bigideas

Rich Cochrane will be running a highly interactive session on Oulipo techniques for writers on 30 August at the Treehouse Gallery in Regent’s Park.

Just a quickie this, inspired by a Philips missive I came across by accident this morning while looking for something else. The main subject doesn’t excite me much: the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester.

There’s been a bit of agnosticism in the air recently, and it reminded me of a popular argument against the existence of God. I think it’s a bad argument, and I’d like to try to set out why. For our purposes here, “God” can stand for any supernatural something at all — I’ll try to stay out of theology.

Robert and I finished the last walkthrough of Align yesterday, and the music is finalised (more or less — I reserve the right to tweak). So here, for the anoraks I know are among you, is the list of what I’ll be playing (bits of), not in order of appearance.

I was looking at The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth by Heath and Michell this morning in connection with the upcoming Align performances (if you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late). In Michell’s section I noticed a couple of claims that are wrong, but in interestingly different ways.

“Nice People Take Drugs“, said the ad on the side of buses.

As some of you may know, BigIdeas has recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Since Twitter seems to be reaching a Facebook-in-2007-like critical mass, all kinds of widgets have been added to it to make it more useful. Unlike Facebook, none of these seems to be about werewolves or fish, which is a Good Thing.

This July, Robert Kingham and Rich Cochrane are presenting the first two performances of their multimedia psychogeographic lecture/performance Align.

As prep for last night’s event I wrote up some notes based on some rather ancient research work, largely to limber up and remind myself of some things. I’ve posted them below — be warned, this is a bit long and pretty sketchy, but at least those who were there might find it useful.

The term rhetoric is most often levied as a term of abuse, deployed when someone’s empty words are not backed-up by their deeds. More often than not, that someone is usually a politician, spinning a yarn.