Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Another rather ad hoc update

***I interviewed Wiley for The Guardian. The original pre-edit piece is here.

***I took the Euston Manifesto authors to task in the New Statesman for rather letting the side down, in light of the left's strong historical roots in stirring, inspirational writing.

***I wrote a piece for The Guardian about MySpace's attempt to horn in on the US Presidential Election.

***I interviewed Amy Ferguson for Nylon magazine, which my sister has rather helpfully scanned in for me.

***I interviewed some random guy called Alex Sushon (arf arf) for Dazed&Confused's upcoming 'Web 50' issue. Watch out for that.

***I have been working for a website called chinadialogue.net, writing about green celebrities, and Live Earth, and generally making the world a better place. It's been very useful to have my suspicions and fragments of knowledge about climate change solidified by the experts, and also learn about the Chinese heavy metal scene in the process. My pieces haven't gone up yet, but they will do when 'Cooler Living', the yoof section of the site, launches later this week.

***I went to HMP Wandsworth last week, which has got to be one of the strangest experiences of my life. Prisons are right there, in amongst us and our hustling, bustling, workaday lives... but they define 'other' more than anything else in modern civilisation can. As memorable experiences go, it was up there with visiting Springfield Psychiatric Hospital.

The Wandsworth visit was for an education event I'm going to document in the Offender Learning And Skills Service (OLASS) newsletter, which I'm still editing. It's quite niche I appreciate, but if anyone wants to read it the latest issue is here.

***One final thing... check out this fantastic book about the art of writing edited by my good friend Phil Oltermann. He was interviewed on Radio 4 about it you know!