Growing up digital

I went to a talk at my son's school in Cambridge today called Growing Up Digital. Not a talk about grammar, as you might already have guessed.

It was actually very good. The speaker was Stephen Carrick-Davies and he had already spoken to my son's year during the day. My son came back from school very eager to show me this film about cyber-bullying they had been shown (as were we). It's very good (albeit upsetting).



The talk was about various aspects of the digital age and how it affects children and their parents and carers. An awful lot of it was deeply depressing, and I was less buoyed by the supposed benefits of this golden age than either the speaker or most of the younger world.

One of the slides showed a picture of Ghandi with a text box that said something like 'What might Ghandi have achieved with a MySpace account?' I think we were supposed to marvel at what a force for good the internet can be. But how often is this the case? We know it is a magnet for conspiracy theorists and holocaust deniers, but I'm not aware that it is very effective in disseminating life-enhancing political or philosophical thought.

But the point is - with Ghandi more than anyone surely - that it is what we do in the real (or Stephen kept referring to it - the 'offline') world, not what we say in the virtual world. If Ghandi had been yet another internet blogger or MySpace show-off, then the chances are we would never have heard of him - or if we had, suspected him of some ulterior motive. Ghandhi did things. He wasn't simply famous. There is no substitute for action and real, personal contact. You can spread a message with the internet, but what is the worth of that message without the basis in a tested truth? There is a big difference between signing an online petition and risking a baton blow to the head. What might Ghandi have achieved with a MySpace account? Anonymity probably.

I feel a great deal of helplessness - as I know lots of parents do - when dealing with these things. My age disallows me from having a worthwhile opinion. I liked this Douglas Adam quote that was used, in which he sets out a horribly recognisable rule of thumb with new technology:

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

The idea that children sit inside looking at YouTube videos, uploading dodgy photos and endlessly chatting to each other on social networking sites is depressing enough without the dangers we know are present. And ironically the reason they are sitting in the house rather than in the local park is that we want them safe.

Might not this dislocation from the 'offline' world be part of the reason why we have such a high rate of mental illness in the developed world? Online gaming and social networking are substitutes for, not improvements to, real human contract. It is this impersonal world that encourages the cowardice of cyber-bullying surely. It is just too easy.



I am reading Tom Sawyer with my son at the moment and we are both enjoying it enormously. The language is confusing - made doubly so by my wandering American accent (Missouri one minute, New Jersey the next - via Scotland)

Mark Twain gets that age of boy absolutely bang on. It doesn't matter that we have no real connection with that age or part of the world, the way that Tom relates to Huck Finn, to Aunt Polly, to Becky Thatcher is so well observed that the jokes still work. I think my son has laughed more at this book than any other.

But the thing that really separates that world from ours, is not the language or the steamboats or the alarmingly casual use of the word 'nigger' - no, it is the freedom the boys enjoy and the intensity of the world they create for themselves.

The fact is that I grew up in a world much closer to Tom Sawyer's than to my son's. I did not have a murderous Injun Joe after me, but I certainly recognise the vibrancy of his childhood world. I grew up away from adults, in the company of children. We played, we invented games, we did stupid and dangerous things, we got into scrapes, we strayed far from home without recourse to mobile phones. That world seems gone for good. The truth is, there is no adventure left in childhood now that is not pre-packaged or risk-assessed. And the world is a lesser place for it.

Of course I am the same. I don't want my son to be in danger. But then neither did my parents want me to face dangers. And I have to say - I would rather he got hurt standing by a friend than escaped unscathed by deserting that friend. Sometimes you have to get hurt. There's a big difference between a Facebook 'friend' and a friend who is there when you need them.

It is always going to be what you do 'offline' that really counts.

Mike Mignola is a genius

This book arrived in the post recently, courtesy of Tom at the Hitchin Boy's School library. Baltimore is illustrated by Mike Mignola and I have already mentioned my admiration for him in previous blogs.

I actually think Mike Mignola is one of the great American illustrators - right up there with the very best. I think if he did not work in comics, there would be little argument about this. I can think of few times I have seen a bad Mignola - he has the drawing equivalent of perfect pitch. If he has an Achilles heel, it is that he occasionally puts too much information in an image. But we are talking about degrees of perfection here.

Mostly though, his drawings are brilliantly economical. Like Rowland Hilder, Mignola knowingly refers to a woodcut style of illustration, though to a very different end. Where Hilder's work is gestural, Mignola's is very designed and restrained. His imagination is second to none, but it is always rooted in a very acutely observed reality. When he needs to be right, he is always bang on. The details that a lesser artist would simple make up or ignore, Mignola draws with almost scientific accuracy. Because his style is so economical and hard edged, Mignola cannot fall back on the illustrator's standby of simply making something vague.

For someone who spends so much of his time drawing action, Mignola is at his best, for me, when he is evoking stillness or silence. It is the moment before something happens that he draws so well. Baltimore displays this talent superbly, illustrated as it is with dozens of vignettes in which very little happens, but which are, every one of them, packed with atmosphere.

Kidnapped

I bought this copy of Kidnapped in the wonderful Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge. Robert Louis Stevenson is a writer I admire enormously and Kidnapped is a fantastic book. It actually cost less than the current paperback editions. It is a 1948 reprint of a 1946 Oxford University Press edition, illustrated by Rowland Hilder.

Hilder was a very successful painter and illustrator. His paintings are a little too illustrative for my liking, but his illustrations - his line illustrations at any rate - are, I think, undervalued.

Kidnapped is illustrated throughout with chapter headings. They sometimes feature characters from the book or scenes from the story but more often than not, they are landscapes or seascapes. Hilder was a landscape painter, so he was on firm ground there. But there are more to these images than simple landscape sketches.

Believe me, that degree of brevity and nonchalance is hard to pull off - especially if you are dealing with a sailing ship and all that rigging. I can think of few illustrators working today who could combine that degree of accuracy with that kind of spontaneity. Hilder employs a kind of traditional stamp-like wood engraving look, but with a calligraphic, almost Japanese fluidity of drawing. There are colour plates in the book but they are nothing more than competent. These chapter headings on the other hand are gems. . .

Enter with drag on

I showed my son the YouTube clip of Bowie and there was an utterly incredulous, 'What the. . .' look on his face the whole time. It's a little like the expression my dad used to wear at the time. Children today are so conservative!

Lisa and Peter Kirkham came round for dinner last night. Or is that supposed to be supper these days? I am rarely this sociable: a trip to London and lunch with Paul and the very next day I'm entertaining the Kirkhams. It doesn't seem right somehow. I ought to spread these things out. Peter and Lisa were great company and knowing them is one of the better side-effects of writing as I got to know them originally through author events at Heffers. Lisa is a designer and massive children's book fan.

At some point in the evening we got to talking abut martial arts. Or maybe I got to talking about it and everyone else just concentrated on not yawning. Anyway, I was reminiscing about my love of judo when I was a kid - I did it as an after school club for years - and of Aikido when I was older. I even did a bit of Jiu-jitsu. Tai Chi too.

I had a poster of Bruce Lee on my wall when I was in my teens and I can vividly remember going to see Enter The Dragon with my brother. I was awestruck. Bruce Lee's acting may not have been Oscar-winning, but his screen presence was mesmerising. He was like a wild animal. Suddenly judo seemed very dull indeed. The towering Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones was the B feature. Wa-haaa!

I used to watch Kung Fu with David Carradine too, on TV. I bought the first series recently on DVD and sat down to watch it with my son, but it is so slow. Even the real-time stuff seems like slow motion. But I used to love it. I wanted to be like David Carradine: peace-loving and wise, but with the capacity to give someone a graceful kicking if absolutely necessary.

Buddhist monk style baldness is looming, but little else.


I have watched my son play football every week in wind and hail, rain and snow. His mother comes once - in blistering sunshine - and he scores for the first time ever! It's not fair.

Madness and modernity

I saw Paul Stewart yesterday. We went to the Madness and Modernity exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. There were some interesting things there, but the best exhibits were in the permanent exhibition. I think I need to go back with a notebook and do some sketches. Paul and I were too busy talking to really concentrate on the deeply strange exhibits.

It is always good to see Paul and he was on good form. He probably won't read this because he clearly finds blogs a bit pointless. 'I'm just not interested enough in other people.' Thanks very much.

But I know what he means. Sometimes when I'm writing these posts I do wonder why on earth I'm doing it. It is the sort of thing I ought to hate. And yet something keeps me burbling on. . .

Paul has been blogging with Chris Riddell, but it is a fantasy blog. That is, the blog is real enough, but the world it describes is a fantasy world. There is a link to it in my blogs list. It's called The Farrow Ridges.

We talked about music - Paul is a big music fan and had written a list of his own 'sad songs' choices. I was impressed that we had matched up on more than one. We talked - inevitably - about writing and what we were both up to and who we were reading. Paul had seen the film of Let the Right One In and thought it was very good.

He told me that he and Chris are off on a tour of the Highlands, visiting schools and giving talks. I'm very jealous.

In the aeroplane over the sea

I'm off to London today to meet Paul Stewart. He emailed me yesterday to ask if I knew the album In The Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. I do. I have it. It was actually recommended to me by another friend with expansive musical tastes - Neil Dell.

Paul said that a lot of the songs on that were sad - and then corrected himself by saying 'emotional'. I think that hits the nail on the head. That's what an Air Supply song isn't. It lacks any kind of real emotion at all.

They obey your commands (even when you hide far away)

Another ad from the 1970s.

I got an email from Sarah at Bloomsbury to say that Raben & Sjogren, the Swedish publisher of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, want to publish Tales of Terror from the Black Ship which is great news. I am reading Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist so I am having something of a horror swap with Sweden.

Let The Right One In is particularly interesting to me at the moment because it has child protagonists in an urban setting and I am working on something similar. In fact I had a moment of panic when I began reading it because it opened in almost exactly the same way. But this is most definitely an adult book. It is not just creepy, it is very, very dark.