MIN REDACT

"Thank for that Chas it makes everything a lot clearer ---- or at least I think it does - sadly, it doesn't explain, or it doesn't explain to to me, why the individual episodes are so short. Do you have a handle on that? His last work had much longer pieces interspersed with the short ones."

"Good point Gee and one that vexed me for a while too - you are right about his previous stuff being much more elaborate and I wondered for a long time about the new short format episodes. I thought, initially, that he was mirroring press coverage length but I'm not so sure. It might have been his starting point but maybe not. It's almost as though he has been tailoring the length and spacing of these episodes for some literary reason. I know that he had some issues with his immediately previous work, one of which was complaints about the longer pieces being so difficult to read online. He is very sensitive to the delivery technology if not to his audience and I think that he has been trying to curtail lengths so that no episode dominates any other. One of the other issues that readers brought up on that previous work was the print option: people wanted to be able to print the thing or to buy it in paper format so that they could more properly study the text and when he came to try publishing it in book format he could find no way to typeset it. I think that that is why he has kept this text free of external links and why his multiple threads are presented in a single host. You noticed that change too?"

"I did as it happens Chas but I didn't see the significance of it I guess - so you think it's about the author fashioning a text that is designed primarily for online consumption but that allows for an offline version to be produced from it? Interesting! By the way, this author writer dichotomy - are both of them constructs? and if so where is the ur-witer and what do we name him? It's becoming difficult to talk about the real creator without confusing, or conflating, him - or her, who knows? - with either the writer or the author within the text or both. Always supposing, of course that there is an exterior or ur."

"Sorry guys, I'm lost. What the fuck are we talking about now?"





(TBC)