More of this

Ohh a day of much buzzling about. A made up word. To the garage and tip and back. And then out to see Liz Lochead do a most amusing little talk on Joan Eardley at the National Gallery. Well, it was amusing as LL herself admitted that she’s a bit of a disorganised speaker. More than a bit, actually. The Edwin Morgan poem she read was ok though.
Then a bus and a smoked sausage supper before meeting some of the boatie club crew down at the Olde Inn at Davidson’s Mains. And good blethers - a bit political with old Hellewell.

And I was most taken with the latest NS - another issue featuring New Times - how capitalist innovation is changing the way we live. Indeed. A couple of items in particular - one about how writing is adapting to a new usage - that is, in conversation (i.e. texting) that it had never previously been used for. There was a nice little aside about the author’s students who see unsolicited voice calls as an imposition; text based communication is preferable (even if less efficient) because it doesn’t demand the recipient’s immediate and undivided attention. I do agree - if someone rings my mobby I often don’t answer - surely they can bliddy well text me, I do think.
And the other one was about the shift from owning to renting experiences as so many no longer accumulate objects. The author Ian Leslie notes, that, despite all this, human nature has not changed: we are still apes with status anxiety, endlessly preoccupied by our position in any given hierarchy, eager for ways to convey our aspirations and allegiances. So we find other ways to signal. Rather than deploy what we own to say who we are, we use our photo streams and status updates to show it, even going so far as to arrange our meals and holidays with the aim of generating impressive on-brand content.
Looking at my diary this week, I think some impressive on-brand content could well be generated. Not, of course, that I purposefully arranged it so…. Ahem