Fitting the battle of life

So I’m working in a bar. It’s a very quiet bar in my home town. I don’t get paid a lot, but then it’s so quiet I don’t usually do a fat lot.

The weather’s not been brilliant, and even when it has turned out nice, people are unsure whether to risk it. Our busiest day so far was last Saturday (14th), when it was actually quite nice. But compared to somewhere in town, say (we’re quite out of the way), it would have been a very slow day. Some days we’ve hardly had ten customers all day. (more…)

Last time I talked about the basic structure and how it is vital to creating meaning. It’s pretty hard to explain how throwing sentences together creates a coherent meaning so I’m going to return to an example I mentioned in my last post, B.S. Johnson and the pages-with-holes. (more…)

Well, it won’t be long now before my current phone contract expires and the iPhone arrives in the UK. Now, I’m not an Apple fanboy, and my iPod nano was bought for me over a year ago by my mother as a ‘welldoneyou’vefinishedschoolfinallynowgetoutofmyhouseandgotouni’ present. I run Ubuntu as my main operating system, but retain windows XP for a few minor things (a couple of games, for instance, and also iTunes occasionally). (more…)

At school I was taught that ‘form+content=meaning”, a handy equation in literature that reminds you to look at both what is said and how it is said in order to derive some meaning from it. This can range simply from whether a word is italicised to the rhyme scheme to the choice of using prose or poetry (1) to cutting holes through pages (2). On arriving at university, our first introductory lecture concluded ‘the medium is the message’. (more…)

As Helvetica celebrates its 50th birthday, with a documentary all to itself, I find myself buying Don Quixote (trans. Edith Grossman) in what used to be Ottaker’s but is now a far more sombre Waterstone’s (the green facade having been replaced by black, and the interior soon to follow, I fear). I chose this edition because it looks, on the outside, far more interesting than the Penguin Classics edition, and the translation is apparently very good. (more…)