The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge

I have an ongoing fascination with the Thames. The strap to this blog was originally “Tales from the riverside”. And my  first proper blog entry was one such tale. A lot of it comes from working in Vauxhall for 3 years and getting to spend at least a few minutes by the river most days.

The Thames is the seam that separates – and joins – north and south London. Through its 15+ urban tributaries all of London flows into it. It’s the biggest single focal point of the city. It’s something with which we [Londoners] all have our own personal relationship, something that we all experience differently.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking of ways of collating these experiences. A twitter search is an obvious way of doing this but, as is the way with twitter, there’s a lot of noise to the small amount of signal.

I love the simple elegance of what @riverthames and @towerbridge do, giving life to objects by translating data into twitterness. But that’s something different to this.

I also love the idea of someone taking on the mantle of an object and giving it a sassy personality, as @imlondonbridge does. But that isn’t what I’m about either and anyway, @riverthames has started to do that itself.

So my offering is humbler, more human and probably less sustainable in the long term. I’m cherry-picking tweets about the Thames and re-tweeting them as @thamesstories. There are no rules at the moment, other than they’ll be stories, rather than news or informational bits. I might include pictures. I’d like to take this somewhere else eventually, but for now I just want to see where this goes in this format, if it goes anywhere at all.

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.