This blog is no more. It was always a little awkward, and frankly I think I always needed something with a little more grunt under the hood than Blogger provides. I won't be updating it and I'll probably delete it in a few months.
If you want to read my ramblings, make with the clicky and go to www.stevencudahy.com if you feel so inclined.
S.
06 December 2009
15 September 2009
Holding comment
I have been unwell, and am recovering.
Thanks for the comment Lexi. More blogging to follow soon.
S.
Thanks for the comment Lexi. More blogging to follow soon.
S.
18 June 2009
Ramblings - A Dancing World
This is a note for me. Ignore it if you're not into the slightly beer-fueled ramblings of a very tired writer...
Given that most people say the middle is the most difficult part of a novel, what about a novel that features only beginnings and endings? Arguably Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller... could be kind of interpreted in this way. Obviously, everything needs to tie into some kind of metanarrative, but the sheer scope for play is immmense.
There would need to be some kind of metanarrative. Calvino does a wonderful rolling story, almost like moving through paintings that each contain a painting of another painting and there's this controlled regression that is just lovely. Plus the marvellous thing with the chapter titles.
In the UK, though? It'd have to be hidden somehow. Any structure that could be looked at as at all pretentious isn't going to fly in UK publishing.
Unless... Hmmm... Reread Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books. That kind of jumping, that kind of flow, that kind of, what thee fuck to call it, burst fiction? You could do a cut-up in a Burroughs way and it would still all link together and make sense as narrative.
Perhaps even do this online and have a randomised chapter functionality, and a constantly growing and expanding narrative. Perhaps this is the point of an online novel. The novel, not as form but as function. Of course, everything's been done already, people have been doing hypertext novels for years, but this would be a progressively growing dumping-ground for little fragments that don't fit anywhere else.
Start with 70-80000 words ready. Push it up as a whole bunch of linked chunks, allow randomised readings, allow people to log in to keep track of what they've read before. Allow a temporally locked reading. Constantly update. The fact is, you start with 80000 words and add, say, five thousand words a month, you're up to 60000 words a year, and you run it for ten years you've got an almost 700000 word behemoth in place.
Fuck it, run it as a collaborative, open-source fiction and get a couple of hundred decent, comitted contributors and you're up to millions of words for an on-line world. Fan-fiction in the service of something completely original. A novel so large and sprawling you can never finish it. You'd need powerful search tools – someone wants characters A and G to feature in their latest contribution and they search every appearance of those characters, do the research and get the gist of who this person is.
This would, by definition, have to be a world where both spatial and temporal geographies are, to put it politely, loose. A Dancing world, for want of a better term...
At which point the original core starts to look more like a rulebook, a skeleton on which everything else hangs. The definition of what few absolutes exist in this fictional world.
Obviously there would be characters with the same name. There would have to be some way to differentiate this.
But a fictional world. Fictional reviews of cultural objects, architectural blueprints, crimes reports, statistics, political rallies, sermons, prescriptions, animals, lovers and fighters and all the blown-out blend of this world.
But how would something like this retain it's readability? How do you moderate this kind of thing? Even a fictional world without ownership needs to maintain some level of quality.
Although I do love the idea of opening my e-mail every morning to find a screed of what a load of creative people have been making in the last twenty-four hours...
S.
Given that most people say the middle is the most difficult part of a novel, what about a novel that features only beginnings and endings? Arguably Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller... could be kind of interpreted in this way. Obviously, everything needs to tie into some kind of metanarrative, but the sheer scope for play is immmense.
There would need to be some kind of metanarrative. Calvino does a wonderful rolling story, almost like moving through paintings that each contain a painting of another painting and there's this controlled regression that is just lovely. Plus the marvellous thing with the chapter titles.
In the UK, though? It'd have to be hidden somehow. Any structure that could be looked at as at all pretentious isn't going to fly in UK publishing.
Unless... Hmmm... Reread Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books. That kind of jumping, that kind of flow, that kind of, what thee fuck to call it, burst fiction? You could do a cut-up in a Burroughs way and it would still all link together and make sense as narrative.
Perhaps even do this online and have a randomised chapter functionality, and a constantly growing and expanding narrative. Perhaps this is the point of an online novel. The novel, not as form but as function. Of course, everything's been done already, people have been doing hypertext novels for years, but this would be a progressively growing dumping-ground for little fragments that don't fit anywhere else.
Start with 70-80000 words ready. Push it up as a whole bunch of linked chunks, allow randomised readings, allow people to log in to keep track of what they've read before. Allow a temporally locked reading. Constantly update. The fact is, you start with 80000 words and add, say, five thousand words a month, you're up to 60000 words a year, and you run it for ten years you've got an almost 700000 word behemoth in place.
Fuck it, run it as a collaborative, open-source fiction and get a couple of hundred decent, comitted contributors and you're up to millions of words for an on-line world. Fan-fiction in the service of something completely original. A novel so large and sprawling you can never finish it. You'd need powerful search tools – someone wants characters A and G to feature in their latest contribution and they search every appearance of those characters, do the research and get the gist of who this person is.
This would, by definition, have to be a world where both spatial and temporal geographies are, to put it politely, loose. A Dancing world, for want of a better term...
At which point the original core starts to look more like a rulebook, a skeleton on which everything else hangs. The definition of what few absolutes exist in this fictional world.
Obviously there would be characters with the same name. There would have to be some way to differentiate this.
But a fictional world. Fictional reviews of cultural objects, architectural blueprints, crimes reports, statistics, political rallies, sermons, prescriptions, animals, lovers and fighters and all the blown-out blend of this world.
But how would something like this retain it's readability? How do you moderate this kind of thing? Even a fictional world without ownership needs to maintain some level of quality.
Although I do love the idea of opening my e-mail every morning to find a screed of what a load of creative people have been making in the last twenty-four hours...
S.
01 June 2009
Tone Matrix
Note to self for further investigation. A simple, elegant, point and click 16x16 step-sequencer with a sine-wave engine. Strangely hypnotic and entrancing and so simple even a non-musician can have fun with it. And pretty too.
Tone Matrix.
S.
Tone Matrix.
S.
29 May 2009
Spam E-Mail Subject Headers May 2009
So, according to the many friendly people who generously take time out of their busy schedules to send me spam, I'm currently concerned about the size of my penis, I'm overweight, I really need a shit watch, and I should buy my medicines from Canada to save money despite living in a country with socialised healthcare.
I sometimes like to read through spam because the mangled language and tortured constructions make for an interesting snapshot of the state of play in the world of gutter marketing (and if you work in marketing, remember that you're only a fancy job-title and a weird social convention/hypocrisy away from being a spam-merchant yourself). These are some of my favourite subjects from today's trawl...
Be A Knight Of The Meat Spear. Now, I'm not sure what exactly a meat spear involves, but spears generally have stabby pointy bits on the end of long thin shafts. This seems to be not particularly promising for the satisfaction of a partner and, worse, potentially fatal. Plus, if an average spear is five or six feet long I'm going to be over the other side of the room and unable to bring any other parts of my body into play. Presumably only really useful for those who are shagging through holes in intervening objects such as, say, a castle wall, a confessional, or a parked car, or perhaps it would be a boon for the kind of businessman who brings work home and needs to keep his hands free to be on the laptop or take important calls. The idea of some sort of medieval romance featuring the Knights of the Meat Spear is so awful that it's probably being made by Channel 5 or ITV as we speak. And the mental image of a Knight shattering his meat spear against an enemy's shield is simultaneously discomfiting and hilarious.
With a bigger tool you will feel a bigger man. Interesting. Assuming 'tool' equals penis then this is presumably a drug that not only alters the size and shape of my 'tool' but gives me the feeling that I'm physically much larger than in fact I am, possibly leading to amusing and/or dangerous complications when buying clothing or attempting to perform basic tasks involving spatial awareness. Or maybe it's a guarantee that if I take this medicine I'll get to grope a guy who's taller than me.
Please their partner, increasing your size. This one seems to be a claim that sex with someone who is in a relationship with someone else will increase penis size. Which strikes me as dubious. I think I'd need to see a respectable scientific journal do a peer-reviewed study on this before I could take the claim seriously. Although, refreshingly, it doesn't specify which gender the partner in question is, so it's kind of an equal opportunity cheating we're looking at here, which is nice. And it might not be about sex at all. Perhaps any kind of pleasing behaviour - the holding open of doors, the giving of little compliments, the buying of thoughtful gifts - will add length and girth through some sort of cock-karma. Just as long as the thoughtfulness is directed towards someone else's partner rather than one's own. Sadly, although this may enhance size, it will probably severely curtail opportunities to share the joy of the newly enkarma'd penis, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless.
With a mega instrument you will feel a more important man. I'm not sure what a mega instrument is, but I would imagine it's something like the classic one-man band set up that enables you to make a godawful racket on several different musical instruments at the same time. I was unaware of the psychological and sexual benefits of this quaint and archaic practice, but next time I see someone labouring away with their back-strapped bass drum, their chest-mounted harmonica and their knock-knee cymbals I'll be sure to ask them about their increased feelings of self-esteem and whether their mega-instrument has led to greater opportunities to fondle, for example, Lord Mayors, bank managers or Cabinet ministers.
Build an outpost on your borders of safe psychic. I shit you not, that's what it said. Presumably only relevant to heads of state, monarchs, or those owning extensive tracts of land. But how do you know the psychic you're using to build your border outpost is safe, and how do you actually build an outpost from a safe psychic when you find one? Confusing and intriguing in equal measures, it turns out it's advertising a drug that claims to cut down my cholesterol, so that's disappointing.
One Watch Is Good But Two Watches Are Better. Presumably so you can wear them both and get the mean time from two different sources. But where does it end? Three watches, four, more? Surely the more sources I have for the time the more accurate I'll be, but I've only got so much forearm real-estate available and now I feel insecure about my ability to give good temporal guidance if a stranger should stop me on the street and ask. One watch clearly isn't enough. I have timepiece envy. Which I suppose is better than the codpiece envy most of the spam is trying to engender in me. But oh no, wait! Time doesn''t work that way. You either have the right time or you don't, so no number of watches telling the wrong time can make up for one watch telling the right time. And I have a mobile phone so I don't need even one watch. So back to codpiece envy it is.
A golden watch is a real turn on for women. A claim so lost in the mists of misogyny that it seems almost quaint, like a plague of locusts or believing the world is flat. Notice that the watch isn't even gold, it's golden. Because, of course, women are so easily distracted by shiny things that they'll have sex with anyone who dangles some gaudy bauble before their eyes, even if it's just some cheap tat that glitters in the sunlight. This is the basic message: Wanna have sex? Get shiny things! Women will be your slaves! Except it's not true, despite being one of the oldest advertising memes in the world. But I suppose sending spam saying things like, 'Why not just talk to her, listen to her, and treat her like a human being?' doesn't sell shoddily-manufactured knock-off watches.
Safely lose weight with Acai diet, Endorsed by Oprah. I clearly must have this because there's no more highly trained or experienced medical expert in the world than Oprah, M.D.
S.
I sometimes like to read through spam because the mangled language and tortured constructions make for an interesting snapshot of the state of play in the world of gutter marketing (and if you work in marketing, remember that you're only a fancy job-title and a weird social convention/hypocrisy away from being a spam-merchant yourself). These are some of my favourite subjects from today's trawl...
Be A Knight Of The Meat Spear. Now, I'm not sure what exactly a meat spear involves, but spears generally have stabby pointy bits on the end of long thin shafts. This seems to be not particularly promising for the satisfaction of a partner and, worse, potentially fatal. Plus, if an average spear is five or six feet long I'm going to be over the other side of the room and unable to bring any other parts of my body into play. Presumably only really useful for those who are shagging through holes in intervening objects such as, say, a castle wall, a confessional, or a parked car, or perhaps it would be a boon for the kind of businessman who brings work home and needs to keep his hands free to be on the laptop or take important calls. The idea of some sort of medieval romance featuring the Knights of the Meat Spear is so awful that it's probably being made by Channel 5 or ITV as we speak. And the mental image of a Knight shattering his meat spear against an enemy's shield is simultaneously discomfiting and hilarious.
With a bigger tool you will feel a bigger man. Interesting. Assuming 'tool' equals penis then this is presumably a drug that not only alters the size and shape of my 'tool' but gives me the feeling that I'm physically much larger than in fact I am, possibly leading to amusing and/or dangerous complications when buying clothing or attempting to perform basic tasks involving spatial awareness. Or maybe it's a guarantee that if I take this medicine I'll get to grope a guy who's taller than me.
Please their partner, increasing your size. This one seems to be a claim that sex with someone who is in a relationship with someone else will increase penis size. Which strikes me as dubious. I think I'd need to see a respectable scientific journal do a peer-reviewed study on this before I could take the claim seriously. Although, refreshingly, it doesn't specify which gender the partner in question is, so it's kind of an equal opportunity cheating we're looking at here, which is nice. And it might not be about sex at all. Perhaps any kind of pleasing behaviour - the holding open of doors, the giving of little compliments, the buying of thoughtful gifts - will add length and girth through some sort of cock-karma. Just as long as the thoughtfulness is directed towards someone else's partner rather than one's own. Sadly, although this may enhance size, it will probably severely curtail opportunities to share the joy of the newly enkarma'd penis, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless.
With a mega instrument you will feel a more important man. I'm not sure what a mega instrument is, but I would imagine it's something like the classic one-man band set up that enables you to make a godawful racket on several different musical instruments at the same time. I was unaware of the psychological and sexual benefits of this quaint and archaic practice, but next time I see someone labouring away with their back-strapped bass drum, their chest-mounted harmonica and their knock-knee cymbals I'll be sure to ask them about their increased feelings of self-esteem and whether their mega-instrument has led to greater opportunities to fondle, for example, Lord Mayors, bank managers or Cabinet ministers.
Build an outpost on your borders of safe psychic. I shit you not, that's what it said. Presumably only relevant to heads of state, monarchs, or those owning extensive tracts of land. But how do you know the psychic you're using to build your border outpost is safe, and how do you actually build an outpost from a safe psychic when you find one? Confusing and intriguing in equal measures, it turns out it's advertising a drug that claims to cut down my cholesterol, so that's disappointing.
One Watch Is Good But Two Watches Are Better. Presumably so you can wear them both and get the mean time from two different sources. But where does it end? Three watches, four, more? Surely the more sources I have for the time the more accurate I'll be, but I've only got so much forearm real-estate available and now I feel insecure about my ability to give good temporal guidance if a stranger should stop me on the street and ask. One watch clearly isn't enough. I have timepiece envy. Which I suppose is better than the codpiece envy most of the spam is trying to engender in me. But oh no, wait! Time doesn''t work that way. You either have the right time or you don't, so no number of watches telling the wrong time can make up for one watch telling the right time. And I have a mobile phone so I don't need even one watch. So back to codpiece envy it is.
A golden watch is a real turn on for women. A claim so lost in the mists of misogyny that it seems almost quaint, like a plague of locusts or believing the world is flat. Notice that the watch isn't even gold, it's golden. Because, of course, women are so easily distracted by shiny things that they'll have sex with anyone who dangles some gaudy bauble before their eyes, even if it's just some cheap tat that glitters in the sunlight. This is the basic message: Wanna have sex? Get shiny things! Women will be your slaves! Except it's not true, despite being one of the oldest advertising memes in the world. But I suppose sending spam saying things like, 'Why not just talk to her, listen to her, and treat her like a human being?' doesn't sell shoddily-manufactured knock-off watches.
Safely lose weight with Acai diet, Endorsed by Oprah. I clearly must have this because there's no more highly trained or experienced medical expert in the world than Oprah, M.D.
S.
28 May 2009
Current Projects 28/05/2009
These are my current playgrounds:
1. Rewriting a novel about a woman who's son dies, who's husband betrays her, and how she lives through it.
2. Writing the first draft of a novel about two old men who are either weaponised humans or humanised weapons and their struggles with memory and loss. This is kind of science fiction. Imagine if Philip K Dick had written Waiting For Godot.
3. This blog. Because after years of not getting it I think I finally do.
4. Some other bits and pieces that as yet have failed to coalesce into anything concrete.
S.
1. Rewriting a novel about a woman who's son dies, who's husband betrays her, and how she lives through it.
2. Writing the first draft of a novel about two old men who are either weaponised humans or humanised weapons and their struggles with memory and loss. This is kind of science fiction. Imagine if Philip K Dick had written Waiting For Godot.
3. This blog. Because after years of not getting it I think I finally do.
4. Some other bits and pieces that as yet have failed to coalesce into anything concrete.
S.
Reboot!
I am rebooting this blog because I think I'm finally getting a handle on how I want to use it.
Randomness is imminent. Cower in fear, mortals.
S.
Randomness is imminent. Cower in fear, mortals.
S.
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