Posts from June 2008“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac On pain of death at the hands of RFW&N, my time in the Valle has been dominated by hard work and early nights. And yet, somehow, amongst all the toil, we’ve still found time to have the occasional very small - and tightly regulated - bit of fun. “People who work in publishing today are by a huge majority young, female graduates from good universities who have an absolute laser-like focus on advancing their career. They are very dedicated, very smart and absolutely fucking terrifying. These people think nothing of arranging a meeting at 9.00 a.m. 9.00 a.m.! To me that’s not a [...] “Arriving late, I’d just missed Angus Bankes’s presentation but made it just in time to see Michael Smith take the platform. In his opinion, The Next Big Thing would be companies that kept things simple rather than building complicated web services which most people couldn’t understand and wouldn’t use. An interesting view from a man [...] Yahoo’s Yang! is back “‘Double Scaatches for everyone,’ he shouted, to no one on particular. ‘Hey, Paul, you don’t mind getting them in do you?’ He threw his Amex card across the table at me; it landed on my lap.” A busy day today, all told. Michelle Act(i)on-Bond and Anna Melville-James have come to visit us in the Valle for [...] “I’m hiding at the back of the room getting slowly drunk with the event’s organiser, an entrepreneur who helped raise a ridiculous sum of money for a business networking site that had projected revenues of precisely zero. His mantra, he tells me, is ‘revenue is the enemy’. It’s not clear what that means, but I [...] ‘Why would you tell me anything? It’s not like I’ve come all the way across London and paid eight fucking pounds for a rum and coke just to hear about your idea. You just keep it to yourself and enjoy your orange juice. Cunt.‘ So, Eris left the Valle on Thursday, heading for New York and [...] Houseguest Eris writes... Ok, I’m back in the room1, and from hereonout things start to get really interesting. Blog silence ends by tomorrow, I promise. Just getting - as they say - my shit back together after a traumatic week of proof reading / changing. I’m still neck-deep in these proofs - reliving the last five years of my life, in painful detail - in the space of four days. A busy few days coming up. Or at least as busy as anyone can claim to be while swinging in a hammock in the mountains of Southern Spain. “The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.” - Hunter S. Thompson Nostalgia is alive and well, and living in the past. “Sad is the day that a Muslim is elected only because the press and others do not want to be called “racist” but he lived in Indonesia and attended muslim school, black americans back up always another black no matter who or what he did. It is o.k. to denigrate a woman like Mrs. Clinton [...] After writing about Hunter S. Thompson earlier, I remembered something I wrote for the Guardian back in 2005, the week after he died. Meeting Estelle Morris the other evening reminded me that I seem to be spending a lot of time at the moment surrounded by people who are much better academically qualified than me. People with doctorates in psychology or highly advanced computer scientists or lawyers who, unlike me, bothered to do something beyond their first degree. When I got rid of my Facebook account, I said there wasn’t anything I’d miss about having a profile there. I realised today that I was wrong. I miss the quotes section on my profile page. I know, I know. You’ve missed me. No, really, you have. |
Other Months
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