New Year's Rant

First, let me wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year from London (pics C. Getty & Reuters)


In my opinion the internet is spoiling the noble art of the rant. The web is full of nutters who think that a rant consists of illiterate ramblings about subjects they don't understand, such as complex science or economics. Cyberspace is choked by offerings from conspiracy clowns wearing tinfoil hats, offering their personal theories that the world is run by giant lizards disguised as George W Bush and Queen Elizabeth.

Personal or corporate abuse is meat and drink to a good rant but it must be witty and cutting. It should sting rather than bludgeon. Calling someone a rude word, as such, is gauche, boring and says more about the speaker than the speakee.

Daniel Seidel has a good rant about the lost art of the rant here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2176968/

As an aside, I particularly liked the link to the rant by the tube letch who raises that great age-old mysteryin a rant - 'Why do ladies put their charms on public display only to get annoyed when men notice the aforementioned delights?'

However, in the literary world it has been the ladies who have shown the way and given us some of the best rants recently.

Ursula Le Guin published an open letter in which she resigns from the Author's Guild after more than three decades of memebership.
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-AGResignation.html
Note she builds up steam by taking a standard pot from those in the provinces about the parochialism of those in the centre before discharging her main weapons. That letter is a master class in how to write a crushing put down in a handful of lines without a single wasted word.

PD James skewered Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, over the ludicrous bureaucracy of overpaid executives with meaningless job titles here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6920354/How-PD-James-skewered-the-BBCs-Mark-Thompson.html


Lynda La Plante also slung a ballistic missile at the BBC for their fatuous politically correct commissioning policy and layers of management here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240009/Lynda-La-Plante-attacks-BBC-saying-Corporation-Muslim-boys-script-hers.html


These ladies are very bright, literate, focussed, and well informed on the subject of their rant.

So feel free, what would you like to rant about for the New Year.

Exeunt the Annus Horribilis

So, 2009 ends with a whine, which is probably pretty apt, all things considered. From my perspective - which is, admittedly, a wee tad biased, it's been a true Annus Horribilis (with options on a 'orrible anus as well) with the constant question of whether my day job will still be there, economic woes, the publishing industry playing lemmings when not doing things that - at best - leave people scratching their heads and wondering where they can get whatever these people were on at the time.

Since I have issues with late nights, I'm not likely to do anything dramatic like stay up and watch anyone's fireworks or anything, unless I get sucked into the current WIP.

So... gazing into zee crystal ball (genuine imitation crystal, $1-99 at Wal-Mart!), what do you see for 2010?

I see ebook readers becoming a more mature technology, maybe one showing up that actually does what I want it to. EBooks becoming more prominent - and more contentious. Someone is sure to try to claim that they own ebook rights for anything they published in dead tree lo! these many years ago, especially if the author has sold the ebook rights to someone else after untold years of out of print-ness (if they haven't already done so, which wouldn't surprise me).

I'm not sure when it will happen, but someone, somewhere, will go big with DRM-free eBooks, and begin the slow cracking of the DRM Curtain (this is a little like the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain, only messier and full of holes - if you know where to look and what to do with the finger you poke through one of the holes). By the end of the 'teens, eBooks will probably be bigger than dead tree, or close to it, and will be predominantly DRM-free.

What are your predictions? And how happy will you be to kick 2009 out the door in the hope that 2010 will be better?

P.S. Me being me, I'm a tad reluctant to say 2010 couldn't be worse - if I say something like that, the universe goes out of its way to prove I'm wrong.