Novelty

I read something last week that really captured my imagination: 

The narratives of the traditional "life-story" are breaking down into unrelated pieces. We work 40 jobs over a lifetime...we move location and we start again and again in the deregulated, privatised world of self-selling. We inhabit virtual places as much as we do real ones. Facts become blurred and we live out fictions. For works of writing to reflect this world, they also have to enter into the language and forms of our time, otherwise we end up with confused, over-stuffed, compromised books that use an old form to try to talk about a new time.

For better or for worse, I reckon this is what now feels like.

This paragraph comes from a piece about fiction's future in the Guardian. The writer, Ewen Morrison, is about to publish a new sort of novel: 'a mixture of facts and fictions, images and videos'.

As a former inhabitant of a 'department of factual verification', I agree that facts are pretty nauseatingly dull on their own. Mixing fact and fiction is where the good stuff comes from.  

Always with us. 

Morrison argues that novels should be novel. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't think Jonathan Franzen is God's gift to fiction.

Like some, I still love the smell and feel of old books. A dream of mine is to reanimate old, forgotten literature in novel ways. 

I know a local librarian who is very wise. He can, for instance, produce batmobile sketches on short notice, and he generally gives the impression of one who could have joined the space program but just couldn't be bothered with anti-gravity. 

This afternoon I got into a long conversation with my wise librarian over a common interest of ours: 'London Labour and the London Poor'. This book was written as a series of newspaper articles by Henry Mayhew in the 1840's. It is a journey into Victorian ethnography, economics, and grimmer than Dickens stuff. Have you ever considered the pay and working conditions of rat catchers, for instance? 

Mayhew's work is woven together from oral life histories. As with America's Federal Writers' Project, this makes the line between fact and fiction a blurry, complicated one. When telling your life history, what would you leave in? Take out? Change? 

Mayhew's work still resonates - perhaps in part because his subjects lived in a broken, deregulated world of self-selling. My wise librarian has photocopies of Mayhew illustrations up in the library billboard. 

I will follow the progress of Ewen Morrison's book with interest. And I will read Mayhew's 'Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life' as suggested by my wise librarian. My interest lies not only the ghost of literature future, but also the ghost of literature past.  

Lost in a virgin forest

What were humans like before the internet (BI)? Can you remember? I didn't think so.

But I can help. You see, I've been conducting cutting-edge, ground-breaking, in-depth analysis on this issue - dropping bombshells and all kinds of bad reportage clichés.

Return to nature. 

My research project was sponsored by my internet service provider. By "sponsored" I mean they went and spent all their pocket money on marketing and had none left in the kitty for engineers.

Bless them - they appear to be perpetual first-timers. And we're all rubbish our first time, right?

So I spent a week - that's right an entire week - with no Octonauts. Not even that fake-pirate one, Kwazii.

My field research indicates that when not wholly occupied with beating up Neanderthals and making mastadon casserole, BI Woman and BI Child partook in the following activities:

1. Denial. 
2. Anger.
3. Bargaining. 
4. Depression. 
5. Wandering aimlessly.
6. Collecting leaves. 
7. Bickering. 
8. Discovering a wonderful secret urban gardens. 
9. Hunting for fairies.
10. Locating fairies.
11. Smiling. 
12. Octonauts? What octonauts? 
13. Returning in high spirits. 
14. Drifting into a contented sleep. 
15. Acceptance.
16. Waking up with the evil plague. 
17. Realizing that the entire family has woken up with the evil plague.
18. Reverting to denial.

Back in from the cold.

I'm pleased to report that service is back up. And the evil plague has passed. The memory of our primitive cousins is fading. 

Thank goodness. 

In sum, life BI was a bit rubbish, but pretty awesome when it worked. Kind of like now. 

I have nothing so kind to say about my research sponsors. 

Robot update

All your toys are belong to us. 

The eagle has landed.

Here he is, flanked by the Iron Man (Ana's birthday present).

Regular readers of the Chaos Chronicles (Hello Mom!) will recall that this little guy was designed by Papa and Ana online, and printed by the fine humanitarian geniuses at My Robot Nation.

I suggest you run over there right now and design your own robot. Even, er especially if you are a grown-up.

For those kids six and over, there is another exciting way to get stuck into robot world. Katy Lindemann, herself a robot expert, has introduced me to MakieLab, where Alice Taylor and her team are busily creating "future-smashing, customisable 3D-printed, game enabled" toys.

And apparently they are looking for some extremely lucky young volunteers to try them out...

Geeks and bookworms

The wizard of OS.

You may remember the 5th of November as that time when a Guy got hanged, drawn and quartered by The Man. Happily, little drawing and quartering gets done around here these days.

My daughters send me out robot-hunting in London on a regular basis. I found two good ones for them this week. Firstly, the Tin Woodman's cyber cousin (see left) in the basement of Fluent Studios, a usability lab in Clerkenwell.

The second robot really took the cake: a camera-mounted Octocopter that a guy built in his garage. This was surely the coolest way that anybody arrived to Mozilla's November 5th festival on Media, Freedom, and the Web, at Ravensbourne  in Greenwich.

Mozilla, of Design Jam and Firefox fame, has now decided to hack the news. Yes, THE NEWS. Which is why the festival featured a data journalism sprint, a Popcorn hyper-video documentary, and a talk by Frontline SMS on using text to spread the news.

Being in the midst of so many wickedly clever people felt invigorating and humbling. It reminded me of a line from my favourite children's book, where a tiny snail gazes at a huge whale and says: "I feel so small."

All your news are belong to us.

But from the hacks/hackers hangout upstairs, to the kids web playground downstairs, these 600 bright people from all over media and the interwebs were focused on that most ancient of human things: storytelling. 

In the future, who will tell the stories? And...how?

I'm a huge fan of story-centred systems as the latest Mozilla add-on. From my dorky obsession with the Federal Writers' Project, to my Ray Bradbury fixation, I think I can reasonably claim to be a story-centric human.

Mozilla's focus on getting kids excited about technology is pretty cool. I can't wait to take my kids to this sort of thing when they are a little older than 2 and 4 and less prone to actually chewing on the interwebs.

Douglas Adams once said: "Anything invented before your 15th birthday is the order of nature." David Rowan of Wired offered a good example of this at Internet Europe Week on Tuesday. To today's child, he said, a typewriter is "a laptop that prints as it goes along and doesn't need electricity."

Sometimes geeks and bookworms look down their noses at each other. Mozilla's festival last Saturday wasn't one of those occasions - in fact the geeks and the bookworms were actually the same people.

Baby hackasaurus. 

Last Saturday the sun sank early as per winter opening hours. The bright lights of Ravensbourne danced in the cold Thames alongside the megalith skyscrapers of Dog Island. 

A smell of gunpowder leached out into the air from the darker corners of England, like ozone before a thunderstorm. Across the island, bonfire logs succumbed to their fate, uncomplaining, as they have done since pagan times (Guy Fawkes was not hanged for inventing bonfires). 

Down the river at St Paul's, a gathering tide of discontentment stood on the temple steps and stared at the city through Guy Fawkes's dead eyes. Like a scene from another of my favourite stories.