Big Pulp Summer 2012 and Dividing By Zero

My copy of Big Pulp Summer 2012 arrived while I was away, and what a treat it is. A very high standard of writing and production, and I’m delighted to be a contributor. So I’ll be a bit quiet for a while as I read on …

Or will I? I’ve been away, and meanwhile, my efforts on the writers’ website Authonomy haven’t done so badly. I’m keeping my work there until something better comes along …

Such as Linkedin. I’m improving my Linkedin profile because it allows me to promote my writing in a professional way, and it isn’t a social networking site, (or is it?). I’ll soon find out.

To misquote Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs joke “The worse I do, the more popular I get”, the more I social network, the more outside the social network I become. Leave it alone for two weeks, and my ranking improves. Eh? This is because I don’t pursue the dreaded consensus. My social networking potential is zero. I actively follow the path of most resistance. That’s how art works. And on a computer, dividing by zero can cause havoc. I wonder whether the algorithm that drives Facebook and Authonomy can cope. I think I know the answer – an emphatic NO.

It’s a feature of the algorithm that drives social networking, that it sweeps along the consensual Nielsen data A1 herd all sharing the same product aware aspirations. I don’t accept that a computer algorithm, a simple formula, should be allowed to form groups and polarise society in this way.

On a positive note, the social networking algorithm appears to be failing. There’s a decline in the take-up of Facebook, and I think I know why this is. There are many zero-rated people with no social networking potential out there. It would be perverse and against the consensus to say why I know this is so. Meanwhile I’m reading Big Pulp Summer 2012 and keeping quiet. But I will whisper BlackBerry. Whoops! Divide by zero error.

Make Mine a Pint of Creme-de-Menth

Or Perversity and the Anti-thesis of Everything Courtesy of the World of Publishing

In my constant search for gems, I found a 400 word blurb for A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Haven’t read the book. Can’t comment, but the blurb that appears on every bookseller web site encapsulates the negativity of the age and the encircling, stultifying dogma of market researchers desperate to exploit the masses with their money-spinning belief system. Feel pissed off, then buy this book. It’s got to be a winner.

Nice cover. Let’s have a look.

“spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives”

Oh yeah. Circling the lives of interlocking spellbinding wotsits. Love it. Imagine that, going round and round looking down on some saddos. Clever! I’ll buy that.

“the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates”

Oh yeah. Shit happens. We’re all doomed. It’s written in the stars. Didn’t you know, mate?

“Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to”

Uh! Make mine a pint of crème-de-menth!

“the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time”

Salvation or oblivion! That’s me on a Saturday night! I’ll buy that.

“Sly, startling, exhilarating work”

‘Sly’ ey?. A bit devious. Bit of a trickster. Cheeky chappie, like me. Ker-ching.

So there you have it. This is selling. The best bits. It’s easy to accuse me of overthinking, as people do, but Marketing isn’t reality, as we’re often told. Nielsen have been collecting data on what we buy, when we buy and why since 1931. They feed it back to the marketing people so they in turn write, Winston Smith-like, non-sequiturs described above. It’s time someone said, ‘I’m Spartacus’.

There really are other world views and belief systems out there, although none that make so much money for shareholders. It doesn’t all have to be going down the plughole, or should I say, ‘circling the inevitable waste disposal system down which we must all inexorably sink”. OMG! Pass the whisky bottle.

Or as George Harrison sang:

“I don’t know how you were diverted 

you were perverted too 

I don’t know how you were inverted 

no one alerted you”

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