Yesterday, Granta magazine kicked off a new collective-memory project called “Nostos Algos.” From a publicity release which just made its way to my Inbox:
The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek words nostos (‘a homecoming’) and algos (‘pain, grief, distress’). We have all known the desire to return to another place or time, and the feeling of being unable to truly go back. Nostos Algos is a collective exercise in bringing the past into the present and making it part of a shared experience with fellow users and the imaginations of Granta’s famed writers. After you post your memory, it will appear in a live feed and be matched to an extract from our Online Archive. Alongside your musings will appear words from Doris Lessing, Arthur Miller, Ryszard Kapuscinski and many other distinguished authors.
I have no idea, yet, if there’s some way to follow the project online in any ongoing way. You can pass individual posts to Twitter and Facebook; but I don’t see an RSS link there, and as far as I know the site doesn’t have its own social-networking presence. I’ll check on this and update this post as needed. (Note especially that the memories can be no longer than 500 characters; this means that for Twitter, at least — with its 140-character limit — some truncation will take place.)
Surely everyone reading this post has something to contribute. And how cool would it be to see your entry matched up with a selection from Granta‘s remarkable, wide-ranging past? Of its modern incarnation, the magazine’s “About” page says:
Since 1979, the year of its rebirth, Granta has published many of the world’s finest writers tackling some of the world’s most important subjects, from intimate human experiences to the large public and political events that have shaped our lives. Its contributors have included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Richard Ford, Martha Gellhorn, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Salman Rushdie, George Steiner, Graham Swift, Paul Theroux, Edmund White, Jeanette Winterson and Tobias Wolff. Every issue since 1979 is still in print. In the pages of Granta, readers met for the first time the narrative prose of writers such as Bill Bryson, Romesh Gunesekera, Blake Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith; and have encountered events and topics as diverse as the fall of Saigon, the mythology of the Titanic, adultery, psychotherapy and Chinese cricket fighting.
Whoa, hmm?
See the dozen or so most recent entries which others have posted to Nostos Algos, and tack on your own to the stream, here.
For more details about the project, see the publicity release (139KB) itself.
Update, a little later: I heard back from Granta about the social-networking technology possibilities. “We’re working through a few technical glitches, such as how much one can see… A search function would be awesome when it gets bigger. A collective archive of memory is a such a romantic idea.”
As I mentioned when I asked the question, a simple RSS or Twitter feed might be too ambitious — overwhelming the timestreams of followers (and possibly their very tools they’d use for following — Twitter, Google Reader, etc.). But a search/browse function? Oh, yeah. That’d be great! (At least, for those of us searching for a time sink.)
…Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe even a little widget/gizmo which people could embed on their blogs or other sites, to pull in a random Nostos Algos entry?
Yet another update…: Duh — considering I encouraged everyone to contribute, it might’ve been nice if I’d included a link to the Nostos Algos project site!
I find the whole thing extremely odd, especially since the memories themselves aren’t told in a way that has any literary merit. I don’t really get it, for such an incredibly picky, upscale, impossible to get published in journal.
Squirrel: Apparently, Granta isn’t doing this for literary but simply for cultural reasons. And business being what it is nowadays, even or especially among publishers, I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure come up with dynamic (as opposed to static), “social networking”-aware online presences.
(They’ve also got a potential, uh, supplemental interest in the entries, which occurred to me when I read that PDF overview. It says, “For all enquiries, including serial rights, please contact [name, etc.].” This seems to admit of the possibility that someone, Granta or otherwise, might conceivably see fit to publish at least a selection of the offerings. However, this is completely unconfirmed by anything else I’ve heard.)