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Is anybody aware of any musicians making public complaint or comment about Spotify? They're all happy to sound off for or against filesharing, after all, and any of the complaints about filesharing (except, obviously, 'I'm not getting paid') surely apply to Spotify too. Plus, the obvious extra one of the ads - yesterday I realised that I should probably have heard Public Image Limited's Metal Box and used Spotify to rectify the situation, but the main result was that I have the Ladyhawke song from that beer ad stuck in my head. Now, OK, complaining about Spotify which *is* paying would be biting the hand that feeds...but since when were pop stars averse to doing that? Patrick Wolf slags off MP3s while expecting fans to invest in his new album in exchange for an MP3 copy of it. And admittedly he's a bit of a berk these days, but he's hardly alone in that. I might just have missed the relevant quotes, though it seems like something CMU would cover - if so, please enlighten me. Vague recollections are as welcome as links.
Saw a fashionable young persons' band play their first show outside North America last night, but in spite of the self-parodically indie name (or is it knowingly self-parodically indie? Who can keep track anymore) I rather enjoyed Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Bouncy electro-indie, fun rather than trying to be cool, and an audience to match. And the great thing about the Flowerpot is that if you're not a fashionable young person who wants to be grooving down the front, you can still find a seat with a decent view. Back of the net.
The main reason I took any notice of Kim Stanley Robinson asking why no science fiction has won the Booker was the letter he quotes from Virginia Woolf to Olaf Stapledon, in which she quite correctly admits "you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at". Robinson himself has never been much to my taste, and none of the SF novels he advocates as worthy Booker winners are ones I've read, though I could certainly name a few other candidates. Beyond that, he wasn't saying anything new, and seemed to have missed the point that whatever its original intent, the Booker is a prize for middlebrow book-group literary fiction, which is a genre like any other - even to the extent of very occasionally throwing up a good book (The Line of Beauty may be Alan Hollinghurst's weakest but it's still well worth a read, sub-Brideshead TV adaptation notwithstanding). Even when Booker judge John Mullan's rebuttal presented himself as a convenient example of a species of straw man we might have hoped extinct, bullish about his ignorance rather than simply complacent (he 'said that he "was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world...it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other." Must have missed the bit where it's all over the cinema and TV screens, but then he probably still believes neither of those is a proper artform either, the dessicated fool)...well, his loss. But the point where I finally got annoyed was when another judge, Lucasta Miller, said in the October 10th 'Week in Books' feature puzzlingly absent from the archive that "When I reread the six, the one I felt had the highest chance of still being read in 100 years time was Summertime by Coetzee...In the event, the majority vote did not go to the book most likely to be read in the far future".
It says so much that a Booker judge, even one less wilfully stupid than Mullan, could consider a hundred years hence "the far future". Even if we assume - as literary fiction by default assumes - that things carry on much as before, that the coming century brings no ascent into posthumanity, then there are children alive today who will be around then. Only if we take the line - but this is again the province of science fiction - that catastrophe is coming, can we expect everyone now living to be dead then.
This is the smallness of scale, the littleness of thought, which defines modern literary fiction. People who would kill their own children to be Woolf but don't even see that Woolf knew she was no Stapledon. I've long said that in the 21st century, you can only write historical fiction or science fiction, because by the time your book hits the presses, 'now' is over. Things change too fast. The Booker shortlist, if nothing else, has confirmed my point for me.
(Yes, I know that's a slight oversimplification - you can write historical science fiction, such as Arthur C Clarke's wonderful The Fountains of Paradise, which I'm reading at the moment. Slipping between a thinly-veiled Sri Lanka two millennia past and a hundred years hence, evocative and visionary, it's exactly the sort of thing the Booker would have loved if it had only limited its scope and intelligence a little)
Saw a fashionable young persons' band play their first show outside North America last night, but in spite of the self-parodically indie name (or is it knowingly self-parodically indie? Who can keep track anymore) I rather enjoyed Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Bouncy electro-indie, fun rather than trying to be cool, and an audience to match. And the great thing about the Flowerpot is that if you're not a fashionable young person who wants to be grooving down the front, you can still find a seat with a decent view. Back of the net.
The main reason I took any notice of Kim Stanley Robinson asking why no science fiction has won the Booker was the letter he quotes from Virginia Woolf to Olaf Stapledon, in which she quite correctly admits "you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at". Robinson himself has never been much to my taste, and none of the SF novels he advocates as worthy Booker winners are ones I've read, though I could certainly name a few other candidates. Beyond that, he wasn't saying anything new, and seemed to have missed the point that whatever its original intent, the Booker is a prize for middlebrow book-group literary fiction, which is a genre like any other - even to the extent of very occasionally throwing up a good book (The Line of Beauty may be Alan Hollinghurst's weakest but it's still well worth a read, sub-Brideshead TV adaptation notwithstanding). Even when Booker judge John Mullan's rebuttal presented himself as a convenient example of a species of straw man we might have hoped extinct, bullish about his ignorance rather than simply complacent (he 'said that he "was not aware of science fiction," arguing that science fiction has become a "self-enclosed world...it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other." Must have missed the bit where it's all over the cinema and TV screens, but then he probably still believes neither of those is a proper artform either, the dessicated fool)...well, his loss. But the point where I finally got annoyed was when another judge, Lucasta Miller, said in the October 10th 'Week in Books' feature puzzlingly absent from the archive that "When I reread the six, the one I felt had the highest chance of still being read in 100 years time was Summertime by Coetzee...In the event, the majority vote did not go to the book most likely to be read in the far future".
It says so much that a Booker judge, even one less wilfully stupid than Mullan, could consider a hundred years hence "the far future". Even if we assume - as literary fiction by default assumes - that things carry on much as before, that the coming century brings no ascent into posthumanity, then there are children alive today who will be around then. Only if we take the line - but this is again the province of science fiction - that catastrophe is coming, can we expect everyone now living to be dead then.
This is the smallness of scale, the littleness of thought, which defines modern literary fiction. People who would kill their own children to be Woolf but don't even see that Woolf knew she was no Stapledon. I've long said that in the 21st century, you can only write historical fiction or science fiction, because by the time your book hits the presses, 'now' is over. Things change too fast. The Booker shortlist, if nothing else, has confirmed my point for me.
(Yes, I know that's a slight oversimplification - you can write historical science fiction, such as Arthur C Clarke's wonderful The Fountains of Paradise, which I'm reading at the moment. Slipping between a thinly-veiled Sri Lanka two millennia past and a hundred years hence, evocative and visionary, it's exactly the sort of thing the Booker would have loved if it had only limited its scope and intelligence a little)
