism has a sufficiently broad range of categories identifiable by it.

Although this is far from as dazzling a book as GEB, and is really an oldish man now saying ‘yes, but you weren’t listening the first time’, the way he tells things – anecdotes, analogies, allegories – is what makes him so much more interesting than most ‘philosophers’. (Though next time the publishers really ought to stop him thinking he can design the book as well – the pictures in here are pretty bad.)

Let’s hope he doesn’t get interviewed by Jim Naughtie, though, who was bumbling his way through whether a restored Cutty Sark is still the real one this morning…

FREEDOM2CONTROL™ ROLLS OUT CROWD MANAGEMENT SERVICES TO UK

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a truly accurate figure for the numbers of people demonstrating outside your facility or threatening law and order – or even automated gathering of their identities?

Now you can, with CrowdCount™ and other products from the Freedom2Control™ range which have taken the US by storm and have just been launched in Great Britain.*

CrowdCount™ uses a patented combination of thermal imaging technology and specially developed software to provide the licensee with completely precise information about the number of people in a group. The technology has already been licensed to the British Police and is now available to businesses.

Rory Ferguson, CEO of Freedom2Control™ (UK) explained the advantages: “Studies have shown that protest groups overestimate the volume of their support by an average of 14%, but their figures nonetheless get promoted in the media. With CrowdCount™ your business can restore the balance of truth. Imagine misguided activists are targeting your chemical plant and attracting unwanted media interest – now you can disempower these people and prevent the spread of their misinformation.”

The technology has already benefited many businesses and private law enforcement organisations in the United States. Suzette Wilkins, COO of Biotic Reassignment Services in Wichita, KA offered this glowing testimonial: “We had a few disturbances from extremists who don’t understand the good our company is doing for both humans and animals, but with CrowdControl™ and the beta of CrowdRoll™, we were able to neutralize the threat to our operability.”

CrowdRoll™ – to be launched as CrowdLister® in the UK – is a partner package which uses the latest DNA fingerprinting technology to provide details of the individual participants in unwanted civil action. CrowdLister® is undergoing trials in Scotland and is expected to be available by this fall.

NOTES FOR EDITORS:
1. Rory Ferguson, CEO of Freedom2Control™ (UK), is available for interview by arrangement with Toni or Jak at Plangent Media on 020 30 4918 2320 or SkypeBayMS™ plangent01.
2. Freedom2Control™ (www.freedom2control.com) provides security and asset positioning services to business and government agencies in the United States and is based in Bennington, MI. Freedom2Control™ (UK) is a wholly owned subsidiary operating from Milton Keynes II.

* Not available in the United Republic of Ireland due to legal restrictions.

Commuting has given me time to read James Attlee’s Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey. I can’t praise this book highly enough – it’s a psychogeographical meander down Cowley Road, in much the same vein as Iain Sinclair’s explorations in London Orbital and Edge of the Orison, though undertaken in a different way. Attlee adopts the same elegiac tone as the crushing monotony of theme park Britain tries to bulldoze anywhere with real character and vibrancy. He lacks Sinclair’s poetic (or obscurantist) touch, but it’s a very enjoyable read. Attlee approaches his various excursions and incursions along Cowley Road in the spirit of a pilgrimage, and his text is informed and inspired by interesting background reading from, among others, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The history of the car plants, refugees, the Bartlemas leper hospital, drunks in the graveyard, the famous porn shop, takeaways and council meetings – it’s all in here.

I don’t miss living in London, but sometimes I miss London walks, and exploring its palimpsest of history. This is the first time a book about Oxford has given me the same thrill, and I know there’s much more to explore. It’s interesting that he avoids the sometimes stagnant and certainly overexplored history of central Oxford, and heads eastward. If you’re not sympathetic to this sort of project, Attlee could perhaps come across as a smug art-world type at times, but that would be unjust. This is a fantastic and inspiring book.

On Easter Monday, we set out on a pilgrimage on our own, taking the bus out to Chipping Norton to walk the route of the river Glyme as closely as possible from there down to where it joins the Evenlode at Woodstock. It makes for an idyllic walk – though around 14/15 miles, mind. The Glyme begins as a gentle stream alongside the mediaeval Saltway (got this one in your salt facts, ?) and meanders through some truly peaceful and surprisingly hidden countryside, despite the A44 not being far away. The Saltway, lost mediaeval villages, mills and waterfalls and absurdly pretty hamlets all feature along its course. In its middle life, the Glyme gets pretentions – as well as being dammed into a small lake at Old Chalford, it then runs through no less than three grand estates – Kiddington, Glympton and Blenheim (where, as at Kiddington, it forms an ornamental lake). At Radfordbridge, we passed the beautiful spot where my Mini got stranded the other week, and met some puppies. We were too footsore to see it through Blenheim to Bladon, where it joins the Evenlode, but we did follow it pretty closely all along. Spring is making me joyously happy. (Anyone wanting to see pictures and the route can download a 290K PDF here.)

On Sunday Brighty and I did half of the ‘Kidlington Circular Walk’ – a badly signed, mixed bag of a walk that even Iain Sinclair might baulk at. Lowpoints include negotiating the A34 and associated tributaries, but of course there was much to celebrate, too – most particularly the slightly spooky but impressive Elizabethan/Jacobean pile that is Water Eaton Manor. My subsequent researches reveal that from the late 1920s it was owned by Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, director of LSE for two decades and a noted eugenicist. His son Nicholas (born at the manor) clearly rebelled however. He died in 1998, having been a pioneer of the wholefood movement (he founded Neal’s Yard). Some gems from his obit in the Independent:

- “He constructed a flat in Edith Grove, west London, so that ducks in the pond outside could swim under a plate-glass window and into his living room”
- “he slept in a papier-mache ‘cave’”
- “The flat became a centre for hippies and anyone with new alternative ideas. These he began to record and the first edition of Altemative London was brought out in 1970… Further editions followed until a friend meditating in front of a candle inadvertently burnt the flat down.”
- at Neal’s Yard “he designed an imaginative rooftop garden and a flat where he slept in a suspended egg and arranged a padded ledge for guests”
- “Nicholas Saunders spent the last years of his life investigating the drug culture and particularly Ecstasy”
(You don’t say?)

Not sure who owns the manor now, but Nicholas’ son Kristoffer runs a nightclub in Denmark. Sir Alex would roll in his Aryan grave.

It’s always fun dandling binary oppositions on the knee. I submit to you that much of modern cultural history is permeated with a dialectic. First, there was religion vs science – where the former was the leviathan trying to defend its territory ruthlessly; second the ‘two cultures’ of art vs science, with the latter partly adopting religion’s role. Now, I suggest, the two cultures are copyright vs copyleft. This latter pairing is something I’m obsessed with.

Margaret Atwood has become a persistent advocate for a book called The Gift, by Lewis Hyde, and thanks to her it has been issued for the first time in Britain only this year (it was originally published in 1979). She’s certainly done more good this way than through her fatuous and insulting LongPen, that’s for sure.

It’s a stunningly thoughtful book, and provides an anthropology of the ‘gift economy’. The first half looks at the history of gift economies around the world; the second, at the specific artistic careers of Whitman and Pound. Most interesting of all perhaps are the conclusion and new afterword. The central question is: how can the artist (and for this read anyone who is creative – scientific endeavour is part of it, too) relate to the marketplace? How can ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ coexist without one destroying the other in some way?

We’re trapped between the Scylla of Disneyfied, Hollywoodized, DRM-bound copyright, with owners of mass-market artistic output obsessed with controlling its consumption, and the Charybdis of the freeform, open-source, Creative Commons world of copyleft where it’s hard to make more than a few groats. Perhaps this penury doesn’t matter. But to someone like me, a freelancer who relies on selling time and output for money, it’s hard not to think about it. I’m not being paid to pontificate here (and rightly so, no doubt!), but people who write their blogs in work time are being paid, you know.

There are so many interesting gift economies at work. A random sample:
- open-source software
- blogging. writes here that: “I can be fairly confident that three figures of people read anything I choose to write. That’s better than a lot of plays… Sure, I don’t make any money from this, but I do get paid in kind, when I read the journals that all my interesting friends write…” (My emphasis.)
(Though he chooses to overlook that a huge amount of the blogosphere consists of maundering self-pity and passing on memic dreck, neither of which I’m immune to myself, I confess.)
- Wikipedia
- BitTorrent
- artistic output of all kinds – it was lovely to receive ‘s gift of Wasted Epiphanies
- NaNoWriMo
- Freecycle
- recycling, for that matter
- and countless more, such as the advice we share with friends. uses his training as a commodity for his employer, but as a kindly gift when we raise a legal issue in our blogs.

Sometimes I feel lost in the middle: I run two commercially disastrous (or at least unremarkable) businesses with a friend, for example – though our lack of wholesale commitment to them probably explains a lot. Realistically, both Reverb and Thoughtplay belong more in the gift economy realm. For the first, we have tried to support new authors, pumping in our own money to little gain, though some good things have come out of it all for some of them. For the latter, What Should I Read Next? makes a trickle of cash, which means we’re only half-way to breaking even after a year – but it has also provided at least passing entertainment for hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of them loyally returning again and again. It’s a good feeling. The problem for us commercially is that we lack the technical skills to do stuff like this without paying people to do the coding – which means we either seek funding, or we don’t do it. Our speciality is ‘ideas’, which are more copyleft than copyright. All these things take time, which has to be funded somehow.


Lewis Hyde’s only answer to how “modern artists have resolved the problem of their livelihood” is threefold, and holds no magic surprises:
- take a second job
- find patronage
- sell your work.

For all my hopes that Paul and I could have supported new authors on to success, and in the context of the zillions of manuscripts we had to reject, I can’t help but think authors expect too much: they all think they have a divine right to commercial support, just because that’s happened for a mere 200 years (they certainly don’t realise that even most successful authors have to work all the time to eke a living, and only a tiny number of soaraway bestsellers buck this). But there’s so much crap out there. It makes me wonder sometimes whether the much-demonised ‘vanity publishing’ isn’t actually a damned good idea – or Lulu is the best model, and traditional publishers with deep enough pockets should look there for the few rising stars and then snap ‘em up.


In the course of vomiting all this out, it occurs that maybe Google is evil after all. Its business model seems to rely almost exclusively on commodifying copyleft, whether it’s selling advertising on the back of search results, themselves an amalgamation of other people’s content, or putting up the world’s books, or getting users to improve its image indexing. True, it ‘gives back’ by letting us all search for free. But who’s to say that won’t one day change? On the other side of the coin, Google has enabled us humble oiks to monetise our websites – but AdSense has become so utterly ubiquitous that maybe its days are numbered. I do find it surprising that enough people click on the ads to sustain this economy in the first place – but then again this is the same world where supposedly 10% of spam is clicked on. Go figure.


What the hell am I venting all this for? Ach, I dunno, I’m just interested. And I’m maybe at a crossroads in life. Having spent eight years freelancing, I wonder at my age how long I can get away with my random sort of life. But also: it’s great, and I love all the different tangents that I’m free to explore. So, if I can continue to blunder some sort of living as I’ve done so far, there’s much to celebrate. Here’s hoping I can.

(Actually, all this is probably me arguing myself round to offering to do ‘s dad’s murder mystery for free!)

Copyright vs copyleft. I want to know what you think. You read books and watch films and devour story arcs. Are you always happy to pay for them? Under what conditions? Is it your right to watch series three of Lost when it suits you? Who pays the piper? Do creators expect too much? Should they abandon the world of copyright and go left, seeking remuneration in other ways? If so, what ways? And how do you catch a squirrel?

This is far and away my longest post ever, and doesn’t have the point I thought it might have done when it started. Ah well. So it goes.

So, as the web already knows, Wired has printed a loada six-word stories, and Slashdot has fostered loads more.

I give you:

Death became her. Resurrection angered her.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel stepped from the –

Birth. Death. Sold sandwiches in between.

Red-hooded girl defeats transvestite wolf.

I. Angry Achilles avenges Patroclus, killing Hector.
II. Odysseus has adventures getting home (uncuckolded).

a. Hamlet dithers after uncle murders Dad.

b. Never never trust your daughters (sometimes).

c. Magician trains monster. Avenges family. Retires.

d. Witches correctly predict Scottish royal bloodbath.

“Policeman” revelation spoils long-running play.

Plane crash. Mysterious island. Interminably unexplained.

POISONED KEYBOARD KILLS HEADLINE WRITER SHOCKE…

So, c’mon people, let’s have yours.

Based on his talk at the Sheldonian in Oxford on 20th October 2006, here is a summary of George Monbiot’s arguments for achieving the necessary turnaround in otherwise disastrous climate change within our lifetimes, put here to spread the message and encourage debate.

A. REDUCE ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND INCREASE EFFICIENCY
1. Carbon rationing. Don’t use taxation, use rationing to give everyone a quota and make it fairer across rich and poor; in fact, it would help redistribute energy wealth, as the rich can buy the extra carbon credits they need from people who don’t use as much energy as they do or want to. (One person in the audience argued for caps at the source of energy production instead, but GM sensibly said that this wouldn’t give people a motive in their daily lives (a) to campaign for more energy efficient products in the marketplace (b) to reduce their own energy use in creative ways – personally, I think both routes might be needed.)
2. Efficient homes. Come on, you know this stuff: loft and cavity wall insulation, low-energy light bulbs, etc.
3. Energy transport. Use DC rather than AC to transfer power as its more efficient over long distances.
4. Look to yourselves. Yes, yes, China has a huge, growing and increasingly demanding population – but we in Western Europe and the US are still far and away the cause of the problems at the moment.

B. USE SUSTAINABLE WAYS OF PRODUCING POWER
1. Offshore wind power on the continental shelf on a massive scale. Monbiot controversially (to environmentalists) dismisses micro-scale wind and solar power, on the basis that, well, it’s overall impact on the problem is going to be diddly squat, unless we have wind turbines on our homes that are dangerously massive. (Though he did concede to the greenies in the audience that of course there’s no harm in people doing it to some extent.)
2. Solar power in the Sahara – the east-to-west axis of the desert provides sun at some point all day long. (He was less clear on the issue about who gets this power – Africa? Or us? – except to suggest…)
3. A global electricity grid to distribute this stuff.
4. Use hydrogen for heat – domestic boilers can burn hydrogen rather than oil or gas. Much of the technology is there, and it is already transported across huge distances for some industries.

C. CHANGE TRANSPORT POLICY & EXPECTATIONS
1. Drive electric cars. The technology is there, and the battery problem is easily oversome: he cleverly proposes that the existing network of filling stations becomes a network of battery-charging stations instead, where your battery is swapped out for a charged one, and on you go. Charge the batteries at night. (Nice – though he doesn’t explain how you could bootstrap such a system without wholesale, dramatic change in government policy…) Oh, biofuels are a disaster: to use them on a large scale takes crucial food-producing land away.
2. Coach networks. We have motorways already, so let’s use them intelligently. Move coach stations from town centres to motorway junctions, and have express services running up and down the Mways all the time; then use local networks to connect to the coach stations. (A statistic: the M25, at full capacity with current average car occupancy, and traffic flowing at 60mph – clearly impossible on the M25! – can accommodate 19,000 people; a coach system would manage 250,000.)
3. Stop flying. The Monbiot headline: we need to stop flying by 90%. He began his talk in awareness of ‘love miles’ – the long-distance journeys we feel morally obliged to take to visit friends and family. His argument is basically that we have to wake up to a ‘new morality’: where our right to travel like this is seen as inferior to our right to survive and not be destroyed by climate change. If we want to fly, we need to save up our carbon credits over a long time.

He’s a convincing speaker, though it’s hard to see how these suggestions can all be begun to be implemented within the 10-year timescale that he says is urgently upon us, given the intransigence of governments, and large corporations’ enthusiasm for clinging to their current profit streams. He throws it at us to motivate political change.

But can we? How, realistically? What do you think?