Academia

Having elected to pursue my MA part-time I’ve only actually taken two modules in the last twelve months: Postcolonial Quest Literature, and Modernist Poetry. The former was interesting, and though I felt it leant too heavily on the Grail Quest as an organising principle (it was hardly present in some of the texts), the course as a whole remains memorable for introducing me to one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. As if to balance that out it also exposed me to one of the worst films I’ve ever sat through: Jane Campion’s The Piano!

Modernist Poetry got off to a rocky start when I got a bit of a wake-up call about my level of poetry knowledge in general. The majority of the class seemed more clued into poets, schools, terminology etc. which I obviously had a blind spot to. The module was intended to fill in a gap in my knowledge of modernism as a whole, and I came away from it very happy. It remains to be seen what grade my paper for this gets, but I was relatively content with the work I put in.

At the time of writing I’m one week into the Postmodern Fiction module which, alongside the dissertation next term, will round out my MA. As mentioned above I’m also putting together PhD proposals and thinking about what might be next academically.

Work

I’ve enjoyed the changes brought to my role at the Marlowe Theatre by the opening of the new building. It’s been interesting to be part of a team working out hoe to fit into and use a new space, and (most of the time) it’s great to see people enjoying the place for the first time.

Going back to my old job running the Box Office at Riverside was a strange experience at first, but one which went pretty smoothly and in the end seemed to fly by. It was nice doing a little encore, getting to work with some old friends again, and realising that I’d actually quite missed the place.

Arts & Culture

Movies of 2011 struggled to top my birthday trip to Curzon Soho for Black Swan. I very much enjoyed Tree of Life, 127 Hours, and Drive was pretty great – but I think I have to give it to Aronofsky for making yet another unique and compelling flick which was as tense as Pi and looked as great asThe Fountain.

Musically most questions will be answered by The List of course, but I have to make special mention for a pretty outstanding gig. The Manic Street Preachers’ birthday bash at the O2, at which they played all 38 of their singles over two 90-minute sets, was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve sruggled since to think of another band that could pull that off - it was a special night. Of a completely different scale but also very good was Portico Quartet at the opening of the Turner Contemporary; I’d never sat cross-legged on an art gallery floor for a jazz set before.

In terms of books, the best I read in the last year were probably Ondaatje’s as mentioned above, Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar which I read over summer and was knocked out by, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire which I read for the course last week. I’m one book down and two to go in Murakami’s 1Q84, finding it interesting but I’m not in love with it – hope to return when I have a moment though… so, September?

2011 games. I was considering writing a post on just this, but the moment’s passed. So, in brief: Dead Space 2 and Portal 2 are tied for GOTY, LA Noire I loved to pieces, Arkham City was excellent, as was AC: Revelations; Sword and Sworcery: EP, and Bastion are right up there. Also, Spelltower.

Other Pursuits

Chess, typography, and zazen were the three I laid out in my birthday post of last year, and I’m happy to say I made a decent fist of all of them. Chess.com has been fantastic, though I need to spend more time with the tutoring side of it and get my ranking up. I got a really nice wooden board for Christmas, so non-virtual chess is also on the up.

I’ve kept a good eye on type sources on the web, and I’ve at least downloaded (if not read all too thoroughly) issues 1-3 of 8 Faces and the first issue of Codex. I quit listening to the Typeradiopodcast with any great frequency because of some of the off-topic questions they ask every time – may check back to see who the recent guests have been though.

One of my resolutions for 2012 is 100 hours of zazen: ~2 hours per week. I’m behind on that already, but I have hopes that I’ll catch up. Same with running, which I started properly in August, took a break from over Christmas, and re-started last week with an aim to notch up 300km by year’s end. I’m tired just thinking about that right now.

Last year I also grew a beard for the first time. At first I liked it, then I loved it, then it was itchy and irritating, then I shaved it off. Not sure whether or when I might repeat that experience but it was interesting whilst I could stand it.

Creativity

As is all too regularly the case my plans at the beginning of the year to write something substantial went unheeded in what turned out to be a pretty busy 2011. The sum of my creative output was a short story written in summer, and a handful of poems. I made the same promise to do more this year – it doesn’t hurt to have good intentions. I have bushels of notes for something which could be a lengthly short-story or a novella, and whilst I’m aware that my main writing projects this year will be my Postmodern Fiction essay and the MA dissertation over summer, I’m still hopeful that I can make some progress.

I could also do with posting more frequently here, and taking more photos; I think this was the best I took last year, though this has ~2000% more views.

That’ll do it, current plan is to spend my birthday seeing either J Edgar, or Haywire, or hunting out a screening of Shame. It’s unlikely any of those will beat Black Swan but still, that just means I still have my film of 2012 to look forward to!

One possible reason (read: excuse) for this, is that starting the actual writing too early feels to me like missing out on valuable days of research. There’s a part of me that thinks that the research is the most important and time consuming part, and that the process of writing the essay is almost secondary: gathering as much great material as possible is the first priority; the masonry work of building something coherent out of it can be done more quickly.

So far (and I realise the extent to which I’m tempting fate by typing this right now) it’s worked out OK for me. But every time I go through one of those two or three day solid writing periods of putting notes through the juicer to make a paper, I promise myself I won’t do it the same way next time. This time around in particular I became a little obsessed with the idea that I would get sick just as the days I’d set aside for composition came up. All over the Christmas break I was almost Howard Hughes when it came to being around anyone with a head cold, or eating anything that hadn’t come, unopened directly from the fridge. Barring some overnight virus taking hold of my system in the night however, it looks like I’ve dodged that bullet this time, but it’s another reason why I know the way I go about this whole process isn’t particularly sound.

The essay this time is for my Modernist Poetry module, and I’ve chosen to write a comparative piece on work by two poets. The full, TBC title is Fragmentation and Palimpsest in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and HD’s Trilogy.

It’s been a fascinating paper to research, even if I feel I may have leant a little too heavily on Pound. Of the poets studied on the course over the last few months he was the one with whom I had the longest aquiantance already, and I felt like I got a lot out of studying The Cantos; it was pretty obvious to me when we were assigned them that Pound would be part of my essay for the term. HD, on the other hand, was a poet I didn’t know, and whose work I have to say I didn’t particularly enjoy when we read it for class.

I took the decision to write on HD for a couple of reasons:

1. The use of palimpsest in her work is interesting on a formal level even if I didn’t like to themes in the poetry too much
2. She had a relationship with Pound which, despite it being barely mentioned in the essay, forms a nice bond between the two of them [1]
3. Writing on work you don’t particularly like can give you something to sink your teeth into

As it’s turned out I found a deeper appreciation for the technique in HD as I re-read Trilogy. In terms of poetic chops she’s considered among the very first tier of imagists, and it became clearer to me why that is the case. The material inTrilogy however, contains a great deal of medieval and biblical allusions which I don’t particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of.

I’m looking forward to having this essay finished up and submitted on Friday. I’ve got a haircut pencilled in the diary to celebrate, and then it’s on to reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the Postmodern Fiction course which begins on Tuesday afternoon!

[1] HD was actually one of two women Pound proposed to in the course of one year; they both turned him down.

Drink your tea slowly.

That was the best advice I received in the first week of 2012. It arrived via Google+, by way of Kevin Rose. It’s actually part of a longer quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, which goes like this:

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.

On one level it’s a simple call for mindfulness: for not taking for granted things as they’re happening, no matter how routine they might be (Headspace’s Andy Puddicombe is fond of inciting people to be mindful when brushing their teeth). I say simple, but that alone is tough enough. On top of that the tea quote is also kind of a neat encapsulation of a Buddhist idea I’ve always struggled with a little: that the past and future, in a very real sense, don’t exist; that the present moment is the entirety of one’s experience of life.

What does that mean exactly? Try explaining it to someone with a toothache who’s holding to make an appointment with the dentist: “Hey, forget getting this thing fixed tomorrow, all that matters is the pain in your mouth right now – enjoy that!”

But the more time you spend thinking about it the closer it gets to making sense. You will never know the future; you will never again know the past – the present is exactly the sum total of your experience. And no matter how many times you brush your teeth (at least twice a day, OK?) or drink a cup of tea, you’d do well to be present in that moment, to pay it the attention it deserves.

That’s a kind of resolution isn’t it?

I fell for Spotify pretty hard in 2009, signed up for the Premium service as soon as it was launched, and have happily paid my £9.99 per month ever since to enjoy ‘unlimited’ access to a huge variety of music. The service seemed tailor made for me: as much new music as I could find time to listen to, synced to my iPod inside a well designed app and updateable at any time via wi-fi. I used Spotify, in both its desktop and portable incarnations, a heck of a lot in 2010, and in 2011 it became my default means of listening to music. Of the 20 albums on my year-end list I own only four, and all but one of those was discovered via Spotify.

I’ve experiences a few glitches with the service, such as a couple of occasions when the iOS app would suddenly decide it needed login credentials to proceed, and would then not be able to use them because I was on a train and didn’t have a net connection. I’ve also run afoul of the admittedly rare circumstance of having an album disappear from the service, rendering itself unplayable – this happened to Das Racist’s Relax this year, which I’d been enjoying for a few weeks before it was pulled from Spotify for reasons unknown, leaving me with a dead playlist. But these are fairly minor problems, easily outweighed by the positive experience of using the experience for the most part.

My doubts about the service started to creep in at some point this year when I started reading reports, maybe around the time of launch of Spotify in the US, about how it wasn’t working out so well for artists. Having positioned itself as the music industry’s saviour, and the answer to the exponential problem of piracy in digital media, Spotify was allegedly not doing right by the people behind the music.

Here’s the pitch: giving people easy access to limitless music for a low price makes the hassle of piracy look like too much hard work. With Spotify you can get everything in one place, it’s sorted properly, the quality is what it should be, and you’re not breaking the law to listen as much as you want. I’ve always been ardently anti-piracy, adamant that artists deserve to be paid for what they create, so this argument spoke to me directly and if it seemed too good to be true it was at least sanctioned by the labels, right?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing for the artists. When Coldplay decided to keep their latest LP off streaming services I’ll admit to feeling a little irked. I wanted to hear the record, and, accustomed as I had become to paying £9.99 per month for as much music as I wanted, I resented being asked to pay £7.99 for one album that-my appreciation for Coldplay being mild at best-probably wouldn’t get played all that much in a couple of months. A year or two before I’d been used to paying £7.99 per album download-down from £9.99 for a CD-and hunting the various digital retailers to pick it up a couple of pounds cheaper was all part of the fun.

I started to look into what the return for artists was from the different distribution channels, and what I found certainly seems to support the idea that if it looks too good to be true it probably is. The exact details of how Spotify calculates payouts to artists is something of a (guilty?) secret, but various sources have pieced together estimations that, together, probably give us a good idea. Anu Kirk (project lead at MOG (mog.com)) estimates that Spotify pays about $0.04 per album streamed, so about $0.004 per track per listen.

David McCandless of Information is Beautiful used data from this blogpost and spreadsheet to put together a visualisation which really helps push the point home:

If an artist has to rack up over 4m listens on Spotify per month to make minimum wage it’s difficult to argue that the streaming model isn’t broken. Selling 12,399 tracks per month on iTunes seems more reasonable, though still a stretch for smaller artists without label-backed marketing. And this is where we come to the argument that musicians these days don’t make money from record sales, instead relying on concert tickets and merchandise to make a living. I don’t know the extent to which this is true, and if it is then it’s something of a shame: not an excuse for the poor earnings made via music sales but a symptom of it.

I don’t entirely know where this leaves me. Do I return to using iTunes and the odd CD purchase as my main channels of music consumption? It seems logical, and with the arrival of iTunes Match it’s easier than it’s ever been to have access to your entire collection from anywhere. But what about discovering new music? I’ve grown accustomed to seeking out new releases on a Monday and giving anything which interests me at least a quick listen on Spotify. Hopefully, if the music blogs are doing their job, I’ll still be able to keep up to date with new releases and hear streams of many of them before making a purchasing decision. Maybe I’ll have to listen to more 6Music, visit We Are Hunted with greater frequency and spend time haunting Bandcamp, but with a little effort it should be possible.

I’ll miss Spotify. The idea is brilliant, the execution is excellent, but it seems too exploitative a model to support, and perhaps to survive. Whether its more artists pulling their albums from the service, or a rise in membership fees which members would be forced to go along with to maintain access to their playlists, it seems something has to give with the way Spotify is set up at the moment.

All of that was before the social networking boom, and in particular the rise of Twitter. My personal internet use now has Twitter as one of its central components: it’s the ideal place to share a single thought that doesn’t require expanding upon, or to post a link, photo or video which speaks for itself. When I relaunched andthenpatterns on the WordPress platform in 2009 it was with a view to posting only original content, with the focus on longer-form written entries. What I found was that this brought the post-count down substantially, but I was pretty happy with what I was putting up… when I had the time.

Substantial content takes time to create, and what I discovered was that by the nature of the parameters I had set for the blog, there was content which wouldn’t fit on Twitter but which was nevertheless not “worth” a whole post on atp. This problem was entirely self-created of course, but I’d built the site around it, using Khoi Vinh’s Basic Maths theme as the framework. This made for a pretty strict layout to the site, ideal for a small number of long posts, but less useful for many smaller posts, which tended to put the site navigation out of reach.

I experimented with a NeueThemes’ Geneva, which made more posts accessible from the home screen – but I found that navigation between posts became a problem, and whilst the landing page looked good the site lacked an obvious flow. I liked the (infinite) scrolling of Tumblr, but experimenting over there I found the archiving, tagging and categorisation tools weren’t quite up to par, and the CMS was nowhere near as powerful and well designed as that of WordPress.

So I started looking around for a template which would combine the ease of Tumblr’s scrolling, with the power of the WordPress back end; which would look good and prove adaptable to any and all types of content, whilst keeping the navigation accessible at all times. I think I’ve found it: native video and photo templates (incl. galleries), sticky navigation on the left sidebar, and still underpinned by the robust system of categories & tags that held the previous iteration together. The hope is that this new template will allow for a greater variety of content, maybe even with a more frequent post-rate. I’ve also improved the comment system (there may be a further change to that once Lettery 2.0 is launched), and added both an easy contact form and quick links to Twitter, Google+ &c. on the left so it’s nice and easy to get in touch.

Hope you like the changes. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

The film is a great addition to Hustwit’s set of accessible, enthralling documentaries. Just as an interest in typography wasn’t essential to enjoying the trilogy’s first film: Helvetica, you don’t need to have much knowledge of architecture to get a lot from Urbanized. The film looks at a lot of different facets of the city: what it means for people, the environment, politics &c. and does so even-handedly. Hustwit displays a fine sense of when a point has been related adequately to give a glimpse of its complexity without bogging the film down in detail. As a result, when the credits roll, you’re apt to have more questions about the topic than you started with, and enough knowledge to begin to investigate the issues raised.

Find a screening, or rent online.

At work in Warsaw in 1965, Opałka took a piece of canvas identical in size to his studio door (196x135cm) and painted it black; then, in white, he began to paint numbers from the top left corner down to the bottom right. The enumeration of this simple, endless sequence was what he dedicated his life to.

Each time a canvas was complete Opałka started a new one of exactly the same dimensions, though over time he did alter the colouring. The black canvasses gave way to grey in 1968, the fourth year of the project, and another four years after that Opałka decided to start lightening the canvasses sequentially, adding 1% more white to the paint which covered each new one that he started.

By 2008, 36 years later, this progression meant that Opałka was painting in white on white, which he called ‘blanc mérité’: white well earned.

There is something heroic about this scale of undertaking, and the immeasurable dedication which it must have required. I suspect that what I find fascinating about this kind of project has something to do with the greater purpose and power of art itself. Surely there were times when Opałka had to face the futility of what he was doing; he must have questioned the worth of his work. And yet he persisted, and leaves behind a monument to both the finite and infinity, which leaves such considerations meaningless.

And yet YouTube’s staple – the content with which it is associated in the first instance – is short clips of human mishaps and animal antics: a ceaseless torrent of cats running up unending slides.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that – it’s content which has its place – but Google are obviously keen to promote the use of the service for slightly less frivolous purposes. The streaming of US Presidential debates in 2008 seemed like a push forward, and there have been various other initiatives over the last few years to harness YouTube’s substantial presence at the centre of the web. The most interesting, to my mind, was the 2010 project Life in a Day, wherein users all around the world were asked to film some part of their day on 24 August, and upload the results to YouTube. From the 80,000 submissions and 4,500 hours of footage a 95 minute movie was put together to act as a snapshot of life on Earth on 24 August 2010.

I’d been waiting for some time to see the results. A very limited cinema run came and went in the blink of an eye, followed by a period in which it seemed impossible to find a legitimate way to see the film. Then, this week, it was screened on the BBC and made freely available in its entirety on YouTube – where else?

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Life in a Day is a unique and powerful film. Its power, and its charm, come from the sheer variety it contains, and from the plain and unvarnished manner in which it presents it all. There is a very cinematic sweep to the wide range of footage, but each piece feels intimate and personal. It’s the same balance accomplished regularly by the best articles in National Geographic – tellingly listed here as the film’s distributor. Watching the film is to be immersed in dozens of little micro-stories, with the dawning realisation that they are all part of one macro-story. That is the project’s power: we see the man with the orange Lamborghini, and the single parent raising 13 children in a tin shack; the worn wooden shoe-shine box and the colourful plastic garden sprinkler; the free-running shoplifter and the man on the respirator… all tied together. One of the film’s most effective features is the use of brief montages which show variations on a theme around the world: how coffee is prepared and served in different cultures for instance, or the different types of people who read newspapers. There are montages of people (and animals) giving birth, of people using the bathroom, of eating, and of dying; there are glimpses of war and sadness, laughter and water – there’s a lot in there, and I found it not a film to study but rather to enjoy as it washes over you.

I had read the week before seeing Life in a Day, that should an alien species set about the task of cataloguing the history of life on Earth, mankind would feature as little more than a footnote. In terms of biodiversity and biomass we are the tiniest sliver of a percentage – far less interesting or significant than the comparatively colossal abundance of microorganisms. I couldn’t help thinking throughout Life in a Day what a visiting species could glean about humanity from watching the film. What would they make of us? Our strange passions; the way we behave when we’re alone; our genuine and our unfounded fears; our variety and the variety of our circumstances; the detail and spectacle of our beautiful, compromised lives.

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Life in a Day is available to watch on YouTube here.