I’ve been away for a few days, specifically in Scotland for the Burns celebrations in Dumfries. It’s the 250^th anniversary of his birth. That’s right, 250. I suppose we have a natural affection for seeming milestones (they give us the illusion of order) but 250 seems a tad random, or more likely, a convenient hook on which the tourist authorities could launch their “Homecoming” drive. Reality it seems is what we make it.

Burns is certainly important in the history of literature, though I’m not sure he’s a great poet. I know that when in Dumfries the Scottish first minister Alex Salmond described Burns as “our national bard” he meant something more than Burns’ poetic skills. There’s an irony here: Burns was not much of a nationalist, but he did embody a kind of Scots distinctiveness, warm, compassionate, committed but down to earth and with a feeling for the land. In this sense he seems much more of a national bard than Shakespeare can be for the English, even though he’s often called that. It’s hard to think of anything distinctly English about Shakespeare (Burns had the advantage of writing in an intensely local dialect). I suppose the history plays deepened certain myths of Englishness, but no more so than the Roman plays did for the ancient classical world.

But perhaps this is because the English don’t have much sense of a distinctive culture, or worse that the English are culturally less interested in culture than the Scots.

Whatever, the interesting question for me here is how we have moved from the popularisation of poetry that Burns initiated to the idea that art can be somehow democratic.

It seems we have developed a schizophrenic attitude to virtuosity, which leaves creative work in an uncertain place. I don’t think people have stopped admiring virtuosity, but art establishments are worried about elitism, while technologies have vastly simplified the means of production. It used to be impossible to produce music without reasonable mastery of an instrument. Now all you need is a computer mouse and some software.

The end results need to be judged on their own merits, though I’ll say more about the relationship between quality, effort and refinement, between knowledge and appreciation, at some later date. For the moment though I just want to note that in a broad sense we seem to be moving to a different definition of popular culture. Where this idea of accessible art/entertainment once marked a shift in subject matter and reach (where poets might “speak for” a broad group of people or even a nation, it’s looking for the moment like a much more participatory concept, appropriate to the age of democracy.

I hope this is going to turn out to be a good thing, but I’m not sure. I’d worry if I thought it might reinforce the nerve-failure of movie studios who regularly “test” alternative endings – much of the power of a story comes from the sense that as a reader, listener or viewer you’re not in control, hence the desire to know what happens next. If everything can be bent to our wills then we face the grim prospect of a world no bigger than our imaginations. (I’m always puzzled by that cliched marketing assertion that “the only limit is your imagination!”; for most that’s quite a serious limitation.)

The paradox of this new idea of popular culture is that it has the potential to liberate individual voices from the tyranny of the lowest common denominator. I have a feeling that money will have a strong influence on the way it actually pans out (my guess is that we’re moving beyond the gold rush era of internet development).

Who knows what Burns would have made of all this. Then again, he might have been a populist poet before the idea really existed, but he had to make a living working as a taxman.

In the London Review of Books recently the novelist John Lanchester discussed video games (not that they have much to do with “video” as we usually understand the word), suggesting that here is a new medium almost entirely unknown to mainstream critics, though commercially the business is bigger than film.

Bearing in mind the likely ignorance of most LRB readers Lanchester goes over the usual preconceptions about these games, as well as their real strengths and weaknesses. He notes that as mindless entertainment goes, the best of them tend to be far more entertaining than the Hollywood blockbusters that aspire to the same condition. He is concerned about the influence of the money men on the young medium, but looks forward to a maturity in which the capacity of these games to offer an immersive experience of imagined realities is exploited to greater effect.

Although I wouldn’t call myself a serious gamer, I’ve been playing these games regularly since Doom in the early 1990s. Aside from the visceral pleasure of blasting a room full of aliens, and the frequent wonder of the visuals, I was drawn in by the possibiliies of narrative in a new medium, and one of the interesting ways in which they are like and unlike films (or novels) is how they are like or unlike games.

Games as we normally understand them have rules and constraints while their outcomes will depend on how well players perform within those constraints: the outcome of the game is the emergence of a winner. Although video games have very successfully developed mulitplayer modes (where different players go against each other via an internet connection) their roots are in something closer to the special cases of the card game Patience or the board game of Solitaire, where a single player takes on the game “system”.

A video game usually comes to its conclusion when you have succesfully completed its various challenges, but this is not so much like winning as reaching the end of a book or a film. In most real world games when you lose you’re out of the game. In a video game you can expect to be “killed” many times, but this is only a limited loss, forcing you to go back to your last save or checkpoint: sophisticated recent games like Prey and Bioshock have even incorporated this necessary game mechanic into their narrative structure, so being “killed” and then returning to the game has a kind of sense within the narrative.

What really drives you through such games is not so much the thought of winning, but of getting to the end. You struggle from level to level largely out of curiosity to find out what happens next, or in the best games to find out what’s going on at all. At the same time because these are games, and because what happens next will depend on what actions you perform, you will feel (up to a point) that the outcome is open and depends on you. I think this is why the games that offer a “first person” viewpoint, where you see everything through the protagonist’s eyes and so become the protagonist, are the most enjoyable and successful (though there are some interesting exceptions, most notably Max Payne and its sequel).

Game designers like to play with this sense of things being arbitrary and open. Far Cry gave unprecedented freedom to roam and find different ways to complete its tasks. Some also offer alternative endings, depending on how you choose to play the game. In the wonderful Bioshock – picked out for praise by Lanchester – there are two distinctly different endings, even if one of them is clearly “the right one” (essentially you can choose to be compassionate or ruthless, and compassion is duly rewarded).

This sense of relative freedom and potency can work to make a game more engrossing, more immersive, and as Lanchester notes, opens up new possibilities for creative imaginations; you can easily imagine how games could offer optional events or visions or activities which have little to do with the main narrative, but which all the same enrich or colour your experience of that narrative, without taking you into the shaggy dog territory of Tristram Shandy. But to be satisfying these games generally need to reach an end, and to get there certain things will have to have happened.

Because they depend on a narrative spine video games are more like films than traditional games, but in a commercial environment where alternative film endings are routinely tested against the reactions of typical audience samples, you have to wonder where this pressure for the narrative to be responsive to the viewer or player could lead us. I’ll be wondering some more about that in my next entry.

I went to see Richard Thompson performing his 1000 Years of Popular Music last night in London. As the title suggests it’s a little tour of songs from the 1200s (or perhaps before) to the present day (Nelly Furtado). Several songs required some mention of their original context – played in the court, in a music hall or wherever, a reminder of the fact that until relatively recently music existed only in live performance (or in notated form where it could only be “heard” by real experts).

I was reminded (ho ho) of Steven Rose’s point in The Making of Memory that a written language vastly increases the human capacity to remember, to recall both experience and knowledge because both could be placed beyond the individual consciousness. The internet takes this further. Before the internet knowledge was partly a matter of what you retained in mind, partly a matter of knowing where to look for further detail. With the internet an increasingly vast store of knowledge is available at the touch of a search engine, and where the infrastructure exists, it’s available to us wherever we are, whatever we are doing. This is likely to change how we think about knowledge, but it may also change how we think about experience.

I don’t mean that it will virtualise experience completely. An interesting consequence of transfer of recorded music distribution to the internet has been a resurgence in the popularity of live performance – interesting because consumers seem to have embraced the unpackaged freedom of internet downloads (where the emphasis is on individual songs, much as it was in the years before music recording) and yet they show an increasing appetite for live performance – where the artist can control the presentation of the experience. It seems we don’t want to be in control. Sometimes we want to let ourselves go.

Recording teases us with the possibility of repeatability, of non-linear experience. A few years ago when my children were younger we were watching a broadcast TV programme together and my son asked if we could pause it for a moment: he had grown up with video recorders and his expectations were conditioned by them. Of course nowadays with a PVR you could indeed pause the broadcast stream and we’re fast approaching the point where the notion of broadcast schedules seems quaint. Science fiction writers have long speculated on the possibility of implanted memory as a substitute for experience. All the same our experience remains emphatically, inexorably linear. The more the recorded world makes it seem easy to grab the new, then pause, and repeat, the more this capability can enrich our lived experiences, the more acute the contrast becomes between our virtual and real worlds.

Or at least it is if we lose perspective. Last night was a great night. I can revisit it to some extent when I listen to the recorded versions of the music, but they are no substitute. Ironically too perhaps that’s why I still prefer to listen to “albums” where the songs have a running order, the semblance of a linear experience. Art which seeks to offer the sense of repeated experience needs to recognise that when the repetition ends you’re not back where you started.

Shelley once wrote that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind”. Well, he was young, but in the mood of the times he could probably be forgiven for thinking the liberal imagination was rising to a new pre-eminence. Where “society” once indicated a tiny elite it was beginning to embrace whole nations. Literacy was spreading in an unprecedented way and with it an interest in literature of all kinds. Tennyson, though always uneasy about being the voice of anything but himself (even when he was laureate) became wealthy on the sales of his books.

This popular success would be unimaginable now. Poets once again address a niche interest. You could point out that from Pound onwards this was a deliberate choice, a reaction against Victorian populist writing, but it marks too a shift in the way writers see themselves in relation to their readers, a shift influenced in one way then the other by technology (cheap printing). Now I don’t want to get bogged down in too academic a discourse here, but I do want to think aloud about how this new publishing technology, the open space of the internet, could affect how writers (or indeed other artists) think of themselves, and what they are doing.

I don’t mean left field experimentation with collaboration and interactivity (though I think that will come into it). I’m talking about a something that will influence practice whether or not it results in formal experimentation.

That probably sounds mysterious, but I hope what it could mean will be clearer over time (not least to me). And there will be a few by ways to explore. It strikes me that in the visual art world the pre-eminence of the artist as someone with “something to say” is practically unquestioned, with dire results. One of the interesting consequences of working in this open space of the internet is that while every voice might find two or three listeners, the availability of millions of voices means that artists will have to work harder to justify the attention they want to claim. Quite how that it is going to work is very much what this blog is about.

A few days ago in one of those endlessly featured “what’s in store for the coming year” pieces the journalist asked a mixture of writers, critics and publishers what impact the recession would have on new writing. The writers mostly dismissed the question as irrelevant. The critics and publishers thought it unlikely that anyone would be taking any risks. I’m sure they are right. Barely popular modes like literary fiction or poetry are set to suffer. Publishing is a business after all, and the business is under threat, all the old rules changing.

The fact that you’re reading this at all is a sign of how far the internet is changing the rules. In the toolbar at the top left of the window I’m writing in is an icon saying “publish”, and it means it.

I want to use the space here to think aloud about what this means for writing. Most people I’ve talked to quickly dismiss the notion that books are about to go the way of CDs, and I’d agree that for the moment the technology is not quite in place. But it will be within a year or so. While poetry or literary fiction would seem to be better suited to the enduring physical presence of paper than the latest celebrity biography, the hard economics of the business may drive more demanding writing largely into the virtual world. So how will it be there? How will it find its audience, and how will this new mode of distribution change what writers actually do?

The answers to these questions will be changing over the next couple of years, so I’ll be following those changes while talking here about the different kinds of writing that occupy my life, things I’ve found or seen that strike me as interesting, mostly around written words but where relevant from film or visual art, or even food politics.

And I’ve included the idea of surviving with grace, and that’s what’s really at stake. I imagine like many people right now I’m feeling both liberated and oppressed by the ubiquity of the internet. I can’t live without it, but I want to find the best way of living with it, the things it can deliver, and with the ways it is reaching into concerns and actions that have previously gone on without it.