Mock Retro Soup

It’s Christmas time yet again. If you couldn’t tell by the growing appearance of ‘What to Buy’ lists appearing in newspapers or by various shops now displaying a glut of festive tat and unsubtly changing their jarringly bland muzak to some saccharine festive anthems. If it by some bizarre chance you haven’t yet noticed, it doesn’t matter anyway, the calendar would inevitably catch up as would the intensity of Xmas media saturation ensuring you’ll be pretty much unable to escape it bar going into an early mince-pie induced coma. But of course I’m not telling you anything new here, and I’m not now going to go on a pointless Christmas rant saying how Xmas is perhaps a capitalist conspiracy to get us all to spend what we don’t have.

As it happens I don’t actually fester with bah-humbugism, I do actually embrace Christmas, but doing so in a stiff upper lip manner, that is to say I don’t get childishly excited; I have an appreciation for the general good feeling that swills about while playing down the Christian/Captialist aspects. One reason I particularly like the festival, that being said, is that it gives me a reason, as if I really needed one anyway, to purchase books for people.

I must confess here that it’s not often that I actually visit major high-street bookshops; I make heavy use of second-hand stores (Readers World in Birmingham is great, don’t let the poor reviews in the link here put you off), libraries and yes, Amazon.

But it was when visiting a bricks and mortar store recently, with the intention of gift purchasing, that I once again encountered a phenomena which I’m calling ‘Designer Covers’. This new breed of books are typically hardback although special paperback editions have seemingly now got in on the game, presumably because the iconised hardbacks have been doing so well. I can of course easily understand from a marketing point of view as to why publishers would create such books, eBooks are forever on the up, or so we are told, and the USP actual books retain over their digital rivals is that they exist in the physical world, (you know, the world of matter, you know, where things actually exist) so it’s obvious even to the most brain-dead marketeer to play this up and fetishize this aspect. But sod marketing and their evil scheming ways. Especially because my first instinct on seeing those books is, but never said, “Oh wow, how cool” Damn them for making me feel like that!

This feeling very quickly dissipates when I actually think about it for a few seconds, leaving me with a quandary. I do, as I can tell from from my initial reaction, like the effort that has gone into re-designing the various book covers, which, I believe, can be an interesting art-form in its own right. But then, with perhaps a smidge of Hipster syndrome at play, I can’t help but think why would I pay for this mock retro when there are are surely plenty of actual old books waiting to be found. But does the genuine matter? In a society of signs surely the synthetic image of old is much more appealing than actual oldness, isn’t it? It’s pastiche of oldness feels more real than the ‘actual’ real article. Well capitalism is certainly banking on it anyway. Eventually the argument at hand here can become tautological. The whole thing ultimately boils down to image, which the marketeers behind this new retro are of course all too aware. The choice is then, do you want to appropriate neo-retro and remain modern in your oldness or acquire ’real’ retro and fool yourself into thinking that the age of the item actually makes a difference to how genuine your delusion of living in a past utopia is.

But ultimately what needs to be questioned is why is this interest in the old even around in the first place? Why despite myself occasionally being critical of it, do I still find myself attracted to such propositions. Is it perhaps that with ever-increasing digitalisation of the world, in which the firm borders of time and space are collapsing, whereby not only does the digital bleed into the physical but whereby the physical, with technology such as RFID, is increasingly, via “The Intertnet of Things, bleeding into the Wired. In such circumstances perhaps we feel the need to grab onto something stable, something physical, something with a defined sense of time, even if that something is essentially nothing, a token relic of times when metanarrative gave us structure and stability.

Rather than being a case of Luddism, I’d suggest the people most susceptible to such purchasing are in fact amongst some of those most integrated in the digital world such as myself. Like reality, there is no real binary, or neither is there pro-tech or anti-tech camps as such, there is space in-between. Hipsters are the classic example actually. They live there life in a digital world, but they taint it with sepia hues and pseudo lens flare, they listen to MP3s but do so with a cassette iPhone cover. Rather than creating new futures, they are creating new pasts.

So where does this leave me? Are these new ‘designer books’ to be scorned or embraced? Essentially, there is no absolute answer; how can there be when we’ve allowed, for better or worse, our main pillars of stability of time and space to corrode? I may end up purchasing one or two of the books, they are nice objects in themselves, but while books can furnish a home that certainly isn’t the point of them. But seeing as they take up space in ones decreasingly lived-in physical environment why not purchase books that serve as art as well as content? As the marketeers have noted and as hipsters like to indulge, the physical item is more than just content, it has an essence of its own. I’m still no clearer as to where my position on ‘the issue’ stands, and to be honest, I glad that’s the case.

 

 

Bookshelf Calamity

Most mornings, before I get up, I lounge in bed and read the news and check twitter and basically take on board information I don’t really need to know via my iPhone before getting up. This morning started just as typically, however, my friend, @DNY_/Chesty Cobbles, who is currently studying for a degree in fashion, sent me a text responding to an image I’d sent to him from the book I’m currently reading called Generation X.

This soon transgressed into talking about his degree, (which he dislikes) but, more specifically, about cultural and related theorists/philosophers such as Foucault, Nietzche and Barthes etc; which is a pretty light way to starts ones day. He was asking me for recommendations of who he should look up for an essay he is writing, all the names just mentioned were suggested as well as a few others, but there was one philosopher I’d only been speaking about a few days previous with mutual friend of ours which I thought would fit in perfectly with what he was after, I knew the name sounded Germanic and that he was relatively contemporary but I couldn’t get the name to come to mind, nor could I conceive of a way to search for it on Google, but what I had got was a book covering the basics of important philosophical works which I knew it just had to be in. (A little victory for books over the internet I’d like to flag-up there)

In a half-awake state I drowsily got up and staggered towards my bookshelf which was, at that point, supported by two makeshift bookends (Trophies my brother had won for playing poker). I reached for the book required, Philosophy: The Classics, and tried to delicately pinch and pull the book out towards me. In front of the books I keep various remote controls and gaming pads, on trying to manipulate the book out of its resting place I’d oafishly knocked my PS3 controller towards me, I quickly tried to catch the falling virtual reality input device, but failed; and from here the event happened suddenly, I can only assume that my right hand, which was still on the book I required, jolted from me trying to catch the PS3 pad which resulted in several books, as well as a heavy glass trophy, being placed under the spell of Lady Gravity. As a consequence I started the day in a bad mood and with a semi-broken chest of draws, although at the time the condition of my books were actually much more important to me, which I like to think is quite telling, in a positive way I hope.

The Philosopher I was after, it turned out, was Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I’d already decided to today that I wanted to put something up on my blog, and to do so more often, and while there is no real need for me to share this minor anecdote I have done nonetheless. While it was an annoying way to start the day it got me to review my book collection and tidy up my main bookshelf of which I am most pleased with as it is something I’ve wanted to do for a while; so while during, and directly after, the moment I might have been annoyed, a lot of good has come out of quite a banal incident, furthermore it’s highlighted to me that I should, rather than actually thinking about things I’d like to do, actually go ahead and do them rather than waiting for fate to force my hand.

Ink and Paper.

(apologies for any spelling/grammar errors but It’s getting late as I finish this, will go through and edit tomorrow :P)

Most of my day today, and in fact the past couple of days previously, has been entirely dominated by reading, something which I do very much enjoy. This reading has been dominated mostly by academic texts and journal articles about science fiction and fantasy as I have an essay due to be completed in less than a week and I still haven’t decided firmly on a topic to write it on, the first time I’ve ever had this problem. I have a few vague concepts so I may just have to start writing and see what I get.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about print media recently, firstly, and something I may very well have blogged about before, e-readers. My opinion on them is already well formed, and also very slightly conflicted. It’s assumed by many at work and by acquaintances that I would own one or intend on getting one simply because I know how to use computers and electronics, well this is not the case; furthermore I’m in fact becoming slightly anti-technology (or at least I feel disturbed/pessimistic by its overbearing influence on society) I prefer and will always prefer the real thing, a real book, over any digital copy. I know the technology behind Kindles and other such e-readers is actually really good, and that it actually makes digital content easy to read, i.e. it’s easy on the eye, but I like the physicality of real books, and while the text is the same in both physical and digital books the medium it is presented on does change message, all be it subtly, as I’m sure Marshall Mcluhan would have attested. I can understand why the devices are appealing, in 21st century technological fetishism is really easy to get sucked into, I’m guilty of it quite often, but ultimately such devices are shallow, I’m by no way anti-tech but there is something enchanting about the form of a printed book which would be lost with we al used e-reader devices. Think about that feeling you get when walking along an isle of books in a library, each new book one dusts off is an adventure waiting to rediscovered and lived or a theory waiting to both excite and educate the mind, and of course while the texts themselves would not disappear due to e-readers themselves, the public shrines to the works would certainly be damaged beyond repair. I may just be a romantic fool but I think that capturing a intangible and vaporous idea and then reconstructing it into a form that is then physical is a much more fitting tribute to the magicians behind the thoughts and ideas than simply encoding it into another untouchable form which then requires a device in order to reassemble the idea once more.

I’ve also been thinking about magazines. I and a few friends are currently trying to create a zine which is currently called Bricolage, and as the name suggests it is a hodpodge of features, stories, poems, and art and so-forth. Why are we doing it, well firstly I guess because we’d quite like to see something we’ve made in physical form, it’s much more satisfying to see something properly printed and bounded than simply on a computer screen, but secondly it’s because the mainstream magazines which are readily available are really depressing. Of course we know that our little project is unlikely to get anywhere, but it is essentially a minor backlash against the state of the industry, which is of course clearly facing tough times due to the Internet, but feeling the magazines with even more adverts or paid editorial is not the way forward, quality should rule the roost. Flicking through a technology magazine here the amount of pages is impressive, but when you strip back all the advertising there is little more than a skeleton left, no wonder they are dying and it really is a shame.

As I’m currently studying science fiction and fantasy, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve of course looked at some of the pulp fiction being produced in the 20s and 30s, much of this was not quality it has to be said but it is still a shame in my mind that one can’t go to a newsagents and buy a magazine of short stories (well I guess you can by “real life” stories, but as stated in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that’s just fodder to keep people distracted) Of course in the period when the pulps were at there height there wasn’t as many easily accessible media forms vying for peoples attention, but I still think that should surely still be a market for such content. Well as a result of this thought I’ve gone out my way to find some indie magazines which feature short stories, mainly fantastic literature, the first one of which is entitled Postscripts. As the year progresses I’m planning on buying some more such magazines as and when I find them and I’ll undoubtedly post some comments about them on this here blog, so be sure to stay tuned for that.

And with that ramble I depart.

Culture Vulture.

Oh, hello there. Sorry for my lack of updates, no real reason for this. In-fact I’ve had plenty I could have blogged about; and not just things about me, opinion pieces and the like. However I clearly haven’t done so but I’m making and effort now and hopefully much more regularly from now on. I don’t want to bog down this post with reasons for lack of posts however I put it down to social networks such as twitter et al (look at the bar on the right and you’ll notice I’ve joined another narcissism service; perhaps the pinnacle of narcissim?, called GetGlue; in fact I intend to do a piece of university work on it) and the vast effort it takes to log onto a webpage instead of using an application!

Anyway of late me and my companions Dan and Joe (currently cut-off from civilisation due to no internet access :P) have been watching/reading/playing etc a number of culture “products”. This didn’t come about as an attempt to purposefully create a “culture club”, as it were, but happened organically brought about in a small part by Joe’s lack of internet and my pile of unread books as well as seeing a couple of comedy shows in quick succession (Stewart Lee and Josie Long) A few examples of what we’ve done include Watching the Film “Network” Playing the Board-game “Settlers of Catan” and the paper roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons as well as reading a number of books individually and discussed afterwards (although we do aim; in a half-arsed manner, to try at least once to read the same book around about the same time) Not much is planned this week due to Joe being away in Devon but long may this group culture consumption continue.


NB: I’ve been looking at comic books of late; something i never thought I’d ever do, brought about mainly I’d say due to me listening to interviews of Alan Moore, creator of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to name but a few. Between now and the end of the week when we next meet I aim to read V for Vendetta (which I’ve just found the university library has) and read some of Alan Moore’s bi-monthly publication Dodgem Logic.