20 Conflicting questions on creating disposables

I think it's time we called consumer culture what it really is: disposable culture. In a world that's all about disposables, and the value of things lying in their obsolescence, what lasts?

More pertinently, how do we make content last?* How does content retain its value? Conventional wisdom implicates:

• Evergreen content: re-churnable, "timeless" content.
• Print: let's face it, a book you read six months ago is almost always easier to find than some article you read online on the same day.
• Epublishing: in theory, although my computer's directory structure appears to be some kind of vortex that sucks such content in and destroys it through what I suspect is a previously undiscovered form of massive, sub-atomic implosion.
• Searchability: will social search put paid to the conventional notion of "value", or bolster it? And what about supposedly less-restricted search, like Duck Duck Go?

But really, what is the value of content? For most people, it seems to be that you can stick it in your head -- you can gain knowledge (even only short-term knowledge, like news), or a semblance of such.

What are the alternatives to disposable content? Are there alternatives? If a central part of the human psyche believes that the most valuable things are those we can lose, and/or that what matters is what's "now", then perhaps obsolescence is to be reveled in.

Perhaps the value of content -- to people who sell it, and people who read it -- is proportional to its ability to churn.

Why am I arguing? Obsolescence will keep writers in jobs, and by rights I should probably be cheering. There'll always be more to write, and more to read. But Jesus, it's exhausting.

*Substitute for "content" the name of the product you make if you wish.

You tell me

I don't know. I really don't.*
Let's look at that again, shall we:

It was a lay-down misere.

In fact, a lay-down misere is a game which is played to lose: the loser is the winner. How these people are losers is a bit beyond me; perhaps it has something to do with riot shields.

Celebrity agent signs riot kissers.

Difficult to glean the meaning on the first read, but you can get it by the fifth or so if you concentrate really hard.

Now, Melbourne romantic's bringing lover home.

What? Honestly, it took me a good forty seconds to glean the meaning of the previous phrase. After ten minutes or so I assumed this bit meant that one of the kissing couple is from Melbourne and is bringing the other party to this city. According to the article, however, he is in fact from Perth.

What's going on with the news and the writing and the reporting and the coherent English, then? You tell me. Cause I have no freaking idea.

*Yeah, we could talk all day about the image content and the intent of the couple (that's a "comforting kiss"? I think I got thrown out of a nightclub once for doing the same thing...) but that's a discussion for another time.

Doing your dash

My grandfather lived until he was 95 or some such, and died only when he ripped the drip from his own wrinkly arm, flung himself out of his own bed, and let himself die of pneumonia.

Yeah. We have some hard arses in our family. Two: him, and me. My sister says I'm like him in that I give the world only so many chances. Once someone's done their dash, that's it. She's right.

Unfortunately this applies to authors I edit just as it does people I know personally.

How does an author do their dash?

• Fail to be polite.
• Decline to humour my suggestions for edits or rewrites.
• Neglect to attend to my requests for additional information.

Tweeting me a day after they've sent me an article or pitch to ask when I'll get to it sails pretty close to the wind, too, but even I can see that failing to nurture such eagerness is less than ideal for all concerned.

Pitching authors, don't do your dash. Be helpful and accommodating, and I'll be the same. Okay? Deal.

Word of the day #9: agoropolis

agoropolis, n. a city comprised entirely of retail outlets, and lacking the public services, homes, and other facilities that would support its citizens.

From the Greek agora, marketplace, and polis, city.

The concept of the agoropolis was created by British writer Monty Monteith, who wrote futuristic fiction in the 1940s.

Monteith had enjoyed the depth of classical education appropriate to his class, and during his time abroad, spent many months on Mykonos and Crete, as well as mainland Greece.

Few know if it was this, or the mysterious months he spent in Lapland during the winter of 1938—a period for which he was largely unable to account upon his return to England—that prompted him to conjure the agoropolis. Many believe it was a combination of the two.

Monteith's agoropolis was a cold, fractured anti-idyll, where the citizens had no homes or shelters, and were trapped in a maze of shops from birth (usually on a street, beneath a tree manicured by the Keepers of Streetscapes—the retail equivalent of council workers, employed by wealthy merchants) until death (usually in some dank bargain basement).

So entrenched, the citizens could do nothing but pursue purchases. They spent their days trawling market stalls, eating street food as they walked between merchants' stores, trying things out and on, and attempting to gain the attention of uninterested store clerks.

In an intriguing twist, the citizens of Monteith's agoropolis had no money—since they had no employment—and thus were destined to window-shop for their entire lives.

They were able to obtain food by using a complex system of accounts, like modern-day tabs, with a restricted number of food sellers.

Yet they were never able to purchase or own the items that they were forced, by circumstances beyond their control, to spend their lives focused upon.

Scholars have since addressed the similarities between Monteith's agoropolis and Dante's Inferno in papers of varying merit.

I love the way she tells stories

Mind-blowing lines #26

From The Death of Bunny Munro. Which is prettymuch all the preamble you need on this occasion.

Soon Bunny Junior will sit back in his seat and stare out at the white, weather-bitten cliffs and the flocks of seagulls that feast on the newly turned earth in the fields that line the coastal road. He will think that even though his mother would come into his room and hold him and stroke his forehead and cry her eyes out, her hand was still the softest, sweetest, warmest thing he had ever felt, and he will look up and see a flock of starlings trace the angles of her face in the sky. He will think that if he could just feel that soft, warm hand on his forehead again then he would he didn't know what.