Yesterday’s announcement that anti-matter had been kept in existence for as long as fourteen minutes caught my attention. This is something remarkable. Matter and anti-matter existed in equal quantities at the time of the Big Bang, it’s argued, but matter instantly won out. We’re back the beginning of time. Not only do we have an alternative co-existing anti-matter universe, we have the possibility of other prior, parallel or alternative worlds, stretching into dimensions we cannot comprehend.

Buddhism curiously has already been there. It has no problem with multiple universes. Whether or not we believe in reincarnation, life and the universe endlessly recycle. We don’t try and hold onto a specific view of the universe, or a theory of its origins or a doctrine of a creator God. We recognise the importance of living in the moment, and avoid being tied down by ideas, theories, points of view to which we give an emotional charge. We’re part of a continuum, and that continuum always has been, whether or not we have. This is the ultimate reality. From that base we can engage in conventional reality, pursue projects and ideas, build castles on the ground and in the air, but we always know them to be transient and temporary, we never hold on, if a theory sinks we don’t sink with it.

Obama and Cameron managed tonight to find their way to a London school and engage in a table-tennis match with two 16-year-old kids. All a complete surprise, all brilliantly choreographed by their entourages. My daughter reminds me that we had a game on one of those public tables outside the Tate Britain last summer. Was it our example?

Table tennis has been under-appreciated. There’s no physical  sport which reduces down to such a small  space. I appreciate that arm-wrestling has its fans, and that fingers get well-exercised by tiddly-winks, but table tennis is the real thing. We had I remember an old dining table at home with bevelled edges and lots of polish, of which there  was little in our play…

The logic is that Obama should now take on the Chinese president at ping-pong, their hitherto national sport, as Mao decreed. But what happens were he to win? They couldn’t surely be on the same side of the table as Cameron and Obama were tonight.

But it seems even if he wins Obama can’t win. I took in the bloggers commenting on the ABC coverage of Obama’s  ping-pong game. Several were going on about Joplin, where over hundred have been killed in a tornado.  ‘What a guy Rome Burns he plays, people die in storms here he and his wife dine in Europe.’ US population 310,000,000.

OK he’s enjoying himself, but he’s allowed that, surely, and that’s the way you build friendships. Friendships don’t happen because you’re miserable. I guess the problem is that every event has equal status on 24 hour news, and everything can be directly compared, as it never could be before. Every time a politician shows the semblance of smile there will someone berating him.

Once upon a time, with distance we could see a way through the trees. These days, much closer to, it’s nigh on impossible. He who shouts loudest leads the way, and we know who they are. And he who grumbles loudest, well, he  always gets heard. He who smiles – don’t, bad idea.

Everything has to have a name. Or does it? My favourite no-name is Innominate Tarn in the Lake District. There’s also its close relation, Innominate Crag, and I gather even an Innominate Crack up on Simonside in the Cheviots.

Roger Deakin in Wildwood mentions two moths which also have had partial success in resisting our urge to name everything, the uncertain and the anomalous, yes, both names, and both members of the Noctuidae.

Moving from moths to movies, there is of course not the moth but the man with no name…

What is it, not to have a name? Tarn, moths, cowboy, they all have identities. But no past, and no future. That’s the idea anyway. And then there’s Juliet:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

She loves the person, not the name. Not Montague.

Well, don’t we have to name everything? Any experience, whether a person, an object, a thought or emotion, even a state of mind, has to have an identity if we’re to recall it. But that way we bring all sorts of other associations into play.

That’s why I like Innominate Tarn: no associations. Uncertain and anomalous moths: they come from nowhere and fly back into the night. And Juliet: she willed that there might be no name, no past, and sadly for her, there was no future either.

I will, if I may, coin a name: innomination, the act of not naming. (Maybe it does exist, maybe someone has beaten me to it.) Something we can only do by not doing. Something to engage in when the hurly-burly gets too much for us.

There’s an awful lot of tripe talked around digital products. They will change the world, and the way we read, but not to the extent their protagonists believe. The degree to which they are creating their own self-absorbed world is indicated by the blurb for an upcoming  ‘transmedia’ conference this coming autumn in San Francisco. Read on:

‘Transmedia development takes a robust intellectual property and organically fragments it across territories, timelines and platforms to reach mass audiences, optimizing the rights holder’s revenue potential.’

‘In today’s era of media convergence, publishers, filmmakers, producers, directors, broadcasters, writers and gamers are seeing – and profiting from – creative collaboration with the ‘story’ at the center. Transmedia development takes the intellectual property or ‘story’ and moves it across myriad platforms to reach mass audiences, optimizing the value of the content, and creating a ‘world’ in which the story lives, morphs, and expands.’

How can I wonder the story’s integrity survive such fragmentation? And will the audience really be there to pick up on all these pieces. Might not they just want to go back to the original, to the unfragmented story, to the novel even, and might not that be what many authors will want? Not all of course. There are those who see marketing as branch of authorship of course, others who write to established formulae that they know work with their public.

Writing is so much more than  story, and authorship so much more than holding rights.My optimism about the survival of good writing and integrity is authorship is I think well-founded, but we do still have to be very careful that the fragmenters and the rights-exploiters do not take over. That is their intent.

(The Bookseller, 8 February 2011)

‘Bloomsbury is adopting a global, internal structure designed to allow it to function better alongside worldwide operations like Google, Apple and Amazon, and react to increasingly globalised and homogenised consumer tastes.’

Inspired by Bloomsbury, my small business, Collier International, is also going global. If it could find a way to do so. It already is global, comes to think of it. But reorganising would give its director a good feeling, and I could put an announcement in the Bookseller….

I will be looking at all functions, from contracts to coffee breaks, but I’m not optimistic. I can come to terms with globalised consumer tastes …but homogenised – well, great if you like milk.

Do I detect delusions of grandeur here? Or maybe a cavalier override of local culture and taste? Tastes may be increasingly globalised, but not, my Bloomsbury friends, to that extent. My travel experience indicates that the taste of milk differs remarkably from culture to culture.

Sometime between 3 and 4 this afternoon the stream came back. No sign at 2.30, just the same damp muddy earth. Now there’s maybe two inches. My first thought: it’s run-off from the fields. But this is clear water. It’s moving so slowly past the window, but where there’s a little dip beyond the bridge it’s faster, the surface is rippled. Not only is there water outside the window, there is movement.

The wonder of it all. The sense of revelation. How out of nothing water appears. Yes, it’s a spring, so there’s an explanation, and the wonder is how below the surface up in the hills the aquifer rises and falls, cuts off the water flow in a moment and restores it in a moment. There’s always an explanation, but the wonder remains.

There’d been a warning yesterday that water had been seen at Lambourn. How could it not have reached us I wondered? It had simply been moving very slowly, curling round and overflowing the stones and flint and lumps of earth.

Rivers should flow through winter and dry up in summer if they dry up at all. But winterbournes need the winter rains, and flow again almost as harbingers of spring. As come the snowdrops and the crocuses so comes the stream.

Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford never ceases to amaze with the sheer range of titles on display. (On sale as well, but it’s the display that’s extraordinary.) But even here we have the two-for-the-price- of-one offer, just like WH Smith’s or any supermarket. For me the trouble is that I don’t usually want two but, more than that, a seed of doubt has been sown in my mind about the value I’ll be getting when I just buy one. One of its own is poor value, so I buy neither the one nor the two. Happily it is often a characteristic of the two for one that they’re products I don’t want. But if I might have wanted them, I don’t now.

If I want a good new novel, I want a novel that is singular in every sense, not a reading programme. The second novel should I buy may rot on my shelves as the second M&S or Tesco packet of sausages will rot in my fridge.  True, come a rainy day or an empty larder I may well consume that second novel or sausage packet but it will only because there’s nothing else, and existing on nothing else is not the way I wish to live my life.

I hear someone call out ‘value’ but I will be my own judge on what is value.

One step at a time is the way to go. Try and take two steps at a time… well, that’s just foolish.

As a starting-point, check out Philip Pullman on the Oxfordshire projected library closures. He brings a bit of passion (and reality) into a cold world of numbers and council leaders: http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/save-oxfordshire-libraries-speech-philip-pullman

Then read on…

We need Pullman’s passion, and his capacity to embarrass, to hammer the leader of Oxford county council, to make us realise just what it is we’re in danger of losing.

What he doesn’t quite get over is the once and forever nature of the cuts. Once the libraries have gone, they’ve gone. Built up over a hundred years and more, part of the great legacy of Victorian civic duty and philanthropy. Much of the red brick is still with us, often looking rundown, but there, at the core of the old communities. New communities have more modern spaces, but it’s all the same tradition.

We can wipe it out in a blink of an eye. 

We’ll find new uses for the buildings. Like old chapels they might make bijou residences for the likes of Mr Mitchell (the council leader).

The government merits as  much opprobrium as councils. I’m pro the big society but government is obsessed with the notion of volunteers taking over what should be legitimate functions of the state, not least libraries. Volunteers are never likely to be equipped to run such institutions, and certainly not in those run-down areas where libraries need to be revived, not shuttered.  

Much better to focus the big society on civic duty, an old and unpopular (these days) and indeed Victorian term.  Volunteers can help in all sorts of ways, but not in running the show.

I know what Philip Pullman means about book publishing, but he’s wrong. The same goes for booksellers. It’s market forces driving them, not moral turpitude. Some of the books he anathematises are the stuff that people borrow from libraries. The great thing is people are reading. And new publishers come along all the time and take risks, explore new areas. It was ever thus. 

Mr Pullman doesn’t like the profit motive. He even mentions Mr Marx which is a little unwise as he’s stir up the ire of the market fundamentalists. We do want to win this case. And it won’t be easy. The fundamentalists carry clout.

Council leaders and fundamentalists like to trot out e-books and the internet as arguments against libraries in their present form. Pullman doesn’t mention them. It’s enough to say that the huge majority of us still read the old-fashioned way – and I suspect will continue to do so.

But Pullman is right on the bidding culture. That needs to be chucked out immediately. The clever arguers and smartly educated guys get the money, all of it. Those with equally good causes but who fall down on the smooth argument get nowt. We need money spread around in a common-sense, even-handed way.

Where, Mr Mitchell will ask, can we make the cuts if we don’t cut libraries? By paring back across the board, I’d argue. Maybe for now buying in fewer new books, even laying off staff, here as everywhere. What you don’t do is wipe out an institution which if you do you wipe out forever.

There’s nothing wrong with redbrick landscapes whether out there on the high street – or as landscapes of the mind.

The child is father to the man… how far can we take this idea?

A child from the moment he gives a name to item, human or otherwise, gives it an identity, is bringing in associations, emotional and physical, which determine how he will view that item for the rest of his life.  Whatever happens in all the years that follow the associations from childhood will be the deepest-rooted and hardest to break.

So far, nothing new.  We know how critical the early years are. And yet, in our own adult lives, we pay little attention to how are our views and opinions were formed. They help us identify ourselves, with a point of view, or family, or a wider group, be it a gang or a political party. Once that identification is established we don’t challenge it. We’re a Daily Telegraph or we’re a Guardian reader. We accept their prejudices as our own, even subtly (or not so subtly) adjust ours as they adjust theirs. What’s more, we associate opinion with attitude and emotion. We’re a naturally angry (not suffering fools) person, or we’re naturally proud (pompous) or assertive (aggressive). 

Phone-ins and live audiences, and shock-jock programmes, feed on this behaviour. It makes for good radio, or good TV. At the same time it demonstrates how little we have by way of self-awareness. How sure we are, how sure the other person is, how much we love or we hate, we follow or we oppose.  We’re in a world of opposites, and we’re not comfortable without them.

An awareness of who we really are, and how we came to be the people we think we are, or with the views we hold, is almost impossible in this world of ours. There’s much talk of mindfulness these days but we’re talking here of mindfulness not just of now but of how we came to be where we are now.

We don’t necessarily have to change the views we hold. But we do need to know where they’ve come from before we put them out into the world, and seek to lay them down for others.

Of course you may enjoy all the adrenalin, the confrontation and the anger, and even the hatred. In which case, stay as you are, ill-informed and angry to the last. For you, a path that makes you more humble, less assertive, less emotional, more compassionate and just a wee bit happier won’t be the right one.

I’ve bought myself a Kindle and forked out a pittance (felt wrong paying so little) for the Howard Jacobson Booker Prize winner. But I can’t bring myself to sit down and read it. I want a book, the sense of a whole book, not a pageless Kindle-screed, in my hand.

35% of US sales in the first week of Jonathan Frantzen’s new novel were e-book, we’re told. How many have read it yet, as opposed to being attracted by its cheapness? Has anyone done the research to find out how they experienced it – how they read it, what they got out of it, how the book and e-book experiences compare? 

E-books of course aren’t so bad. Paper and digital can co-exist at this level. It’s when e-books get enhanced, and the whole book reading experience gets merged with the wider online cheap-knowledge experience that we have to start getting seriously worried.

* 

A few quotes and thoughts from Tom Chatfield’s article in the current (November) Prospect highlight the issues further:

We hear first from a few old-school voices. For Lionel Shriver carefully-crafted novels may be hard to find ‘in a sea of undifferentiated voices’. She’s also ‘concerned that the ‘kind of fruitful professional life as she knows it might be consigned to the past’.  Blake Morrison: ‘Will the craving for interactivity drive books to extinction.’  Philip Pullman: ‘I strongly resent the time it takes.’

Books in digital form, on screen, are suddenly part of a stream of media, so the danger is they’ll lose their identity. So Chatfield argues, and yet it seems he isn’t too concerned, there’s almost an inevitability about where we’re headed.

Apple, Google and Amazon will know what we’re reading, and all those authors who blog and tweet know all about their audiences too. They can write what their audiences want. Don DeLillo: ‘Novels will become user-generated.’ The new digital authors get out there and woo readers, and ensure their output generates mass discussion and consumption. We’re hearing more and more about telling stories, less about novels. Thrillers – ‘the only real genre’ (Lee Child). The novel as potential film script, novelist Julian Gough re-categorising himself as storyteller.

‘In whole fields of research, from politics to academia, the very notion of a book as a static, authored discreet hunk of prose – is starting to seem quaint.’ (Chatfield)

Time pressure: ‘Outside the elemental appeal of stories, many books are ill-equipped to fight their corners.’ The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications.  People will only click to read a novel that fits their own tastes and moods.  ‘This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people, speak, write and read.’

DeLillo again: ‘Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page?

 *

Digital it seems will change the way we read, and that means the way we think. Will we really be left with an undifferentiated world of pseudo-knowledge, with story uppermost and subtlety, critique and analysis sidelined? Chatfield’s analysis is over-egged, he’s bought into digital, doesn’t recognise that there’s a point beyond which digital may yet not go. It may run up against its own natural limitations. Our concern has to be that if and (as we must hope) when it does there is still a book industry – publishers, distributors, bookshops – to support it. And indeed authors worthy of the name.

The idea of story, even thrillers, taking over the earth is pretty horrifying. So too this lazy notion that we will even more than now only buy what matches our tastes and moods. There’s a trap here and the likes of Chatfield are walking right into it, because they rather love the buzz, and want to see what happens. Those of us who love books enough, and the serious business of reading that goes with them, need to start fighting back, and not lying back and let ourselves be steam-rollered.

Remember Philip Pullman’s comment about the time it all takes. Good writing takes time, slack writing doesn’t. Pullman has worldwide following, much of it online. But let them follow. Authors need to lead a different way.

Publishers are doing their best, but they’re covering themselves, trying to point both ways. We need the ‘lay readers’, ordinary people of the book, not publishers, to start fighting back. And we need to do it now. Lose bookshops and it will be much harder.

Let’s not get too alarmist – but there is a death of culture argument here.