Exitlog | Leaving Impressions

TuneUp software for iTunes promises to clean up your tracks. As the ad says, Your music collection is a mess. TuneUp fixes it. Automagically.

Whether or not the software works is not really a consideration. This is not a review. Need a verdict? Try choosing from: not sure, don’t care or could be a consideration as most people’s iTunes libraries are a mess, especially those with a little torrent help. It is the unnecessary word-smithing, or mash-up, of automatically and magic is of interest and certainly gets a nod.

Word mash-ups (or portmanteau for the literati), were popularised by Lewis Carrol in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Enjoy the opening of Jabberwocky, featured in the latter, for example of his craft and invention:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

Brillig might not be so well known as say chortling, from the same work, but we all know Tarmac, Blaxploitation and Wikipedia.

Advertising historically has never been one to miss an opportunity to make-up a feature or phrase for the sake of sales. Today’s mash could easily be in tomorrow’s dictionary. TuneUp is in good company with this attempt. There is a certain charm and elegance to blending the right words. Automagically might not be of the same calibre as Carrol’s work but it is fun to say – good effort.

Is it better to be alone in the universe or not? asks the BBC in its subversive, new plug for the Radio 4 dramatisation of Iain M Banks’ The State of the Art. If the new ad is anything to go by (imagine the grizzled old face of a man who has his eyes blacked out at the narrative turn of the question) then life out there can be worrying, if not sinister.

It is something of a long-running, considered question in science fiction. The resolution of which tends to have a war and peace theme. In films, often with Hollywood employing action over quality acting, life in the stars unites a divided planet. Strangling each other for domination, for oil or even faith, loses its appeal in threat of other-worldly invaders. Somehow our individual disputes become irrelevant when humanity is no longer master of the universe. Thankfully there have been other thoughts on the subject.

The State of the Art follows a spaceship from the Culture visiting the Earth in 1977. There it finds our planet populated by an “incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species”. Look out for the dramatisation on 5 Mar 2009, rather exactly at 14:15. As part of BBC Radio 4’s Science Fiction Season it is certainly worth a listen.