The 15 Step Anti-Jargon Programme

The other day I took part in a very enjoyable debate on the subject of jargon organised by the lovely people at Matzine. Along with Dr Crystal Bennes, I was on the anti side of the To Jargon Or Not To Jargon divide. We lost, mostly due to the formidable debating skills of our opponents @daisyfroud and @indyjohar. Despite this, I thought I'd post up what I read out on the night.......

15 Steps To A 100% Jargon Free Life

Getting off jargon isn't easy, but carrying this list with you at all times can really help. It's a handy list of words that you should avoid if at all possible. Try eliminating them from normal conversation first and if you feel confident extend the ban to professional situations such as crits and presentations. 

Remember: these are 'gateway words' that can easily lead to you becoming addicted to meaningless verbiage. It includes words that I use myself. I describe myself as a recovering jargon abuser. But with the help of this list I'm slowly getting better........

1. Space. As in; “This is a really contemporary space”. Translation: I quite like this room.

2. Map/Mapping. As in; “I’ve been mapping this contemporary space”. Translation: I’ve drawn a plan of the room.

3. Programme. Especially when pre-fixed by ‘cross’ as in; “I’m really into cross-programmed space.  This vertical trout farm on Mars* is still a bit boring. Maybe it needs an experimental theatre attached to it".

4. Interrogate. As in; “I think you really need to interrogate this building in section”. Translation: I can’t think of anything else to say in this crit.

5. Problematise. As in; “This upside-down staircase really problematises the concept of vertical circulation".

6. Challenge. As in; "This upside-down staircase really challenges preconceived notions of up and down".

7. Calibrate. As in; “The threshold is carefully calibrated to express a sense of transition from public to private spaces”. Translation: This is the front door.

8. Boundary: As in; “The junction dissolves the boundary between inside and out”. Translation: It’s glass.

9. Blur: As in; “Their work blurs the disciplinary boundaries between art and architecture”. Oh hang on, I think that’s one of mine.

10. Disciplinary: See above.

11. Practice: As in; “Writing is my form of spatial practice”.

12. Praxis: See above, but far worse.

13. Theorise: Example; “Sorry I’m late, I’ve been busy theorising my praxis”. Translation: I’ve been reading my twitter stream.

14. Liminal: As in; “My spatial praxis is very concerned with mapping liminal spaces”. Translation: I live next to an industrial estate”.

15. Territory/Territorialise/De-territorialise: As in; “This is my attempt at de-teretorialising the ideological function of jargon through challenging preconceived notions of language with respect to spatial and theoretical praxis”.

* Props to Alastair Parvin

Holiday Reading

"You are from Kent?" she said, 'maybe you can answer me this. Why are old things so important in England?'*

My wife laughed when the book arrived. It seemed almost too right for me, as if someone had suddenly perfected one of those Amazon consumer profiles to an eerie, unnerving degree. There was that title for a start, the Elliot misquote that could be a description of a certain kind of blogospheric writing with its hyper-links, digital jump cuts and chance virtual encounters. 

More fundamentally there's the subject matter. Connecting Something With Nothing is an anthology of writing about the south east coast, a place we have spent the last five or six years exploring. A flick through the essays within it reveals familiar place names and obsessions: Pegwell Bay, New Romney and the Wantsum Channel, long-since silted up harbours, nuclear reactors, muddy estuaries and rusting neon signs. My kind of holiday destinations basically, the sort of places I drag my family to on bitingly cold new year mornings or rainy bank holiday weekends.

The contributors list offered up some  familiar  names too, names recalled from Twitter encounters and even in a couple of cases, Actual Real Life. All of which is to say that I was quite heavily predisposed to like this book, almost to the point where it could only disappoint, like an over anticipated night out.

Fortunately such perverse worries turned to nought. There are some great things in Connecting Nothing With Something.  Kit Caless' lyrical evocation of ordinary pleasures in un-lyical places is genuinely moving. I liked Salena Godon's bracing poems about teenage love affairs and filthy fishermen too,  as well as her suitably salty tale of teenage mayhem in 80s Hastings. Rowena McDonald recalls a more awkward adolescent experience in the Sussex town of Newhaven.

Adrian Self's contribution is both enigmatic and funny, a kind of miniaturised version of W G Sebald if he'd had a sense of humour. It takes the form of notes from an imagined audio-art project, a parodic psychogeographic derive that is more of an eventful walk around the block.

Owen Booth's short story is highly entertaining and faintly peculiar, a fictionalised account of a young Richard Burton's antics while filming Green Grow The Rushes in New Romney in the early 50s. I enjoyed this tale of illicit drinking, smuggling and sex so much I sought out the film on YouTube, which is considerably more enjoyable to watch if you've read Owen's short story first I imagine.

There is a similar tone to much of the writing here; memories of adolescent lives in burnt-out seaside towns that are still fresh. The voice is generally sophisticated, sceptical and aloof but also prone to nostalgia and an unspecific sense of loss. Many of the pieces suggest a rapprochement with places almost forgotten about over the last few years, places now indelibly linked with (recently lost) youth.

The Margate contributions coalesce around the role of teenage sub-cultures - skin-heads, punks, mods and rockers alongside its cheerier, cheesier reputation for cockney knees-ups and Chas'n'Dave. Iain Aitch - curator of Margate's Hidden Youth Culture History - contributes a good, short essay on Margate's recent half-hearted attempts regeneration while Gary Budden describes a personal revelation at the Turner Contemporary exhibition Nothing In the World But Youth.

Art and regeneration loom large too in these accounts, especially in the two gloomy but still grand towns that bookend the collection. Margate and Hastings are like mirror images of each other with their mysterious pier fires, shiny new contemporary art galleries and histories of drinking, drugging and escape.

The book and its contributors are more than aware of the contradictions, the dubious nature of the role of art in a regeneration industry seemingly fuelled by middle-class property speculation and cup-cakes. And yet, undeniably both towns have acquired two fine new public buildings after years of mostly shonky and careless development, buildings that draw day trippers and 'staycationers' in the best seaside tradition.

These conflicts have become intertwined so that it is now virtually impossible to separate artists and writers drawn to forgotten or overlooked places from the boosterist language of the regen. agencies that are themselves now confined to (New Labour) history. Iain Sinclair after all has a flat in Marine Court, Hastings' extraordinary cruise-liner like art deco block of flats. Psychogeography has become inseparable from the inevitable clean-up campaign that follows in its wake, property speculation on the back of obscure interests and arcane modernist fictions.



I should say at this point that I'm a part of the problem.  A DFL (Down From Londoner) if ever there was one. My wife and I bought a house in Deal a few years ago. Spending time there is partly about escape and partly about a nostalgia of our own. My father spent his childhood in Deal and my wife was brought up by the sea, so for both of us it connects back to something for sure.

The seaside represents a place where the usual rules don't apply, a holiday from normal life. But the British seaside is indelibly and unavoidably about the past. The stories in Connecting Nothing With Something situate themselves in this illusory and highly ambiguous space. For people born there - and most of the writers in this anthology were - the coast is somewhere to escape from rather than to, small towns with big social problems and only one direction out. Or two if you are feeling particularly bleak. But then, as the stories also make clear, such places drag us back too, exerting a powerfully nostalgic pull. Like boats borne back ceaselessly against the tide, as someone once said.



* Taken from Old but Somehow New, by Kit Caless.

Connecting Nothing With Something: A Coastal Anthology is available from Influx Press here.

Slim Slow Slider

Well, this quick-fire blog post thing didn't work too well. And the Richard Rogers post will have to wait until after I have visited the RA exhibition, which, incidentally, I will be reviewing for Icon. So here's another short post instead on the architecture of the Square Mile....

This is a bit of an oddity really, but well worth checking out if you are in this particular neck of the woods*. St Mary at Hill not only has a pleasingly strange street name but is home to a very peculiar collection of buildings. Three in particular stand out because of the way in which they interact and integrate with each other. 

The short, shallow hill is dominated by St Mary at Hill itself (herself?), an originally medieval church rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. Its official address is Lovat Lane, but the real frontage - if you could call it that - is on St Mary at Hill. The facade is deeply strange, featuring a blocked-up Venetian window, a broken pediment and a very large, hand painted sign bearing the churches name. 

Odder still is the entrance which is through an unsung opening in a very mannered, late-Victorian structure off to one side. This building has a completely asymmetrically grouped array of windows which can be only partially explained by the fact that it abuts the church and effectively hides the courtyard behind.

The archway leads to this courtyard and the entrance to the church itself, which features a collection of circular openings of diminishing scales. This intersects with the main entrance from Lovat Lane and the cleverness of Wren's arrangement - which effectively buries the church amongst its neighbours - becomes clear.

To the left of the church is another opening marked appealingly enough by a small, slightly sinister skull and cross bones hovering in its pedimented doorway. This leads to a stepped passageway that appears to lead off to Lovat Lane but which was gated on the day I visited. 

The cream stucco of the church frontage spreads across this adjacent building as if to claim a bit of it for itself, with the result that the spaces behind the facades of these seemingly discrete buildings slide into each other ambiguously. No great shakes perhaps, but there's some, y'know, complexity and contradiction going on here for the mannerist geeks amongst us. 

Inside, there is a rather beautiful and not very mannered at all Wren interior.