Writers — Page 2

Ummm, it’s about both

August 10, 2001 by Michael Boyle

. The Talking Moose waded out of the mud and into the fire with his piece yesterday. It’s the most ridiculous thing the Moose, who has otherwise been a very interesting read, has ever published.

The poor Moose clearly doesn’t understand what web designers, as opposed to code monkeys or integrators, do for a living. He seems to think they need or want to code every page or something inane like that. On personal sites that may be true, but that’s just for fun.

You can’t do content management properly – or even do it at all – without a damn good designer figuring out how to make it look, and with a damn good coder to make that design work with the content management system, and without a damn good architect to make sure that it fits together well through time.

I’m just old school enough to think that all of those roles – designer, coder, and architect – are best done by a single person. But none of those interests are antithetical to using a content management system to actually make it all happen on a day-to-day basis. In fact, a CMS can’t be implemented efficiently unless those folks do good work first – otherwise, the benefit of the CMS is lost in a miasma of snippets and included code and exception-fixing.

Of course the irony is that the Talking Moose site itself is a good example of this fact. Bryan Bell couldn’t have casually changed the design of the Moose had his code (made up of HTML and CSS) not been clean and useful to begin with. Likewise, had Dave and the gang at Userland not built a weblog architecture whose function enabled the weblog form (with the calendar-based navigation etc.), Bell’s work would have been useless. And the “design” (defined strictly) would be a secondary concern had both of those things not been done well for the task at hand.

It’s absolutely about design and the kind of work people like Zeldman do and it’s all about integrating content management systems as closely as possible to the writers and other “content people” who are doing the publishing. There’s no fight here, though the Moose seems to have wanted to stir one up.

I love a good rant

August 2, 2001 by Michael Boyle

: The Talking Moose tells some more truth: “when you run a business by the spreadsheet, you deserve all the hell that you get.” A lot of interesting stuff about content, the place of content developers (aka writers and people like that) and the web.

Very sad news today

July 3, 2001 by Michael Boyle

from the world of Quebec literature. Mordecai Richler died this morning at the Montreal General Hospital. It’s ironic, and sad, that one of the greatest writers ever to come from Quebec is massively disdained by much of the population here.

I don’t have many personal memories of the man. We never met, though I used to see him quite often when I worked at Concordia. What I do remember are his words – vivid, funny, wry novels that captured the spirit of a neighbourhood, and city, that I have made my home. And even 40 years since his first great novel, shades of his Montreal are still evident.

I had a rare

June 6, 2001 by Michael Boyle

opportunity to see Ron Sexsmith last night at the Cabaret, a nice cozy room just down the street from me. It was great to see him live – I missed what has become a legendary show he played about 4 yrs ago at a now-defunct space called Isart. He seemed a little hemmed in by his band – his solo songs were better, and although the band was OK, they seemed to put a box around him a bit more than I would have liked. Probably just a lack of familiarity – the guitar and bass were pretty new. Incidentally, the bassist (Maury LeFoy) used to play in my friend Ian’s band, Starling.
In case it’s not obvious, I (and many others) consider Ron Sexsmith to be among the very best songwriters and performers of the past several years. You could say he’s like the demon spawn of Brian Wilson, Tom Waits (who he covered last night) and Neil Young (maybe), but that wouldn’t be quite right. I can leave his first CD (or his third, for that matter) in my car for weeks and listen to it over and over – it’s never boring. Just in case it wasn’t clear.

I received an interesting

May 17, 2001 by Michael Boyle

email yesterday:

This Friday May 18th, in an unprecedented gesture, the Union des crivains du Qubec will present an evening of ENGLISH poetry and literature in performance.
The show is entitled “Howls and Whispers (Souffles et hurlements)” and it highlights a remarkable cultural breakthrough that has occurred in the spoken word scene in Montreal.
Due to pioneer work by a list of names on both sides of the linguistic divide, the scene for performance literature has become a place where English and French performers know each other, work together and share an audience – an altogether amazing event when one considers that poetry is probably the most language-specific cultural activity one can find.

The show will feature a panoply of the most interesting writers and performers in the city, including Cat Kidd and jack beets, Fortner Anderson, and musician Tom Walsh – all in one of the best locations in town.
[ahem – I should have mentioned that location – it’s at the Lion D’Or, on Ontario St. E. Did you know that Ontario St had that name before the province of Ontario did?]