Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Last night, my partner introduced me to Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, starting with the infamous Amy’s Baking Company episode where shit hits the fan, then working our way back to the UK editions of the show which involve marginally less schadenfreude.

There’s a joke when I make in writing classes about writers being reluctant to embrace the business side of their craft, basing their expectations off a handful of outliers, which is kind of like trying to invest a million dollars into a restaurant because you’re a big fan of Jamie Oliver.

It wasn’t until the second or third episode of Kitchen Nightmares that I realised how many people actually do that, and how reluctant they are to take on board the suggestion that they, maybe, should try learning a little about how things actually work in established, successful restaurants.

It makes me oddly comforted to think writers are not alone in this particular behaviour.

The first blog I truly followed belonged to Neil Gaiman, when he added the American Gods dairy to his website back in 2001. It was quickly followed by Caitlin Kiernan’s Low Red Moon journal, which quickly metamorphosed into her Livejournal (and has stayed there, even now, after Livejournal has become an archaic thing occupied by Russians and die-hards refusing to walk away).

I’m not sure when, exactly, I started my own web presence. The first site I owned was coded by my friend Sean and set up on a friend’s server, a place to flag gaming things. It was quickly followed by a Livejournal, where I didn’t need to know HTML or ask friends for help to make an update.

This blog, which turned ten in November last year, was a grudging concession to the idea that I needed a site I controlled more than I needed Livejournal’s friend’s feature.

When I was young, you’d occasionally find books full of writer’s letters or notebooks. Compilations of things they’d written that offered a glimpse behind the curtain.

These days, you can trace a writers history by going to their site and scrolling back. Those first posts I followed are still out there, archived on Gaiman’s site, a glimpse into a younger writer and the beginning of an ongoing chronicle that evolves with Gaiman’s career. Kiernan’s Low Red Moon Journal is still live, waiting for those interested in her history as a writer to find their way there. Every now and then I’ll go back and read the archives of writers I love, tracking the way projects evolved as they talked about them, picking up the little details that only seem significant in hindsight.

One of the things that makes me sad about the shift to social media is the way these archives get lost, or at least transformed into something it’s a huge pain in the arse to try and find.

For years, I worked on the theory that I was not built for podcast listening. I didn’t like the formats people used, and the signal-to-noise ratio didn’t add up when I looked at fitting them into my schedule. Then I discovered the genre of podcasts I really enjoyed: short, topic-focused essays and the interview series, as exemplified by Writing Excuses, the Allusionist, and Chris Jericho’s wrestling interviews.

Recently a whole host of the podcasts I listen to regularly went dormant, so I started searching for things to replace it. The one that’s really captured my attention: BBC World’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.

The series is everything I want from the format: short, informative, and generally built around a seemingly innocuous topic that ultimately changes the way you see or understand the world around you.

Which isn’t a bad result for something which spends 8 minutes charting the history of things like barcodes and spreadsheets. The transition from “this is how someone built a program to handle complex accounting calculations” to “this is actually a meditation on what ‘the robots will take our jobs’ actually looks like’ is deftly handled, and always leaves me wanting to go and check out their source texts to find out more.

Strongly recommended.