Ink stuff

It's been a while. Sorry about that.

There are a fair few pieces by me on newsstands at the moment, although I'm afraid not many of them are available online. One prominent exception is my second piece for the New York Times, published on 23 March, probing the idea that a perfect home is the key to happiness, and tracing it back to modernist ideas about housing, health and hygiene. You might, if you have been kind enough to read it, of course recognise this as being an underlying preoccupation of Care of Wooden Floors.

Speaking of COWF, the German edition - Die nachhaltige Pflege von Holzböden, published by Carl's Books - is now on sale. Buy buy buy!

"The Anxiety of Influence" in Frame magazine issue 91, looks at copying and plagiarism in contemporary design and asks if too much emphasis is placed on novelty. Has fear of plagiarism led to "amnesiac design" that denies its own history and is disingenuous about its influences?

In Disegno issue 4 (S/S 2013) there's an essay by me examining press trips, a fundamental but little-remarked aspect of architecture and design discourse. Do they warp the way we see architecture and design? Are they, in fact, fundamentally corrupt?

I can be found in two places in Icon 119 (May 2013) - in the News section I talk to Sou Fujimoto about his plans for the Serpentine Pavilion, and the role of landscape in his architecture, and in Review there are my very positive thoughts about David E Nye's fascinating history of the assembly line.

A labour of love in the current issue of Art Review (#66, March 2013): reviewing the superb Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard 1967-2008.

In the spring edition of Audi magazine I mark the 40th anniversary of the first mobile phone call by talk to the man who made it, Martin Cooper.

Also now on sale is Metahaven's excellent essay Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (Strelka Press), which is did not write but helped edit. It looks at the potential for anarchic viral online humour to overturn the present neoliberal austerity consensus, and the role of design and designers can play. Also it's witty and provocative, so please do take a look. 

Five Things I Didn't Know Until I Was Published

Thoughts after a year's adventures as a debut author, presented as a warning to other authors approaching publication.

1. Be careful what you write about your book. Long before publication, I had written a few short descriptions of my book - on this blog, in emails to my publisher, as a starting point for publicity materials, that sort of thing. I then spent a year watching those phrases getting spliced together, chopped apart and endlessly repeated. Stray bits of your phrasing end up on press releases, on the Amazon description of your book and elsewhere, and then get repeated back to you by bloggers and reviewers. That's the way of the world. But there was one turn of phrase I had used - it was my words describing my book - that I found trite and in-apt, and I kept seeing it everywhere, rebuking me for my own laziness for just tossing it off when I should have been more careful. So when writing a sentence describing your book, even in an ostensibly private email, consider how you'd feel having it read back to you as part of your introduction on stage at a literary festival.

2. Write your acknowledgments as late as possible. I wrote and filed mine really early, with the text of the book, and consequently neglected to include all sorts of people who should have been there. I later revised them but by then it was obvious what I was doing. Leave the acknowledgement to the last possible moment to minimise the risk of leaving people out.

3. Make yourself available. I have had nothing but good experiences with publicists. But all these lovely people seem to be haunted by previous bad experiences with authors. When I was asked to come and talk to a room full of booksellers about why they might be interested in reading and then prominently displaying my book, my answer was of course: "Why yes, naturally, what an amazing opportunity, thank you for setting it up, refusing would be tantamount to self-harm, I accept the invitation with frank gratitude!" However the invitation was proffered with a degree of trepidation, as if the answer is often: "What a monstrous waste of my time! Away with you!" And apparently there are authors who refuse all such opportunities. Which, as I say, strikes me as being tantamount to self-harm, and also a bit of a bum deal for the publisher who has taken you on. So I say, agree to whatever you can.

4. Appearances are harder than they look. I've been to see a lot of authors sitting on a stage in twos and threes, and I've often thought "that looks pretty easy". You sit there, a kindly moderator asks you helpful questions, everyone has a lovely time. I have a fairly pronounced fear of public speaking (although it has ebbed this year), so a chitchat panel or friendly interview always looked pretty good as a format. Well, I was wrong. First, they involve homework. If you're next to another author, it's only polite to read their books, for the audience's sake as much as for social nicety. So, depending on the number of authors you're appearing with and how many books they have written, you can have quite a large reading list and not very much time to cover it. It never occurred to me that literary festivals would involve so much reading. I thought they were what authors did instead of reading. Not that this is a bad thing, at all - it has exposed me to several good books I might never have otherwise picked up, for instance Francesca Kay's The Translation of the Bones and Iosi Havilio's Open Door. It was simply surprising, and I'm unused to having my fiction reading decided for me. Second - bloody hell, it's improvised. It might not be Paxman but you're still expected to come up with something reasonably cogent and, with any luck, interesting or entertaining to an audience at very short notice. Sometimes the mind just goes blank on the most basic things. This happened in the first radio interview I gave, and it was horrible. I was asked to explain how the narrator in Care of Wooden Floors gets from situation A to situation B and I just couldn't. I had forgotten the plot of my own book.

5. People have designs on your reading time. You get asked to read a lot of books, for comment or blurbing. And of course you can hardly say no, because only months before it was you or your editor out there tugging on the sleeve of other writers, who generously gave of their time. And now the wheel has turned, the bill is due. Free books, how awful, I know. Don't get me wrong - as with the literary festivals, this doesn't even qualify as work, especially when whatever you've been asked to read is incredibly good, as is the case with the novel I'm reading at present. However it does mean that your leisure reading time rapidly gets programmed - an injection of a modicum of duty into a private and intimate realm that can feel like quite a violation.


There are, of course, a lot more than five things I know now that I didn't know this time last year, but that's all for now. If I think of another five I'll post them.

Appocracy

"Giddy futurity": The Cybersyn Operations Room

A first for me: I have a piece in the New York Times, relating David Cameron's "Number 10 Dashboard" app to Stafford Beer's "Cybersyn" system for democratic socialism, as proposed for Salvador Allende's Chile. It's a welcome chance to point people to Eden Medina's recent book on the subject, which I reviewed for Icon earlier this year (Icon 106).

As well as Medina's book, here's a full accounting of my sources:

“Turn off your iPad, David Cameron, and start dealing with Britain's debt”
Fraser Nelson, Daily Telegraph, 17 May 2012

“Fast Stream Case Study 4: Improving Digital Capability”
Cabinet Office website, November 2012

“David Cameron tests real-time economic data app on iPad”
The Guardian, 8 November 2012

“David Cameron tests iPad 'government dashboard' app”
Daily Telegraph, 8 November 2012

"Apple's iPad saves Greece from $140b debt" [sic]
Macworld, 23 May 2012

On the Canal

Yesterday I was a guest on Kit Caless's wonderful Resonance FM show "Mapping the Metropolis" alongside the author and critic Lee Rourke. We talked about canals and "stunning canalside developments". Banality, regeneration, psychosis, dead zones, network society, the general awfulness of residential architecture ... it's all a bit of a blur in retrospect but I had a lot of fun and hopefully it seemed an amusing and stimulating hour. Anyway the whole thing is up on Soundcloud now, so have at it. I can't be certain but I think we went the whole hour without mentioning I__n S______r. There's also music.

Appearances in November

There's a fair amount to report in November, to make up for a fairly quiet October*.

The book
First up, Care of Wooden Floors is now on sale in the USA by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest, and throughout November it's just $3.99 on the Kindle as part of the Kindle 100 promotion. However I do urge you to consider buying the hardback, which is a beautiful object.

Here I am talking about the book from Amazon's own video, against a variety of scenic Shoreditch backdrops.

Here I am at the Huffington Post talking about the somewhat unusual business of being the first debut novelist published directly by Amazon. I was also interviewed by the New York Times and NPR, and the book has had some really good reviews, including this rave from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Many more nice reviews on the Amazon page, if you should be so inclined.

Also I understand that Puulattian Kunnossapito, the Finnish edition of COWF published by the good folks at Moreeni, is also out now. Or very soon. Physical copies of it exist, anyway, look:

Thanks to my Finnish translator, Seppo Raudaskoski, for that photo and for rendering the book into Finnish.


Talking (mostly in south London)
On Wednesday 7 November at 1pm Lee Rourke and I will be taking part in Kit Caless's series Mapping the Metropolis on Resonance FM. We will be talking about canals, a subject dear to Lee's heart. (If you haven't read Lee's book The Canal, you really should - read John Self's review, linked above, if you're not sure.)

On Wednesday 14 November at 7.30pm I'll be interviewing the incomparable Jonathan Meades about his new book, Museum Without Walls, at the wonderful Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, south London. Here's a Facebook page for the event, and here's an Eventbrite page where you can reserve a ticket. The event is free, but likely to be very popular so it's worth RSVPing. Building Design subscribers can read my review of Museum Without Walls here. I gave it five stars - it's really, really good.

Lastly, but not leastly, on Tuesday 20 November at 7pm I'll be taking part in a fantastic evening of short stories at the Review bookshop in Peckham, part of the Peckham Literary Festival. It's a really great line-up: Benjamin Wood, author of The Bellwether Revivals, Nikesh Shukla, author of Coconut Unlimited, Jim Bob, author of Storage Stories and Driving Jarvis Ham, and Sam Mead, author of A Thing That Was Built to Be Torn Down. And me. FREE.


Writing
I have six (six!) very short stories in issue 3 of Disegno magazine (which has a sharp new website). They each describe an "erotic" (or sensual, at least) reaction to a design object, and each is inspired by a true story told by the designer of each piece. It's an experiment in design fiction, but it's not Design Fiction, capital D capital F, in the strictest sense. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, each taps into that emotional or sensual side of a piece - I'm a shade (50 shades?) uncomfortable with the e-word because I always hear it in the sexful tones of Zapp Brannigan.

Also there are a couple of new Cabinet pieces on the loose. First is a history of that maddening garment, the straitjacket, in Cabinet 46, which is on stands now. Second is an introduction to the fascinating Phillips Hydraulic Computer, a water-powered model of the British economy, in Cabinet 47, out shortly.

Some reviews are also now online: on Edwin Heathcote's charming book The Meaning of Home in Building Design (£, sorry) and on the Barbican's  "Designing 007: 50 Years of Bond Style" in Icon.

Also, here's an odd little piece I wrote for NPR's "Three Books" strand.

I think that's everything ...

* Outwardly quiet - we had a baby, and it was the longest and busiest month I can remember, even though it involved very little writing work. All very worthwhile though.

The New Aesthetic now and later

My essay on The New Aesthetic has now been up at Aeon for a while, and the Tumblr that started it all is back online. It's a huge old topic, for sure, and that essay was pushing 6,000 words at one point until judicious editing brought it back to a more digestible 3,000 or so. I don't intend to recap its main points here - this post is more intended to tidy up some loose ends.

First of all: did you all have a good look around the rest of Aeon? It's a completely new online magazine with an emphasis on ideas, culture, science and memoir. Take some time and have a poke around at the other essays online in the launch edition, and bookmark the site, it's worth it.

Second, some loose ends from the essay itself. Some responses, such as Rory Stott's, wondered at the next steps for the New Aesthetic: if it isn't a movement (and it isn't), could there be a movement? Having identified the political concerns inherent in the New Aesthetic, what can be done about them? How should designers act?

... Which is a whole 'nother essay in itself, but there are a couple of things I'd like to point to. First is to properly credit the work of BERG. I first came across the idea that technological seamlessness could be A Bad Thing in conversation with Schulze, Jones and Webb, while I was writing my Icon profile of the studio last year (Icon 099). Contra pernicious seamlessness, they said their philosophy was one of "beautiful seams". Which could be a New Aesthetic design manifesto in a nutshell, or part of one. Also if you want to see incredibly smart people designing with New Aesthetic antennae turned on and properly calibrated, look to BERG.

The other direction to look is the work of Keller Easterling, possibly the most important architectural theorist working today. I've just finished reading "The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo's TED Talk", her essay for Strelka Press, and it's just astonishing. It's like sipping from networked broth in which the architecture of tomorrow is broiling. The essay forms a bridge between Easterling's 2005 book Enduring Innocence, which introduced the idea of architecture being reduced to a series of "spatial products", and architecture as nothing but an expression of data, and her forthcoming book Extrastatecraft, on zones, which is likely to be incredibly special and important if this essay for Design Observer is anything to go by. God only knows if she's even aware of the New Aesthetic, but she perfectly shows how it couples with architecture and what it could mean for activism. So, my advice is make those essays your next stop, then buy her books. She knows what's going on.

Joining the paperback club

Care of Wooden Floors officially came out in paperback in the UK yesterday, although it's been on the shelves in a few places for a few days and might take a day or two to filter through everywhere. It's part of the Waterstones Book Club this autumn, which means you can get it there for a substantial discount and if you don't like it they'll give you your money back. So, a pretty enticing offer, but it's available from all good retailers, be they your friendly local indie bookseller, affable railway terminal stationer or hail-fellow-well-met internet retail colossus.