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Just a quick note about a death. John M. Ford, science fiction writer. One of those small, briefly noted passings; one in which the suddeness catches you by the lee, as the unexpectedness of that new gap in your existence suddenly jolts you to care about it, even though you don’t know enough to know quite how to care about it. I’d never met the man, never corresponded with him – he entered my life simply as a erudite and witty commenter on another blog, and as the highlight of an otherwise pedestrian old S.F. anthology a friend gave me.

I perhaps wouldn’t even mention it, were it not for the fact that he wrote (over on Making Light, née Electrolite) one of my favourite pieces of verse. It’s excellent enough just standing alone; what gives it that extra boost into the realms of pure pleasure is knowing where it came from – a casual mention from another of seperate personal data points, leading to the observation that “If I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms.”

A few hours later, Ford produced the following sonnet. It seems fitting.

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

Drawn tonight at a MeFi meetup:

Chris has already done a sterling take-down of John O’Farrell’s daft bit of self-promotion (by way of slagging off everybody else) on the BBC’s site. I feel the need to chime in to record that my immediate response to O’Farrell’s question:

So why is there only a sprinkling of obscure and erratically funny UK sites?

was

Because far too many people just tried to do lame Onion rip-offs. Just like you are.

Having now had the misfortune to actually look at his site, NewsBiscuit (ugh, hateful sub-Morris name), I didn’t realise how accurate that was. The site is arm-gnawingly dreadful. It’s a feeble dribble of Commonplace Thing Does Mild Exageration Of Normality headlines. There’s no wit or originality. There’s barely anything to suggest that whatever created it would pass a Turing test. And in every case the headline is the only sodding joke in the article. The Onion wasn’t funny because it had headlines like “Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children” (although that’s a funnier idea than anything on NewsBiscuit), it was because the articles had lines with perfect comic construction like:

“Hermione is my favorite, because she’s smart and has a kitty,” said 6-year-old Jessica Lehman of Easley, SC. “Jesus died because He was weak and stupid.”

You know – funny stuff. That they actually spent time writing well. In order to make it funny.

Satire? As I write this, the BBC are showing an utterly bonkers over-the-top bit of shiny prime-time spy drama that’s satirising the shit out of… well, everything. John O’Farrell is making tired jokes about reality TV. Well done. You are less cutting than Spooks.

And of course, what O’Farrell doesn’t realise is that his “plan is to get young talented humourists all over the world to send their stuff to me” is the antithesis of how the web works. They don’t need to send their stuff to John O’Farrell (sweet of him to offer, though). They can just do it themselves, and it might be superbly constructed comedy gold, or it might just be a picture of a willy drawn with MS Paint. That’s the fun. And if they do choose just to draw pictures of willies with MS Paint, well… it’ll still be funnier than NewsBiscuit.
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The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was obsessed with the perfection of meaning in words – one of the strongest repeated themes throughout his work is of crafting words so precise in meaning that they encompass infinities; and related to that, of the illusions of meaning that are produced by mental groupings and classifications that lie behind all allusion and evocation (see ‘Funes the Memorious’). As such, it is fairly clear that the common work of the translator – of interpreting not just words, but words in cultural contexts and in the light of author’s experiences – is utterly inappropriate for Borges; indeed, it’s implicitly parodied in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’.

It is clear therefore that the only correct manner in which to translate Borges is for it to be done without any attempt to read intention into his writing, without the slightest possibility of subconscious correction for cultural or personal mores. To be explicit, it must be done by a machine.

Therefore, as a tribute to the late master and as a result of being bored yesterday afternoon, allow me to present the first definitive English langauge translation of ‘The Library of Babel’ (as translated by BabelFish).

I think you will agree that the ominous poetry, and the perception of simultaneous familiarity and alienation, that stems from the new readings of lines like

“One allows to sleep of foot; another one, to satisfy the final necessities. That way it passes the stairs spiral, that abisma and rises towards the remote thing.”

or

“Visibly, nobody delay to discover nothing.”

posesses a degree of power and truth not found in any previous translations, or possibly even in the original text.

Ahem.

Daily Mail, 12/09/2006:
The death of British humour
by Leo McKinstry
Killed off by the forces of political correctness and bureaucrats who are beyond parody…

The famous British sense of humour has long been our most cherished national characteristic… But, sadly, there are signs that the great British sense of humour is no longer what it once was. The eagerness for laughs seems to be receding, increasingly replaced by a mixture of priggishness and grievance…

The real thorn in all this is the influence of political correctness. The ruthlessly enforced official dogma of multi-cultural-ism, with its emphasis on social divisions, means that we no longer have a sense of shared values in Britain. And without that collective norm, we cannot all laugh at the same things…

Comedians and writers, who quite happily poke fun at Christianity, dare not utter a squeak against Islam – though I suspect that the great decent Muslim majority are relaxed about such humour.

I was told a joke the other day, in which a female Islamic terrorist in a burka asks a friend: “Does my bomb look big in this?”

Hilarious, but is it permissible to say such a line in cringing modern Britain? Perhaps not.

Well, I think you just did, but point taken. Who can these humourless rascals be?

Daily Mail, 11/09/2006:
BBC staff in bad-taste Middle East spoof
The BBC has come under fire for allowing its senior journalists to make a spoof video which makes fun of war in the Middle East…

…It also contains crass Arab stereotypes and makes joking reference to Osama Bin Laden, the PaIestinian conflict.

The video has been condemned by an Arab rights group as ‘insenstive and puerile’, as well as being potentially offensive to Muslims…

…Conservative MP Nigel Evans, a member of the Commons Media Select Committee, said: “We just had the largest number of deaths over the shortest period of time in Iraq and Afganistan.

“Despite the fact that this video was meant as a joke, this is one of those things we can say is certainly no laughing matter.

“For these people to make light of the conflict is in the worst taste – they can’t have thought it through at all.”

Oh.

Just to complete this little London newspaper trifecta of posts, I thought I’d extract a bit from the beginning of Roger Wilkes’ hugely enjoyable Scandal: A Scurrilous History Of Gossip (which is very interesting for anybody interested in the origins of modern British journalism, as well as being great fun):

“The harlots of Piccadilly hitched up their petticoats and stepped aside. Jostling pickpockets, hearing the commotion, were momentarily distracted, and carriage horses shied on the clattering cobbles. From his drawing room in Arlington Street, Horace Walpole was astonished to hear the sound of drums and trumpets; hurrying to his window he saw a procession carving a path through the crowd. At first, he thought it was a press-gang raising soldiery for the war in the American colonies, for this was the autumn of 1776. It was a war of sorts, but Walpole noticed that the marchers were smartly groomed, ‘dressed expensively, like Hussars, in yellow habits with blue waistcoats and breeches’. These were no warriors, but a hired band of street performers wearing masks, advancing to the beat of martial music and brandishing not muskets but coloured streamers and handbills, which they pressed into the hands of gaping onlookers. On their high caps, picked out in braid, the words ‘Morning Post’ glinted in the watery sunshine. At the head of the procession, Walpole recognized the pugnacious and defiant figure of the young Revd Henry Bate, the editor of that notorious scandal sheet and renowned throughout London as ‘the fighting parson’.

Walpole gazed down on ‘this mummery’ and despaired. ‘What a country!’ he twittered in one of his gossiping news-of-the-day letters. ‘Is there any sense, integrity, decency, taste left? A solemn and expensive masquerade in defence of daily scandal against women of the first rank.’ Walpole had heard that the Morning Post had a rival, the new, but identically named, Morning Post, so packed with even more scandalous matter, he noted, that it ‘exceeds all the outrageous Billingsgate that was ever heard of.’ The opening shots had been fired in London’s first – and highly entertaining – circulation war. The battleground was the paragraphing trade, the inky ancestor of newspaper gossip.

Daring to be different, the original Morning Post was roughly the size of a modern tabloid, cheaper and smaller than the other journals hawked on the street corners of Georgian London by a raggle-taggle army of bugle-blowing postboys. Advertisements dominated the content; one in the first number in 1772 offered for sale a register of addresses of the strumpets of Piccadilly; another (accordingly) offered ‘the famous Patent Ointment for the Itch’. For his morning threepence, the eager reader would also be regaled with a few items of foreign intelligence, news of the court, church appointments, borough elections, accounts of highway robbery, arrivals at the Bath spa, sporting intelligence and even some uplifting poetry. But what really sold the paper were its scandalous paragraphs, teeming with the details of people’s personal lives…”

Further to the wee debate going on in the comments to the post below, I’d say that I think we may have identified something other than content, distribution, design and ad-sell that can determine the success of a major urban newspaper. In this case, thelondonpaper.

Yes, it’s that old unwritten rule of journalism: make sure you don’t accidentally accuse a multimillionaire megastar of being crackhead because you can’t tell the difference between a black American rapper and a white English indie musician.

Woo-hoo! For the first time in ages, London has a proper newspaper war, with today’s launch of News International’s afternoon freesheet thelondonpaper going up against Associated Press’s afternoon freesheet London Lite, launched last week. Fans of previous London newspaper battles will be looking forward to the spectacle of rival groups nicking the other one’s stock and dumping thousands of copies in Epping Forest. Ah, good times. As someone with a history of launching unsuccessful London afternoon freesheets, I feel uniquely well placed to bring you this comparison of the two…

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Quick, Africa, organise a charity event to help send copy-editors to Oxfam. Your contribution could make all the difference.