Growing up

Because narrative is essentially temporal it draws attention to how people, and the events they are caught up in, change. Of course, they rarely change beyond all recognition - except perhaps in myths and fables. Slow, unexpected or even inevitable change is more often the norm. Change usually happens in a network of relations and one of the things that I admire about writers like Joan Silber is a way of dealing with a tapestry of characters and events whose lives intersect and change in different ways, along multiple timelines. Everything is in flux, just as it is in life. Silber's artfulness lies in her ability to draw attention to cross-cutting themes in this flux, and that's what makes her writing distinctive. But I'm also drawn to her writing because it conjures up places, events - even lifestyles - that I'm familiar with. She's very much a writer of my generation. But this kind of specificity isn't strictly necessary to the success of narrative. I've never trained to be a boxer or worked on a building site, but that doesn't stop me from relating to stories in which such things are important. Narrative also transports one into different times and places - and that's part of the magic - but probably we all need some point of contact, some anchorage or reference point. I think that's the allure of coming-of-age stories, part of the attraction of romance, and so much more. Narrative has to be relatable. Coming-of-age stories are accessible in that sort of way. Stories of young men coming-of-age are particularly relevant in times in which there is widespread concern about the possibility of alienation, about different routes into masculinity and, at least in some quarters, a concern for what constitutes masculinity itself. Two recent French films - both from 2025 - explore this territory from thought-provoking but slightly different points of view - Carnoy's Le Danse de Renards and Campillo's  Enzo. Carnoy's film, set in a residential sports academy for young boxers, dwells on the relationship between these young men, their rivalry, their jealousy and - occasionally - their tender friendship. But there's also some painful loss of status and ostracisation, set against the brutal backcloth of a particularly violent, macho sport. If there's anger, frustration, confusion and alienation in Enzo it works differently, by depicting a young man's struggles with his own bourgeoise background, with his loving parents, who are sometimes just a bit overbearing in a permissive, progressive sort of way and some growing uncertainty about his own sexuality. Le Danse de Renards packs a punch through its exploration of strong emotions, some of which erupt into violence, whereas the dissatisfaction at the heart of Enzo is more insidious, speaking to issues of identity, wealth and even global conflict as Enzo falls under the spell of a charismatic Ukrainian worker. They are both narratives of their time and well worth watching alongside one another.

Sold short

I'm most probably attracted to the short story form because it's all I can really manage to write myself. But although I can be impressed by what can be done with so little, as a reader I'm more at home with longer fiction, something that takes longer, and promises more of an immersive experience - something that builds. For all of the skill of a short story like The Swedish Match, I find myself wanting more. And then coming to Lydia Davis - let's face it, she's held in high esteem by the literati - I find something similar. The extremely short pieces, the microfictions, just frustrate me. I'm all in favour of experimentation but how might I read Ph.D, which I quote in its entirety because I can? 'All these years I thought I had a Ph.D. But I do not have a Ph.D.' Should I be amused, should I read it for a second time, or should I read it as a conversation with some of the other pieces in the same collection - A Letter to the Foundation, for example, which is firmly located in academic life - or Her Geography: Illinois, which is just as brief and is a similar sort of reflection on getting it wrong? Or maybe I'm not clever enough, because I've missed the point which could be about my own apparent need for a context and my sense of dissatisfaction with being at sea - of trying to find a context to make meaning out of, in the first place. Then perhaps I'm the one with a Ph.D who shouldn't have one. Dazzling and innovative are a couple of the glittering words that grace the dust jacket. I don't find that description works for Ph.D or Her Geography for that matter. But, I'm talking about myself as a reader, here - someone who thinks that such descriptions should be reserved for the observational acuity and lucid writing of The Cows and the craft and emotional intensity of The Seals, both of which are longer offerings in the collection 'Can't and Won't'.

Rethinking AI

One of the problems of writing about technology is the speed at which it changes. Back in the early years of digital literacy it seemed as if there was a bit of a scramble to keep up with blogging, peer-to-peer music sharing, Friends Reunited, Flickr, the early stirrings of social media, gaming culture and virtual reality. But before Buzzfeed, Bitcoin and AI - and certainly a long time before platforms and algorithms began to dominate the scene, things seemed more straightforward, perhaps more app-specific. This broadening of concerns is a recurrent theme in Rethinking Digital Literacy. But one of the struggles involved in trying to get an overview is that details may get overlooked. Having touched on AI in Why Writing Still Matters, I worked hard to develop that theme in the new book, but the more I think about it the more I feel the need to develop those ideas a bit further. I think I'm successful in pointing out some of the big issues - the limitations of AI, the pitfalls in using it, the potential distortions and of course the massive and wasteful energy costs that accrue from large numbers of people asking what are, in all probability, banal questions that could easily be answered in other ways. There are larger questions - questions that probably lie outside the ambitions of Rethinking Digital Literacy most of which circle around notions and definitions of agency and intentionality, and what we think intelligence and computing are in the first place. The vast computing power of a well-trained Large Language Model hangs on an extremely complex and sophisticated predictive guessing game of which word comes next in any given sentence. And what an achievement that is! But it's not how I go about thinking or writing. There is no representational model of the world, no genuine sense of what is valuable, no hierarchy of values, no overarching intentionality and little of that erratic, whimsical fuzziness that leads to creativity and invention, perhaps just as often as it leads to frustration. It seems that the doom narrative - that AI will rapidly discover that humans are wasteful, inefficient and obsolete and then dispense with them altogether - reflects a somewhat negative self-evaluation of the human condition rather than the likely future of computing. This wasn't written by ChatGPT and only partially reflects a desire to increase the profile and sales of Rethinking Digital Literacy.

The book

 

In spite of everything I may have written about the changes in literacy, the feeling of holding the book itself is still significant! The print copy of Rethinking Digital Literacy has arrived, and it feels important to hold it - even though it is light in weight when held against the hours of writing. It is a slim thing, but I'm proud of it and particularly appreciative of how it looks. I owe my thanks to my good friend for the great cover image and of course to my publisher, Edward Elgar, for doing all that publishers do and for their part in producing such a handsome volume. The book is, of course, available in digital format but I can't help thinking that readers would be missing out - even though they might be saving something like £45. But, having said that, I'm not really sure that I know what it is about print books apart from familiarity, nostalgia and habit that makes them seem so special. Rethinking Digital Literacy is an almost entirely digital thing. It was written and researched onscreen, on my iMac, at my stand-up desk. Open, on that desk, to my side, I would have had a notebook and pen, but that would be for a few scrawled reminders - that's all. It was a digital thing. It took form through tapping on a keyboard, it was saved sent, revised and checked digitally. I've never met anyone from the publishers - or even spoken to them on the phone. They might as well be machines or creatures from outer space as far as I know! I'm not complaining, I didn't feel as if I was missing out on anything, in fact I was undisturbed. The process was smooth, frictionless. I think of myself as being fairly measured. I don't go in for grand flourishes or big statements, but as the book developed and as it drew on some themes from Why Writing Still Matters, my previous book, I began to find myself arguing that there had been a revolution in writing - not just a revolution in how we produce text, but a revolution in the reproduction and distribution of text, accompanied by a discernible shift in the place of writing in the ecology of communication. As if that wasn't enough we are now obliged to take account of technological agency - not only the active work of search engines and algorithms, spell-checkers and other digital resources, but also the way in which AI and chatbots can create original text. The old monkey-typing idea- the idea that eventually (perhaps) a monkey's random keyboard tapping might produce the complete works of Shakespeare seems outworn now that AI can produce plausible and original Shakespearean English in a matter of seconds. All told, I've talked my way into a rather strong assertion. So whilst my ambition to write a powerful, popular book for a wide readership seems to have abated, I know that if I did it would be called The Writing Revolution or - perhaps its slightly weaker as a title - A Revolution in Writing. It would need someone to throw down the gauntlet before AI comes up with a version.

Digital literacy - again?

When I first started thinking about the impact of new technologies on language, any idea of what might or might not be referred to as digital literacy was not really on my mind. I was convinced, however, that these technologies would change the face of written communication in a fundamental way. This was in the late '90s - and, as I studied the ways in which teenagers were beginning to innovate with the resources that were rapidly evolving, it seemed to me that we might soon have to think about literacy in new ways. A short piece, published in 2007 called 'Writing the future in the digital age', captures my thinking at the time. And in this piece I did use those two words 'digital literacy' and began to engage with the debate about what it might mean for how we talk about writing and reading - as well as the broader semiotic landscape. What were the implications for education in particular? There was plenty of opinion, both radical and conservative back then and in that sense nothing much has changed. But I noticed, as time went on, that a lot of effort was being spent on trying to pin down the term - particularly by those who wanted to influence policy and practice in schools. Instead, what interested me was the direct experience of children and young people and the ways in which new communication played out in a rapidly changing social, cultural and linguistic milieu. My linguistic training had led me to an understanding that whilst spoken language changed quite quickly - over the course of a lifetime - written language, being more strictly codified, was much slower to change. But here, new written forms were popping up all over the place, with novel conventions of address, abbreviation, new methods of distribution and - because of rapid connectivity - new ways of relating to one another. To call it a revolution in writing seemed too bold, but it was certainly a time of rapid change. I'm now of the opinion that a good argument could be made for calling digital literacy a revolution in writing and I've made my peace with the term and all its multiple meanings. Revolution wasn't on my mind in my last book, 'Why Writing Still Matters', even though that work was concerned with describing and analysing the changing face of written communication. But when Edward Elgar asked me to write a book called 'Rethinking Digital Literacy' I gradually came round to that way of thinking. Because I really wanted go into all the different layers, and all the various implications of this shift in communication, it seemed economical to start using 'digital literacy' again and to try to get a grip on the sweeping changes that it's caught up in. In this new book I finally am suggesting that we're in the midst of a revolution in writing!

Gabriel?

Gabriel - I think of it as a literary name, a name that you'd expect to find in a novel, but rare in everyday life. So to add to my thread of literary coincidences, meeting a character called Gabriel in two different novels shouldn't be too surprising. But reading one after another there's always the danger of contamination. Fortunately though, the Gabriel or 'Gabe' of Maggie O'Farrell's excellent Instructions for a Heatwave is radically different to William Boyd's accidental spy in Gabriel's Moon. The similarities begin and end with the name. Both authors are leading exponents of contemporary English fiction and both do character very well, although their approaches are quite different and quite distinctive. In these two novels O'Farrell explores relationship through interaction, through inter-relation and social behaviour, and whilst this features in Boyd, he ends up taking us down a more analytical, psychological path. There are, of course, all sorts of ways that the impression of character can be conveyed. Modern novelists have often used descriptions of facial expressions and features, physical bearing and movement to identify and communicate something about character. O'Farrell has some delicate touches in describing how the family in her fiction dress - and this is important in capturing an era, principally focused on the Summer of 1976. From her I learnt what a sprigged dress is - and how well it sums up the Laura Ashley era. Some writers can't seem to hold back on this topic. Think of Flaubert who has 'a Polish girl in a salmon-coloured velvet spencer' with a 'gauzy skirt over pearl-grey stockings encased in pink boots edged with white fur', but then again this is him describing a fancy dress ball! But in Boyd it seems overdone. A double agent in a 'crisp white shirt and Royal Artillery tie', a minor character in 'a simple, close-fitting white dress', an artist in 'an olive green cotton drill suit with a dark orange silk tie', a barman in a 'starched double-breasted jacket ', a waiter in a 'cerise jacket' and the enigmatic Faith in 'navy blue pedal-pushers with a matching short blouson jacket' - all in the space of ten pages. Is Boyd giving wardrobe instructions for some future film adaptation or is he trying to capture something of the spy genre? Or is he inventing his own genre? After all Gabriel's Moon is described as the first of a trilogy of Gabriel Dax stories. What characters wear and how they wear it can supply important detail to the reader, it can anchor them to a particular culture or point in time, but in the hands of a skilled writer it can also convey a character's age or social status and something more subtle about their relationship to the world. I'm not sure that Boyd's descriptions do any of that work, but in other respects Gabriel's Moon is a very readable book. I'll sign up for the next one.

Waiting on the Platform

After a fanfare of message alerts and email notifications my copy of Literacies in the Platform Society arrived today. It's a collection that's skilfully edited by Philip Nichols and Antero Garcia and I would like to wish them every success with it. The book has a chapter that Cathy and I wrote which may or not pass the test of time, but it reflects on the way that academic work has become commodified and drawn into a market economy under the influence of technological processes. One of the features of this piece is our use of an imagined dialogue with the software. We use that technique to capture or characterise the internal experience and affective responses of those scholars who have to engage with journal publishers' platforms. That strategy of layering fictional accounts into the academic practices of theory and data has been a long-standing pre-occupation of ours. It might make for a more readable text, it's fun to do, but more than that there is a sense that fictional work can carry more complex meanings than something that is baldly scientific. In a way it's the next logical step forward from narrative research. There's quite a lot of it in my new book Rethinking Digital Literacy which is due to be published in October. Since submitting the manuscript of that book my writing life has turned quite decisively towards fiction. Of course, I've been doing bits and pieces for some time now, but this is both more serious and more playful. My first short story, a fiction that seems to me to be more or less complete in that it stands on its own two feet, is finished and I'm poised for a follow-up. I have no particular ambition for this new writing. No contract. No deadline. Free from all that I can just explore writing as a purely creative process - one that I have considerable investment in and derive a certain sort of pleasure from - and then see where that takes me. I'm happy with the transition although I have nothing but fond memories for the academic writing I've had the privilege to be involved in - even a strange sort of nostalgia for those journal platforms, successor to what we once called 'electronic submission'. Looking back on it that seems like such an odd term. Were we even then submitting to an unknown power? The power of the electronic. In contrast 'platform' is such a neutral term, but as our chapter title suggests, it's where you wait.

Academic outputs

At about the same time that academia was force-marched into accountability, the writing that academics do came to be referred to as outputs, as if in some sort of quasi-mechanical fashion scholars were being paid to sit on a production line watching ideas, data, themes or perhaps chunks of half-formed text rolling down a conveyor belt to be riveted together into papers, journal articles or monographs. According to this new industrial logic the productivity or worth of an academic would depend on the availability of high quality material published by a reputable publisher in a prestigious journal. Academic writing would then be on the market, favoured or favourited, liked, bought or somehow consumed by others. Just as the ways in which we think about publishing has had to take account of digital distribution and open access, academic activity, and writing in particular, has been reshaped by new market forces. Much has been written about this, and there's still plenty to debate, but the hidden cost lies in the reshaping of academic labour into something that appears to be measurable, even quantifiable in some way. A single output certainly could be described in terms of its weight as a printout, its word count or average word length - and people would be right to scoff if these were proposed as measures of its importance. So perhaps the number of citations an output receives seems more scientific - but then, if we think that influence or popularity is the same thing as quality we'd be fooling ourselves. Such measures are at the most a very rough guide, as is the h-index of an individual academic, dependent as it is on the cumulative market value of citations. Could we ever achieve consensus on the quality of academic writing? Perhaps in very broad terms we might agree that some outputs are more persuasive than others, that some develop a robust argument, develop or introduce a new perspective or contribute to the advance of knowledge. But as with writing in general, perceptions of quality are, in the end, an individual and even a temporary judgement, partly because of the way in which our own reading reflects shifting interests and purposes. For me it has frequently been the case that what I've read, and perhaps cited, may not be particularly well argued or well founded, but something that has caused me to stop and reflect - just as going to a presentation that annoys me can help to clarify my own thinking. Even academic writing that has had a formative influence may not be recognised as significant till later on, until its ideas have been absorbed, debated and reinterpreted. After all, even Einstein's groundbreaking work failed to make an immediate impact. Steady and considered assessment and re-assessment is how knowledge evolves, how ideas build within and across academic communities. As we know, a piece of writing - an output, if you must - is always in dialogue with other writing, with other discussions, and with a range of practices and perspectives. At the end of Middlemarch, George Elliot claims that the 'growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' and owed to those 'who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs'. The accumulation of knowledge and the evaluation of the work of academics in general seems to me to require the same sort of logic - a recognition of a community of practitioners many of whom may live a hidden life, rather than an assembly line of outputs judged by their market value and the prestige of the individuals who produce them.

Reading with the algorithm

Georgi Gospodinov has an enviable light touch as a writer. Reading his novel Time Shelter I was delighted by his description of temporary havens from years gone by - havens initially designed as a comfort for those suffering from dementia. In Gospodinov's fictional world the idea becomes so popular and so contagious that it extends to whole cities and then eventually whole countries. Under referendum-like conditions, citizens then vote to remain or return to earlier times. It's an engaging and thought-provoking political satire. But it also encourages deeper reflection on personal and cultural memory, on identity and the meanings of nationality. After I'd put Time Shelter down almost straight away I picked up Sanak Hiiragi's Lantern of Lost Memories, which is a very different sort of book, a different kind of writing, but equally engaging in its own way. The coincidence of choosing two novels that explored the theme of time and memory struck me as odd, despite the fact that it's a common literary trope. Of course you could develop a whole reading list on that theme - one that for me would have to include Proust, Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and Yoko Agawa's charming novella The Housekeeper and the Professor. It's not surprising that time and the novel is a well-worn theme, and scholarship still looks back to Bakhtin's essays on the subject for inspiration. Yet despite knowing that this is a recurrent trope, it surprised me to read two such well-matched books. It was only later when I remembered that I'd looked for Time Shelter on Amazon, shortly after reading a review of it in the London Review of Books. It was the Amazon algorithm that had recommended the Hiiragi book to me. Thank you Amazon, but it pulled me up short. I'm continually realising that I don't enjoy as much agency as I think I do. I'm under the influence. Of course there's upbringing and education. In fact there's all those forces that formed me as a reader, and a particular kind of reader at that. I'm influenced by all sorts of social, cultural and political forces that manifest in all sorts of ways (taking out a subscription to the London Review of Books is just one small example of this). I'm influenced to follow up on Gospodinov, and then I'm influenced by the algorithm! All in all I'm caught up in, influenced or even produced by, a condensation of heterogeneous forces, algorithms included. We know how algorithms influence us, how they nudge us in different directions, influence what we think is important - what we buy, where we go and how we get there as well as what we watch and what we read. I used to argue strongly for the importance of having a community of readers - peers, colleagues, friends and family - in fact all of the wider social network is worth considering. And these are still so important, but there are wider forces at play, too. Now technologies are beginning to play an important role as well. Perhaps non-human factors have always been there, but the development of algorithms and AI signals an enhanced technological participation in how we experience the world. I read with the algorithm.

The guide

Although a Western visitor to Bhutan can in theory travel independently, in practical terms a guide is necessary in order to negotiate the language and culture, as well as to be granted access to many of the places one might wish to visit. As a result, for most of visitors the experience is heavily mediated by a guide. If our experience of visiting is anything to go by, guides can be friendly, knowledgeable and adaptable - a good thing, and integral to the experience. A good guide is essential when you're visiting dzongs. Dzongs are strategically placed fortified monasteries and the ones we visited in October were very well preserved or in some cases carefully, even lovingly, restored. Decoration, particular in terms of wall painting, is exquisite and uses a distinctive regional colour palette. But iconographic interpretation is complicated, sometimes even challenging the advanced knowledge of an experienced local guide - ours was both knowledgable and experienced. I was, however, surprised to see our guide using AI to solve one particularly knotty problem. This intrigued me and from that point onwards I started using AI, too - sometimes to check and at other times to add to my own knowledge. I found that ChatGTP was pretty knowledgeable about some quite remote areas of Bhutan, and reasonably reliable in commenting on iconography. On one or two occasions I felt like I’d run into a wall, as if I’d found the edge, the furthest reach of AI, where I knew more or at least knew that there was more to know. It was like being in a large room in the half-light and then suddenly, unexpectedly touching the wall.  But the way in which an AI app can become entangled with people on the move, with niche representational practices in remote places is impressive. I quickly realized that we really did need a guide, but found myself wondering how AI might change what you need a guide to do and even what a guide needs to know in the first place, and by extension what any of us need to know. The digital materiality of devices, the infrastructure of connectivity, the labour of production and of software engineering, the more-than-human flows of energy and resource all seem to coalesce in the interpretive work I've mentioned – but yet it seems as if this coalescence alters the place you’re in, how it is seen and how it is experienced. Everything is placed in a new kind of relation – phone, guide, dzong, knowledge, movement – the list is endless. Should we worry?

Method or madness?

Can inspired teaching be reduced to method or does it always require inspired teachers? The most influential educational models today duck this question by placing their trust in curriculum and through policing teacher compliance with testing regimes. The best teachers, according to this model, are those who efficiently and consistently get good results in high stakes testing. But there was a time when quality in education meant something different and when the key site of educational debate was method. Now method has been relegated to the sidelines. The old arguments for student-centred education and discovery learning, now bundled up as 'progressive', have been safely stowed away in the stock cupboard to gather dust. As a way of thinking about knowledge or about learning processes they have been shelved. The idea of disrupting power, of education as a critical force or some sort of act of emancipation have gone out of fashion. Education is there as an economic investment in a stable future rather than as a force for social change. You may still hear enthusiastic university lecturers talking about facilitating rather than transmitting knowledge, preferring to be the 'guide on the side' rather than the 'sage on the stage', but that's in the arena of adult learning. Christopher Zalla's film Radical resuscitates this seemingly moribund debate. Here the teacher is inspiring, his method - well, it's radical - and it delivers the goods in test results. The brilliantly drawn teacher, Sergio Juarez, who prefers to be known as Sergio, turns the tables in an underachieving primary school in Mexico, where social forces, crime, poverty, corruption and high stakes testing seem to have the students well and truly trapped. Sergio literally turns the tables (into imaginary boats) and then gets rid of them altogether. He does the same with curriculum requirements - turns them upside down, then gets rid of them. He is passionate, inspired, sometimes frustrated, and maybe even slightly crazy. But all along he is desperate to find ways for his students to realize their full potential. Not once in the film does he express any overtly political views, despite the fact that what he is doing is deeply political - there's just no dogma attached to what he does. He appears to be driven by an unwavering belief in learning and knowledge as a fundamental human right. That's it. Well, that and the internet. His vision is inspiring, but it's not as if there aren't obstacles - the initially sceptical principal, the dismissive colleague, the corrupt official and so on. Also there is the grinding poverty, the oppressive forces that restrict the students, their lack of self-belief - the injustice of it all. Radical the movie is sometimes a little simplistic in its analysis, in its avoidance of politics, and occasionally veers towards the sentimental. But Sergio's passion is brilliantly captured and the evolution of his relationship with the principal is delicately handled and heart-warming. It's based on a true story and that gives weight to the argument that Zalla's film is making. Still the argument rests on method - re-packaged from A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses. It's not exactly Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, more like a neoliberal fantasy - but that would be straying into the politics of education which the movie doesn't do. This is about education and method, but it could just as well be about a very brave and inspired teacher who believes in his students. In the end, it's thought provoking and there's so much to discuss. I wonder how this movie would play in a teacher education course today?
 

Monitoring reading

I've been reading fiction throughout my life and I seem to have developed a number of strategies for evaluating - or perhaps it might be better to say monitoring - what I'm reading as I go along. I don't think they'd have universal appeal or that they might just simply work for anyone without any modification, but they work well enough for me and just because of that they may be worth sharing. So here we go. First of all I want to be won over by a writer, and I want that to happen fairly quickly - in the first couple of pages at least. I want to enter the world of the writer. Nothing too flashy but just enough to make me want to carry on. Maybe it's a gentle hint of what might follow, a voice that appeals, a setting or interaction that intrigues me. Then after the start I tend to apply what I call the 100 page rule. At this point, do I understand what's going on? Do I feel sufficiently hooked in to continue? Do I want to know what happens next? Can I get some sort of purchase on the different characters - can I remember who they are? In the past I've just abandoned what I'm reading if it fails the 100 page rule. Nowadays I'm a little more forgiving and may persevere for a while. And then next, about halfway through, regardless of the length of the thing it's the halfway point - I'm asking myself 'Is it worth carrying on?' or have I just had enough? Life is short enough. My default tendency is to give a writer the benefit of the doubt. I know enough about writing to know how much effort is required and just how hard it is to say what you want to and how easy it is to fall short. Writers should be given the benefit of the doubt. But this halfway point is very significant to me. It usually helps me to distinguish between the very good and what's good enough. Of course, you never really know until the end - that's just the way it is. By way of example, at the moment I'm reading Colm Tobin's The Blackwater Lightship. The first couple of pages are excellent. That's definitely a tick, then. By page 100 I note that I'm completely absorbed. It's certainly got more to give. At the halfway mark I have Declan, a central character, at his grandmother's bleak abode, dying of AIDs. Present, a couple of friends and various members of his fractious family. Is it worth continuing? Well I'm not put off, but neither can I see much in terms of resolution for the family. How will it end? Declan's got a one way ticket - there can be no surprises there. Sad or tragic though it may be, he will die. Things hang in the balance but nothing much can change by the logic of the book's own narrative. Yet the second half manages to open up the back stories of the characters in a way that is so much more plausible than other two parters (Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies would be an example). This gives Tobin's novel additional depth and nuance. It looks like there won't be an easy settlement but as Declan's health becomes progressively worse, the three generations of women move closer to understanding one another. It's as close to a resolution as we're going to get and the writing is very good. There's a small dazzling window when Tobin's narrator captures Declan's sister's despair: 'Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea ....It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glittering of the sea, and the moving breeze happened without witness, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love.' Bleak, but blindingly good - I guess that's what Tobin intended.

 

Let's hear it for the trees

There's a hypnotic, meditative quality to Perfect Days which foregrounds the Koji Yakusho character's quiet immersion in simple everyday life as a Tokyo toilet cleaner. He is surrounded by busy people, but also by natural beauty. A touchstone here is the sunlight leaking through trees, summed up by some beguiling cinematic images of that komorebi effect. Quiet acceptance seems like a template for contentment and it has been suggested that Wim Wenders is taking a stand here. But what do we read into some of the other motifs? The cassette tapes he plays in the car each morning - those lo-fi analogue recordings of a previous generation that haunt the movie? Or the delicate suggestion that his past and his family relationships may not be so straightforward? And all those imaginative toilet designs that we encounter? Critics have tended to focus on the beauty of the film and have celebrated the portrayal of a character seemingly at peace with the world, turning away from, or escaping from the mess. But, perhaps inevitably, there's more beneath the placid surface of the film. It takes us away from toilets, from toilet cleaning and from Tokyo, such a potent symbol of the modern world. It could be argued that Perfect Days makes an uneasy settlement with the modern world, in the same way that the Koji Yakusho character may have made an uneasy settlement with his life. Some parallels can be found in another slow and quiet film - Here from the Belgian director Bas Devos. The central characters, a Romanian construction worker and a Chinese bryologist develop a romantic connection in natural beauty walking through the woodland around Brussels. The trees and the mosses come to the foreground, They are beautifully filmed as modern life speeds by in the background - trains ceaselessly moving rootless people from place to place. Here is another sideways glance at modernity. The character Stefan is more troubled than Wim Wender's toilet cleaner, but his life is just as simple and his motivations are nothing but generous - he cooks up soup and walks miles to deliver it in plastic tubs to his friends. Here may be overlooked because Devos is not so well known and because it may be siloed as art house, but it is still a real achievement. On the other hand Wim Wender's huge reputation has already insured that Perfect Days gets plenty of attention. But both films deserve to be taken seriously, both show what a feature-length film can do, and both have important messages for us. And let's hear it for trees - they don't feature in the credits, but they are major actors in both these wonderful, thought-provoking films.

The reading habit

My reading habit is almost as bad as my writing habit. In fact it may be worse. It costs more for a start and it has the added disadvantage of cluttering the place up with its remnants - books. I usually read a couple of them a week. Sometimes non-fiction but most of the time these days fiction. A long term ambition has been to make some sort of reference to what I read here, on this blog. But that's too much pressure. And the trouble is that I don't quite know what I think about a piece of writing until sometime afterwards and by then I've started on something else and then I forget what I thought before. My clearest thoughts about my reading usually begin to crystallise out as I'm reading, but somehow it seems wrong to write them down before I've finished the whole thing. Wrong and probably unfair. So my first impressions of Checkout 19 was that it was a rather clumsy attempt to claim cultural capital with all those references to her reading. That was until it started to impress me with its deep interiority and its own grappling with the writing/reading process. But all that fell away when I started to admire the jaw-dropping way that it would lurch into full-blown fantasy. Still when I reached the end it had become something else again, another kind of story. Bennet's book is unsettling. It's hard to compare it with anything else and perhaps that's why I can't quite bring myself to say I enjoyed it. OK, it shares some common features with something like Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, but then that's a more conventional form, a memoir with an explicit trajectory, a memoir that dwells directly on its central character and context. On some occasions when I read I just get absorbed in technique and with Checkout 19 I found myself turning back the pages on a couple of occasions to find out how skilfully Claire-Louise Bennett got us from A to B. Quite remarkable in itself. I turn the corner of the page as if I'll go back again which is something I rarely do, because by then I'm on to the next thing which in this case is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Don't lean on me man

Scribbled notes on a scrap of lined paper sold for £89,000 the other day. They were the draft lyrics for Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City – complete with the added revisions ‘Hey man!’, ‘Don’t lean on me man’ and ‘Outasight’. The everyday nature of the materials and the rather unremarkable addition of those words might seem trivial or even banal if it were not for the huge impact of Bowie’s songs on popular culture. That scrap of paper, those hastily scribbled jottings are like visible traces of a creative process in vivo. Those songs echoed around bedrooms and shared houses, bedsits and squats, family homes and student flats. They were sung along to, played, replayed and performed time and again, spooling outwards, as it were, from those hastily scribbled lines. Of course, it wasn’t just the lyrics, it was the voice and the music too, the distinctive sound of that particular recording, distributed on vinyl, in its instantly recognisable cardboard sleeve. And it goes without saying, the RCA supply chain ensured that copies were there, ready and available in the racks and trays of LPs that like-minded people habitually flicked through when they went to their favourite record store, back in the day. Matter of little significance has, over time, become a much sought after collector’s item - the value of that scrap of paper far outstrips the value of the raw materials it’s made from, and the ways in which the words themselves wound their way around the feelings and impulses as well as the hopes, beliefs and dreams of a generation of listeners is difficult to capture because of its inevitable multiplicity. It may well have been the soundtrack of many people’s early lives - but then what lives? How did the lyrics come to mean in different contexts, how were they understood - how were they heard, misheard, disliked, detested? Material history can be a bit like that, for although we might agree on the importance of a particular artefact, its meaning is fundamentally unstable inviting interpretation, re-interpretation and misinterpretation. Music in popular culture seems to inhabit the outer reaches of such instability because of the way in which it is often woven into significant personal events, stitched in to one’s particular state of mind, the recreational drugs, relationships, lifestyles and ambitions of the time. Perhaps music in general does this, seamlessly attaching itself to the memories and affects, the distinctiveness of a life. After all this is key to the success of Desert Island Discs, now 81 years old. The 8 track format is such a convenient hook to tell the story of one’s life - or at least a version of it. With an aspiration to be a writer, poet or wordsmith and a nascent literary sensibility I was drawn to the words that punctuated the soundtrack of my early life. That soundtrack was made of vinyl. Singles and EPs that span around at 45 rpm, LPs at 33.3 rpm. Mostly I first heard stuff on pirate stations, on a transistor radio, on Top of the Pops or round at friends’ houses. But the LP soon became something to own. The record sleeve had the all-important supplementary information. The aesthetic of the art work, the names of the musicians, the way they looked, the way they dressed and how they had their hair - the instruments they played, who sang, who wrote the songs and of course, the lyrics themselves. No longer inaudible or misheard, there they were, nearly always on the back of the sleeve or on a pull-out, and you could read them, sing along or just pour over their meaning, if you could fathom it out. Some were more self-consciously poetic than others, some were just rubbish, but nonetheless huge clouds of creativity billowed out of that early flowering of rock music. It seemed at the time that the lyrics carried valuable messages. If they were not poetic they might gesture towards expressions of lifestyle, of taste, of belief and in doing so fashioned the habits of mind of a generation. Whimsical and romantic, uncompromising and rebellious, conceptual, quirky, hedonistic, we were served up with a range of possibilities, a wardrobe of identities that might distinguish us from the mainstream. Only a few at the time saw how the subtle threads of capitalism were part of this, establishing a marketplace in which even the costumes of anti-capitalism could be bought. And now, just the words remain – like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan (it’s all there somewhere, even if the melody is hard to sing!). Skeletons, threadbare outfits. At an earlier auction the lyrics for Bowie’s Starman sold for £203,500. Unlike Suffragette City, these look like neat copy – presentable handwriting on graph paper with misspellings corrected, probably provided for publication of the official lyric sheet. They don’t have quite the same feel as the Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette City lyrics – they’re more polished, more self-conscious, but their market worth is still interesting, and given that an early demo of the song went for £41,000, a fifth of the price, it seems like the material trace of writing is an important marker for the collector, being closer perhaps to an autograph than a ghostlike voice, written by the hand of an icon, don’t lean on me man.

Killers

 

Perhaps Martin Scorsese is playing with conventions, but 3 hrs 26 mins sounds like a very long movie. Killers of the Flower Moon is that long but I can honestly say that it didn't drag, the evening just had to be rearranged to accommodate it, and that's no bad thing. The murders, the casual racism and the downright evil intent of William Hale are dramatisations of real-life events that took place in the 1920s and were explored in David Grann's book of the same name Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. The film script is based on the book. But although we get a bit about the FBI, the film concentrates on the strongly drawn characters and the atrocities that they unleash. Leonardo diCaprio, as Ernest Burkhart, is excellent at playing a character who is weak, confused and easily manipulated by William Hale (Robert deNiro) whose charitable mask hides a seething caldron of malice.  Most sources categorise the film as a Western and there's plenty to be said about that - how the genre has evolved and what it means now. I don't find it a particularly useful box to put this film in, but through a series of co-incidences, work on the mostly grim encounters between white settlers and Native Americans has been on my mind a lot recently. Delving into the work of Sebastian Barry had taken me into the brutal world of the Indian Wars - a bloody chapter in American history, which Barry handles so well. In Days without End he manages to weave in delicate intimacy, love and yes, even gender fluidity, with the trauma of human atrocity without lessening the impact or significance of either. I didn't need Faber to include the first chapter of A Thousand Moons in that book, but I went on to read it anyway. Equally brilliant writing. So although reading the two, one after another, was no co-incidence at all, I didn't think of either in terms of a Western - and good for Faber, they don't go down that route, either. Then, in a second-hand bookshop, I picked up West by Carys Davies. If anything was at work it was subliminal. I just wanted something fairly short, something with a lively narrative and a quick flick through suggested that's what I'd get. What a great first novel it is too. It's short, there's a strong storyline and some pitch-perfect writing. Always fascinated by writing about writing I thought she has a particularly deft touch in looking at that particular settler practice from a different perspective. One of her central characters has a Native American companion who dispassionately observes the act of writing 'the dip of the point of one of his half-bald feathers into the ink, the sound that was like the working of the claws of a small creature on a leaf or the smooth bark of a tree.' Wonderful! With a title like 'West' it's easy to think of it as a Western, but it's so much more than that. And again it exposes colonialism and the bloody violence of the settlers, the land grab, the fight for domination, the inhumanity of those who think of themselves as civilised or somehow superior. And then we watch the news.

Why writing still matters, too

 

For the cover of Why Writing Still Matters I wanted an image that conveyed some of the messages that are to be found in the book - and that's quite a big ask. This image of Tom Price's wonderful piece called Network, which is in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, was an obvious candidate. It might make you think of writing as it is becoming - writing with technology, which is consistent with the book's subtitle, 'Written Communication in Changing Times'. The fact that I'm in the picture as well is a bit of an in-joke. But in the end we went for the more abstract image which is credited to Nick Oakes but doesn't actually get any commentary. It's a photograph of initials and names carved into a tree trunk near the Alhambra in Spain. I like it because it references an everyday, but unofficial use of writing - using your name as if to say 'I was here, too' - here for as long as this writing surface remains. It will outlast the act of inscription, but anything further is uncertain. It is the trace of an action - a penknife gouging out the crusty bark of a tree. Someone leaves their mark, announces their existence, expresses their frustration, pledges their love or whatever. I like it because it can be read in different ways, and because it might provoke all sorts of different reactions. The specific detail of its origin and author(s) are unknown. The fact that it has been coloured with the primary colours that Miro was so fond of adds another dimension for me. That and the place in which the photograph was taken - I have fond memories of visiting the Alhambra. Visiting and queuing. Once we waited for 6 hours! It can be like that at the height of the tourist season. But, it's always worth it. The Alhambra and the Generalife are a potent reminder of Moorish rule in Europe and an important part of Spain's architectural heritage. A jewel in the crown of Andalusia. Of course, none of this is in the photograph, but it's what I bring to the photograph. And somehow when you put all that together you get more of a sense of what writing is, what writing does and then maybe, perhaps, why writing still matters.

Paper matters, too

In Why Writing Still Matters I spend some time tracing the invention and development of paper as a writing technology, but not with the detail and enthusiasm that Basbanes applies in On Paper. But I do note that after the French Revolution writing paper began to appear bearing the names of new government offices and departments. Sometimes this was lavishly produced from engravings of the motif Liberty, Egality and Fraternity. Pictorial writing paper subsequently began to make its appearance on the correspondence of traders and shopkeepers, signalling a sort of sophistication or professionalism. By the early 1800s good quality writing paper was beginning to become available in England. Headed paper with embossed and ornamental designs was often printed with decorative or coloured borders. Some of this high quality paper was watermarked and used for invitations, greetings and to promote social events. Although the written messages inscribed on them were important, the quality and decoration on the paper carried an additional message - distinctive, expensive, tasteful, carefully chosen. Paper and printing were important to the prolific French novelist Balzac. This is partly because of his professional background as a printer, and partly because he was a keen observer of the practices of the Parisian literary world of his time and the gradual diffusion of literacy which was shaping the social and political life of the time. His concerns add texture to Lost Illusions, even when they stretch the bounds of credulity. When David, the printer's son proposes to his sweetheart he accompanies this with a lengthy discourse on his new ideas about paper making. 'Paper, which is no less wonderful a product than printing, of which it is a basis, had long been in existence in China when it penetrated through the underground channels of Asia Minor' he declaims. And this is just the beginning! This proposal speech spans five pages. What it offers us in terms of a detailed history of papermaking far outweighs its potential in the arena of courtship.

Why Writing Still Matters

My new book Why Writing Still Matters was published by Cambridge University Press last week. I haven't actually seen a copy yet - distribution being something slightly different from printing and publication, but I'm fairly certain it exists in that particular material form. And that's actually a significant transformation because up until this point in time it has been entirely digital. From proposal through to draft and final chapters it has been a thing on a computer screen. During this time the 10 months worth of writing has found its way up and down the country, across to New York and then out to Puducherry (formerly known as Pondicherry) for proofing. I mention all this because it's directly related to a major theme in the book. I wanted to explore, to think about and perhaps rethink writing in the context of digital communication. Does writing still matter? Of course, it will come as no surprise that I do think that it still matters - but of course, how, why and in what ways is central to the book. I don't make much of the double meaning of 'mattering'. With the rise of new materialism that's become rather old hat, but nevertheless my book does dwell on the materiality of print and digital technology. And still I find myself keen - perhaps too keen - to actually hold the thing. It has had an ephemeral existence for too long. I want to feel its substantial form, its heft. I want to see it occupying some space on my desk, my windowsill, the kitchen table. I want to take it with me in the car and watch others browse through it. And I want to give a copy to some of those who have contributed to its development. It's almost as if its 'thingness', its existence as a work only becomes complete when it achieves a certain material form. Why should that be the case? A common sense way of thinking about this is to recall that I did actually set out to write a book. I wasn't thinking of an extended blogpost, a free-to-use extended pdf essay, a beer mat or anything else. I was imagining a book all along. I shouldn't be so surprised. An observation, that can be found in the book, is that we live in a sort of halfway house, in which pen and paper happily co-exist with keyboards and screens. Our local high street probably still has a stationer's that stocks pencils, pencil sharpeners, pencil cases and all the other peripheral devices associated with what is sometimes referred to as traditional literacy. We might need to Google 'stationers near me' to find it, but that's my point. Back to the book - Why Writing Still Matters ends up being something like a cultural history of writing. My rather unsystematic tracing of writing through its long history is a way of illustrating many of the amazing and inventive uses - and staggeringly tragic misuses - of the written word. Its reach and its influence. Writing itself is value-neutral and like any technology, it is malleable. But it has become an established part of how we develop perspective, how we legislate, how we govern and build knowledge. It's part of how we unite around a common cause. It's part of informed debate. Of course, it's a whole host other things too - and not all of them are so positive. But perhaps an education in and through writing is the best we can have. I hope I have contributed to that understanding - but all that aside, I have another hope, too. I hope those who get to the book will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thinking about Yoko Ogawa

I read The Memory Police about a year ago and I thought it was so good that I should post something about it. I put the book down on the deep windowsill in my study which functions a bit like an in-tray. That's where I put things I'm working on, or things I need to attend to - work, parking fines, speeding tickets, tax notices and so on. For a while, each morning, I'd look at it and think about what I might write, but I couldn't come up with anything. Gradually things began to accumulate around it, and there were more pressing things to do, like my own writing for instance. Soon it was hidden underneath other stuff, well after the fines were paid and the tax notices filed away. But now there were papers to review, drafts to look over - maybe a new parking fine to pay or to appeal against, life goes on. It would be a fiction to I claim that I forgot about The Memory Police. It just got buried. It got buried because I couldn't work out what I wanted to say about it. Occasionally it would come to light again as I sorted through the mess of things on the windowsill. And if I tidied up, as I do occasionally, there it was - something I wanted to do, and I'd promise myself that I'd write something about it. But I didn't. After some time, maybe six months or so, I realised that I wasn't going to get round to it and that it would be better just to forget it altogether. It got shelved, somewhere or other. I gave up. The title stayed with me though, and from time to time I would mention the book to someone or just conjure up the strange atmosphere that it created for me. And then last week, when I found myself in a bookshop looking for something to read, I remembered it, but I couldn't think of the name of the Japanese author who wrote it. I felt a bit under pressure because I wasn't sure whether I'd parked my car illegally, but I googled the title anyway and there it was - The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. The bookshop had a couple of shelves that featured Japanese writers, and that's what had prompted my memory. I quickly turned up three titles by Ogawa and chose The Housekeeper and the Professor. I'm about half way through it at the moment and it confirms my view that Ogawa is a brilliant writer. It seems good to post about it now and I certainly don't want it to sit on the windowsill like The Memory Police did. It's written in the same spare prose style, conjuring up this rather strange world, not unlike our own but different, of course, unusual perhaps. 'Haunting', I think it says on the dust jacket. But what does that actually mean? I have no idea, nevertheless it is - haunting, unusual, atmospheric. The reader is drawn into this very particular sort of world, detailed but impressionistic - both at the same time. If I said it was a bit like ink wash, I hope it doesn't sound as if I'm looking at it through the eyes of a romantic orientalist. It's like ink wash because it's beautiful, delicate and at the same time slightly out of focus. Blurred. There's craft and precision; every word contributes to the whole. In this sense, I'm reminded of Small Things Like These, in fact everything by Claire Keegan, although the result couldn't be more different. And just like The Memory Police, The Housekeeper and the Professor is about remembering and forgetting although so far, at least, there isn't the same feeling of oppression, the same political undertow that haunts the pages of The Memory Police. Even though I haven't finished reading it yet, it's a real achievement, and it probably won't ever sit on the deep windowsill underneath the random stuff that accumulates there.