Stuart Kelly: The Browser

Although the Book Festival is still a fortnight away, I've been to a clutch of literary events recently, all of which prove the old church service style of book events may be a thing of the past. The Writers' Bloc group performed a stunning evening of stories haunted by new technologies, under the title Planet of the Apps, including a barn-storming piece by Andrew J Wilson and new work by Stefan Pearson, Gavin Inglis, above, Kirsti Wishart and Andrew Ferguson, all with audience comments via Twitter. The second Forge of the Wordsmiths at the Scottish Book Trust mixed music, multimedia and manifestoes, as well as fancy dress and pamphlets. Finally, renegade Neoist, post-punk agitator and expelled member of the literary awkward squad, Stewart Home, destroyed one of his books at the Roxy, and did some bizarre ventriloquism. The author reading is dead! Long live the literary cabaret!

Longlistless

Congratulations to Alan Warner, below, on whose shoulders Scotland's hopes now rest for the Booker this year, and commiserations to James Robertson and Andrew O'Hagan, both of whom ought to have made the longlist. The longlist is an annual Rorschach test, where we try to scry meaning out of a scrambled curate's egg. Good to see David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy, but where were the experimental women? Even better to see no sign of Messrs Amis and McEwan.

Something Amis

The Browser has been in awe of Gabriel Josipovici ever since reading The World And The Book at an impressionable age. This awe resurged this week when Josipovici delivered a stinging and neatly argued attack on the old-fashioned pantheon of Rushdie, Amis, Barnes, McEwan and even Naipaul and Roth. ("One finishes them and feels - So what?" - hear, hear). It might well be a preliminary marketing shot before the big cannon of his new book Whatever Happened To Modernism?, but he's also right.