Irritatingly, I have been forced to shelve my plans for Electricana for a while. I’ve got too many scripts and pitches to write in the next few weeks, and I just don’t have the time to devote to it – the narrative structure is just that bit to complex for me to be able to bang them out like I’d intended. I’ll take the listing off the sidebar when I get a minute. With any luck, I’ll have the time to ressurect it toward the back end of the summer.

I am, however, developing a replacement (non-fiction) project that will take less of my time – I’m hoping to drag other people in on this as well. More on that when I have a full brief written up.

I’m currently reading Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death”, a study of the way different media affect the values imposed on our cultural conversation. The early chapters detail the shift in values from and oral tradition to a print one – from an academic and legal system based on proverb and parable, holding good rhetoric as an indicator of the correctness of one’s arguments to what Robert Anton Wilson might call a time-binding culture, prizing the written word as more considered, and therefore of more value than the spoken.

The fact that our legal system is a mix of both, of course, is not lost on me, with my jury service coming up…

Postman’s book is moving toward a consideration of the effect of television on our cultural dialogue, and the way it has placed greater emphasis on how one looks determining the worth of what one has to say, but I haven’t got to that bit in depth yet.

Still, it set me to thinking. The book is getting on for twenty years old (and still set as a text on media courses, which speaks well for it) but has anyone undertaken anything similar with regard to the internet?

As a medium, it seems to me to have properties of both print and TV, and even oral tradition. It can be as ephemeral as TV or as long lasting as print, and can spread information in ways that have more in common with oral tradition than anything else. Anyone know if there’s a good book about this sort of thing?

In response to my comment about having a load of interviews and things about Alan Moore and magic bookmarked, someone (I don’t have the email on this computer, so I apologise for forgetting who) asked me to make the links available. I live to serve.

Alan Moore interview at Eddie Campbell comics. The Magic of Alan Moore website – a good collection of info from various places about Alan and magic, including his correspondence with Dave Sim on the subject. Another interview at blather.net, this time. Another site with a load of collected bits about Alan and magic (including the aforementioned correspondence) is available here.

Just bought myself an espresso machine. Hurrah! I’ve been after one for the last year or so, and while I still can’t afford a proper high quality Gaggia one, this’ll do me for the time being. Of course, if anyone out there wants to buy me one of these or these, I’d be delighted to accept them…

As part of my “New things in 2002” list, I’m learning to play Go. But I’m kind of short of people to play against, since my flatmates appear massively underwhelmed by the idea of learning to play a new and interesting game. So if anyone reading this is in London, and fancies learning the game as well, give me a shout, eh?

In a desperate attempt to stop listening to The Pogues all day at work, I have had to dig out lots of Nick Cave.

Actually, I’m doing this because I’m currently working on a 12-page comic about music and broken hearts and bloodied guitars, and Cave’s gothic tinted deep south, all sharp edges and rain and murder is just what I need in my head while I write this.