Alasdair Watson

There’s been a lot of stuff about Art in this meme. There’s been precious little about Design in it. I like design, and back in the early days of this iteration of this blog, I spent a short while explaining what I think its relationship to Art is.

So having skipped past the need for that re-cap, I thought I’d now witter on a bit about what sort of design I like, and I thought I’d start with a couple of links to designers I know.

Phil Clandillon. I worked with Phil in a little yellow room in Acton. Dark Days. Phil’s particular knack is coming up with really interesting and clever shit using unexpected technologies. The Kasabian “Football Hero” video was him, as was the AC/DC music video that was an Excel spreadsheet, as were a few other clever things that you can find out about at his portfolio there. What I like about Phil’s best work is the strength of his ideas – the execution’s important, too, but I like the fact that Phil isn’t just turning out websites any more, but is in a place where he can come up with genuinely orginal stuff that pulls in all sorts of digital media, and generally makes me think “I wish I’d thought of that”.

BERG. BERG is the sort of place that I would love to work for, but quite frankly, am not clever enough to do so. What I love about their work is twofold: one, is that it tends to be cutting edge, at least in terms of thinking, if not technology, and two, that it tends to be made the with the aim of enabling people to do things – they’re makers, rather than marketers. Also, how can you not love an agency who named themselves after of something out of Quatermass?

Between those two, I find I’ve very neatly encapsulated what I love about design – it’s the means by which people’s ideas shape the world, and bit by bit, change our lives. Here at the start of the 21st century, if you’re not engaged with design as a (very broad) field on some level, I do kind of wonder what you’re doing with your life, apart from taking up resources that the rest of us could be making better use of.

So that’s design as idea, and design as world-shaper, which is all vitally important background, but what about aesthetics? After all, that’s what most people think of when they think of design.

Well, I only really qualified to talk about my own sense of aesthetics, and me, I’m a pretty unabashed Swiss modernist. Give me clean, clear lines, plenty of white space, and attention to simple detail in the service of clarity. Sure, I can appreciate the cluttered, hand drawn and grungy look – I quite like the work of people like Courtney Riot or Christopher Cox, but honestly, give me plain black text, well spaced, on a white background every time – a bit of simple elegance. If I had to pick my favourite font, it’d be Helevetica Neue – just about the only font face that is more precise and tidier than Helevtica.

This applies in just about everything from ink on paper to products to architecture – I love simple clear lines and an absence of clutter. Those who have seen the spaces I inhabit and the general state of my desk are probably laughing themselves sick right now, to which I can only remark that very often, really good design is an aspirational thing.

Well, I’ve talked before about one my favourite works of art, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. So my obvious choice is out.

So let’s talk a little, instead, about my favourite painting, Wright of Derby’s “Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump“. Mostly, what I love about it is the quality he’s given the light. I could stare at if for hours, just contemplating the use of light and shadow in that painting. But even aside from that, I like the themes, the way the different members of the audience are reacting to the progress of science, with expressions ranging from disgust to fascination.

I like the way that all the moral outrage in the painting is reserved not for the fate of the poor bird, but for the effect that the bird’s plight is having on the people watching it – how dare this scientist cause us distress? It seems to me to sum up a lot of the problem with people’s attitude to science, which is simultaneously that it can be terribly harmful to the natural world, but that the reality is most people don’t care about the harm, as long as it doesn’t cause them distress – that there’s a basic hypocrisy inherent in denouncing science and progress while living with the comforts that it has brought us all. Most of the figures in the painting are either unbothered by what is happening, and are far more wrapped up in the other people around the experiment, in some way of form.

I particularly like the fact the of all of them, it is only the scientist who is looking out of the picture, engaging with the viewer and the wider world.

Tom Waits – “Georgia Lee”.

I’d like to talk about it, but there’s something in my eye.

So today’s meme-mandated topic is fanfic. I have nothing interesting or useful to say about fanfic – I haven’t read any in years. So I thought I’d talk about something that is at least slightly relevant to fanfic: copyright. Or rather, the history of copyright. I’m still working on what it turning out to be quite a long bit of writing about the Digital Economy Bill, and what I’m opening it with is a brief background on the history of copyright, which I thought might make good reading in any case…

Let’s start by admitting something: copyright is a good thing. That can get lost in all the shouting about piracy, and draconian measures and three strikes and creative commons and all the associated jargon. So it’s important to admit up front that copyright is a good thing, and the ideals it was created to protect are still good and valid today. We do need to provide a system to incentivise people to produce creative works, otherwise large parts of our culture will up and blow away. And it was in that spirit that copyright was first codified in England in 1709 by the Statute of Anne, or to give it it’s full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” (Incidentally, in case anyone’s wondering what people did before copyright law was codified, then you’ll find that spending five minutes looking up the term “book curse” will pay interesting dividends.)

It gave creators rights over their work for 14 years after creation, and gave them the ability to extend those rights for another 14 years on application. It also expressly ensured that distributors retained no rights to control use of the material after first sale. If you bought a book, you were free to read it in public, sell it on, or use it as kindling if you so wished – so long as you didn’t make your own copies and distribute those, you were in the clear. But after that time was up, the works would pass into the public domain, for the common good.

I’m not going to bore you with the full history of copyright, I just wanted to bring up the full title of that 1709 act. The spirit in which copyright law was created was that of education, and of safeguarding the common good, to balance the rights of creators and of the public. The rights of distributors, however, were quite expressly limited.

But then, in 1709, there wasn’t a lot of demand for books. The person who printed the book was quite likely to also be the person who sold the book. And if someone in Edinburgh wanted a book that had been written in London, they either got a friend to in London to buy them a copy, or they wrote to the printer and asked them to post it. Distribution was not really something that people worried about.

But the world moved on, and a revolution or three later, people in Edinburgh expect to be able to buy not just books, but CDs and films made and published not just in London, but in New York, or Beijing or Sydney. And over the last hundred years or so, distribution has become very, very important. Entire industries have been founded on the fact that actually, the job of creating and printing something is the least difficult bit of the process, and that the hardest part was first making people aware of the product, and then getting the product into the hands of people who might want to buy it. And copyright law changed because it served the common good to ensure that the people who did the marketing and distribution were incentivised to do so.

And then we invented the internet. And now my friends can make films, and write books and record music in their own homes, and with a little effort, they can tell people all over the world about them, and they can sell them to anyone that’s interested. Suddenly, marketing and distribution are the easiest part of the process.

And that’s where things start to go wrong, because there are now entire industries that are rapidly becoming irrelevant who can only remain relevant by appointing themselves as gatekeepers of what can be done with created works. And that’s the background to the Digital Economy Bill.

Oh, all right, I’ll play along this time. We can’t all be expected to speak English good, and god knows I’ve made far more egregious typos in my time.

I havered about what to write about here, though. I probably own more non-fiction than fiction, as long as we discount the comics, and are a little generous with the classification of some of the more lunatic bits of occult reference I own. I’ve got journalism, I’ve got reference, I’ve got history, biography, travel, collection of opinion pieces and so on and so forth.

I could spout on about HST, I could bring up the perennial bleak favourite “Dark Heart” by Nick Davies, over a decade old now, and I don’t imagine the problems it’s talking about have magically gotten better, I could even talk about one of the cookbooks I own, and almost never use.

But honestly, the single aspect of my non-fiction collection that brings me the most pleasure is the shelf full of books about London. I know, I know. I think I’ve done pretty well, so far, not banging on about London, but I’ve just made my annual pilgrimage back to Northern Ireland, and after a couple of days in a place that’s at once home and Not London, London is on my mind.

Whenever I pop into my local book store, the first place I gravitate to is the London section. I had to flee the gift shop at The Museum of London, before I had a truly ruinous shopping accident.

What I love is the diversity of books on London. There are histories, both city wide, and localised. There are books charting some trend of other, or the development of some industry. There are guidebooks up guidebooks. There are maps, both ancient and modern, there are histories of maps, there are books about London’s place in some wider context, there are books of photography, poetry and fiction.

Yes, I know they could be found for any big city. Don’t care. London’s the one that’s caught my imagination, and I am delighted that it’s a place that seems to have caught the fascination of so many others, because it means I’m never short of some new non-fiction to read.

I’ll try and be a little less predictable tomorrow.

Note carefully: not a fiction book. A fictional book. So I’m going to talk about the Sigsand Manuscript.

The Sigsand Manuscript features in the stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson, one of a few works published roughly contemporarily with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes that I like almost as much.

The Sigsand MS, as it is generally referred to in the tales, is one of the devices that Hodgson uses to ground the tales in reality, which is sort of why I wanted to talk about it, because at first sight that sounds absurd – how can something fictional be used to ground something in reality?

Obviously, some of it is just that it’s part of the internal reality of the tales, but the greater part of its function rests in the way that it is referenced. Where Lovecraft and his inheritors tend to refer to their many, many fictional texts (and this was very nearly a piece on the cultural importance of the Necronomicon) in tones of hushed dread, as rare and special things whose secrets were enough drive men mad, Hodgson’s characters refer to the Sigsand MS as common knowledge, at least among themselves – talking of it’s contents like “The Saamaa ritual” as things that they are all familiar with the detail of. While it contains information that is obviously fantastic, information on how to deal with the supernatural, it is always referenced in terms that make it seem as if all the characters already know this information, and whenever Carnacki is called upon within the stories to draw on it’s contents, it is always in the sense of falling back on a familiar set of tools. Even in extremity, when Carnacki is in great peril, and an unknown agency recites the most secret of the lore in the MS “The unknown last line of the Saamaa ritual”, the description of the consequences given is:

“Instantly the thing happened that I have heard once before”

Even the ultimate secret is something Carnacki has felt before. This is a known, if impressive and fearsome quantity.

Further, its contents are not entirely presented as mystic, but as something that can be employed as reliably as any scientific method, and often within the trappings of science – Carnicki uses an electric pentagram, and develops a thing he calls “the spectrum defense” – bands of projected colour – as a means of combating the supernatural.

There are Carnacki stories in which his science fails him, but invariably in these stories he turns out not to be fighting the supernatural at all, but rather the monster or haunting turns out to be a hoax.

And so it grounds the works in a reality, where laws and the scientific method apply, and indeed triumph of legend, myth and the irrational. And in the process, Hodgson takes his place toward the head of an entire cannon of fantastic literature, where the fantastic is treated as just another science, with rules and principles that can be taken from one form, and reapplied in another – one can draw a line from the likes of Hodgson and Carnacki, right through to Mieville and the biothaumaturges and punishment factories of his fantasy world of Bas-Lag. And this is important, because it’s this willingness to treat the fantastic are very real, rather than a thing to wondered at in and of itself that allows for the better brand of fantasy that is used, like the best SF, as a tool to examine our present condition, as opposed to looking back, in the manner of Tolkien, or Lewis, at some pastoral idyll, or religious mythology.