Enhanced Editions found via James Hogwood

Intrigued by this. A multimedia iphone ebook app that lets you switch between text, audio and video without losing your place. It all looks beautifully seamless.

Despite the fact that I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks, I’m seriously tempted to give this a go.

But although I completely appreciate the amount of work that must go into producing this,  it still feels a bit pricey at £15. I’d pay that much for a hardback. But whenever there’s ever a book that I want so much that I buy the hardback, then I want the actual physical hardback rather than a digital version (if that makes any sense?).

If it were £9.99 I’d be playing with it now rather than writing about it. But then, as I say, I’ve never been one for audiobooks or ebooks.

Saying that, Nick Cave is a brilliant one to launch with because…because it’s Nick Cave for chrissake. If there’s anyone I’m going to watch reading a novel, it’s him. Sod it, I’m going to do it.

I love Thomas Pynchon. I love the richness of his prose. Each sentence feels important, as if cast from heavy metals. And I love how he makes no concession at all to the reader. There is no compromise in the arcaneness of his references, or the number of characters he’ll introduce and fleetingly re-introduce over the duration of a novel.  But because of these levels of complication, you can sometimes feel as slightly paranoid as one of TP’s beleaguered characters that you’re missing something important.

So while I was googling his new novel, ‘Inherent Vice‘, I was very happy to find the Pynchon wiki. It’s loaded up with as many references, character descriptions and nuggets of background info as you could possibly desire. Can’t remember which Traverse is which in Against The Day? Here’s the family tree.

Of course it descends into ridiculous geek/fan-dom in places. Do we really need to know that “It has been suggested that Pynchon relied on the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a major reference for his treatment of 1890s Chicago”? Actually, yes, we probably do. But in the main the wiki is a really useful thing. It’s not using anything brilliantly new technology-wise (although the wiki as a search-based iPhone app would be great, come to think of it). It’s just being useful, using an existing technology really well. And useful is good, right?

Each lecture addressed a concept that Calvino suggested would define, or be worth saving by, the millennial writer, namely: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity  (Constancy, the sixth, wasn’t written).

Despite being written in 1985 and aimed squarely at literature, it’s amazing how prescient they are re all things online. In 6 words he’s pretty much nailed the internet.

But then is that really so surprising? Most people operating online are telling a story of some description, aren’t they? And, ok, what Calvino means by some of those terms might not immediately spring to mind now – In Visibility he fears the loss of the abilty to imagine up picures from the written word, of our over-reliance on visual stimuli. And we do like a bit of visual stimulus online, don’t we? That aside, it’s still interesting how these tenets of a proposed new fiction have been migrated to the web in telling those stories.

Is the web a better medium for story-telling than the novel these days? I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I read anything new in the shape of a novel that came close to representing any of the above, but that might have more to do with my reading habits over the last few years, and especially since the loss of David Foster Wallace. And while there have been some pretty lovely uses of new media to create outright fictions (I’m thinking of Carl Steadman’s 99 Secrets, as randomised on twitter by Matt Webb), I’m not sure these are any more successful than the occasional poetry of a single 140 character missive.

Anyway. It’s a lovely little book. You should read it.

Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road, he has taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p24.

I’ve never anticipated a book’s launch like I did Infinite Jest‘s. I still have the courderoy jacket with one shoulder worn down to the cotton from lugging its hard-backed thousand plus pages to work everyday.

The first time I saw the internet in action was while visiting my friend Tom’s flat – the first search we did was for ‘David Foster Wallace’.

Read this by Robert Potts in the Guardian