YouTube & Books

Since I am drowning in work during the run-up to my Australian trip, I’m going to cheat tonight and in lieu of actual content instead post a series of videos that have a connection to books.

First up, courtesy of author Alex Irvine, is this genius video from the Irish Film Board, in which James Joyce and Samuel Beckett enjoy a nice game of Pitch’n’Putt. Obviously the target audience here are people who’ve actually read Ulysses (or, in a more frightening scenario, Finnegan’s Wake) and Waiting For Godot:

Your mileage may vary, but that was the funniest thing I’ve seen today. Of course, it’s been up there since the middle of last year, so I’m probably the last person on the ‘tubes to see it.

Next up is this little northern european sketch that quite brilliantly puts the life and experience of a technical support person into context for people who’ve never done the job. It does this by illustrating the level of user ability and openess to change that tech support folks often encounter with the example of a previous adoption of new technology. I think this would have been funny anyway, but since I did once work in tech support for a few months (many moons ago), it has some special meaning for me:

I’m not going to embed a video for my third link, since there are actually several videos involved. Expatriate American author Norman Spinrad is experimenting with YouTube. These are probably only of interest to people who have a favourite Spinrad novelI have several. I was the perfect target audience for Little Heroes when it came out–and thinking back on it, there’s a ton of really predictive stuff in there, and both Bug Jack Baron and Agent Of Chaos have special places in my internal library. Oh, and the one about Scientology. That was good, but in a very different way. Oh, and the one about the future of post-glasnost Russia–which turned out to be a poor prediction about Russia’s future, but pretty on target for Fortress Amerika, etc…His first experiment was a performance in a… well… experimental piece entitled VOTE FOR ME (OR I KILL YOU). I can’t really explain it.

His second experiment is a series of what are essentially vlog entries that he’s running on YouTube under the “MeTube” rubric. You can see the videos here: MeTube. The ones about Star Trek have interest for me, but the hint of political commentary in the introduction hints that there might be some good ranting to come. (Note: the microphone problems on the introduction are corrected in later videos.)

For the record, as with Ellison, I am shocked by the video-borne reality of Spinrad’s age; in my mind he’s still this guy. Also, the pacing of his speech, and the way he is obviously reading from a script are both things that surprise me–I expected a faster New York pace, and I expected him to appear more practiced at “public speaking”. In fairness, speaking to a camera is probably a very different skill than speaking to a room full of people, but I was still surprised.

The fourth item is only tangientally related to books. In fact, it’s a bit of sketch comedy, but it appeals to me in that it blends slapstick with a deeper level of thought about the grammar of speech than most people bother with, and an implicitly very aggressive position on normative questions of grammar.