Now we are six

I started this blog six years ago today. My first post mentioned the analogue/digital continuum, Bertie Bucket (RIP), Haruki Murakami (see last post) and vodka. Well, what did you expect? Progress?

We Can Be Found Everywhere

Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland

Some of you may know of this already, of course. To others, this is news. If you have a glance over there at the right, you'll see the Writers of Mass Distraction icon. That's not just a neat decoration, by the way. That's the link to our group blog. Click on that, and it'll take you there.

The Writers of Mass Distraction is an imprint. We're a collection of independent writers who have formed something of a united front. We write in very different genres, but we share a similar twisted sense of humor. It started out as a group on Writers Digest, but has developed into something else. At our group blog, we take turns contributing articles on various aspects of the writing process. Some of them are blogs that we've written in the past that focus specifically on writing. Others are new blogs for the site itself. Most recently, Norma and I did a joint blog there on characters crossing over between authors. You can check it out right here. If you're not already following the group blog, by all means, do so. We're a lot of fun.

Aside from our group blog, the Writers of Mass Distraction can be found at other sites along the way, and I thought I'd point you to some of them.

Over at Facebook, WMD has two pages. The group page continues to grow as more people find their way to it, and we invite you to come check it out. And we also have an imprint page there for your consideration which we WMDers use for a more professional approach.

WMD has a presence at other sites as well. Over at LinkedIn, we've got a group. If you're active at LinkedIn, come on by and check us out.

Many of you have heard of Shelfari, the reader and writer site. I know some of the bloggers I follow and who follow me back are already over there. You can find WMD there as well.

And a lot of you have used Goodreads, no doubt. WMD has a group there as well. Come check it out, as well as the many other groups there. I've gotten to like the site.

Finally, I should mention Book Blogs. WMD has a group set up there as well. If you haven't checked out the site yet, it's very useful, and we'd be pleased to see you at our group there.

On a personal note, I'll likely be absent through the weekend, but I'm keeping up the effort to keep up with your blogs. Have a good weekend, and don't do anything I wouldn't do. Seriously.

The Gaddafi/Westlife memorial blog post

...and suddenly, when I really ought to be preparing light artillery to repel looters, something leaps unbidden into my head about a piece I wrote for Careless Talk Costs Lives, about going to see the LA band The Warlocks in some smelly back room in London, and how a drunk and/or mad man singing Eddie Cochran songs (or was it Hank Williams?) on the station platform on the way home seemed to act as a sort of digestif to the whole gig, and there were discursions about the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (both of whom had been called The Warlocks at some stage or another) and Beavis and Butt-head (who weren’t, so far as I know) and the article had 17 footnotes, and when they used it in the magazine, it appeared that the designer couldn’t really cope with that sort of thing, but in any case I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but while I’m in that frame of mind I try to find some songs by The Warlocks and they aren’t nearly as good as I remember, and I start to doubt whether the missing article was all that great in the first place.



Every time I use footnotes, it seems that there’s someone in the publishing chain who can’t cope. They cut them back, or shove them to the end of the book, or both. They really ought to read this article, by Alexandra Horwitz.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about the flooding in Bangkok. We’ve been untouched so far, but the run-off is expected to reach the canal nearest us in the next few hours. Our luck may well continue, but if in the event that it doesn’t, we have plenty of food, water, improving reading material and other necessaries, and also the advantage of a second storey if things do get damp down below. The most likely forecast is a few days of grumbling inconvenience at worst. And if the next blog post washes up on your shore in a bottle, think of it as part of the analogue revival I was talking about last week. But in the meantime, this is pretty damn fabulous:

My heart belongs to Dada

I seem to be stuck in a loop of post-literacy, my only creative impulse being to leach moderately amusing photos from other people’s Facebook posts (so thanks to the rum cove who goes by the handle Hegemony or Bust for these two). Is this what being on Tumblr is like?

PS: And, slightly perversely, a rather literate response to the above at Include Me Out.

Phil space

In Prospect, Philip Hensher reviews four recent collections of essays, and draws a distinction between writers who voice an opinion, and those who just write about themselves. Which is entirely sound, until we get to:

When a report on personal experience is not that well-written, not particularly unusual, and focused entirely on the state of the individual rather than the experience, we may conclude that the place for this sort of thing in the future is online, in an unpaid and largely unread blog.

Oh dear. I thought we’d dealt with this years ago. No longer is there an impermeable binary divide between mainstream media (well-paid, well-written, well-read, authoritative, influential) and blogging (amateur, sloppy, ignored, unreliable, impotent). Newspapers and magazines are shedding readers quarter by quarter, and as a result the amount of money available to pay writers is shrinking at a similar rate: Hensher writes for The Independent, so I rather suspect he knows all this only too well. Moreover, the notion that poorly-written, self-indulgent witterings about the banal minutiae of a writer’s personal life (occasionally leavened by a smattering of inane opinion unencumbered by any evidence of journalistic research) have no place in mainstream media would be a personal affront to any number of successful columnists, who appear to have based their entire careers on such a technique.

And of course this doesn’t just apply to print media. Howard Jacobson (another Independent hack, and the author of one of the collections that Hensher reviews) describes the existential crisis of a BBC radio producer in his most recent novel, The Finkler Question:

After more than a dozen years roaming the ghostly corridors of Broadcasting House in the dead of night, knowing that no one was listening to anything he produced – for who, at three o’clock in the morning, wanted to hear live poets discussing dead poets, who might just as well have been dead poets discussing live poets? – he resigned. ‘Would anyone notice if my programmes weren’t aired?’ he wrote in his letter of resignation. ‘Would anyone be aware of my absence if I just stopped turning up?’ Again he received no reply.

Hacky sack

I’m not really a journalist, you know. I mean, every now and then I do something that might loosely be defined as journalism, but ultimately I’m a bit of a dilettante. I’ve never done any real training (rather like Johann Hari, then) or taken any exams to prove my mettle; and I never quite got round the joining the union.

So I’m not really sure how it would affect me if Ivan Lewis’s proposal, that seriously misbehaving journalists should be struck off, were actually to end up on the statute book. I mean, the people who tend to get struck off are the likes of lawyers and doctors, proper professionals who have to ascribe to codes of ethical conduct. Is journalism in the same sort of zone? I would have thought that proper, trained, accredited hacks would rather welcome such a move, as it protects their jobs from the predations of cheaper, untrained wannabes, but it seems that very few of them have a good word to say about Lewis‘s proposal – possibly wondering whether certain indiscretions in their own professional lives might, under a new regime, provoke expulsion from inky-fingered Eden. In any case, the details are far too blurry: would struck-off journalists just be banned from working for newspapers? All print media? Broadcast as well? And how the hell could you stop them writing for an online product?

Talking of which, Italian lawmakers aligned with Silvio Berlusconi are trying to pass a clause that would enforce a right to reply for those who believe they’ve been defamed on a blog. The blogger would have just 48 hours to accept the submission, or face a potential fine of 12,000 euros. Which seems perfectly fair to me. If I’ve ever said anything horrid about you in nearly six years of blogging, please feel free to answer back in the receptacle provided. In Italian, though, naturally.

PS: Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust on why a registry of journalists is a silly idea; Hari’s editor, however, seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

Jiving us that we were voodoo

Sometimes people send me links to things, in the hope that I’ll mention them on the blog. Apparently they’re not terribly bothered whether I’m nice or nasty or indifferent about them, provided the product gets a mention. I will however take this opportunity to note that Anatomy of Norbiton is delightfully odd; and that High50 isn’t my sort of thing quite yet, thanks, although I did catch myself last night ranting about why people today are rubbish because they listen to Justin Bieber when they could be enjoying Marlena Shaw, so maybe I really should spend more time there. Oh, and I just got an e-mail to remind me to remind you that Rock’s Backpages will be 10 years old in November, but since that’s got some of my stuff on it, that’s hardly a disinterested plug.

A link, however, is just a link; every now and then someone sends me something analogue and meatyspacey. The estimable Howard Male, for example, who put my way a copy of his novel Etc Etc Amen. And I think the solidity, the realness of the book is what caught my attention, rather more than an e-book might have done. The author has had some copies made up through the auspices of lulu.com, but it’s fairly clear that this is just a means to an end: he wants a proper, old-school publisher to pick it up. And there are plenty of arguments to be had around that notion, and whether a book only becomes a book when a publisher says it is (and backs that up with hard cash) but we’ve been there, haven’t we?

Etc Etc Amen is a novel about rock music. Except that it isn’t of course, because plenty of people have attempted to write novels about rock music and failed: the best stab was, in my far-from-humble opinion, Nik Cohn’s I Am Still the Greatest says Johnny Angelo, but that’s another story, literally and figuratively.

The plot revolves around Zachary B, a glam rock star whose identity clearly owes much to David Bowie and Marc Bolan, but is specifically distinguished from either (Bowie lends him his Stylophone). He’s clearly clever and talented, but not as much of either as he thinks he is. Success makes him something of a petulant ponce; failure just makes him a self-pitying git. Male wisely  avoids attempting to render the actual process of music-making in fictional form, apart from a deliciously bathetic comeback gig in Trafalgar Square. He’s far more interested in those that feed off rock’s festering corpse: the journalist who gets too close; the eerily calm stalker; the fans who turn his slightest utterances into a religion. And this is where things get interesting.

The narrative, which boogies back and forth between London in the 1970s and Marrakech in something approximating the present day, is broken up by philosophical screeds expounding the KUU, the Knowing Unknowable Universe. It’s a sort of fundamentalist agnosticism, and I personally found its details eminently skippable, but then I gave up on the poetry in Pale Fire, so what do I know? That’s not really the point, though. Just as the nature of Zachary’s music is all but irrelevant, so is the content of the KUU. It’s the effect that each of them has on people that matters, the ability of rock and religion to persuade people to do bloody stupid things. It’s not necessarily an original idea (think of Bowie’s leper messiah) but Male is more convincing than most in persuading us that fandom can snowball into something bigger and worse: the climax is like the Jonestown Massacre choreographed by the Marx Brothers. And who’s to say that’s not feasible? People must have looked on the early Christians in a similar manner to the way we see those Bolan fanatics who gather at Barnes Common every September.

Male hasn’t written the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll novel, but then I don’t think anyone ever will. What he has done is to write one of the smartest, most knowing books about fandom since Nick Hornby’s early stuff. The text could possibly do with a modest trim, and there are a few typos here and there, but that’s what publishers are supposed to deal with, right? So, publishers – deal with it.

Quality control

Sean Adams, top banana at the splendid Drowned in Sound music site, yesterday tweeted thus:

Persnickety perfectionist comment posters unite! Donate to a fund for full-time sub-editors for websites you’re charged nothing to read...

Well, um, yes and no. It must indeed be deeply galling to devote huge chunks of one’s free time to an online project that has brought entertainment and information to hundreds of thousands of readers, none of whom have paid you a farthing for the privilege, and then have one of them point out that in the midst of a 7,000-word retrospective on the career of the big lad who looks like a farmer from Boyzone, the author uses “affect” when she really means “effect” and thus must be a bad writer who knows nothing of the big lad’s work and thus the whole site is entirely worthless. And Adams does hint at one of the dirty little secrets of mainstream media, the fact that plenty of people who appear to be Good Writers (whatever that may mean) probably wouldn’t be labelled as such if it weren’t for the assistance of subs and fact-checkers and other mostly anonymous troubleshooters. Their contribution to journalism is as great as that of plastic surgeons to Hollywood, and don’t you forget it.

Moreover, as budgets at mainstream media outlets get tighter, while at the same time the sheer volume of content required increases, the need for such quality control become more transparently obvious. Every few days, it seems, a local newspaper somewhere outsources its sub-editing function, and the result is never an improvement (except, possibly, on the balance sheet). And then there are those established papers that have jumped on the blogwagon, but don’t feel the need to extend the benefits of an editorial once-over to those who huff and puff under their brand identity. I do find it amusing that Toby Young, who has become a standard bearer for the Free Schools movement, still makes egregious grammatical errors on his Telegraph blog, which are only eradicated after readers (the digital ghostbabies of Simon Heffer, perhaps?) have pointed them out.

But at the same time, that shouldn’t be a permanent get-out clause for writers who don’t have big money behind them. Andrew Keen and his like sneer at bloggers and other one-person bands because they’re not Proper Journalists, even when they’re not trying to be Proper Journalists (which is, of course, different from Good Writers, but that’s another thing). However, that doesn’t mean that bloggers don’t have a duty to use language accurately and appropriately, and even more importantly, to get their facts right, and to respond graciously if someone points out a mistake. To shrug and say, “What do you expect? It’s only a blog,” is to do the haters’ work for them, and reinforces an us-and-them scenario in online media which should have been redundant five years ago. (And incidentally, I know that’s not what Sean Adams was doing. He was, after all, decent enough to let me write a piece for him a while back.)

OK, you persnickety perfectionist comment posters, tell me what I’ve done wrong.

Post about something other than the bloody riots (mostly)

Inspired by a notion of Annie Slaminsky:

"..."the offences of the night of 9 August ... takes them completely outside the usual context of criminality". [link] At what point will James Murdoch deploy the Top Gear defence, that it's just *banter*? @dickon_edwards Only one of them was the subject of a Chas 'n' Dave song, I believe. Books people claim as influences, without having read them: The Great Gatsby; Breakfast at Tiffany's. Cigarette makers sue over graphic warning labels [link] Does free speech include right *not* to say something? @Treepixie Nabokov on excellent form, I see :-) @StiffPigeon At least you took the trouble. Inciting acts of violence gets you four years? Well, Louis Walsh makes me want to punch his face in. Get your trousers, Lou... @jamescrabtree Let me guess... Criticises the rioters for their abysmal standards of grammar? @jamescrabtree Fourth Reich? Jesus, not even Nicholas Ridley was that demented. Tonight am going to a production of Carmen in a nightclub. If I don't drown en route. Lawks, if you haven't seen @rhodri's Bad Date Compendium... [link] Well, that was different. @aethelflaed Yeeees. In Thai. With binbags and a breakdancing terrorist. @aethelflaed Well I didn't, and i think I got an OK deal. @CathElliott For Su Pollard it's a lifetime.

Boxers, Briefs, Speedoes, And Going Commando

In the last few days, several of my blogging friends have been answering a certain challenge called the Under Where Challenge. This started over at Eves' blog The Desert Rocks, where she was answering the same kind of challenge from Laila Knight. The idea's simple: answer a series of questions about underwear, and see where it takes us. Already we've seen some blogs to answer this one, and others who are promising to do the same.

Mike Saxton
Christina Lucas
Donna Yates
Beth Muscat

These four bloggers, in addition to Eve, have already played along with the challenge. Among the rest of the gang of rogues and scoundrels I'm acquainted with who've been challenged are Norma, April, Mark, and Shelly. We're expecting answers, people!

Now, before the questions, I'll issue this challenge to a few extra bloggers to see what they can come up with, if they're willing to play along....

Scarlett and James  (rumor has it our alter egos will have lots of fun with this one)
Karla Telega
Erin Lausten
Don't Hate Hubby
Angry Parsnip
Talli Roland
PK Hrezo
The Happy Whisk

And without further ado... the questions.

1. What do you call your underwear/undergarments? Do you have any commonly used nicknames for them?

Boxers, of course, since that's what they are. I wouldn't give them nicknames, mind you. Sort of odd calling that pair over there "Nigel", or that pair "Lord Brutus Victorious" or that other pair "Dear God it's cold today, break out the flannels, you idiot!"

Ahem.

By the way, why do we call it a pair? It's one piece of fabric, damn it!

2. Have you ever had that supposedly common dream of being in a crowded place in only your underwear?

No, but I have had the occasional dream of being up on a rock face with only my climbing boots, the rope and harness, and my underwear on. Does that count?

3. What is the worst thing you can think of to make underwear out of?

Glass, of course... Poison Ivy would probably be worse. Yes, the poison ivy would be worse.

4. If you were a pair of panties, what colour would you be?

Psychedelic purple. The real question is... who would I be on?

5. Have you ever thrown your underwear at a rock star or other celebrity? If so, which one(s)? If not, which one(s) WOULD you throw your underwear at, given the opportunity?

Easy: Sarah McLachlan, who, of course, is a goddess. Though to be honest, I don't think she'd appreciate it. I could throw them at Courtney Love, who'd probably use it to distill some heroin.

6. You're out of clean underwear. What do you do?

In such circumstances, I must, naturally, go commando. I... probably shouldn't have said that, should I? Now everytime you hear me say I have laundry to do, you'll be wondering if the jeans or the shorts are the only stitch of clothing I've got on below the waist line. Answer: there's also the socks. Keep wondering.

7. Are you old enough to remember Underroos? If so, did you have any? Which ones?

What the bloody hell is an Underroo?

8. If you could have any message printed on your underwear, what would it be?

"If You're Reading These Words, We're Getting Lucky Tonight."

9. How many bloggers does it take to put panties on a goat?

Fifteen.

The real question is: how pissed off will that goat be if you're trying to slide panties onto it? And by extension, what fraternity are you a part of if they make you do that?

It’s all about meme meme meme

As AnnaLittleRedBoat suggests, the blogosphere isn’t – notwithstanding the haters – dead, but every now and then you do wonder whether it might be a bit kinder to whack it over the head with a shovel. (Whether or not it’s still social media or not I’ll leave to Patroclus.) Who remembers how it was in the olden days, like 2007 or something, when Amy Winehouse was always in the News of the World and we bloggers used to exchange memes? Well the dangerously brilliant and devilishly cute Annie Bookcrossing Slaminsky has deposited a new one in our collective digital lap. Feel free to pick it up and run with it:

1. Movie you love with a passion.
Casablanca. For all its flaws. Damn it, because of them.

2. Movie you vow to never watch.
That new Planet of the Apes thingy. The trailers seem specifically constructed to dissuade me.

3. Movie that literally left you speechless.
Festen. The whole audience stumbled into the light, as if we’d all been kicked in the face for the duration of the film.

4. Movie you always recommend.
Tampopo, because everyone who watches it feels hungry and frisky at the end, and they can’t decide which urge to satisfy first, which is a pleasant dilemma to have.

5. Actor/actress you always watch, no matter how crappy the movie.
A whole load of British character actors, especially those who were good at underplaying; let’s say Denholm Elliott. No, John Le Mesurier.

6. Actor/actress you don’t get the appeal for.
Jennifer Aniston. I don’t even get her hair.

7. Actor/actress, living or dead, you’d love to meet.
Orson Welles. Damn, that man could racont.

8. Sexiest actor/actress you’ve seen (with picture).

9. Dream cast.
The Misfits was a pretty good combination, although most of the actors had at least a toe in the grave.

10. Favorite actor pairing.
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Brainy sex.

12. Favorite decade for movies
The 1940s.

13. Chick flick or action movie?
Action movies can distract you from their essential crassness with a big explosion or the like. Chick flicks can only deploy yet more crassness.

14. Hero, villain or anti-hero?
Anti-hero. Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle.

15. Black and white or color?
Black and white; specifically, black and white films made from about 1960 onwards, when going mono became a conscious decision rather than a default position. (Whistle Down The Wind, The Manchurian Candidate, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, Branded To Kill, The Last Picture Show, Eraserhead, Manhattan, Down By Law, Clerks, Ed Wood...)

Your turn.

PS: Only just realised that I missed out question 11, which is:

Favorite movie setting

The Dali-designed dream landscape in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. I’m not a huge fan of Dali’s paintings, to be honest, but this makes me wish he’d done more set designs. 

Pants

In the midst of a stack of papers, including a 60-page radio script that has my name on the cover, but I’m damned if I remember writing it, I find the filleted remains of a 15-year-old cheque book. The first thing that strikes me as I flip through the stubs is how scrupulously I noted the payee, the amount, and often the product that was being paid for. I even carried over the resulting balance in my account. Apparently I was in the black as well, which is odd.

But some of these messages from the last century now conspire to baffle me. Who or what was JM Cave, and why did I pay him/her/it £1.50 for underwear? Even in 1996, that would only have bought a single pair of pants, surely? Did some unspecified mishap leave me in desperate need of boxers, but bereft of cash? Perhaps I’ve erased the memory of such a predicament from my mind.

And then I turn to the next stub: one of your English pounds to A. Mannion, for something identified as deliceuse. And then £1.20 to L. Hoggett for suicidal lemons and it suddenly all falls into place. These – Underwear, Deliceuse, Suicidal Lemons, R*E*P*E*A*T, All About D, Michael Bolton Looks Like A Potato and so on – were all fanzines. I sent cheques to people, perhaps with stamped addressed envelopes, and they sent fanzines back to me, fanzines full of earnest, whimsical, cute, bitchy, profound, tortured, confused prose about Pulp and Bis and the Manic Street Preachers and how John Peel was going to live forever. Some even had glitter on the covers. I even thought of starting one, went as far as putting a small ad in Select magazine, asking for demos, and some arrived, and most were rubbish, but the mag never quite happened. Bikini Machine, it would have been called. In many ways, Cultural Snow is the fanzine I never wrote. All that’s missing is the glitter.

Amina that most sincerely, folks

Following the revelation that Amina Arraf, a lesbian blogger in Damascus, was in reality Tom MacMaster, a straight, male American postgraduate student in Edinburgh (who had borrowed Facebook photographs, taken in Paris, of a Jelena Lecic, a Croatian woman living in London), now seems as zeitgeisty a moment as it could ever be to admit that I am not, as I  previously claimed, a straight, balding, grumpy British man who occasionally  writes about restaurants in Bangkok, but a celibate Belgian woman who runs a small hardware shop in Montevideo, Uruguay. I hope my readers will a) forgive me; and b) take note of the special offer we have this week on rawlplugs.

While we’re on the subject, though: who are you, really?

PS: Zeitgeist update: now the woman whose photos were hijacked has her own publicist.

PPS: And if fake lesbians are what floats your boat, here’s another.

Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel?

Andy Warhol, in addition to painting soup cans and movie stars, and making extremely long films, and getting shot, and generally being Andy Warhol for a living, was nominally the manager of the Velvet Underground in their early days. However, it’s probably fair to say that his duty of care to the degenerate art rockers was no more hands-on than his attitude to production of his art (which, once he’d had the idea, was often undertaken by his acolytes). In one interview around that time (1967-ish), he admitted that the band members didn’t actually get paid for their labours. “But how do they eat?” asked the journalist, aghast. “Um, well, they go to a lot of parties,” deadpanned Andy.

This came to mind a few days ago, when a marketing guy from one of the big riverside hotels in Bangkok asked me if, in my sometime capacity as a food journalist, I’d like to come over and sample the delights of the Italian restaurant there. I said I’d be delighted, but I wasn’t sure whether the usual outlets for my prandial witterings would be able to find space any time soon. “No problem,” he said. “If you could just give it a mention on your blog, that would be great.”

It all falls into place: Warhol had unwittingly created the model for journalism in the 21st century. Readers don’t want to pay for journalism, and advertisers are increasingly unwilling to subsidise it. The only way a hack without a private income can survive is on freebies, scraps from capitalism’s table (almost literally, in the case of food writing).

Two problems present themselves here. The first is that it gives an unfair advantage to those writers who specialise in the necessities of life, such as food and shelter and clothing. I have an image of emaciated literary bloggers desperately attempting to trade in their review copies with their foodie colleagues in the hope of getting a decent meal for the first time that week. That said, perhaps it might be a good idea if media were to focus on what people need more than what they can be persuaded to desire. [Thinks: Damn, does that mean nobody will want to send me free books any more?]

The other potential glitch is that the hacks might feel obliged to say only nice things about the products they’re being offered, since the alternative is starvation. But this has always been a problem under the old system, as publishers try to keep advertisers sweet, while also maintaining their hacks’ delusions that they’re morally pure seekers after truth, rather than enslaved rearrangers of the cultural slush. So it’s fortunate for me that the meal was most enjoyable (especially the whipped salt cod with avocado), and I have no hesitation in suggesting that Giorgio’s at the Royal Orchid Sheraton is very good and you should all go there, provided you tell them I sent you.

Thoroughly spoiled

Sorry if you’re getting bored with Doctor Who, and apologies also if you’re getting fed up with all these underclad women who’ve started populating my blog  – see previous appearances of Charlotte, Helen, Lily, some feet, etc, – hey I don’t make the rules – although of course the nipples-for-eyeballs transaction is purely abstract if Blogger enjoys another spectacular global brainfart – in which case I’ve already staked a preliminary claim over at WordPress, a bit like a Nazi in around 1944 trying to get his paintings out of Berlin – anyway, yes, Doctor Who – that’s Katy Manning, incidentally, who played Jo Grant, an assistant to the Third Doctor, in the early 1970s, but she usually wore more clothes – but yes, chief writer Steven Moffat has unleashed a fearsome diatribe – I think he was probably wearing clothes at the time – against people who leak plot details of the show before transmission:

It’s heartbreaking in a way because you’re trying to tell stories, and stories depend on surprise... Stories depend on shocking people. Stories are the moments that you didn't see coming, that are what live in you and burn in you forever. If you are denied those, it’s vandalism.

Is it really? Is that what stories depend on? There must be a literary equivalent to Godwin’s law, something along the lines of “As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Shakespeare becomes one” and if there wasn’t, there is now, and it shall be called Bradley’s Law, after the deliciously anachronistic Bardic scholar, but anyway – when people went to see Shakespeare’s plays, most of the time they knew what the story was going to be, who was going to die, who was going to get the girl and so on. Before him, the same was true of medieval mystery plays and, even earlier, Greek drama. It’s only in the past few hundred years that the unexpected has become a key element in fiction and drama – think of the Dickens fans in New York calling out to arriving ships “Is Little Nell dead?” – and that readers and viewers have really started to enjoy not knowing what happens next. Indeed, it’s become something of a marketing gimmick, especially for thrillers. Audiences at The Mousetrap and Psycho being entreated not to give the ending away, and TV shows as different as Dallas, Twin Peaks and The Killing being hyped on the basis of the identity of a murderer, successful or otherwise.

But although the revived Doctor Who has helped to recreate the notion both of event TV (it’s nearly six, got to get home for Who) and family viewing, we’re also in a cultural universe that is at the same time more atomised (I’ll watch Who when I choose, not with my family while we’re having tea) and more connected (but if I do watch it live, I’ll Tweet it at the same time). The notion of an entire nation simultaneously gasping as River Song is revealed to be the bastard love child of The Master and K9 belongs to another, happier, less wibbly-wobbly time. And in any case, many of those for whom  stories – according to Moffat – depend on surprise then go and watch the same stories over and over again, having bought the box set. For all the Spoiler Alerts Moffat can try to deploy, he’s fighting a losing Time War. Just ask anyone who’s tried in recent weeks to protect his dignity with a superinjunction.

That said, I only got round to watching the first episode of The Killing last night, so shush, OK?

Horny topless smoking Lily Allen (with optional lesbians)

The excellent James Blue Cat recently offered his readers an amusing tale of bad parking, a passive-aggressive note, two sexy lesbians and some rope. In fact, he only guessed that the two sexy lesbians were thus inclined, and I suggested that he only cast them as such in order to drive more prurient traffic to his blog. I was half-joking, I think, but the recent analytical bluebells and dogwhistles that came with my Blogger upgrade (it feels as if I’ve just managed to receive BBC2 at the point when everyone else is getting used to HDTV) have reinforced my gut instinct that my most popular blog posts in recent months were not those in which I ruminate on the Baudrillardian self-deception of modern culture, let alone deconstruct the primal weirdness of Asian street politics, but those that have saucy pictures in. The big eyeball magnets were posts that featured: a saucy picture of Helen Mirren; some saucy pictures of Charlotte Rampling, Anita Pallenberg and Princess Margaret; a saucy picture by (not of) Jack Vettriano; and a picture that may appeal to any reflexologists who need to get out more. (The only exception to this is Monday’s post, which benefited from an inevitable upsurge in interest about Osama, and an element of scepticism about the official line. Sorry to anyone who felt short-changed when their frenzied Googling brought them to a 40-year-old TV clip, but is it beyond the realms of possibility that the Dr Who community and the wacky conspiracy theory community might enjoy a certain overlap? Apparently not.)

Rubber masks and analogue synths aside, it’s not even that the punters prefer that I write about saucy ladies to writing about more serious, cerebral matters. Essentially, they aren’t really bothered what I write or whether I write at all; they just wanted to look at the saucy pictures, none of which were my own work, and none of which, I’m ashamed to admit, I credited properly (except of course for the Vettriano image, and I only mentioned him because I was discussing the essential badness of his art). I recently sighed at the explanation for Tumblr’s success (“With blogging you have to write, and this is just images.”) but now it seems that not only is writing a lost cause, the masses can’t even be bothered to read, beyond a few words that necessarily include promises of sex and celebrity. Of course, if you don’t agree, despite the fact you came here because you wanted a good look at horny topless smoking Lily Allen, please make your displeasure known in the comment box.

In short, where James went wrong was to talk about ropey sexy lesbians while failing to include a picture of them. Fair enough in this instance, you may think, as he never actually saw the ropey sexy lesbians, and doesn’t really know that they existed. But he’d unwittingly created an opportunity: he could have identified them as Kate and Pippa Middleton, with specific reference to the latter’s bottom. Because if a toxic casserole of sex, celebrity, photography and lèse majesté (with a bit of dead terrorist as an amuse-bouche) doesn’t save blogging, I don’t know what will.

Shame about the boat race

Several years after everybody else, and at a stage when proper old-fashioned amateur blogging appears to be pretty damn moribund, I’ve finally got round to tweaking the look of Cultural Snow. Words such as “Titanic” and “deckchairs” come to mind; it’s as if Stockport County had chosen this point in the season to design a new away strip. Further tweaks are necessary and inevitable, such as resuscitating the blog roll. But do let me know what you think.

White suit man

I was offered some work the other day; it would have involved covering a forthcoming election in Asia, which sounds terribly exciting, all very Graham Greene, sipping a whisky and soda while waiting for a sweaty man who smokes cheroots and is found stabbed to death on the bidet of my hotel room at the end of Chapter 7. Proper foreign correspondent stuff; and bear it mind I spend much of time in an eco-system where foreign correspondents are at the top of the pyramid, and everybody wants a little of their raffish glamour to rub off on them (which is why most outlets of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club are packed with people who write press releases for exhaust pipe manufacturers, while the foreign correspondents themselves are out corresponding).

Except that rather than the chance of being a proper fo-co and reporting coolly and objectively (with just a dash of the aforementioned raffishness) about the election, the task proffered to me was to write a blog that would be favourable to the incumbent who – according to his Wikipedia page at least – is something of a dodgy geezer. The offer, I should stress, came not from a conventional news organisation, but a ‘strategic communication’ company, which should have alerted me. Rather than spend several days weighing up the ethical ins and outs of the thing, I just said no thanks within minutes.

But why exactly did I turn it down? Well, the fact that the guy for whom I would have been shilling is of dubious probity certainly entered into it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean my motives were entirely pure and selfless. I’ve been watching all the people who’ve done business with Gaddafi over years furiously trying to rewrite history, and none of them comes out of the mess looking good. So maybe it’s not that I didn’t want to help a crook; just that I didn’t want it widely known that I was helping a crook. My biggest fear was getting found out. Complicity is bad; embarrassment is worse.

I could, of course, have gone in on the pretext of doing the job, and then blown the whistle on the whole story, thus provoking anguished think pieces on the dangerous grey area between journalism and political PR and perhaps a sarky footnote in Private Eye. But the person who asked me to do it is an old friend, so he’d have suffered for my high-minded subterfuge. Moreover, whereas my moral courage ebbs and flows, my physical bravery is a tiny, stagnant puddle. While the guns and grenades and catapults were tearing big holes in Bangkok last year, I was at home in the suburbs, drinking tea and following the whole thing on Twitter. If I’d taken the job, I might have been duffed up, or worse. I’ve read The Last King of Scotland, you know; these things never end well.

But really, at the heart of it is the fact that I’m very bad at lying, at pretending, especially at feigning enthusiasm. (On the other hand, today of all days, maybe I’m making up all of the above, even the bit about the bidet, like Annie Rhiannon does when she pretends to go to Tibet and America and Wales.)

In cyberspace no one can hear you yawn

Jay Rosen at SXSW on Saturday, trying to heal the rift between bloggers and legit hacks, announced: “It’s one internet. The news system now incorporates the people formerly known as the audience.”

Which is all well and lovely, but if the audience isn’t the audience any more, who are we talking to?

...things that people don’t need to have

It seems pretty much that the only people who visit my blog these days do so on the offchance they might get to see Charlotte Rampling, possibly naked, or at least in some degree of under-dressed rudeness. This state of affairs was starting to distress me, but now I’ve found the ultimate justification: it’s Art!

(Courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland website; via One Fine Weasel)