Who says literature’s dead when masterpieces like “Penis Pokey” are still being published?

“Books: like a movie, but happening inside your head,” runs the staff note in Waterstones – a motto for a media-hungry post-literate world that's just too busy for books. Look around you and the writing’s on the iWall: buses swipewashed with faces lost in screens; the Äppärät-touting teens of “Super Sad True Love Story”; novels sold for a quid in Tesco’s. I got my nephew a book for Christmas, but he couldn’t work out where to plug it in… Don’t laugh: the first generation is now being born that will grow up with formative memories of the iPotty.  

But who says the book’s dead? True, the bottom’s falling out of the fiction market, and true, writers earn less than they ever did – which is a bit like saying that street beggars have taken a painful hit in their incomes – and yes, those of us who still care will no doubt be stepping over the rubble of Waterstones and Blackwells before long, grasping for fire-sale trophies like hungry survivors of the Fall. But from these ashes a new phoenix is rising. We’re on the threshold of a new age for fiction. Bit by bit, illustrious new homes are appearing for books.

Take my local PoundStretcher for example, keeping literature alive with celebrated titles like “100% Unofficial Jedward” and “Shoot! The Ultimate Football Activity Book”. Take the arena-sized supermarket near me, whose bargain bin throws up gems such as “Carol Vorderman’s Sudoku DVD Game”; “The Crossword Puzzle Flip Pad (Find the answers on the flip side!)”, or my favourite, the cryptic, gnomically titled “Pasta”.

Or take that bastion of artistic standards, Urban Outfitters. Today, such an August institution (it may soon be the most prestigious physical bookshop left standing) exudes the musty fumes of literary excellence. From the erudite “Slam Kicks: Basketball sneakers that changed the game” to the richly textured “How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity”; from the ribald “Penis Pokey” (a book with a hole to poke your penis through in a variety of amusing positions) to the robustly formalist “101 Places to Get Fucked Up Before You Die”, Urban Outfitters caters for all tastes.

There’s “Mini Babybel: the Best Recipes”, the companion piece to the original masterpiece, “Nutella: 101 Great Recipes” which set the literary world alight on its publication as a landmark in the emergent chocolate spread recipe genre. There’s a probing exploration into the depths of the human soul from the acclaimed memoirist Alexa Chung and a treatise on philosophy from that thinker of world renown, Karl Lagerfeld. Why, it’s not just books you can find in the books section – I accidentally stumbled upon a bit of bunting bearing the colourful injunction to “Party with my Bitches”, something that truly livens up any book pile – and highbrow tastes are catered for too with a pristine deluxe edition coffee table sized book bearing the title “Fuck You”. Who said literature was dead?

Were Woolf, Fitzgerald or Hemingway alive today, they’d be up at night trying to come up with masterpieces like “Photocrafty: 75 Creative Projects For You And Your Digital SLR” or “Understand Rap: Explanations of Confusing Lyrics for White People”. Joyce himself would feel humbled by the experimentalism of a work like “Why You’re So Awesome (Fill in the Blanks)” with its daring deconstruction of the relationship between writer and reader.

Of course, some might question whether replacing Lolita, Catch 22 or Tender is the Night with a book centered around sticking one's penis through a cut-out hole is a healthy substitution for literature. As bookshops die and hipster craft stores become the last place in the city to actually make a profit from paper pages, can we really rejoice at the fact that "Peek-a-Boo Cakes" is the first thing people are splashing out a tenner on?
But to take that approach is to ignore the fertility of these dazzling new literary forms. “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary,” Boris Pasternak once said. Who could take a book like "Nutella: 101 Great Recipes" and not agree? 
Contemporary classics like “52 Things to Do While You Poo” promise fascinating new journeys for the reader that not even the author of Zhivago was daring enough to envisage - something that storied literary publishers like Jeff Bezos are helping to reinforce. Perhaps writers who want to keep literature alive just need to get off their pedestals and back on the toilet - after all, that might be the last place anyone has a chance of being read.

Faster, happier, more productive

Life hacking, smart cups, a surveillance state in a smartphone: is this the age of the "time-motion human"?

Read my piece for the Baffler magazine here

Yes vote? No vote? How about a “Don’t Really Know” vote

Astonishingly nobody’s solicited my opinion on the Scottish referendum. Everybody else in the UK has been consulted: economists, journalists, MPs, people on the street, the Prime Minister, your local chemist, politicians from Scotland, politicians from England, politicians from Canada, the guy in the bagging aisle at Sainsbury’s, Sean Connery – but not me. What gives?

“Maybe it’s because you’re an English person with nothing whatsoever to do with Scotland, Dale,” I hear you cry. Well, okay, but when has that ever stopped anyone writing an article about something? Or simply crop-spraying social media with badly-spelled bluster? Google #scottishindependence and you’ll see an army of gobtrepreneurs howling out factoid-fuelled opinion until they go blue in the mouse pad. Google anything remotely controversial and you’ll see an army of gobtrepreneurs howling out factoid-fuelled opinion, in fact: all over the press people are paid to have an opinion about something, because, in an age where digital developments are gathering to demolish the last standing pay wall, what used to be known as “journalism” is becoming harder and harder to fund.

The answer is an ocean of provocative click-bait that’s cheap to produce and draws in the eyeballs: grazing grounds for the commentariat, who can then howl out more factoid-fuelled opinion in the comments sections. And someone can respond to them, with more factoid-fuelled opinion. And so on.

Here’s my take on Scottish independence: I don’t have one. Or to put it another way, I think the question of a referendum is a phenomenally complex bag of socio-political thorns that probably needs unpacking by an intelligently chosen army of technocrats, planners and economists. Neither Yes or No campaigns used that one for some reason. But I feel strongly about being ambivalent. Ambivalence isn’t indifference – it’s ignorance. And the proud admission of ignorance is the bedrock of scientific enquiry. How can empirical investigation proceed without first doubting absolutely everything you’ve assumed? A world that admits its ignorance is a world better poised to actually know something. So yes: I’m passionate about being ambivalent. Forget Yes and No. What the independence debate is missing is the “Don’t Really Know” vote.

This is partly because either alternative is kind of dismal. Support Yes and you align yourself with Cameron and an army of swivel-eyed nationalists, bullying corporations and the kind of people who buy dollhouses for their children with Union Jacks hanging out the windows. Support No and you let the warnings of high profile economists get swallowed in arguments tinged by patriotic sentiment; more sinisterly, you’re complicit in perhaps the smiliest positivity-based marketing campaign this side of the Scientology AGM. 

An extra terrestrial visitor stopping off on planet Earth for the weekend might assume from all the YES signs everywhere that Scotland was a sophisticated emotional dictatorship engineered by an unelected ruler called Alex Salmond. Indeed there’s been so much positivity that even I briefly wanted to become independent from England, and I live there. These are the limits of political for or against: you’re caught between a rock and hard place – or rather you’re stuck on a rock that wants to become two rocks.

Democracy is a demanding beast. The politics of “not really any of my business” has little currency in the modern world, where in the course of little more than a century we’ve gone from only being allowed to vote if you owned a castle and the wives of half a dozen peasants to one where your opinion is a sharable commodity and must be exercised at maximum volume on a minute-to-minute basis. Or else nobody will click Like. Of course not everybody’s that enthusiastic about expressing their democratic right in determining the fate of the not-entirely-united Kingdom – as we saw last time with the plebiscite on the alternative vote, when millions passionately stayed at home to ignore the future of a breathtakingly boring electoral change which you’d have had to be a qualified political scientist to understand how it affected you.

And good for them, I say. Our ambivalence is something worth fighting for. If we should feel strongly about anything, it’s the right not to feel strongly about anything. I wish the Scots all the best in deciding their future, but I’m not going to pretend to have an opinion about it. On that one I’ll put my foot down.

The traditional broadcast model of advertising – one way, one-to-many, read only – is being superseded by a vision of marketing that wants consumers to spread the word themselves. But what are the implications of moving from being passive advertising targets to being “advertisees” – responsible for being marketed to?

Read my article in the Baffler here:

www.thebaffler.com/blog/an-army-of-eyeballs/

"Orange is the New Black"? Rubbish. It's Scrubs with shower rape jokes

Growing up one of my favourite films was Trainspotting. Wit, snappy cutting, MTV aesthetic: it was heroin as pop video. ‘Just choose life...’ The blu-tacked face peered down from my bedroom wall. If there was anything I aspired to, back then, it was to become a drug addict.

It was a trend that persisted throughout the iconic films of the 1990s. Oldman in Leon, Keitel in Bad Leuitenant, Thurman in Pulp Fiction: charismatic stars taking drugs in designer colours to cool soundtracks. Awesome! It was only later I began to wonder if it really appropriate to film narcotic addiction like you’d shoot the titles for a Blur video. Legalise them or not, drugs do change lives, especially young ones. Had Trainspotting done for drugs what Tarantino did for guns? In other words, should coke and heroin abuse really be made to look cool?

Which brings me onto Orange is the New Black, which has been airing for a while here. It’s the witty gritty tale of a woman imprisoned for a brief contact with a drug dealing girlfriend a decade ago, and it has some good points: it has a bisexual lead, which is good to see; it’s wittily and snappily written, fluidly filmed; it’s entertaining pizza television.  

So what’s wrong? And how’s it any different from the rest of the focus-grouped and test-screened U.S. sitcoms, which are generally pretty watchable in a time-wasting kind of way?

Here’s what’s wrong. A series about prison life – about damaged lives, violence, trafficking – doesn’t need to be fun. It doesn’t need to be sassy, or smug, or snarky. Sitcom values aren’t appropriate here. How funny is a colonic strip-search for prisoners who are actually forced to undergo them, rather than the attractive actresses pretending to for a few takes before they waft back to their trailer? Do we really need to raise a smile about starvation, racism, sexual abuse? Do we need this stuff enacted by a shiny cast of mostly beautiful people who help to make prison look kind of fun – Scrubs with shower jokes?

And boy, is Orange twee. It’s aggressively twee. It's like being waterboarded with an organic smoothie. Cool, gentle, new-age, indie boyfriend? Check. Cool, gentle, new-age, indie soundtrack? Check. Cool, cute scenes of lying around in bed checking photos and Netflix on Apple tablets? Check, check, check. It's awful. Orange is fodder for the iPad bourgeoisie. 

The thing is, I can take twee. I can: I just need it to be quarantined. I need twee to be kept in its own little Twee-hole, cute and pink and curly – and I need it to stay there. When twee embraces social commentary (black people! human rights! prisoner abuse! #WeReallyDoCare) it feels tonally jarring – like a segment on child suicide in Nuts! magazine. I get that this is the kind of class slumming the show is gently mocking – we’re as complicit as the lead character in finding out what prison’s “really” like – but... Well, no. Sorry. Orange is TV wanting to have its cupcake and eat it, to be both thoughtful social commentary and iPod froth at the same time. I don’t buy it.

I’ve been briefly imprisoned myself (only a few hours, for a mistaken arrest, but boy – those few hours really mark you) and had DNA swabs in my mouth and all the other routine invasions of the body modern policing rests on, and let me tell you there’s nothing funny about it. And I was only in there for about three hours. Orange is the New Black is a smart, smug, sassy, snarky, sarky piece of moving wallpaper, but it won’t be going up on my wall. Which makes me also wonder how many prisoners’ll actually get the chance to watch it. Or if they'd want to.

European legislation threatens to create a new legal industry for dismantling the searchable past. But the web itself is already a gigantic memory hole, burying history beneath endless screeds of white noise. In the heated attention economy, perhaps a greater plight is faced by the millions striving to be searchable but ultimately lost in the long tail?

Read my Guardian article here: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/30/right-to-be-forgotten-most-trying-remembered