E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I was finishing reading John Le Carre 's latest literary spy thriller, A Delicate Truth , when the news broke about the US government's secret Prism project, whereby almost all our online activities are received, recorded and analysed, at least potentially, by national security snoops.  The last pages of the novel, which I feel is a masterpiece, and worthy of comparison to Greene 's The Ministry of Fear and Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four , find Emily and Toby confronting a very compromised world, where digital activity automatically triggers massive response.  I recommend the book highly - and am astonished by some of the lukewarm reviews.  Its style, hard to relate to at first, grows on one, with its arch, italicised speech, and the passive-aggressive behaviour of its Establishment characters; after half the book was complete, I recognised it as a satire as well as a thriller, and perhaps the most moving and eloquent indictment of the privatisation of intelligence and...

Within minutes of posting a message about a poetry issue in the UK, I was inundated with nasty personal messages.  One poet said she was "disgusted" by me.  Goodness, and I was only recommending we try and get along.  Apparently, poets are not immune to the dangerous attractions of instant messaging and the Internet.  But, as I have said before, we need to be good to each other, and to try to reign in the ad hominem attacks.  I can only imagine what it would be like to be one of the offenders in this whole PoSoc debacle, if a mere bystander can get so spammed and reviled.  This is why I have removed the earlier posts on the matter from this week.  I have no wish to continue being a part of this.  There are enough parties on both sides to handle it at this stage.

The Sunday Times Culture section has a cover story on Faber's new app, for The Waste Land .  Sounds great.  What next, iPound?

David Fincher has been making Hollywood films since 1992, but it was fifteen years ago that he became a critical and commercial favourite with the stylish, dark and shocking Se7en .  Since then, he has made a handful of classic films, as good in their way as anything by Hitchcock or Kubrick , the directors he is most often compared to, in terms of theme and visual originality: Fight Club , and Zodiac .  He has also made a few mediocre films, like Panic Room and that Benjamin Button fiasco.  Zodiac marked a new level of maturity for the director - for that film is justifiably admired for its open-ended, Checkovian (nothing much happens) manner, combined with a low-thrumming menace.  Fincher is, notably, best at mise-en-scene.  He is, like Michael Mann , a stylist first and foremost. Therefore, his new film, The Social Network , seems an anomaly, though it is about male competition, a regular concern.  It is not about violence (physical anyway) and i...

Orion Headless is a new online place for writing, edited by Sara Fitzpatrick Comito .  I am happy to have several new poems up here.  Warning - this will take you to writing by Todd Swift .

Orlando Figes , a highly-respected academic in Britain, has been caught writing very negative reviews of his colleagues, and very positive reviews of his own works, on Amazon.  When caught, he denied this, and his wife, for a time, took the rap.  As often happens, this all came to a head because - like Wilde - he instigated a legal case against his accuser; unfortunately (and perhaps again like Oscar) he actually was what he looked to be.  It's been in the TLS and is now in the papers and on the BBC . Figes - who is now on sick leave - is clearly under great stress, and the potential decline and fall of his career - trumpeted in the media - cannot be helping him.  I wish him well.  Meanwhile, this sad case reminds us all of the seductive dangers of the Digital Age - how seeming anonymity, and the instant pleasures and powers of the Internet, offer many opportunities for self-destruction, as well as destruction of rivals.  Intellectuals and poets are not ...

David Lehman is back in New York after his whirlwind reading tour of London. Stacey Harwood blogs about his London trip at Best American Poetry . His Oxfam reading with Mark Ford and younger poets was a resounding success - one of our best audiences ever. Photo by Harwood, after the event.

The Times has run an impressive article, singling out a few (ten) younger British poets , for attention. As I recently included or mentioned several of these same poets in my Manhattan Review section, such as James Byrne , Joe Dunthorne , Luke Kennard , and Emily Berry , I can only concur, and in fact, welcome such a focus on them. However, I cannot help but feel there is something a tad disingenuous about the "Facebook poets" tag that has been applied here. Not by the poets themselves, I hasted to add. As with "The Movement" tag, this is a media label. I am the co-founder of the original "Poetry" group at Facebook, with over 6,000 members - and I can tell you, while poetry circulates via that leviathan, it does so at a snail's pace; few real poets post work online. Facebook mostly reps mediocre poetry; it is superb for advertising events, magazines, contests, etc. - and in that way only is this "generation" of under 35-year-olds shaped poe...

The greatest politician of our time is about to become president. This is the pivotal TV and online event of the digital age, and rivals the moon landing as a key shared moment of the global village. Godspeed, Mr. Obama .

A curious piece of Internet stuff: Wikipedia's article on " 2008 in Poetry ".

I Google, therefore Eyewear is. Hard not to, in this day and digital age eh? However, stop the presses. According to today's Times, to Google is to expend major carbon footprints. Forget about flying - lazy students and idle narcissists everywhere are killing the planet, one search at a time. What is a blogger to do? It may be curtains, soon, for the whole Internet thing. Meanwhile, let's face the music and dance.

If U2 are to be believed, New Year's Day is a little like poetry making nothing happen (why not begin 2009 with a cliche?) - and yet, of course, the ambiguity in that line of theirs: "nothing changes on New Year's Day" is a clever one: the lover's love remains, just as the world (underway) is ongoing in its beauty and its terror. So, both love and evil do not change, so much as calibrate their relationship, even as the years go by. Eyewear wants to wish you, dear reader(s), the best possible of years ahead, in the full knowledge that war, credit crisis, environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and general despair are in pretty full swing just about now (as in Gaza currently). As poets and readers, we have an especially challenging task - to maintain some form of literate communion with the past, while innovating responsibly for the future (and the present). I was recently in a bookshop that had no poetry books for sale (well, one). That's not a good sign...

I have not been rickrolled, have you ? The latest Internet "craze" - apparently the most widespread (and basically harmless, a nice change) viral of all time - involves the vanilla 80s crooner, Rick Astley , a manufactured heart-throb who for four years was world famous, then gently declined into total (and gladly-received) obscurity - until now. Eyewear loved Astley's music, then, and still retains a fondness for the idea of the man, and his music - it was fun, old-fashioned, tuneful pop. I think the sweet irony of rickrolling is that Astley never hurt a fly, has no axe to grind, and is entirely out of the loop; a good pop culture icon to reinsert into the Zeitgeist.

As Eyewear has said often, the Internet is the place where younger poets and poetry readers tend to flock. I have an interview just up at Pomegranate , a new, exciting UK literary site that skews to the poets of the future.

Stephen Page , publisher and chief Executive of Faber and Faber, has begun to see the digital light - or at least, some of its glow. While his brief article in The Guardian is hardly evangelical, it does seem to represent a conversion, for mainstream British publishing, away from a model that ignores social networking on the Internet, to one which seeks to grab hold of that platform, and haul bricks and mortar publishing, paper and all, into the 21st century. Eyewear has been arguing, in these unpapered but lettered pages, for just such a decision, for some time now, and welcomes Page's moves, to an extent. However, if one reads closely, one will see that what is being proposed is not precisely an e-celebration. Rather, Faber is proposing to basically do what Salt Publishing already does - the "build it and they will come" approach, where a site offers cool things, around the books for sale (podcasts, and so on). This is not new; nor is the print-on-demand idea - many o...

Asked about message pictures, the director famously said he'd use Western Union if he wanted to send a message. I've just sent one, via The Oxford Forum , on British Poetry and the Internet.

The Internet, far from being "inane", is allowing younger, emerging poets to reach an audience, and generate a community of readers. In short, the web is allowing poetry to pass on to the next generations, with verve. Check out this new project, Pomegranate , for example.

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that, even as the Internet - comparable in scope and range to aviation or the phone, perhaps combined - alters our imaginative landscape, and permits extraordinary freedom of expression and transmission of information - certain vested interests, and older literary figures seek to cancel out its achievements. Latest to protest too much is Nobel laureate Doris Lessing . Her new anti-net diatribe is not new, but stale invective. It is a retread of that old canard that books will be killed off by digital enjoyments. Blogging is singled out for its addictive, time-wasting effects, a new opium. Sadly, Lessing ignores the fact that blogging encourages writing, and reading - and is a new genre of creative writing. Just as comics were once seen as the ultimate foe of literacy, and are now revered as a new kind of classic, so too may be certain works of the Internet-era, in future. At the very least, the enemy of great writing is not the web. It may, instead...

Internet history has just been made - the winners of the first-ever Facebook poetry competition, with real cash prizes - have been announced. Drum roll, please. Facebook Poetry Competion 1.0 The Winners: #1 Tolu Ogunlesi #2 Janet Vickers #3 Dominic O’Rourke Go to the group site on Facebook for more, including the poems. Don't forget Facebook Poetry Competition 2.0 This time the rules are even simpler: a love sonnet - unpublished and your own work. Post entries on the wall before January 30, 2008. We'll announce the winners on Valentine's Day 2008. First prize nets you $150. Second place a sweet $75. Third Prize a paltry $25. Submit now .

Marvel has placed much of its extraordinary comic book back catalogue online . Can't wait to take a closer look and report back.