Books versus screens

Recently I reassembled the library after completely redecorating and carpeting that room. There is now a substantial piano and a guitar, some well-loved paintings, a table and chairs, a ‘whatnot’ showing off shiny things, a carpet and an old but fine rug.

But what first hits the eye when you enter the room is the books.

If you’re like me, it is always a pleasing sight because your books somehow become you. They represent a lifetime’s collection, a resource. And a shrine. These books have exploded your imagination at times, made you ponder, opened windows in the mind, and substantially influenced your thinking and outlook. Some of them have given you your very language. They are the references and moments that have peopled your life. Like memories they are arranged haphazardly, colourfully. A wall or two of books is a generous monopoly of space: it allows paintings to breathe on other walls but has an aura of its own.

Your eye draws to titles you’ve read and which still beckon to you like easy mistresses: Hardy, Steinbeck, Fowles, Gladwell, Hare, EE Nesbit, Sisman, Susman, Shakespeare, Woolfe, WH Auden, Shakespeare, Browning, Eliot, Thoreau, Gide, Shakespeare, DA Mackenzie (Who? Where did I get this fine 1910-vintage book from, The Myths of China and Japan?).  

Then there’s the smell: an intricate dust carrying insight, memory, nostalgia – and possibility: it’s as universal as the Internet but it’s yours to hand and far more special.

So I’ve not, yet, taken to reading from iPads, Tablets, Kindles and their many cousins. True, it might be compulsive, convenient, even a bit magical; and surely it could have its disciplined place on trains or holidays or on the move. Except I am not disciplined enough to apportion that kind of reading time to its useful place: I only read on my phone when I need to.

And what if we carry on this way for a lifetime, holding this poorly reflecting mirror and its future easy-wrap equivalents? Where does that unbeautiful hard disk go, or where that ephemeral substance of your work and life which represents you, and makes such a decorous picture of your living surfaces? It becomes like the patient etherised upon a table.

Having thirty years of RAM storage as a writer is already enough to frighten me into a separate collection of six or more old computers – mostly in the attic, mostly with the ability to restart and even to print out former work. That hording instinct is a professional as much as personal requirement, though only once have I been asked to update a twenty-year-old publication for a client.

So a portable electronic library, easily tossed into another pile or sloshed mistakenly in the washing machine, is low on the priorities. I have enough desktops, plus a decent laptop and masses on them that help me daily but which are prey to a massive power cut. But I will have books and some papers of my own that I keep and which I can return to, on foot, at any time.

I wonder. Might I return to this in a year or five, and have to update it, saying “I’m a convert to electronic reading, and I’m hooked”? If I do, I’ll bet it will just be one more gradual step in techno easy (lazy/convenient/duping/soul-destroying?) living, a kind of irrelevance, a bodiless thing. And I’ll know my library is still there and welcoming.

While the spirit moves me…

I want to write something about one of the trickiest arts of a good writer. Ghost-writing. Why is it tricky? This has to do with mutual expectation and the gaining of trust between the writer and his subject.

I say ‘subject’ because the subject is of course the man or woman for whom you are writing. And ghost-writing is of course not merely bound to a book, it may also be in the form of a speech, a presentation, an article for trade, journal of national newspaper publication – anything where the subject tells his version, his story, to the audience; and where the audience is broadly speaking of his choice.

Under the above terms I have mostly been a ghost-writer. I get paid by the commission and if I am acknowledged I am pleased to be able to augment my personal and attributed portfolio. In probably 80 per cent of all the work I have done there is no such attribution or there may be an odd footnote in the acknowledgements. For this I am grateful enough.

So to mutual expectation? When you meet a new client who is sounding you out on the basis of, let’s say, a book he wants written about an area in which he has special knowledge or interest, you need to assure him right from the outset, with no apparent money on the table, that you can do it, that it would take this or that long to accomplish, and that you have the talent and experience he is or should be looking for.

Above all, there is expectation and negotiating to be done about the cost of the project.

If the client chortles with derision at the very outline suggestion that a 70,000-word book on the sex life of the Brazilian fig wasp might cost somewhere in the region of £10,000, with caveats, you might be well advised to wrap the conversation early. For if he wants an excellent book – and you must do no other than excellent – of any kind and wants to buy your copyright by contractual agreement, you need to stick to your intuitive guns whatever the outcome. If he does too much chortling you really need to get him to the door and preferably hold back the dogs. But always be polite, offer him into his coat, smile nicely and gently close the door.

Then there is expectation about process – how you will fish into his brain and squeeze your own to make a happy coupling that leads to a book which might sit up and sing in the right marketplace. If you find the subject sufficiently general, or one that plays to your strengths and expertise AND you can agree a sum that suits you both, it would appear the path is open for another meeting.

Perhaps the next meeting is a pre-start one; one that has allowed the tentative opening discussions to take route and enables you and your client to ask a few more practical questions about process, price, expenses and what exactly it is that the clients wants in his hands when the task is done. Does he, for example, want your help with finding a suitable publisher or is he going to go away with a text tied up with a ribbon so he can present it where he so wishes? You might, by the way, suggest that this second meeting is rated by the hour so that you lose no further time on the matter. You should also suggest, if you are both in agreement, that that at the end of this meeting some kind of practical contract can at least be spelt out if not actually signed between you.

What then of building and gaining trust? That purely depends on the well of loneliness into which you may have thrown yourself. In my opinion trust is sacrosanct however wonderful or ghastly your client might turn out to be, however good the book you write for him. If you have dedicated your time and value according to an agreement you have made, stick to it. Your reputation and inner good will are more important than a lost cause costing you three months intense labour in which you apply a lifetime of writing experience. 

Remember that the deal you make as a ghost-writer is to give everything to the cause to which you have initially agreed. That is what you are paid for. If you write something that you know is good and on the ticket, and the client is delighted you have made something from nothing, you have been creative, positive, purposive and useful. If by chance your client doesn’t even mention you, even in passing, in the book – entirely and utterly written by you for him – even whisperingly in the acknowledgements, he’s still bang on the deal.

I write all this just in case anyone out there thinks there is some glamour and reward in being a ghost-writer. There is, at least, reward. Apart from some precious funds, it is mostly that of knowing you did a good job and might have the strength to do it again sometime.

The ring of change

By Giles Emerson

“Time for a change” rings out the constant cry. Change fashions, change jobs, change phones, change cars, change media, change suppliers, buyers, wallpaper, in-laws, habits, jobs, governments, nappies, cars, buses, one’s tune, one’s money…ways of doing things. Such a lovely word, with so many gradations of meaning for so many people in very different circumstances: the threat of climate change, the hope of regime change; for some a truly desperate prayer, for others a trip to the hairdresser.

Are we not all bewildered by the brutal battery of both global and domestic events interpreted by a hyper-ventilated media demanding everything, all answers to all questions now, and now, and now? We helplessly follow the camera lens and editors pens inertly condemning or marvelling at the daily foibles of the poor sods who put themselves up as leaders. Each effort and well intended breath is amplified and ridiculed on a global stage. With every new day history is in the basket waiting to be recycled. Throw out the old, bring in the rehashed.

Is it just me feeling overwhelmed by the idea of change – perhaps because of the halo that this particular word still forms around President-Elect Obama’s oratory – or could it be that the very notion of change is both changing, changeable and possibly diminished by repetition?

Why diminished? Well that depends on the context in which it is used. If we take two large sorting bags both labelled ‘change’, we could place government aspirations and business practice in one bag and everything else in the other. We can ignore or sift ‘everything else’ as we see fit. The horrors and joys and interim ploys lie in the first bag, muddled and struggling.

So starting with government aspirations, edited to policy, change tends to be something promised but infrequently delivered. In the UK, the lack of a fixed term parliament, coupled with the political machinations required to please the electorate as new circumstances arise, mostly put pay to changes that may well be geared toward, say, improving education and health services. Short-termism and expedience seldom allow fundamental change. Besides which an increasingly wary and informed electorate readily spot old policies with a new name; change starts to mean less and less. Of course, governments do achieve incremental changes of one kind or another, some good, some bad and many unintended. Politicians measure and count and spin and shout about these things. But, in general, the more the bell of change is rung, the less it is heeded.

While the global leaders are up to their necks in spate water, attempting to direct the flow, the rest of us do our best to tip our daily buckets into the maelstrom and make ends meet.  It is not change or reform that the lucky, mostly pampered people who live in developed countries require, but a sense of purpose and a little more efficiency.

And so, very briefly, to business practice, also lumped into bag one. The leaders of major businesses show signs of believing that they must make strident changes in order to gear themselves for a lower carbon future. Given the volatility of global markets and the financial crisis, it is extremely difficult to find a way forward in this respect. Any surpluses or profits these businesses have are hard to reinvest when former, tried and tested economic models and assumptions about future growth are changing, almost by the hour. For more than twenty years, big businesses have relied to some extent on their ability to ‘manage change’ – a constant, iterative process in response to mostly predictable stimuli. But with so much at stake and so little sense of where we will all wash up, the change manager is becoming obsolete. Slightly in the dark, he can no longer hang his hat where the money is.

Yet in the face of climate change and with the desire to perpetrate the goods and services that people need or want, businesses really do have to look at the bigger picture, one which embraces competitors, suppliers and customers - all of us. A species survives by adapting and often by working together and not generally by fighting at the waterhole – unless they’re desperate, by which time it’s too late. With hope our business leaders will explore the symbiotic equivalent of profit and learn to share, collaborate, make the waste of one industry the input of another. Perhaps our political leaders will do this too, using a softer pedal and some courtesy to other drivers. It just takes more time and a longer view.

© Giles Emerson, 13^th November 2008

The nature of matter

In my slim experience the nature of matter is that everything conceivable and in evidence has consciousness. (Bernard Levin, eat your joyous heart out, the jokes are still massive the music fine; you so loved a parenthesis!)

But, to the thesis:

I’m writing this prompted by a discussion which is just about concurrent, as I write, on BBC Radio 4 (left to play downstairs presently) which discusses the future algorithmic potential and ‘symbiosis’ (a truly wonderful concept in all art and hap) of artificial intelligence.

The end of the discussion was lighthearted and touched upon the dimension that apparently marks human consciousness from that of future-perfect (possibly future-proofed?) artificial intelligence. Spirituality.

To me, as a man of deep beliefs, and a person who seems to be incapable of spotting evil activities, apart from the work of a number of banks (which mutually and ineffably respond to times they cannot master or control), artificial intelligence is utterly amazing and marvellous.

It is like the floret that some clever cleaning ladies will leave to look like a white rose on the head of an awaiting lavatory roll in a spotless bathroom. It might be likened more appropriately to other things too. But as in the image of man in his self-reflexive mirror, it is just one more moment in the context of its perception. And just as ego ergo ego, each such man, moment or thing is different and depends on its circumstances (I hope that women will enjoy the reference to a man as it!).

Time presses so I'll take a little imaginary leap.

In my opinion, if we use words too much such as ‘deliverables’ and ‘solutions’ and work upon these in a business-like way, all we are really doing is blindly throwing out our anchors into the mud, forgetting or unaware that the real breath and the beauty of the world and all of us (defaultedly good in our hearts at least) is not only right in front of us in real terms but is endlessly awaiting to entertain.

So once again, I’m content to read The Times Newspaper (dropped for years after Bernard Levin departed on his forward journey) to see what someone somewhere may have thought to have happened in another place, possibly, with the wind blowing in the right direction. 

Thankfully some of the servant rocks of our most amazing planet hold true however they let the light dance within them.

All silly or friendly comments truly welcome.

Hmmmm…..

Feeling in good fettle the other day at a client meeting, following six-months or so of slow admin and other work necessary to gain the trust of the client, I rather bounced into the meeting room with three highly intelligent and purposeful people and put myself in serious ‘self-check’ mode.

When a lot appears to be at stake in ordinary cash-flow terms, the last thing any of us want to do as writers and communications consultants is to blow the deal by blowing too hard on one’s own trumpet.

One has to remember that in the six-month period of negotiating one’s position, some measure of one’s calibre as a useful tool might have already been gauged.

The real purpose of any first meeting therefore – especially when one is unaccompanied by other members of one’s staff (as a freelance I have only myself accountable for my business) – is to sit as still as possible and let the brief unfold a little.

My only way of suffering the enthusiasm that spills forth is to palliate the serious dedication one has for the client, with humour.

As it happens my trumpet somewhat blew its irrepressible self for the moment at about the time of a question posed to me by my client of the order of “What do you think you will contribute?”.

Flashing out of my head came the reply, unchecked but meant as funny in a way: “I’m the brightest man I’ve ever met”. 

Ooops!

Taken out of context this is a pretty peculiar thing to say – there was of course context and I felt very comfortable with my clients at this point.

Yet I still go red in the face thinking of this possibly quite arrogant statement. Thankfully a little reflection helps: such a statement is genuinely funny (at least to me privately) and enlightening in equal parts. For surely, we all are the brightest people we have ever had the pleasure or privilege to meet.

None of us can know the reality of another’s full lives, true intelligence and desire for good outcomes.

These are, I have the faith to say, the default aspirations of all human beings. And perhaps a translation of these virtues might indicate the instinctive modes of all sociable animals. Perhaps they may be read into the life and flows of all flora and fauna – when they are left natural in their own domains.

Do please follow me if you like these blogs or find them interesting.

Perspective

Without perspective, in all senses of the word, nothing is possible inwardly, outwardly and certainly scientifically. No one can understand you well if you don’t have this essential quality. If you lose perspective, you need to be careful and take stock before your next move.

I think good writing is like this: you as the writer know what you have in mind but if you are without the balance and judgement that permits the flow of your words – as you wish them to flow – you must take stock and put the kettle on. There is, as EM Forster so often reminded us, the problem of muddle - the knot that comes with too much connection and no clarity. 

It's a beleaguering kind of knot that ravels and unravels like a demented self-procreating organ fed with fire and doused with ice. Take the internet as an agent in this confusion. Think how we over-connect as a people and remember too how little light can get through the blocked up cave of our times when we don't remember our hearts and try only to use our minds to think out a way forward. Most endeavours are a tad pissed on by the internet, although they can occasionally be made strong by the good connections that do get through.

Generally, with muddle, the ease that perspective brings can be difficult to attain.

So we have to be careful and watch our feet, letting imagination do the work until the plot and the character come appropriately into view. It helps to take a walk sometimes, rain, shine or whatever – or sneak out for a fag on the pretence of needing one to get a breath of fresh air. This is particularly the case at those times when the family crowds us…just after we’ve sat on a drawing pin or  while we are trying to stifle wind, buttocks clenched, or when we forget to put the dustbins out...or the man from Porlock knocks and....

  

On a personal note, thanks to everyone who leaves a comment and thanks for visiting.

Oh Lord, save us from euphemism!

It seems astonishing but it was actually more than 20 years ago that I wrote an article for The Independent which was fairly savage about certain nasty but popular expressions. One of them was ‘natural wastage’. When I first heard this I was curious; I seriously had no idea to what it referred and I recall being a little shocked to learn that it was intended as a quick way of referring to people who take early retirement at a time when a company is intent on shaving down numbers. So it’s kind of but not quite ‘a forced early retirement’.  

Perhaps the person or committee that came up with this term intended the ‘natural’ element to convey something that is going along happily in the ordinary course of things, and therefore is acceptable. But the idea of ‘wastage’ makes the expression totally repugnant, particularly as regards putting people out of work. Somehow the inventor of this expression either missed a trick or is taking the Michael.

Natural wastage is one of many grubby little euphemisms. Like most euphemisms it sits on the shady side of the street and is used as a means of, at best, lessening the impact of a hard truth and, in most cases, attempting to sterilise the emotional impact of words. But it’s an odd thing to do isn’t it? To use words which seek to muffle meaning? So often, the very attempt at muffling meaning or diverting an emotional reaction will simply draw attention and even augment the very emotion you are seeking to calm or suppress. There is a cold, clinical detachment in ‘natural wastage’ – a sense of job-lot disposal of real human beings – that is not felt at all in the easy equivalent idea of ‘early retirement’, even of ‘forced early retirement’.  

  

One other point about this particular expression and then I’ll stop worrying the bone on the floor any further. Part of the reason for its repugnance is that it is one of a number of macho, semi-militaristic expressions that flooded business language in the late eighties and early nineties. Business people, even number-counters, liked to think of themselves as bold, aggressive fighters bringing home the bacon, doing the deals, hoisting the stuff up the flagpole, bringing each other up to speed. The first Gulf War brought such gems as ‘collateral damage’ meaning the accidental killing of civilians into most people’s living rooms and this and other military terms were a gift to the new business ‘speke’ of that era.

Another one is ‘ethnic cleansing’ – a term that bobbed up at about this time, leaping on to the news pages and into the mouths of broadcasters as they reported on the Bosnian/Serbian conflict in former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the nineties.

I couldn’t believe that people would stoop to use such a term. What on earth is ‘cleansing’ about a process that starts at persecution and ends at cold bloodied murder? I remain amazed that this strangely anodyne term is still used today to describe an activity that so often happens in war-torn countries across the globe.  

Here’s what I said at the end of that article of yesteryear: “Natural wastage is probably as welcome a term to the naturally wasted as ethnic cleansing is to the ethnically cleansed. Let us murder, kill, rid ourselves of, but let us not ethnically cleanse.”

But twenty years later and this proved to be such a fruitless plea. There are some fashions of speaking which just disappear after a brief outing – remember how everyone in business referred to their salaries in terms of ‘k’? But a large number remain. What slightly disturbs me is that so many of those that eventually get bound into the lexicon show our weakest profile.