Niven Govinden - Books of the Year

"Short fiction is alive and well, and provides the perfect antidote to some of the year’s more bloated novels. Julia Leigh’s Disquiet (Faber), a tightly-knitted novella about a battered wife returning to her mother’s house in France is a must, reminiscent of early McEwan in the way it unnerves; Yoko Ogawa’s excellent trilogy of stories The Diving Pool (Harvill Secker), is a glorious mixture of Japanese suburban ennui and alarm, no more so than in the title story, where a teenage girl schemes to feed her growing obsession with her foster brother; Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff (Harvill Secker), a series of interlinked stories about the fictional eponymous Ohio town, is unafraid of shying away from the brutal desolation of small-town life, but written with real humanity – the sort of stories you imagine Raymond Carver to have written whilst drunk - and finally, to read Tobias Wolff’s short story collection Our Story Begins (Bloomsbury) is to immerse yourself in a master of the form. Staggeringly good.

"Rinsed plenty of new music this year, but what stands out is usually what helps me to write: MGMT, Goldfrapp, Fleet Foxes, and N*E*R*D."



Novelist Niven Govinden is the author of ‘We Are The New Romantics’ and most recently ‘Graffiti My Soul’ (Canongate).

Books (and Other Stuff) of the Year

Motivated mainly by boredom rather than righteous anger, I've emailed nearly everyone I know who is connected to writing or publishing and so on (a surprisingly small amount of people) and asked them to send me their choices for books of the year (or other Important Cultural Business of the year). The lists in the newspaper are always so dull, so I thought it would be interesting to find out whether this is because the format itself is tired and played out, or the people they ask to write them are tired and played out, or I am and it's all really a hell of a lot of fun and I'm just too much of a wet blanket to play along. It's an experiment, see? Or at least I think it is.

Anyway, the responses are already rolling in (or at least, trickling in) and I will post them up one at a time over a number of days or weeks for added excitement. Please feel free to leave your own suggestions, comments etc in the section provided...

More Phorm

Spooky. Within 45 minutes of posting about "Black Monday" Lamont and his new chums on the board of Phorm, someone from a Phorm-registered IP address checked out what I'd written. Which just goes to show, never fuck with the deep packet miners. They may not know where you live, but you can be pretty sure they know how you live...

Phorm and Content - Norman Lamont wants your Deep Packets

A couple of interesting pieces on Bad Idea's blog about the internet advertising company Phorm. The first focusses on the addition of Norman Lamont to their board of directors and the second on the simultaneous appointment of Kip Meek, one of the founders of Ofcom, apparently... The MD of Phorm, incidentally, is called Kent Ertugrul, which makes me wonder if Thomas Pynchon is now in charge of naming business executives...

Quote of the Day

"I am not that sensitive or that weak to believe that because someone says I can't do something it means I haven't done it." - Ornette Coleman. It could be self-help nonsense but read it carefully...

Techno Techno Techno Techno

Techno-paranoia story of last week goes to the Grauniad's Technology section for more stuff about How Fucked Up And Evil Google Are (Or Potentially Could Be, Fella). Seth Finkelstein used his rather excellent column to point out the various ways in which we perhaps don't want Google predicting flu trends, because, hey, once they get into that shit, what will they data-mine on us all next...? Feel that shiver run up your spine...

I still think they're only collecting data to feed into the giant, God-like A.I. they are intending to build in a few years, which could be a good thing, if you are to believe recent reports in the Telegraph about how the US are developing robot soldiers because they are less likely to rape, pillage, torture and maim than good old Johnny Human. Despite the Today programme taking a Daily Mail line this morning about mad, rampaging robots, this is more Isaac Asimov than the Terminator, or so the experts claim.

If you're interested in this kind of thing (although I have to say that I think in this day and age we're less moved by ideas of Good machines than by Very Very Bad machines) then there's a new book out called "Moral Machines" and the authors blog here.

Tom Raworth - more

In a republic of poets, receiving an email from Tom Raworth would be like getting a telegram from the Queen. So, it follows that yesterday was my 100th birthday. A friend of his had seen my post about his film "Hands," and so he emailed me to tell me about a more complete version which appears on his site.

"It is, indeed, my left hand," he writes, "photographed (sometimes just one frame, sometimes two or three) as still images once every day of 2007." Anyway, the full version is up here. This particular take is soundtracked by Billy Bragg because "when I'd finished the video I checked its time-length, ordered what music tracks I had on my computer by length.... and the Billy Bragg took exactly the same time. Serendipity too good to miss".

Be sure to check the news section of the site, too, for Raworth's excellent downloadable music podcasts, his battles with the law-drones of The Independent and much other good stuff. Or browse all the music here. He has a very fine record collection...