Seize The Day (Tomorrow)

There'll be a subheader here in a bit but I'm going to watch TV first. That show that I like is on.

This weekend's 'suggestion' from Marina Hyde: ban all meetings. Number Ten have apparently resized their negotiating table so even more spads (abb: special advisers) can chivvy around it. Living standards and therefore people's general happiness will not improve with more people having their tuppence, suggests Hyde, as it's a clear example of professional procrastination/ urinating contest. Plus a reason for the UKIPs of the world to weedle out of the woodwork. You've got my vote Marina.

The other thing that caught my eye from that paper was Will.I.Am, a man who to my mind should be a giant, benevolent god of partying; a 21st century Dionysus if you like. His Q&A consisted of questions so generic no wonder the responses are near-monosyllabic and sound catatonic to your ear.

Example 1: What did he "deplore" about himself? 'I can procrastinate a little bit', he drawled (my adverb). I admit the response shocked me a bit. 'When does he do that?!', I thought as I waited for YouTube videos to load.

Procrastination comes in many forms. Multimillionaires do it apparently. Ironically, sometimes it comes in blog form (but the author might not know it so best keep it to yourself eh dear reader?) but often it'll appear in tasks so middling, chores so yawnsome, it's apparent what's going on well before the pencils are all sharp, let alone the same size.

Monk, my go-to TV show of
choice when procrastinating.

The rules aren't hard and fast when considering who'll miss a deadline. How much a person drinks for example, or whether their formative environment was a relaxed or disciplined one. The answers feel off-kilter - procrastinators statistically drink more but also come from more controlling parents. They are honest but tend to self-deceive whilst also being an extremely optimistic group. You'd have to be when leaving that essay until the night before.

Surely the most fascinating part is why people procrastinate. There are the indecisive (no brainer there), the avoiders (yup) but interestingly, some people actually get a rush from pressure. The downside to all that down time? Your health suffers. One college found that students who procrastinated the most got more cold and flu viruses and suffered from insomnia more than other groups (no prizes for guessing why).

So procrastination looks like a term describing a set of behaviours basically not conducive to what's unconsciously agreed upon as successful living. But did it exist a century ago? To me it feels contemporary, a symptom of something else much bigger. A phenomenon that's metastasized in a body of culture many now want out of.

I don't think this is about cash or a lack of it; that's another branch of the same tree. It's a natural side effect of choices we made six decades ago in a near-bankrupt nation exhausted from conflict. That people could twiddle their thumbs in the face of unprecedented ruin is unthinkable, but maybe the very industry that brought about a country we know today equally provided seedling of a different type.

The tyranny of choice.

Basically it's hard to continuously create without people falling into other modes of thinking. Creating is hard core stuff. I mean the act, not the end product. And yet I think that comment earlier nicely represents a terrible, painful paradox; we can continue trying to inspire ourselves and inspire others because the alternative has physical and emotionally unpleasant symptoms of decay, stasis.

Whilst stretching the argument rather thin, the fear of standing still - of doing nothing- could actually promote less healthy behaviour. Businesses, democracies have diagnosed a lack of choice as the heart of the matter. But giving people more choices does not necessarily empower them, and plenty of smarter people than I can elucidate on why that is. Check out Barry Schwartz's brilliantly straightforward take on a profoundly complex problem. His TED talk's here.

Here's my possibly controversial conclusion: creation is harder than ever to stimulate and not because of the usual excuses like time constraints (last fascinating fact: procrastinators can also be excellent at managing their time. Weird right?). Creation is hard because everyone is trying harder than ever to be good at it, and as more people are sucked into a semi-professional state at all stages of existence, creation no longer represents what we want most: happiness.

Photos from MonkMania and guardian.co.uk

We Need To Talk About Literary Fiction

The Bell Jar is coming to a coffee morning near you. But could Faber's 'repackaging' open the door to more classics being read?

The Bell Jar, a book I'd described as 'discombobulating', particularly the oft-quoted intro, was repackaged last week and released back into a world with its nose in a Kindle, reading Jackie Collins and thinking about who'd be the ideal presenter for Daybreak. Right?

And in probably less significant news that most likely only Guardian Culture section scourers will have observed, journalist Sam Jordison and his band of merry readers have decided on Proust as their next book for their online reading group. This part is devoid of sarcasm, by the way.

It seems to me that these topics interlock with each other and, I think, point to a great, positive future for the classics. I may be committing heresy here but if the Plath experiment goes well, maybe the publishers (Faber) could look at a few more of their untouchables and... well... touch them up a bit.

Regardless of the above however, the new cover is still horrendous. Based on the image to the right, I'm thinking Faber's design team works in a modern version of Frankenstein's lab, attaching jackets from middlebrow authors to more contentious work with all the insane zeal and panache of the eponymous doctor. Or should that be Dr Picoult? Perhaps these ladies will see a boost to their works on the back of Faber's decision to dress Plath's novel in such odd attire, but this new jacket is the equivalent of a Juicy Couture tracksuit.

It's fair to say that repackaging rings alarm bells for all the right reasons, usually. It's the literary equivalent of the 'reboot' that has recently pervaded cinema and particular the comic canon. Of course the bottom line in both industries is, um,  the bottom line and Faber have reported their new cultural positioning of the critically acclaimed proclamations of Esther Greenwood has gone down a storm. And that new Spiderman is way better than all the other ones.

Naturally enough the financial side here's perceived as a bit grubby - 'an increase in revenue', the most un-poetic language in the land. Yet everybody who claims reading as a hobby will have a conscious or unconscious interest in the future of books, and what can be done to refocus eyes and ears around them. Often the last thing of consideration is making the most money possible - and that's seems the right attitude for all sorts of practical reasons.

But all of the words I associate with a book - predominantly sensual terms - still represent the best foot forward vs the odourless, visually unobjectionable tablets gradually glazing eyes over and changing accounting practices in the optometry industry (maybe), and a book should make what it can of the visual element to attract itself to newer readers. Survival is, I guess, otherwise futile.

A lack of third dimension and more than a touch of dogma there, but hard to ignore. In that sense at least I agree with Faber. The other big reason I have for being the only guy in the 'mmm...maybe' camp relates to Jordison's on-going reading group who have made their way through some classics of the Western canon but, so far, nothing as big as Proust.

OK so they're only (only) reading Swann's Way, not the whole collection, but how many people have actually read Proust, Joyce, Eliot - and, for that matter, Plath? I've only read Joyce and Plath, and only one book by each. Here's a more general point; if that's what readers of the Guardian are reading, what about the rest of the country?

I admit something unconscious reared its head and just as quickly disappeared; that something felt sneering and a bit contemptuous. Basically prejudice - as if Proust should be for reading groups! But why? What do I know about reading groups? As soon as I gave this some basic consideration, I realised how foolish I'd been in not distinguishing principles from their practical applications, and perhaps there's an element of this behind the Plath debate.

Generally you don't appreciate a great by swaddling it in the pap Faber have dressed Bell Jar up in, and regardless of the marketing angle it's a strange decision to move a classic into middlebrow territory - yet it could an inspiring one, the bridge some would argue will join the worlds of genre and literary fiction.

OK, so the point is to sell more Bell Jar. But there's social utility here too - we're not talking collateral debt obligations (if anyone's a Michael Lewis fan I apologise for the plagiarism here, but it's an intelligent perspective). If in six months, those reading groups whom I sniffily dismissed are discussing a classic, Faber could justifiably point to a good deed done. It might put several comedians out of a job but would it be so terrible if Sophie Kinsella sold less and Stendhal, Lawrence (D.H), Yeats - i.e. the dark and sombre shelves of Waterstones marked 'classics' - sold relatively more?

Being reasonable, Kinsella, Vincenza et al are never going to go out of print, but a bigger share of readers' shelves claimed for literary fiction would still represent huge progress - and publishers would be back in business with a whole new range of books they could reintroduce to an intellectually starved climate. Plus, less Kindles. I just don't like them, OK?

Maybe it's snobbery or maybe it's protectiveness of what's rightly (my opinion) called a classic. It's a paradox, but it might be best for all, particularly those arguing the loudest, if this debate was parked on the shelf. It's beginning to look as fusty as some of the dust jackets on those works of literature Faber et al want to do something with.

It's Hip To Be Square (But Not Made of Concrete)

Changing city skylines through contemporary styles is laudable but may waste more money than it intends to generate through repopulation

Two stories in Tuesday's Guardian culture section took my eye, because I live near one and lived near the other and at first glance seemed opposite ends of the creative spectrum.

In the first. a row of rather charming terraces have sprung up in Ancoats, where a lot of my family come from in East Manchester following the painfully slow death of a Will Alsop project (my exposure to this guy is fleeting although the gist I get is a weird rococo-absurdist concoction) fronted by the Urban Splash people. Alsop is apparently emblematic of the 'champagne socialism' years of New Labour (how child's toys in Middlesbrough relate to that socioeconomic model I'll never know but eh) in the late Nineties when huge swathes of the city were reconstructed following the Commonwealth Games project win. The turnaround could not be more striking; here is Great Ancoats Street in the late Eighties:

Image from open.edu
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/great-ancoats-street-manchester

And here it is now following these rather charming, faintly Scandinavian (truly those Nordic monsters have never lost their pillaging prerogative) terraces in traditional red terrace brock topped with bright and breezy confections.



Image from guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2012/dec/18/social-housing-new-islington-manchester

Functionality is the term here and it's interesting to note the change in approach the respective architects have undertaken in response to the economic times they operate in. "The bones of [the plan] come from Alsop's sketch, made with a glass of wine in one hand and a thick felt pen in the other," reads the promotional page for the Urban Splash project. It's easy to perceive an almost judgement in the construction here - and I personally prefer it.

The second article concerns the long-overdue (my opinion) demolition of Preston city bus station, a monument to the Seventies fashion of brutalism (the station was completed in 1969 when, interestingly, the country was again beginning to sail into choppy political and economic waters). Here's a picture for you to vomit over:

Image from BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/Lancashire

However. Whilst the great pieces of architecture rarely appear to be debated (everyone bar everyone loves Barcelona, Gehry's Opera House, Bilbao international airport, The Shard - okay I'm definitely pushing it there) at least to my untrained totally amateur eye it does feel that regeneration is increasingly an argument for money on style. Indeed although eye-watering to me, many protesters have announced the station as a masterpiece of a certain style which ought to be preserved as - don't chuckle - a piece of national heritage. Costs, inevitably in these times, have proved its final undoing.

Whether you agree with that or not, what is it about the functional terraces of Ancoats that are infinitely preferable to the arguably equally more functional and more stylish (i.e. it is of a style) concrete station in Preston? Clearly style - or more probably taste, which possesses a certain moral (i.e. insufferably smug) quality to it - moves on, but surely on any level the arguments here are murky at best.

I suppose my summation here is that perhaps mere functionality is the great undoing (and I recognise my own responsibilities here too) of much popular modern architecture now. Whilst I certainly prefer my red brick block of apartments to living in La Scala (yes I do) I recognise a certain guiltiness on my part; irony underlies the linear idea that the less ornate a thing, naturally the more naked it becomes. And we should be able to live with that.