Conorthoughts

Onage

I couldn't post here (Typepad) for at least a full day and posts disappeared. A bit unnerving but a visit to a wise old Doc (not so old actually, only ten years older than me) helped. He put me on Onage which calmed me down.

On writing now

The speed with which people write on the net, on their blogs. David Berlind writing yesterday while listening to Sun Systems' Jonathan Schwartz speaking with Doc Searls.   

The confidence with which people write on their blogs.

The way in which this confidence has an ease and excitement about it, as if a new tone were being added to personality - to human being - in the writing, an up, confident,  speeding-along, tone. Does this - what I am writing here - have that tone? By osmosis, a degree of it, I think. 

"To find one's own speed and own slowness, one's slow-speed, in an accelerating world". Gilles Deleuze must have written something like this somewhere. His face pops into my mind, centred on that large non-Parisian nose, rural. (Sorry, but I haven't read the Wikipedia entry on him to which I've just linked. My guess is it would not be that good. This is meant as a comment on Deleuze, not on Wikipedia. For some reason, he breeds in the main poor interpreters).      

Is there something in this new human tone with its web origin that is careless and superfical? Yes and no, I think. It is defining the 'yes' that interests me.

The 'no' is pretty clear. There is an intimate, internal relation between the new human tone and the development and expansive creativity of the new medium. Software people - I.T. people generally -write like this, work together with one another like this, write the new code together. Language is being altered in tandem with the computer. Much of economy and society are being pulled along in the movement. The new human tone is neither careless nor superficial. It is the tone of the time, and now is moving, creatively, rapidly.

So what is it that is about the new tone that is careless and superficial? Is it not arrogant, ignorant, to even suggest this? Am I perhaps simply showing my old world humanist colours or the nostalgia that seems to come with being in one's forties?

That dimension of writing having to do with choosing one's words with a certain slowness and to do with interiority, the writer withdrawn in that gap of time between him or her and the reader, is it not disappearing? Clearly, such writing can go on - Faber & Faber (the pull of the local, I live in London) will go on publishing well-made poems - but as the world moves another way, what can good writing be about, can it have the object it would most often have, the human world?

Is this - what I am writing here - superficial, careless, written at speed? Yes and No, I hope. My interest is to try to think in the internet (born as a mass phenonenon about 1998) in the time of its growth, a moment that we are now in, of technological and cultural transformation. The moment before, in this epochal sense of 'moment', was  probably that of photography and film, their invention and impact.

Is Walter Benjamin not trying to write about this earlier moment of transformation within the moment itself, as it is happening, in his essay 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' (1936) and in an earlier essay 'Die kleine Geschichte der Photographie' (1931), both the fruit of many things including of a largely forgotten newspaper article by Siegfried Kracauer 'Die Photographie' (1927) reproduced in the book of essays Das Ornament der Masse. (My friend Philippe Despoix insists on this link, pointing to it in his Ethiques du désenchantement: Essais sur la modernité allemande au début du siècle.)

The invention of the printing-press was such a moment, the Industrial Revolution was such a moment.

To start to find one's way in this moment (1988-   ) by writing well-badly, simply-complicatedly.

It is time to go to bed, so here is my post. To leave it, to leave go, to write not very well, to write in this moment. I am a minnow in his wake but Deleuze never wrote as badly as this. He could not - it was not a historical option - for he died a few years before 1998. A late pre-internet philosopher.         

 

Presents I want

Here is my current wish-list, mainly books I would like to buy on Amazon and Abebooks but can't afford to buy just at the moment. Any would be gratefully accepted as presents. Second-hand copies (Abebooks' strength) are fine. My birthday isn't until next October, though. Never mind!
 

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance  (ISBN: 0471394203) Emanuel Derman

Gesamtausgabe 12. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909 - 1918. Bd. 1 (ISBN: 3518284126) Georg Simmel

Gesamtausgabe 13. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909 - 1918. Bd. 2  (ISBN: 3518284134) Georg Simmel

Philosophische Kultur. Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne. Gesammelte Essais. Georg Simmel.

Erewhon (ISBN: 1853262846) Samuel Butler

Knowledge and Human Interests (ISBN: 180556664) Juergen Habermas

Le Nouveau Petit Robert. Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise. (ISBN: 2850368261)

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (ISBN: 0198608691)

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. In Two Volumes. (A much cheaper second-hand copy of the 1993 edition) (ISBN:019861134x)

Harte Bank Kunst Philosophie Architektur (ISBN: 3883961957) Hannes Böhringer

A subscription to Z Magazine

Conférence sur l'efficacité (ISBN: 2130551432) François Jullien

Nourrir sa vie : A l'écart du bonheur (ISBN: 2020792176)  François Jullien

Eloge de la fadeur (ISBN: 2253063797)  François Jullien

Culture in Practice: Selected Essays  (ISBN: 0942299388)  Marshall Sahlins

Alternative Economic Spaces  (ISBN: 0761971297) Roger Lee, Andrew Leyshon and Colin C. Williams (Editors)

Other Items

I would like a nice rug, please, for my bed (to replace the moth-eaten blankets I use at the moment for extra cover on cold nights).

My road to Doc

I was reading Microsoft's blogger-in-chief Robert Scoble on a conference on blogging Les Blogs 2.0 that took place earlier in the week in Paris. Scoble didn't go into any detail about it. Looking at the Les Blogs site, I noticed, however, that Adriana Lukas-Cronin had been billed to speak. Adriana works for the Big Blog Company in London. I had come across the company's site some months ago, had R.S.S.-bookmarked it - 'livemarked' it, should perhaps be the term - and had noticed that Adriana and I had been to the same college. I thought that I might contact her some time, given that she is a professional blogger and might not be averse to giving a leg-up to an older Balliol person struggling to get into the blogosphere. College blood runs quite thick, if you have been to an Oxbridge college. I haven't contacted her but may well do. I'm still too much of a baby blogger, I feel.

Anyway, I went to see whether Adriana had posted something on the conference. I couldn't find anything but came across some rapidly scribbled notes that she had written during, and on, some of the sessions in the first Les Blogs conference (Was it called Les Blogs 1.0, I wonder.). Her notes I found fascinating, particularly those taken during a talk given by one Doc Searls.

Adriana concluded:

This was the best session and that’s saying a lot ... Doc’s perspective is the one that is of most interest to me, as it tries to include blogs in a wider understanding of communication and interaction between human beings.

Doc Searls is, I quickly learnt, a well known computer industry analyst, a champion of open-source programming, and lives in San Francisco. Adriana's notes led me to look at some of his writing online. It really is interesting, I think. Here is an example.

My road to Doc.

Speaking of whom, I completely forgot yesterday afternoon that I had an appointment with my G.P.  Damn!
 

Interview

I have an interview in the morning with an Ian Williams at financial P.R. company Lansons Communications. I wrote to Dan a little earlier. 

Dan,
hello. Hope all is well.
I haven't been making much headway in the job search, so I am heading into financial P.R.-land.
First up, Lansons Communications, in the morning. I haven't asked whether there is a job on the table but I don't think they would be calling me in unless they are hiring.
I've done enough preparation: I had lunch with Marc Pops [our friend Marc Popiolek] last week.
Two questions, though.
1) I want to convey that I have a down-to-earth side. What, in your view, is the most obvious and basic thing that most London PR people make a mess of all the time?
2) Lansons is a good firm, Marc tells me. Do you happen to know how good?
C

God knows where Dan was but my guess would be with Sam somewhere half-way up the slope in Hong Kong (Is it called midtown? No, that is New York. I can't remember what it's called.). Luckily, however, he was on his Blackberry so I got an immediate response.

Hi Conor, good luck with the interview.  I don't know much about Lansons except that they are a niche firm with expertise in financial services clients (I think!). As to your other question, it always surprises me how PR people will ring journos to talk about clients or to respond to breaking news without having briefed themselves properly. So you often end up with "I don't know" or "I'll have to call you back". To me that is a very basic failing!
A close second in the annoyance stakes is when they ring up to sell a story without having checked whether it might be relevant to the journo they are calling.
Best, Dan

These are useful things to know, and should do the trick in the morning. Maria! (Is 'maria' - with the emphasis on the last 'a' and meaning  'I'm only joking' - Hibernian English? Martha - my late sister - used to use it a lot. Or is it North Cork? It could be in Shakespeare, for all I know.). 

"Why are you so nervous?"

"I will just have to be direct about this", said Leslie. ''I'm sorry but there is no other way. Why are you so nervous?"

The interview was not going well. We must have been five or six minutes into it, maximum ten. It was a small, windowless, room, with a glazed wall and door bringing some natural light from the office across the corridor. There were four armchairs, in imitation leather, off-green and off-orange, between them a table so small as almost not to be one, Leslie and I.

I had come to see a consultant in a big headhunting firm, Whitehead Mann. No, it wasn't Whitehead Mann but it was a big firm, and her name is not Leslie.

It had been billed a meeting but was an interview. All job-related meetings, bar with friends, are interviews anyway, in my stage of life, mid-life unemployment. Leslie had a job in mind, she told me swiftly, in investor relations. So it was a pre-first interview interview.

The first mistake I had made was not to ring her ahead of the meeting, after it had been arranged, to ask whether she had something "on her books" that might be of interest to me. The second mistake was not getting up early, at 7.30, as alarm-clocked for, but instead lying in bed for three whole hours and ten minutes, giving myself little time to get going and get there. The meeting was at 11.30. The third mistake, the most serious of the three, was to get up at all, or rather to get up other than for one reason, to ring, postpone and return to bed.

This mistake came to me as Leslie walked me back up the corridor - we walked each other, I was her partner in this - mentioning how, if you are not in form to see someone for a job, it is best to postpone.   

"Why are you so nervous?". It had been said nicely, placed half way between a real and a rhetorical question.

I accepted the charge with few words and let Leslie speak.   

"You have no need to be nervous. I'm sure you have no need. You have an excellent C.V., lots of good experience. I am on your side. This is not even an interview. You are going to see lots of people besides me. You are so nervous that you are unable to communicate. You will not get a job in communications if you cannot communicate. I'm sorry but I just cannot present you to my client in a state like this because this will be immediately obvious".

All of this was also said nicely. Leslie had been in headhunting for some years.

Was I nervous? I had arrived sweating, having had more difficulty than expected finding the right building, the street having turned out, in the London manner, to have an extra stretch that I and my bicycle had not known about. And I was a few minutes late, bringing the total to five mistakes so far. I suppose that I was nervous. I was mainly aware of how unconvincingly this morning I was talking for the umpteenth time about how I had got to this point in my life.      

To be continued perhaps (in the next post, like in the next newspaper issue for those nineteenth century novels).