Traffic Light Musings

Personal highlights of 2011

2011-12-31T09:53:00.000-08:00

The Highs:

1. Arab Spring.

2. An amazing weekend visiting Jo in Paris with Charlotte. It reminded me of how wonderful continental Europe is.

3. Leaving Talis to set up a (so far) successful business.

4. Dave's 50th party at the Barton Arms.

5. I join the Prince of Wales Writers' Group and start writing a novel.

6. Fantastic weekend with Dave in St Ives. We happily blow our life savings on a stunning piece of art.

7. A week in the Lake District at Tiplog with Dave and Dave Aveston.

8. Two exciting weeks in Mumbai and Kerala. India is endlessly fascinating.

9. Bill and I meet Odyssey at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath.

10. Echo and the Bunnymen at the Symphony Hall with Sandra.

11. Jury Service in June. I loved it!

12. Dave and I meet Roy Hodgson at Bank.

13. The Academy - three days of intensive learning with the Institute of Ideas in July.

14. Working with schools - another great evening judging for the Debating Matters competition. Plus, being a Dragon in the Dragons' Den at Small Heath School, judging marketing plans.

15. Clay pigeon shooting with Dave.

Lows:

1. The summer riots

2. The Birmingham Rep is still closed and there are no theatre highlights this year, which is unprecedented.

3. Dave fell downstairs and broke his toe just after Christmas.

4. Headaches get worse again, after two years of improvement.

5. The moment when I realised I would be losing my job.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011-09-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's Guardian Review, William Boyd described the problem that faced the screenwriters of the newly-released film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

"Adapting a novel for the cinema presents unique problems - it's not at all the straightforward process people assume, particularly if the novel is as complex and cerebral as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

You could indeed argue, as my friend Bill did on Facebook, that even the celebrated 1979 BBC serial, which had seven one-hour episodes to play with, nevertheless struggled to convey fully the labyrinthine complexity of the novel. Having stayed up all night to watch it, Bill said:

"It's classic TV drama - meditative, but tense, and subtle. Great to see all that tobacco smoke and 70s grimness. It's vividly realised but, still, I miss the atmospheric detail and the interiority that only the novel can give."

The first Le Carré novel I read, The spy who came in from the cold, is a book that I recommend to anyone who is grappling with the nuances of office politics. That's one of the many strengths of Le Carré - he takes apart the mental machinations of every individual player, and expertly rolls out the consequences on the game at hand. The dynamics he reveals are specific to the fictional situation - Le Carré is brilliant at context-building - but there is also something universal that transcends Secret Service operations during the Cold War, for example.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is certainly demanding on the audience. At a superficial level, I couldn't help but wonder, about 45 minutes into the film, how today's cinema-goers will react to this beige, hazy, grainy portrayal of a bunch of washed-up forty-something males going about their deceptively mundane business. More problematic though is the complex unwieldy plot that resists the confines of a two-hour dramatisation. There are no handy little sub-plots to cut out (an ex-BBC friend told me that when the serialisation of Martin Chuzzlewit was being planned, he overheard a colleague say "We're just going to cut out the whole of the American section") because the narrative is too tight for that, and particularly in the first half, the scene-changes are frequent as the narrative is forced to represent all the multiple agendas, suspects and possibilities, which are fundamental to the story.

For all that, there are big bold splodges of brilliance which I will remember for a long long time. My favourite scenes mostly involve the flashback to the Circus in its heyday (unanimously deemed to be World War Two). At a raucous Christmas Party at the Circus, Santa Claus is substituted by a Vladimir Lenin look-alike, dressed in scarlet red of course, and giving every impression of being an annual ritual. The whole party erupts into a joyous rendition of the Soviet Union national anthem. Everyone in the room, including the female eye candy (I assumed them to be translators, transcribers or secretaries) was absolutely word perfect.

The incongruity of Cold War Western spies fervently embracing Soviet culture was, to say the least, striking. It was only when the gramophone needle dropped on La Mer by Julio Iglesias that I truly understood the significance. In an espionage drama centrally concerned with betrayal, you have a group of operators who can only survive the deadly demands of Cold War fieldcraft by steeping themselves in every single aspect of enemy language and culture. La Mer reminded me of a time when I eagerly devoured all things francophone. I even bought my first copy of Le Monde at the age of 12 (at WH Smith in Manchester's Arndale Centre).

The central paradox of espionage is neatly encapsulated in that rapturous scene in which the enemy's anthem is sung so joyfully and sincerely that it could easily be the opposing side - Karla's team over at the Kremlin. It's hard not to grow to love a culture that you are deeply acquainted with. You could even argue that such expert knowledge is impossible without that underlying passion in place. The scene prepares the audience for the final betrayal, the end-point of the film, and maybe injects some sympathy into a character (no spoilers here - I'm following William Boyd's good example) who sees only a grinding decline in Western culture (a sentiment echoed elsewhere in the film), and who has been fatally exposed to something seductively foreign.

Almost strangers

2011-05-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

We were all encased in our private domains. We weren’t invited to party elsewhere. We didn’t drive but we didn’t drink. We watched the wedding of almost strangers. On the telly; on our own. We watched the guests in Westminster Abbey. We judged the hats of almost strangers. We failed to enter their private world. We stayed in our homes. The shops were empty. We didn’t gather. We didn’t care. We all switched off at the boring speeches. We all drifted off and did different things.

We gathered in a public place. We worried. We cared. Desperate to help. We stared at the patient. We touched him. We stroked him. We tried to enter his private world. We all signed his book in case he survived. We bonded with visitors who were almost strangers. We formed a community – a makeshift network. We all compared notes on making a difference. We brought him juice. We brought him fruit. We brought him chocolate. We badgered nurses. We gave our time. We tried to reach him. We humanised the hospital in case he could hear us. We chatted. We laughed. To raise his spirits. To raise our spirits. It was fun. It was desperate. We groped in the dark. We helplessly watched as he sweated and suffered. We tried to interpret his feverish speeches. We shamelessly watched the most personal of battles.

And always we wondered, how could it happen? A strong healthy man cut down in his prime. As if he were governed by natural laws – of princes and paupers, pomp and disease.

An English field in winter

2010-12-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

Grey with faint remembrance of green,
A delicate dusting of dirtied white,
But this thin coat provides no warmth,
No refuge from the cold in sight.

Frozen too the mind's imaginings,
Of future greens and autumn's flame,
Subsumed in nature's deepest coma,
Trapped in winter's freeze-frame.

Memento Mori

2010-12-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

My friend Yvonne Thompson (@yvonnert) from Melbourne, Australia, yesterday tweeted a fascinating link to the Victorian photographic phenomenon known as Memento Mori, in which the dead were photographed, in an era where relationships to both death and photography were very different from what they are today.

One of those photos has inspired me to write a little poem, only the second poem I've written since leaving school (the first one was written on Tuesday on the train to London), so please be sparing in your criticism at this early juncture.

A modern memento

We fought, we nursed, but could not save,
Our dearest daughter from the grave.
And as we toil through deepest grief,
We clutch the thin threads of relief.

For ere she crumbles down to dust,
She will not disappear from us.
The man said "Hurry, I'll take a picture,
Then add some colour to enrich her."

He brought his black box to our dwelling,
And what would come out, there was no telling.
One last time we embraced our lost one,
Still as death all three till twas done.

Strangers, yes, to this modern mystery,
Our family won't be lost to history.
From one black box, a memento beautiful,
Eternally captured - our daughter most dutiful.

Highlights of 2009

2009-12-31T07:39:00.001-08:00

Dave and I have been drawing up our respective annual lists of highlights for years now, but last year I reproduced mine on my blog (see 2008 Highlights and so it seemed natural to do the same this year. It's been a funny old year - well actually quite straightforward to characterise. It was a hard slog of a year at the end of which I'm in a better place in almost every way than I was back in January. My highlights can be anything from a general statement of life improvement to an individual moment, so with that in mind, here goes and as usual in no particular order:

1. Dave and I made a decision in January that 2009 would be the year of home improvements. As such, there've been no weekends away, no spectacularly expensive holidays, and very little in the way of fine dining - our usual avenues of extravagance. However the house now looks fantastic and we're totally in love with it. There are still things to do and buy - but aren't there always? It's been totally worth the lifestyle austerity of the first half of the year in particular.

2. This year was a great year for live music, one great reason for living in the UK, imo. The best live act I saw this year was The Leisure Society at The Glee Club in Birmingham (which provides a much more relaxed experience with live music than it does with comedy). The concert that meant most to me though was Magazine at the Manchester Academy, in company with what seemed like the whole of the Mancunian punk generation. Sound quality could have been better (and that's not the fault of the venue) but it was still a great experience, given that they're my all-time favourite band, and they split up in 1981, when I was only 16 hence too young to have seen them. Other good live acts I saw this year were David Byrne at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, Great Lake Swimmers at the Glee Club, Handsome Family also at the Glee, and Blue Nation at the Actress and Bishop.

3. At the beginning of April 2009 I moved into the Marketing team at Talis, and this turned out to be a great move, into what is probably the best team I've ever been a part of. Professionally, it's been a very good year - my writing has come on in leaps and bounds, becoming a lot more versatile, and I've also made a mark with podcasting in both library and educational contexts.

4. Easter. The home improvement austerity drive meant that a weekend away was out of the question, so we stayed at home instead and did loads of amazing things. We saw Nottingham Forest play Bristol City on Easter Saturday, and it was a staggering 3-2 victory (always indicative of a great game), stopping in the unassuming Swan in the Rushes pub en route for a very tasty oxtail and cheddar mash for £5.99. In the evening we met up with Fiona for a curry at Lasan's in the Jewellery Quarter, but apart from that we were on our own for the weekend, and we loved it, filling our time with the Our Friends in the North DVD, lent to us by Karen Reece, The Watchmen at the pictures, and other stuff.

5. Together with Jason Smith from Workers Education Association and Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education at University of Birmingham, I've helped set up The Birmingham Salon for debate of contemporary issues in the city. Our first meeting, in partnership with University of Birmingham and the Institute of Ideas, will be held on Tuesday 9th February 2010 at The Studio on Cannon Street. See you there?

6. We had a lovely summer holiday in France, spending a week in a gite in the Loire Valley and a week in a windmill in our own meadow just inland from La Rochelle. La Rochelle was too busy to be a highlight, and anyway, we'd had bad news from home that morning, but we had a perfect meal at the restaurant at St Savinien, which we walked to from the windmill through fields and deserted lanes, and the other French people there were really friendly, coming to our table to chat. We also had a very good meal at nearby Tailleborg. Meanwhile, our meadow provided an ideal vantage point for a spectacular meteor shower.

7. My friend Sandra invited me to her 7 year old daughter's dance show in Solihull. As a non-parent, I rarely get a chance to see stuff like that, and I loved it. In fact, this evening I'll be watching the DVD of the show with Sandra and Rachel, and then hopefully reading a bedtime story to Rachel and her elder brother Ben, before we start eating and drinking to see out 2009 with Dave, Andy, Sophie and Geoff.

8. This year I was privileged to see Usain Bolt run at Crystal Palace with my friend Sally. We saw the full two days of athletics, staying at the best B&B I've ever experienced. It was enough to make a BNP member apply for Jamaican nationality (I'd like to think). It was also good to see Mo Farah win the 5000 metres, in fact I nearly fell into the row of spectators below me with the excitement.

9. Dave and Andy Collins perform Sweet's Ballroom Blitz at Fiona's birthday Curryoke. You had to be there - I laughed so much I couldn't breathe.

10. Jo and I spent a perfect day in London, centred around a matinee performance of Carrie's War which was wonderful. We saw an exhibition and lunched at the Courtauld's Institute, and mooched around our old West End haunts.

11. I had another good day trip to London, this time with Dave. Dave's sister and her kids had bought us a wine-tasting experience for Christmas, so we built a day trip around it. We went to the Imperial War Museum, and Dave tried not to get annoyed with my delaying tactics in the Holocaust section. We launched in the Oxo Tower, browsed around the Borough Market, and then went wine tasting.

12. We remembered my Dad on May 3rd, the 10th anniversary of his sudden death on the golf course of North Manchester Golf Club.

13. The Sopranos! We've just started Series 5, and we wonder how we'll fill our lives when it's over (the answer is The Wire, according to just about everybody).

14. It was another good year for theatre, but the best play I saw was the almost unknown Orphans (by Dennis Kelly) at the Birmingham Rep. Other strong contenders were The Winter's Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon with Sandra, and The Good Soul of Szechuan (Brecht) at the Library Theatre Manchester with Bill.

15. Just before Christmas, I met up with my friends Jacqui and Brenda at the Farmer's Market in Moseley. Bought some nice Christmas treats for me and Dave, and then we went off for a coffee at The Cross. There was a light sprinkling of snow on the ground, just enough to make you feel really festive, and I saw loads of people I knew. It reminded me to count my blessings about my lovely friends and acquaintances.

16. We had a perfect Christmas Day with Dave's family at the house of my sister-in-law, Lyn. Lots of champagne cocktails, wonderful food, wii dance games, and other
treats.

My top 10 pop guilty pleasures

2009-10-28T13:52:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to publishing this top 10 list, after talking about it for weeks if not months. Putting together this list made me realise how subjective the concept of a guilty pleasure is. You might think that Chic and Abba are guilty pleasures, but as far as I'm concerned, if it belongs on the dance floor, then I'm not going to feel so much as a pang of guilt any time soon.

So here goes, in no particular order except that number 1 truly belongs at the top...

01. Mr Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra- YouTube
02. Make me smile - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - YouTube
03. Blue Savannah song - Erasure - YouTube
04. Ruby don't take your love to town - Kenny Rogers - YouTube
05. Copacabana - Barry Manilow - YouTube
06. Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty - Listen on YouTube
07. Save a prayer - Duran Duran - YouTube
08. American Pie - Don McLean - YouTube
09. Nights in white satin - Moody Blues - YouTube
10. Breakfast in America - Supertramp - YouTube

The Cult of the Amateur

2009-07-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

The 2004 O’Reilly-hosted FOO Camp (“countercultural Sixties meets the free-market Eighties meets the technophile Nineties”) is where Andrew Keen experienced a life-changing epiphany. As attendees proclaimed the democratisation of “media, information, knowledge, content, audience, author” by Web 2.0, and the demotion of “big experts” to “noble amateurs”, Keen was seized by a strong sense of unease that led to the writing of The Cult of the Amateur – an expose of the consequences of Web 2.0, the unleashing of user-generated content and the disintermediation of society’s cultural gatekeepers. As a consequence of this process, Keen argues, we can expect information to become steadily less reliable and more chaotic.

Most of us are aware of the devastation being wrought in industries such as music and newspapers. Keen argues that as professional content creators are forced to compete economically with free content, there are simply less resources with which to generate high quality creative works. As he says:

To make a top-quality recording today… an “exquisitely slow and detailed album… ideally would take a full year and, given the price of top contemporary musicians, could cost a million dollars. But this kind of investment… can’t be earned back in a market where people are buying fewer and fewer compact discs. So recording artists necessarily compromise their music because it is not economically viable to hire the best musicians and take enough time making the recording.

He also defends professional journalism, arguing forcibly that at best, citizen journalism can only ever complement professional journalism unless we are to resign ourselves to second-rate poorly-informed information:

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent of the Independent newspaper, for example, didn’t hatch from some obscure blog – they acquired their in-depth knowledge of the Middle East by spending years in the region.

Despite my reservations around the record of professional journalists for delivering a consistently in-depth and accurate view of conflicts such as the second Gulf War (weren't they essentially spoon-fed information from the military?), or the political demonstrations of the
past in which numbers were consistently under-reported, for example, I think that his arguments around the importance of professional journalism are important, not only in intellectual but also in democratic terms.

I’m hugely sympathetic with Keen at a cultural level. I hate the thought of snippets of content becoming so prevalent that people no longer read a book in a linear fashion – have we collectively thought about the intellectual consequences of this? And I do share his nostalgia for Tower Records – in my case based in Piccadilly Circus, just round the corner from Haymarket in London, where I worked for years in my 20s. Yes it sometimes feels like the soul has been taken out of music. Stuart Maconie recently reported on radio 2 that over 40% of people no longer listen to a complete musical track let alone album – they get what they want from it emotionally, and then move on. What room is there for the pop grower, let alone the complexity of classical or operatic works?

But, on the other hand, not everyone had access to the rich variety of music on offer at Tower Records in LA or London, whereas now the cultural divide between kids in Manchester and kids in, say, the Lake District, must surely be narrowing as access to culture levels off with ubiquitous internet availability.

He makes a very very important point with regard to Web 2.0 user-generated content, namely that it is to a great extent dependent on professionally produced content i.e. it’s highly derivative, and yet it is simultaneously destroying that content.

So basically, at the level of description at least, I find much to applaud in The Cult of the Amateur. And that’s really what I expected from this book. I truly expected to identify some sort of soul sibling who shared my commitment to ensuring intellectual integrity in a Web 2.0 context, but who nevertheless espoused new technologies in terms of their potential for furthering human progress.

However early on in the book I started to get a bit concerned. It started here, in the introduction:

It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule, on steroids.

Plus…

…if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece.

And…

… instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many of them with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

References to “mob rule” and comparisons of human beings with monkeys seemed to me to be a highly elitist and dangerously anti-human articulation of concerns around cultural decline. Why is Keen deploying such unattractive arguments? Personally I’d say it’s a consequence of the overall faultiness of his critique. Keen argues that reasoned informed analysis is now in short supply, as we become swamped with inexpert user-generated content. Yes, Web 2.0 may have exacerbated that trend, and it has certainly surfaced it. But is Web 2.0 really to blame? Did
some golden era of informed analysis come abruptly to an end in 2004 when a bunch of moneyed Californian geeks (that most of us have never heard of) went off camping together?

Keen’s deepest concern is a feeling that truth itself is under threat:

This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse,
encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity.
When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between
fact and fiction becomes blurred.

Surely Keen can’t be arguing that the “undermining of truth” began with the inception of Web 2.0 technologies? I’m no expert on philosophy, but didn’t cultural relativism start to gather force way back almost half a century ago in the 1960s? Yet he does seem to be saying that:

Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus
two equals five, then two plus two does equal five.

The problem is that by failing to trace back intellectual trends historically, Keen seems to be leading us irresistibly to the conclusion that only Web 2.0 can be the cause. Isn’t it more helpful,
though, to see Web 2.0 as a phenomenon that became technically feasible precisely at a point in history where humanity’s uncertainty about its mission has deepened over a period of time, and society has fragmented to the point that:

every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is
just another person’s version of the facts.

So I see the value in Keen’s descriptions of the web’s impact in areas such as music, industry and books. But I’m less certain about his ability to analyse that impact in terms of underlying causes and forces at play.

It’s a very enjoyable and engaging read though. The sheer vitriol is immensely entertaining, not to say refreshing in this politically correct world in which so many of us shy away from forthright statements of conviction.

But towards the end I came to understand that it wasn’t just the analysis that was a problem. Many of my disagreements are rooted in the fact that Keen’s motives for writing the book were at variance from my motives for reading it. When Keen writes that “our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur”, I perceive that
his interests are too narrow to enable him to write the book I want him to write.

It is surely time to examine dispassionately at the broadest level what is gained and what is lost with user-generated content. But maybe that will only become possible once we collectively re-engage with the realm of ideas and re-gain an understanding of what we need them for.

Food for thought from a virgin grazer

2009-06-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

I was out with my new friend Jason Smith at Jyoti's on Wednesday (we're planning to set up a Birmingham Salon in conjunction with the Institute of Ideas). Because Jason reads a lot about food, I mentioned the craze that's been sweeping Talis for some time now - namely Graze. For the uninitiated, it's a service delivering a daily box of healthy snacks that costs about £3 a day. I told him that my colleague Grant White started subscribing at the beginning of this week, and that I was monitoring him carefully to see whether he survived the vertiginous drop of food intake.

By coincidence, our colleague Zach Beauvais went off on leave the following day, and forgot to cancel his Graze subscription. So he kindly emailed me and invited me to treat myself to the contents of his Graze box. I'd brought in food for that day so I saved the box for today.

I was pretty nervous, I don't mind admitting, at the thought of surviving a whole working day on only three slices of pineapple, a small portion of "fire nuts" and an even smaller portion of cashew nuts. For good measure, I took along a small banana and a raspberry yogurt to supplement what seemed like a draconian quantity of food.

For breakfast I had what I always have - two boiled eggs and a glass of cloudy apple juice. I had the banana at about 10, and around that time I started eating the fire nuts, about two at a time. By 13:50, I'd finished the fire nuts and eaten 1 of the 3 slices of pineapple. I was stunned to report to my best friend Sandra, who's taking quite an interest in this experiment, that I was feeling completely full and wouldn't be able to eat a thing for the next hour at least.

So it's now 17:15. The pineapple is now gone but most of the cashew nuts remain uneaten. And the yogurt's still in the fridge.

My usual habit is to eat a banana at around 10. Then at 12 I have a (home-made) tortilla wrap containing iceberg lettuce, red onion, red pepper, rather a lot of Pizza Express salad dressing and tuna. By 16:00 I tend to be pretty ravenous and eat a yogurt to try to stave off a trip upstairs to the Talis staff tuck shop for the ever-tempting packet of Walkers crisp.

This previously vocal cynic of the whole Graze thing is starting to get impressed. I'm only slightly hungry, so I'm probably going to tuck into the yogurt. I might take the nuts to the pub.

Dave and I are having an austerity year - saving up to do everything that needs to be done around the house. Hence the home-made lunches. It's simply not an option to spend £3 a day on an ongoing basis. However, going down the Graze route for a month before our trip to France, land of eternally skinny women, is starting to look attractive. Would I spend £60 to lose half a stone before my holiday? This "pleasantly plump" Angl0-Saxon 40-something wouldn't hesitate.

100 Spanish-speaking writers choose the 100 books that changed their lives

2009-05-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Last year I, in common with other Talis employees, posted a list of 100 important novels. This time I'm posting another list which is similar but different. It too is a list of books, but this one is of interest because it reveals to me how Anglocentric I can be in my reading. Maybe other people will experience a similar realisation when they read this list and will broaden their cultural horizons as a result. That could only be a good thing. It was published in El Pais magazine last August. I generally score highly in this kind of list, as I'm quite well read. I also speak fluent Spanish. And yet I've only read 18 of them and a good few I'd never even heard of. It's always good to be jolted out of complacency. I accept that the list has a strong European bias.

1. Don Quixote de la Mancha - Miguel de Cervantes

2. In search of lost time - Marcel Proust

3. The Odyssey - Homer

4. The trial - Franz Kafka

5. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

6. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

7. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

8. Selected stories - Anton Chekhov

9. War and peace - Leo Tolstoy

10 - Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

11. Poet in New York - Federico Garcia Lorca

12. The brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

13. Crime and punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

14. The bible

15. The magic mountain - Thomas Mann

16. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo

17. Ulysses - James Joyce

18. The sound and the fury - William Faulkner

19. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

20. 1001 Arabian nights

21. Under the volcano - Malcolm Lowry

22. The death of Virgil - Hermann Broch

23. Essays - Michel Montaigne

24. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

25. The red and the black - Stendhal

26. The Aleph - Jorge Borges

27. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne

28. The heart is a lonely hunter - Carson McCullers

29. Heart of darkness - Joseph Conrad

30. The flowers of evil - Charles Baudelaire

31. The banquet - Plato

32. Catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger

33. A sentimental education - Gustave Flaubert

34. Duino elegies - Rainer Maria Rilke

35. Rhymes and legends - Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

36. This business of living - Cesare Pavese

37. The book of disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

38. Complete works - Jorge Luis Borges

39. Thus spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzche

40. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

41. Rayuela - Julio Cortazar

42. Fortunata and Jacinta - Benito Perez Galdos

43. Extraordinary stories - Edgar Allan Poe

44. The city and the dogs - Mario Vargas Llosa

45. The waste land - T.S.Eliot

46. Metamorphoses - Ovid

47. Poems - Emily Dickinson

48. King Lear - William Shakespeare

49. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

50. Trilce - Cesar Vallejo

51. The outsider - Albert Camus

52. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

53. Odes - Horace

54. The long goodbye - Raymond Chandler

55. The idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

56. The shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti

57. The first man - Albert Camus

58. The maker - Jorge Luis Borges

59 100 years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

60. The divine comedy - Dante Alighieri

61. La Regenta - Leopoldo Alas Clarin

62. The waves - Virginia Woolf

63. As I lay dying - William Faulkner

64. The diaries of Franz Kafka

65. Celestina - Fernando de Rojas

66. Richard The Third - William Shakespeare

67. Residence on Earth - Pablo Neruda

68. Demian - Hermann Hesse

69. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

70. Conversation in the cathedral - Mario Vargas Llosa

71. Pride and prejudice - Jane Austen

72. The leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

73. Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad

74. Lazarillo de Tormes - Anonymous

75. Journey to the end of the night - Louis Ferdinand Celine

76. Canto General - Pablo Neruda

77. The Iliad - Homer

78. Bohemian lights - Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan

79. The war of the end of the world - Mario Vargas Llosa

80. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

81. Aphorisms - G.C. Lichtenberg

82. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx

83. Mortal and Rose - Francisco Umbral

84. Dubliners - James Joyce

85. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

86. Peter Pan - James Matthew Barrie

87. Sonnets - Quevedo

88. Aunt Julia and the scriptwriter - Maria Vargas Llosa

89. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

90. The Alexandria quartet - Lawrence Durrell

91. The fall - Albert Camus

92. Orlando - Virginia Woolf

93. The unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro

94. Time and space - Juan Ramon Jimenez

95. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

96. The garden of the Finzi-Contini - Giorgio Bassani

97. The wild palms - William Faulkner

98. Stone and country - Gabriel Aresti

99. Complete works - Pio Baroja

100. The second sex - Simone de Beauvoir

Our Friends in the North

2009-04-05T04:13:00.000-07:00

Months ago my colleague Karen Reece lent me the DVD of Our Friends in the North and it languished on my shelf for so long that I had to email her at one point to reassure her that I hadn't appropriated it. I knew I was going to love it but Dave had to be convinced (he has occasional laggard tendencies - not that I can talk: OFITN was first shown back in 1996!). A few days ago we got around to watching the first episode, and Dave pronounced himself "completely hooked" within the first 10 minutes. On Friday we watched the second episode before we went out (as a result we didn't leave the house until 10.30pm), and then came home early, an hour later to watch the third episode, maybe pissing off some of our social circle in the process.

Our Friends in the North is one of those TV dramas to which the term "landmark" is routinely applied. The story centres on four friends whom we first see in Newcastle in the prime of their youth as they make choices that will influence the rest of their lives. The first three episodes, which as I say we've now seen, take place in the 1960s, switching between Newcastle and London as we follow the lives of the main characters (acted by four now household names -Daniel Craig, Gina McKee, Christopher Eccleston and Mark Strong). The story will continue right up to 1995, giving it an impressive historical scope as well as a compelling narrative.

Dave and I are both well into our 40s now so "retro" is often stuff that we can remember from first time around. The first episode, then, set in 1964, made us feel really young because I hadn't been born and Dave was only 3, and as a result, the cultural references mean very little to us. This is a good thing, not least because the kind of cheesy quality that has become commonplace in depictions of the 1960s, and (especially) the 1970s, is entirely absent.

The four friends are still living in their family terraced houses in 1964; the brother of Mary (Gina McKee) is mentally and physically disabled, but whereas in the first episode he's cheerful and chatty in the family living room, by the second episode (1966), he's become so ill as a result of living in Mary's damp high-rise flat, that he's unable to speak or even raise a smile. For some reason, this has really lingered with me, and has made me reflect on the bumpy road to progress that the British working class endured in the 20th century. Indeed, at least part of the success of the drama can be attributed to a tightly integrated socio-economic backdrop to the story which is extremely well realised and apparently so accurate in its representation of real historical figures that there was a strong possibility of litigation.

We tend to cariacature the 1960s as a golden era of promise and prosperity, but in fact my Dad's family were living in housing that was more appropriate to the 19th century than the second half of the 20th (my Dad's words not mine). My parents bought a house in Radcliffe, Lancashire just before they married in 1963. They didn't move in until after the wedding (because you didn't then) so at the weekends, Dad used to go over and do DIY and decorate the place on his own. I remember him telling me of the joy with which he'd run a bath before going home, and lie in his own bath, finally able to control his own hot and cod water taps and stay in there as long as he liked. He and his family had never had a bath in their own home, and at the family's weekly visit to the public baths had always had to ask the attendant for more hot water. Years later, I dated a musician who was quite a bit older than me, and he told me what a great experience he'd had going to a public bath and having to ask for hot water. I remember thinking - you middle class twat. See "Common People" by Pulp for further details.

At the beginning of the 1970s, my Nana, who had recently become widowed, moved from 16 Johnson Street in Lower Broughton, Salford, to a newly constructed high rise called Greyfriars Court. I personally remember this as a very happy period. Nana was in a first floor flat with a balcony, and it seemed that every Sunday afternoon when we went over to visit, there was something new in the flat, often the kind of cheap ornament that kids love. It occurs to me now, watching OFITN, that some lessons might have been learnt from the Newcastle experience, as Nana, to my knowledge, never had any damp or structural problems in her flat.

So Nana's move always felt like progress to me, but I was too young to know how happy or otherwise my Nana (or indeed the rest of the family) felt about it, and that leads me in a roundabout way to another impressive quality of OFITN, namely that it's rarely clear-cut in its observations. Mary is extremely bright and is starting a university course in 1964, but by 1966 she's married with a child to Tosker (Mark Strong). Just when you're thinking how trapped and compromised she is in an empty marriage, there's a powerfully scene in which genuine love is revealed. Following 4 characters over a period of 3 decades gives ample scope to explore the nuances and ambiguities of the finely drawn characters and their relationships.

We can't wait to watch the rest of it, and if you've never seen it, try and borrow Karen's copy!

Flasher at large

2009-03-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

After a chore-packed morning I logged onto Twitter to be confronted by multiple tweets proclaiming how beautiful the day was. Everyone seemed to be outdoors except me. So after lunch, a little neighbourhood walk with Dave was in order.

We can only have been five minutes into the walk, and we were already ambling along the River Cole, which we're lucky enough to have at the bottom of our road. As we approached Sarehole Mill (see pic), we were jolted out of our mid-afternoon reverie by some sort of fracas between a couple of men on the other side of the "river" (at the risk of compromising my neighbourhood pride, it's really more like a stream - I think I jumped it once when I was out running). My initial impression, as I focused on the situation at hand, was that they might be drunk, but in any case there was something so aggressive about the situation that I was immediately ill at ease. I smiled one of those smiles that says please don't involve me in your drama and prepared to move on, but Dave had already started to engage with them. On our side of the river there wasn't just me and Dave - there was also a family of about 6 children with their mother. I was sure that at least two of the children were laughing. I turned to the men. One of the men, who was holding the other man down, told Dave, in the midst of a seemingly unstoppable rant, that the other man had been flashing his penis to the children, but was defending himself by claiming that he was actually taking a piss. He was clearly a paedophile, the man said (ranted). Dave calmly asked whether the police had been called, to which the answer was yes. When I looked back at the children, I realised that two of them were crying their eyes out, and as their Mum moved them on, they called out to their Dad, the ranter on the other side of the river.

We passed the mill and crossed over the road, and then before we proceeded with the rest of the walk, Dave stopped and went into self-doubt mode. "Have you got your phone on you?" he asked. Neither of us had brought our phones out. It's a new sort of downturn thing with me that I delight in leaving the house with as few possessions (generally money but other stuff as well) as possible. We wondered whether the man had really phoned the police. We agonised, like the couple of middle class liberals that we are, as to whether we should go back and confront the situation. We worried that the man was going to beat the living crap out of the suspected paedophile.

Above all, however, we questioned whether the man really was the paedophile he was accused of being. He looked like a middle-aged homeless man who might well have been relieving himself after an afternoon of drinking. On the other hand, it could have been more sinister. We waited for a while but the police didn't turn up, for whatever reason.

When I was little, one of my friends was a girl called Katie Warford and she lived on Church Lane in Ashton-on-Mersey. She would delight in recounting to me that the old man in the big house down the road would stand at his front door every Sunday morning and expose himself to all the church-goers passing by. We both thought it was hilarious. We were 10.

Thinking back then to this afternoon's incident, was it really the flasher that had upset those children, or was it in fact the angry reaction of their father and the intensely disruptive effect it was having on an otherwise playful and harmonious afternoon? Does the media's treatment of paedophilia prevent us from taking a measured approach, and in turn, is this causing children even more harm on top of problem itself (horrific though the problem unquestionably is)?

Dave and I copped out of the situation in the end. I argued that I had enough problems of my own without taking on someone else's as well - a position I've pretty much maintained since I intervened in an argument at a party when I was 21 and by some miracle survived the vicious assault that ensued.

My Top 10 experiences of 2008

2009-01-01T12:36:00.000-08:00

Along the lines of what Dave and I do every New Year's Eve, here's my favourite experiences of the year, in no particular order...

1. Re-establishing contact with my Spanish friends (lived in Santiago de Compostela in 1985) by bumping into Karen (see pic, second left) in the Modus Vivendi bar, Santiago. Thanks to Dave for giving me the space to catch up properly, and a special mention to Tito (aka Andres Pineiro on left) for travelling from El Ferrol with a day's notice to see me. I was so happy that I sat in the cathedral one day and cried. Also on the picture - Carlos.

2. Seeing David Tennant play Hamlet (my favourite play) at Stratford-upon-Avon, October, with Sandra.

3. My presentation at the ER&L Conference, Atlanta, is a resounding success, in March. Plus I make friends with the indomitable Christine Orr and we dine at Mary Mac's Tea Room - truly a unique experience.

4. The highlight of my first trip to New York at Easter with Dave is drinking cocktails at the Flat Iron Lounge, an Art Deco extravaganza.

5. Sandra and I throw a fantastic party in the room above Patrick Kavanagh pub, Kings Heath, in October. Jo, Alistair and Bill all stay over.

6. Dave and I become very good friends with our neighbours Andy and Helen over the course of the year. One particular highlight is the neighbourhood barbecue in our communal back lane in August.

7. Another great year for the national schools competition, Debating Matters. As inspiring and energising as ever.

8. My headaches become manageable for the first time in 15 years.

9. I run the 10K Great Manchester Run effortlessly in May, and enjoy the whole experience.

10. Dave and I have a fab time at Fiona's 40th in September (see previous post), staying out until 4.30am with Fiona and her friends Ros and Ben.

Manchester says No to congestion charge

2008-12-12T07:37:00.000-08:00

Given that I'm a highly opinionated person, I express surprisingly few of my opinions on this blog. But I'm going to make an exception in this instance. Today I'm pretty proud to be a Mancunian, even though I knew really that the congestion charge vote would go to a No as I didn't know a single Mancunian who was voting in favour.

Some of the comments in the Guardian demonstrate the kind of contempt for the views of ordinary people that I've come to expect from this government. One very astutely draws parallel with the Irish referendum over the summer that rejected the European Lisbon treaty and as a result drew ugly responses negating the validity of democratic mechanisms when you don't get the result you want. Responses along the lines of "those ungrateful Irish after all that Europe has done for them" and "we'll carry on run the vote again until we get the right result" are not guaranteed to bring universal harmony across national and social divides any time soon. However, they're extremely likely to bring out the inner rebel in quite a lot of people, certainly those with any self-respect.

I don't agree with people who are saying, albeit sympathetically, that it's about reluctance to vote for extra taxes at the start of an economic downturn. And it's certainly not true that the No vote is a vote against public transport; Mancunians are justly proud of their tram system. I really think it's about people getting fed up of being told what to think (where was the No campaign, for example?), and that is a good thing, surely, for everyone, no matter where they live.

Thai green fish curry

2008-12-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

Way back in October, Rob Styles tagged me to get me to blog a recipe. It's a token of the esteem that I hold for Rob that I'm prepared do divulge my favourite and most admired recipe.

So here's how you make the best Thai green fish curry ever, for 2-3 people. It's on the soupy side, and it's fragrant and flavoursome rather than red hot. But that's the way I like it.

Besides the fact that it tastes great and everyone loves it, the beauty of this recipe is that you can make the paste well in advance, and then the rest of the curry can be made in a matter of minutes.

Ingredients for the paste:

2 stalks of lemon grass finely chopped

3 hot green chillis, deseeded and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and chopped

1 shallot peeled and finely chopped

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only

Half a level teaspoon of ground cumin

Half a level teaspoon of ground coriander

1 tablespoon of lime juice

1 tablespoon of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

Half a level teaspoon of ground black peppercorns

Ingredients for the curry:

500g haddock fillets, skinned, cut into wide pieces

200g bag of frozen, cooked and peeled extra large prawns

1 tablespoon of groundnut oil

250ml coconut milk

250ml fish stock

8 lime leaves

15g fresh basil, leaves only, torn

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only, torn

Method:

Put all the paste ingredients into a food processor and blitz into a rough paste, stopping to scrape down sides with rubber spatula as necessary.

Fry paste in the oil for 1-2 minutes, stirring so it doesn't colour.

Pour in coconut milk and add stock, lime leaves, haddock and prawns.

Simmer until fish starts to turn opaque, stirring regularly so the sauce doesn't catch - 7-8 minutes.

Add basil and coriander leaves. Check seasoning.

Remove lime leaves before serving.

That debatable time of year...

2008-11-30T10:31:00.000-08:00

Can it really be a year since I drove over to University of Aston one autumn evening in 2007, and had the most terrifying and also rewarding evening in years?

Once again the opening rounds of the national schools competition Debating Matters are taking place across the land, and this year the venue for me, as one of the judges, was Wolverhampton High School for Girls. The competition has presumably grown so much in the past year that there are now two opening rounds in the West Midlands instead of one. Which is utterly fantastic, as Debating Matters must be one of the finest cerebral experiences you can have, either as a sixth former or as a judge.

This year the three subjects for debate in the opening round were

Space Travel - Manned or unmanned?
Privacy
Congestion charge

The passing year had not dimmed the memory of the sheer tedium of ecotourism and the various arcane offsetting schemes that I had to ingest for last year's competition, so naturally I avoided the congestion charge like the plague. This was a shame because it produced the liveliest debate of the night. Having done quite a lot of the recommended reading on space travel and privacy, then, and considered some tricky questions to ask the hapless debaters, I drove off to Wolverhampton and managed to arrive on time by some quirk of luck entirely unrelated to the degree of journey planning carried out.

In fact I felt like crap; I had done all day, so I'd worked from home, secure in the belief that the sight of me rocking back and forth in physical pain might cause some consternation among my colleagues. But by the end of the evening, I felt great, and just like last year, the whole experience gave me a boost of energy that lasted for days. I think I wrote words to this effect in my blog posting on this subject last (academic) year, but it bears repeating. When you are privileged enough to share a room with these 17 year olds who are unbelievably well prepared and arguing so passionately and skilfully, all your anxieties about our dumbed down society just fall away and you remember that the very best of humanity can prevail in the most unlikely of circumstances.

All of this was underlined by the content of the Space Travel debate. I plead guilty to having been completely ignorant about the manned vs unmanned debate prior to preparing for Debating Matters, whereas I am now a veteran of over 3 articles from The Space Review!! The arguments in favour of manned space exploration are unapologetically humanist. It's not even a pro-science versus anti-science thing. Right now, to take a purely pro-science stance involves arguing for unmanned not manned space travel - the progress that robotic and other forms of unmanned exploration have made in a number of fields vastly outweighs the scientific achievements of the Apollo missions. But apparently, as a result of those Apollo missions, admissions to undergraduate science courses doubled in the US, as did PhD applications. The very existence of Silicon Valley is testimony to the inspiration that the moon landings created among us earth-dwellers. Manned space travel is also extremely unsafe and bloody expensive! So it's pretty difficult to argue its case, particularly in the straitened economic circumstances (not to mention the prevailing mood of risk-aversion) that we're all experiencing right now. But sometimes you've just got to take a long term view. Because if a bunch of British 17 year olds, brought up in an era of Reality TV and ubiquitous corporate branding, can demonstrate rigorous and passionate debating beyond their years, just think what they might achieve if human space explorers once again go beyond what was previously considered to be unachievable.

Meanwhile, Debating Matters goes from strength to strength, as indeed it should. It was recently announced that The British Council will be bringing the competition to India, using its network of schools and educational institutions, and the plan is that the contest will gradually be developed into "a real-time television reality show" according to India edunews. Time to revise my opinions of reality TV? Let's have a debate!

Emerging Economies Question Time @Battle of Ideas

2008-11-02T09:00:00.001-08:00

Panellists at this session were:

John Dovey – acting president, UK Corporates BT Global Services
Jim O’Neill – MD Global Economic Research, Goldman Sachs, creator of the acronym BRICS
Stuart Simpson – Financial Analyst and journalist
Dr Linda Yueh – Oxford University, author of Macroeconomics and globalisation and economic growth in China
Professor Slavo Redosovich, LSE

Main arguments:
What will be the foreign policy consequences of the crisis for China and India?

Linda: India and China are grappling with the potential foreign policy consequences of the global downturn. China sees itself as an emerging economy, focusing primarily on the growth of its own economy.
Jim: Next week France will formally propose that the G7 be expanded to include the BRICs. This is long overdue, especially in view of the crisis. It’s going to be important that the Chinese economy be led by internal consumption rather than export, as there won’t be a US economy to export to .
Stuart: We need to differentiate between China entering the world stage, and China as a global manager. China is not yet a rich country.

Why so much talk about China and India, why so little attention to Brazil and Russia?

Jim: India has 1.1 bn people; China has 1.3 bn. Russian and Brazilian populations are small in comparison. With urbanisation a key driver for both China and India, the scale of their potential is of a different order. It is wrong to focus on India and China though. Brazil and Russia are much more powerful economically than in the past. Brazil keeps good macroeconomic stability, and in 30 years time could be one of the biggest 7-8 economies of the world. Brazil has handled itself very well in the crisis to date. Russia is far too dependent on oil. It needs to reduce this dependency to reach its potential.
Traditionally economic downturns have impacted the developing world disproportionately. Is this still true?
Stuart: The decoupling issue. China et al are becoming more self-reliant. Unless some solutions are arrived at, though, some countries will really suffer. Some countries can’t rely on national banks, foreign exchange reserves, i.e. those mechanisms currently being widely used across the globe to deal with the crisis.
Jim: The BRIC economies are still developing in the classical sense. Now they’re an integral part of the world economy with their own multinationals and so on. The consensus is that the BRICs will continue to grow in the next 30 years.
John: The world is a lot more complex. The average price in Chinese designer shops is a lot higher than in the Western equivalents. And most of the shoppers there are Chinese not tourists. So there’s a significant middle-class emerging.
Linda: Are they themselves in financial crisis? All markets are interlinked. One potential problem is protectionism. The view that opening the borders for trade isn’t helpful is a bit dated. Brazil has brought actions against US and Europe and won. Virtually no country in the world truly has free trade and open borders. In the NGO world, protectionism will be strongly under consideration. The IMF will have to provide bail-out packages for Pakistan, but they shouldn’t be telling them how to run their own country. The IMF is weaker than it was 10 years ago, in any case.
Jim: There is a difference between modest protection for countries in an emergent phase and the aggressive protectionism of the 1930s. Germany has been sustained over the past 2 years by exports to China and Russia. IMF seems strongly pro-international trade at the moment. The Norman Foster partnership, with 1400 employees the biggest employer in Wandsworth, is almost entirely dependent on China.

Could international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF become obsolete?

Linda: IMF has just appointed its first Chief Economist from an emerging economy – China. So it’s trying to reinvent itself although it may be too slow.
Slavo: World Bank started this process earlier with its “Learning from the 90s” document. It’s trying to fashion itself as a developing agency.
Stuart: The IMF doesn’t have the resources to perform the same role as before. Partly because of BRIC growth - the reserves of China dwarf IMF reserves. Years ago, South Korea needed IMF help. So the IMF came in and dictated how South Korea was to be run. China saw this and decided the same would never happen to him,a nd built its foreign exchange reserves.
Jim: The world has blown up. This is a very powerful and scary crisis. Without powerful responses by multiple countries, it would be a lot worse. The IMF is currently back in business because a couple of developing countries have been very irresponsible. But the IMF and the World Bank need to become institutions reflecting the complexity of the modern world. So Western nations need to agree to substantial structural changes. The IMF and World Bank are currently well past their sell-by date.

To what extent is the crisis due to under-consumption in China?

John: Are the financial sectors of the West clearly at fault? Complex financial derivatives have produced a classic bubble.
Jim: Indirectly, part of the crisis is caused by China saving so much. The global savings glut has led indirectly to the overheating of the US property market.
Linda: In macroeconomics, these are just identities, rather than causes and effects. Americans were consuming too much way before China started saving too much. China needs to look internally and determine why is its consumption so low. Culturally, they have fears of catastrophic health events, and worry about their children’s education. It’s not a blame thing.
Jim: Global economic crises happen. Human behaviour goes between greed and fear. The Chinese authorities wanted the decade to be dominated by an export strategy, and only now do we see that it was unsustainable.
Stuart: US consumes 72% of its GDP. [Jim: This is way too much.] A lot of capital goes to the US in the form of debt, with China buying US Treasury bonds. There’s a lot of saving in the Chinese corporate sector as well. US business didn’t take advantage of the cheap credits. The money didn’t go into production. Why not?
Linda: Usually, if there are low savings, it should be expensive to borrow.
Jim: This is not a static environment right now. This year US’s current account deficit is starting to disappear. US is selling more cars abroad than it is importing. Surpluses in the emerging economies are slowing down – Russia, India and Brazil now have deficits. Countries will no longer be able to depend on exporting to the US.
Jim: The current situation feels bad. But it is reality. Global growth is forecast at 3%. Last year it was 3.2%, so it isn’t the end of the world. Price mechanisms work themselves through – both sides of the US election are committed to exploring alternative forms of energy. China has done more for globalisation than the US in the past decade. Countries like Nigeria are intellectually very energised by the example of China and how they’ve raised themselves from poverty without behaving like the US.
Stuart: There is much more political freedom for developing countries now with China in the picture.
Linda: 56% of the Chinese population is still rural. We should be wary of learning too much from a country whose path is not yet set.
Jim: The last decade shows that international trade is one of the few win-win games that exist. Global inequalities are no declining rapidly. In the next 30 years, there will be an additional 30 billion new members of the middle class.

But in Africa, aren’t some countries still undeveloped?

Stuart: Development since the industrial revolution has been characterised by divergence between developed and developing countries. Only with China has that changed. China shows the way out of poverty – with massive infrastructural projects and engagement with the global economy, rather than the small-scale projects proposed by NGOs.
Linda: Political reform is happening in China, but in a quiet slow way because the Chinese government wants to be responsive and stay in power. So it does it by focus groups etc. but rejects the Western model.
Stuart? Yes! It’s following the anti-democratic practices of Western political forces like New Labour!

Growing pains: the pros and cons of economic dynamism @Battle of Ideas

2008-11-02T08:09:00.001-08:00

Panellists at this session were:
· Daniel Ben-Ami, finance and economics journalist
· Dr Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge
· Paul Mason, TV broadcast journalist
· Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, Financial Times

Takeaways:

Dynamism is the most profound concept for our civilisation. It matters because it transforms people’s lives. It underpins our life expectancy, food, the expectations of the next generation reaching adulthood. It both signifies and generates change. It generates a range of opportunities unimaginable to previous generations. In agrarian societies, serfdom was normal, and the prosperous had to live from their labours. It has also transformed the position of women, with labour devices, contraception and so forth. Political democracy is both a natural expression and a concomitant of economic dynamism. A positive sum society – with the total number of goods and services rising over time.
In the early 1950s the life expectancy of people in the third world was 41, whereas today it’s 63-4. This is a measure of the huge benefits of growth for developing countries.
Ha-Joon Chang was born in South Korea in 1963, and has experienced phenomenal changes in the standard of living during his lifetime. It’s not just about having more money and things – it’s life expectancy, reductions in infant mortality and so on. In one and a half generations, South Korea has acquired the life expectancy of Switzerland! But this is unachievable without brutality and dislocation. Nevertheless, in undeveloped countries, there’s a lot more violence and destitution. Child labour was abolished in South Korea in the early 1960s, so there are labour rights and freedoms in place now. So the main problem with today’s liberal democracy is that growth is not executed well enough.
Paul Mason maintained that it’s correct to question the conditions of growth. In early capitalism, it was believed that capitalism would collapse without the labour of 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. Then we saw that after the Factories Act, regulated capitalism was actually more dynamic. This is inimical to the Ayn Rand principle – that only selfishness can act as a dynamo for growth. A mature debate is needed around the distribution of wealth.
Martin Wolf argued that the pursuit of GDP per se is meaningless. The biggest change in economics over the past 30 years has been the integration of Asian labour into the global economy.
Up to the 1980s, a great proportion of the gains of capitalism went to the working classes of industrialised countries. This is partly because of the internal politics of those countries. The interests of the UK and Chinese working classes are directly antithetical. Paul countered this by saying that labour movements have been a fundamental part of capitalism since the first strike in Lancashire in 1818. China has just passed its own Factories Act – The Contract Labour Law was passed this year. Some factories have moved to Cambodia as a result, but the Chinese government is firm that labour regulations will be enforced.
Local pollution will ultimately be fixed by local political processes. But are there global constraints, and if so how will they be handled? Drinking water is a real constraint to growth in both India and China. Ditto petrol. India can’t afford oil at $100 a barrel, and it’s forecast to rise to $500. Paul argued that the issue of water in China isn’t about quantity but quality. Why is the Yangtse so polluted? It’s because of a succession of paper factories killing everything in the river. Daniel argued that there is no inevitability of water shortage in India. They need infrastructural investment, that’s all. There’s always desalination if all else fails – look at Dubai, Arizona etc. There is a classic Malthusian confusion of infrastructural issues and god-given problems. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of Stone. Martin argued back that over-dependence on fossil fuels is a problem – the water problem in India is exaggerated, but the fuel problem isn’t. India’s challenges are unique but unbelievably exciting.
Daniel Ben-Ami argued that the problem with the term “sustainability” is that it’s used in so many ways. He opposes the idea that entire generations should hold themselves back because of the risk of damage to future generations. The real problem is unbalanced growth that is insufficiently productive.
In Germany in the 19th century, the average number of working hours per week was 90, whereas now it’s 35. US work about 20-30% longer than us.
In all countries, as soon as women start having a choice, they stop having the children they don’t want.
In India and China the benefits of growth are ceasing to spread among the population – this is a significant problem.

The Credit Crunch Demystified @Battle of Ideas

2008-11-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

This session was an on-stage debate between:
· Phil Mullan, director of Business Transformation, Easynet (in a personal capacity)
· Dr Michael Savage, Investment Banker (in a personal capacity)

God this session was packed! Standing room only in the biggest room of the building. As Phil Mullan pointed out, you can usually house the economics session in the broom cupboard, with room to spare. As an aside, at the meeting of the CILIP Update Editorial Board on Friday, the icebreaker at the start of the meeting was to state what you’re reading, and at least 2 people said they’d stopped reading novels in order to be able to follow the news and gain an understanding of the economic situation.

The essence of the debate was:

What is the severity of the current crisis? Well, it’s very severe! But although it’s being described as the worst financial crisis ever, the human dimension is muted – having said that, it’s so far had a limited effect on the economy – unemployment isn’t as bad as it was in the 1980s for example. But there’s a lot of misery and hardship to come.
Phil: The most important thing is that the crisis isn’t just about economic recession: it reflects a fundamental atrophy of economic activity in the West. This is very serious, with politicians unable to cope, it will be more difficult for them to contain the consequences.
Michael: Right across the board, everyone failed to see this coming. In terms of steps taken by governments, allowing Lehmann to fail has proven catastrophic, but that this couldn’t have been foreseen. The British banking system was within hours of failing.
Phil: The past 14 months had been characterised as panicky paralysis with intermittent firefighting. George Soros had said that governments have been consistently behind the curve, displaying oscillation and lack of imagination. We’ve lived with an economic paradigm of “There is no alternative” [to the market] for a quarter of a century now, with a very technical as opposed to political approach to running the economy. But the people elected democratically failed to see this coming. There’s been no attempt to date to grasp the fundamentals.
Michael: Some of the growth and dynamism in the West has been false, but this has nevertheless been a period of great consistent growth and innovation, although we should have picked up on the issues in the financial sector earlier.
Phil: This position amounts to a fetishisation of numbers – growth looked good but what about the quality of growth? In reality, the West has experienced prosperity based on growth elsewhere. Economic activity in countries such as the US and UK has been based on a. Property and retail, and the interactions between the two b. Financial services c. Public sector. So a huge amount of activity has been based on circulation and services around it, while the productive economy has shrunk. Manufacturing in the US now only represents 12% of the economy. 30 years ago, financial activity comprised only 20% of the average US corporation, whereas today that figure is 50%. Back to the drivers, only c. public spending now remains. This introduces a very real risk of a state deficit crisis. The economy has been hollowed out. When an economy doesn’t make much, and the financial, property and retail sectors implode, what’s left? Apart from making money out of the East, of course.
Michael: US still makes up 25% of the global economy. The East is still led by the US – the only country with the financial depth and breadth to manage the crisis. The current crisis is driven by additional money in the system, not just because of bank lending, but money from Asian and oil-producing economies. Simply put, US, UK et al have been spending more money than they’ve made. Other countries, by contrast, have been saving masses of money and pumping it into the West. This has led to low interest rates in the West. The West has then made money where it can – for example from property.
Phil: China has been keeping the West afloat. Value production continues in the West, but it’s not new value creation, but creaming off value created elsewhere in the world. China is going to have a hard time in the next two years with the spillover from this. US is the most indebted country in the world, and yet presumes to be the world leader. The economy pre-crisis was characterised as SAD – stable; anaemic; durable. The West has been able, since the 1980s, to cope with its difficulties; political stability and credit availability have together removed the need for economic restructuring. This was like a hiatus period of muddling through. The West has now had its comeuppance, and needs a long period of regeneration. Everyone is going to feel a lot of pain, but at the moment there’s a strange feeling of denial in society about the future repercussions of the downturn.
Michael: The recent period has been characterised by consistently high growth and employment. It hasn’t been SAD at all – actually it’s been a great period in the economy. The banking sector had to be bailed out, though, because there was a blunt choice between bail-out or generalised depression. We now need to think fully about how to manage the economy, the banks and restructure society.
Phil: 40% of GDP in China is based on economic investment. They create more values than they can use. This is much more than an economic / financial problem. Intellectually, the most important point is the hollowness of economic life, and the imbalances between economics and politics globally. We’re closer to barbarism than we were 10 years ago; we’re at a tipping point. There’s a potential to restructure using the East as an engine, but how likely is that?

Caught in the web: who controls the Internet? @Battle of Ideas

2008-11-02T06:01:00.000-08:00

Panellists at this session of the Institute of Ideas' annual Battle of Ideas festival were:

Jo Glanville, editor of Index on Censorship
Dr Tim Jordan, Open University, author of Hacking: digital media and technological determinism
Rob Killick, CEO, cScape
Cassandra Wilkinson, author of Don’t panic: nearly everything is better than you think

Key takeouts from this session were:

An important question is – does the internet render the fight for free speech unnecessary? Or, in fact, is the internet at risk of becoming even more regulated than real life? Certainly, the great libertarian godfathers of the internet didn’t bargain for new forms of censorship to emerge. There is more potential for control and regulation in cyberspace than there is outside. Compare browsing in a library with browsing on the web, where the act of opening a page is exposable to other people or organisations.
The new censors of the internet aren’t the usual suspects. Instead, they’re like a layer of middlemen. A great example is Smart Filter by Secure Computing in California. Used by some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes and also in the US, its list of blocked sites is so secret that even the countries using the software are kept in the dark, and can affect more sites than you might think – for example gay and lesbian sites wrongly interpreted as being porn. The list of blocked sites is the intellectual property of Secure Computing and is protected by copyright.
This week Yahoo and Google signed up to a voluntary agreement to protect freedom of speech in their business practices. This code of conduct took 18 months to formulate, and they’re now trying to persuade hardware suppliers to sign up. Cisco were invited to the discussions, but declined to participate. They argue that in transactions such as the supply of hardware to the Chinese government, the application of the technology they supply is not their responsibility (I’m sure I’m not the only anti-censorship activist who’s broadly sympathetic with this position).
On “takedown notices” and their censorship implications – a group of researchers put up a fake JS Mills Appreciation Society website containing quotes from the 19th century philosopher and freedom advocate, quotes which, of course, are now out of copyright. The same researchers then sent a takedown notice to the UK ISP on the basis of a copyright contravention, who immediately obliged, taking the site down even though the text is out of copyright. A significant global trend is how easy it is to get ISP to remove material on the basis of defamation. One ISP employee in the audience added that the number of takedown notices issued is actually quite low, around one per fortnight, so it is quite easy to investigate each one. His ISP has a policy of only taking down sites if the notice has the weight of the law.
The breakdown of anonymity, an important principle in the early days of the internet, points to a fundamental problem of the internet as public space – namely that the very digital nature of the space makes this contentious, as the web operates on privately-run networks and we leave traces of pretty much everything we do on it. With social websites such as Facebook, we’re putting personal data in the hands of Facebook who can then do anything they want with it. Rob Killick called for Facebook’s ownership of all your data on the site to be an opt-in.
In relation to the global economic downturn, we need to recontextualise much of the discourse. When governments experience threats which they don’t know how to deal with, they tend to react with authoritarian measures. So trends towards regulation are likely to accelerate in the coming period. As individuals, we feel more isolated and individuated in these conditions, and are therefore more likely to take accepting positions of this authoritarianism. However, the deep nature of the recession we’re facing, and the absence of political solutions means that as a society we actually need more freedom to debate than less.
Nearly everything can be said, but almost anything can be recorded and is keyword searchable. The gap between production and consumption is radically altered by the internet, and this has important consequences. Free speech hasn’t gone away with increased surveillance, but the conditions have changed.
Tim Jordan talked about Torpark servers, a system accessible via Firefox designed to ensure anonymity on the web. Interestingly, they were impounded by Google during a recent paedophile investigation. Users of Torpark servers, which are located in Europe and the US, and were in fact designed by the US Navy and the Free Haven project, are perceived to be in authoritarian regimes. They are OS, and this raises very interesting questions – in theory the code is open to all of us, but in practical terms it’s only open to that small minority of people who can understand code. This is important in this context for determining whether there are any “back doors” i.e. ways in which users can be identified and reported. So the OS geek subculture offering an opposition to regulation is in fact not straightforward.
The paradox of the web is that it is simultaneously outside control and under control – free speech and surveillance cohabit in cyberspace.
Freedom of speech only means something if it’s offensive, and it is an absolute. I agreed with this, but not all panellists did.
The difference between private speech and free speech has been eroded by the internet. We say all sorts of things in private that we may or may not really mean. But online this can be a problem. This is a very interesting dimension. At the moment, people tend to know that everything seems private whereas it is in fact recorded, but don’t really care. To an extent, of course, it doesn’t matter right now, but it may matter in the future if what you’re doing becomes politicised in some way.
An interesting case is coming up in the UK, with the prosecution of a civil servant who wrote violent porn about what he’d like to do with Girls Aloud. This is a potentially groundbreaking case that will come up in 2009.
An interesting debate arose around the issue of incitement. Rob Killick argued that incitement shouldn’t be a crime, although it now is one. So child rape is a crime, for example. If you see it, you should report it. But the act of seeing it should not be a crime. There are difficult issues around this – are people who are paying to see child rape actually colluding?

Re. the previous post

2008-10-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

The bibliographic details are:
http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=3&ti=1,3&Search%5FArg=hill%2C%20robert&Search%5FCode=AUTH%5F&CNT=50&PID=GKRvCD3V0nP9Tp0gaKxmmUe2Rw&SEQ=20081029175731&SID=1
There are copies of the book at British Library, Oxford University Bodleian Library, Worcester Cathedral and Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, District of Columbia (source of bib record).

Preserving the book

2008-10-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

At the weekend I finally got around to ordering some acid-free packaging (corrugated cardboard boxes) in which to store my antiquarian book. I desperately hope that in the time I've been procrastinating on this task I haven't caused irremediable harm to my wonderful family prayer book, my most precious possession.

Printed in 1617, the various owners of this book, presumably all direct ancestors of mine, have written their signatures, poems and quotations and sometimes have simply doodled on its now decaying pages. The oldest "contribution" that I've found is the signature of one Gabrielmus Evans, dated 1686. Was he a choir boy? That's how I see many of them, especially Joseph Donnaldson who, in an undetermined century but I'd place my bets on the 18th, filled an entire empty page with ornately written ramblings beginning with "Heavens quickning grace exalts the zealous mind, And therefore be to pious ways inclined. Joseph Donnaldson aught (sic) this Book and god give him grace on it to Loook (sic) both to Lark and understand never ..." and it gradually becomes less legible. Some other anonymous wag wrote "A man of words and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds" over and over again. More recently, James Carson of Cheetham Hill, 1861, is someone of whom I feel I should know, yet I've no idea where he fits into my family tree.

I remember very clearly staying at my Granny's house. I must have been in my early teens, and I was lying in the big bed in the spare room when my Granny came in and took the prayer book out of a drawer. I'd never seen it before and she let me browse its contents until I fell asleep. Next day I assiduously transcribed all the entries of the book, like the librarian bibliophile I was destined to be. Before she died my Granny, who herself wrote an entry in the book on her wedding day in 1939, entrusted the book into my care, but I do wonder whether the book has deteriorated under my custodianship, as I feel sure that the handwriting was clearer when I was a teenage girl than it is now.

In any case, who am I going to hand it down to? I have no children and neither does my brother. I'm sort of hoping that the recipient isn't alive yet. My cousin Ann, who's as interested in our family history as I am, has just had her first baby, but he's a boy, and I feel that a girl might look after it better, even though my Granny is still the only woman to have signed the book in nearly 4 centuries. That's just put an idea in my head - I'm going to have a party in 2017 to celebrate 4 centuries of our prayer book, and I'm going to get all my relatives to sign it.

In the meantime, it has to be consigned to the acid-free cardboard box, if only to enable me to assuage my conscience for my less than dutiful care to date.

So farewell to Gabrielmus Evans, Joseph Donnaldson, James Carson, Edmund Williams (love your bird sketch), William Evans, George Jones, David Harry, Daniel Jones (1693), Edmond Wiliams, Thomas Jones, and of course Joyce Newall nee Vosper.

See you all in 2017.

Kenan Malik at Birmingham Book Festival

2008-10-19T13:59:00.001-07:00

Last Thursday Birmingham Book Festival played host to Kenan Malik, journalist and author of Strange Fruit: Why both sides are wrong in the race debate. I went along with my colleague Nad (Nadeem Shabir), an exceptionally open-minded and inquiring individual who is consistently good company. Kenan ran through a number of key arguments, some of which have been covered in earlier works such as The meaning of race. One such key argument is that 85% of human difference occurs between individuals in a single population, whereas only 30% of difference occurs between so-called racial groups. Such arguments and findings have helped to demolish racial theories particularly in the post-war period, and have led to an understanding that in fact there is no evidence of race existing (between different groups of humans) in terms of clearly delineated characteristics.

Kenan then turned his attention to the politics of anti-racism, pointing out that when he was a young anti-racist activist, "black identity" was seen in political or cultural terms, rather than in terms of race itself. It was thus seen in opposition to "white" - acknowledging a broad commonality of being non-white and therefore being subjected to racism in the UK and elsewhere. Whereas in my experience, it is now common for Asians to refer to themselves as "brown", and in fact, referring Asians as blacks now seems to jar slightly.

For me there were two really important arguments that Kenan made, both of which clarified stuff that I've been turning around in my mind.

The first of these was around multi-culturalism - Kenan put forth the idea that the politics of multi-culturalism actually undermine multi-culturalism as a lived experience. In the road where I live - Burnaston Road, Hall Green, Birmingham - there is, I would say, an exceptionally good mix of ethnic groups. Crucially, this is a very dynamic mix, and as the groups intermingle, we learn more about each other and start to change as a result. This can only be a good thing, and is one of the finest aspects of Birmingham life. However Kenan argued that what multi-cultural politics does is to preserve those groups in aspic, emphasising the differences over the universality, and slowing down the process of assimilation as a result.

The second argument that really chimed with me was around differences between France and the UK with respect to racial policies. France has very different approach to the UK: it demands in quite an inflexible way that its immigrants assimilate immediately and simply become French. Although this avoids the problems attached to a more multi-cultural approach as described above, the problem is that this ignores the reality of racism. I knew as soon as I heard this argument on Thursday, that I was going to be able to hold it in my head and use it as a tool to apply to other situations, such as people arguing that gays should stop "going on about it".

Strange fruit - food for thought.

How I won my husband in a bet

2008-10-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

Six years ago today I met Dave for the first time in the Watershed Bar, Bristol, so it seems appropriate to relate the tale of how I won my husband in a bet not so very long ago.

Summer 2002 was not an easy time for me. I was knee-deep in my Masters dissertation on citation analysis (not the easiest area of Information Science) and working full-time for Talis, so my social life was thin, to say the least. On one of the few occasions that I did go out, to a party in Moseley, I came to the tragic realisation that everyone had somehow become younger than me, and that in relationship terms, I was almost out of options.

Into this greyish existence stepped an entertaining new friend, Manish. He'd just started going out with my friend Samira, and was about to embark on a 6 week round-the-world trip with his two teacher colleagues, Fraser and Dave (yes, the hero of this rom-com has made an early appearance). The snag was that he was so smitten with Samira that he was destined to spend a good deal of the trip missing her desperately. What better way to relieve the emotional longing, then, than to go tinkering around with the personal lives of singletons such as myself and Dave. It proved pretty easy for Manish to generate some degree of mutual interest, given that I had no life to speak of and Dave (by then nicknamed Short Fuse Dave by Samira) was surrounded by Bangkok prostitutes and lady-boys. We all tentatively agreed that in Autumn, when I'd finished my dissertation, I'd go over to Bristol and we'd meet.

In September, then, the date for this auspicious meeting was set at Saturday October 12th, and over in Birmingham, considerable interest was generated. At the Patrick Kavanagh pub in Moseley one Friday night, I announced to my friends that I was sure I could get to snog Short Fuse Dave on the same night I met him for the first time. The bets rolled in until there was £35 on the table from various friends.

On Saturday October 12th 2002, 3 days after submitting my groundbreaking dissertation (which no-one has ever read apart from my supervisor and the external examiners) I drove down to Bristol with my friend Ashley, and that evening, Ashley, Samira, Manish and I went down to the Watershed bar to meet the famous Short Fuse Dave. Dave is very easy to spot, as anyone who knows this 6'8" man will testify, so I had the benefit of prior scrutiny. What I saw was the man that I'd wanted all my dates over the past 5 years to be.

Straight away I hit a barrier - acute shyness. As I spoke with Dave and Fraser for the first time, I was so nervous that the cocktail stirrer I was twiddling with flew right out of my hands and into the hood of a man a few feet away. Dave and Fraser thought this was hilarious, but I was mortified. Tactics were formulated on the fly, consisting of avoiding Dave like the plague until I'd drunk at least 4 vodkas and could be relied on to operate in the manner of a grown-up woman.

Four vodkas later we were in bar number 2, and I wish I could remember its name, because that was where I finally mustered the courage to approach Dave and start a conversation. Our first conversation consisted of me (ever the sophisticated seductress) telling Dave how much I was looking forward to having cosmetic surgery on my nose, and Dave replying that he wished he could have part of his legs chopped off so he would be 6'4". But we just kept on talking and talking, so everyone left us alone, and suddenly we were in a gay club snogging. And at 2am, we all caught a taxi to Manish's house so I could pick up my bag and take it to Dave's.

By 5am, I knew I was onto a good thing. And then I remembered about the bet, and realised, not without some degree of trepidation, that unless I handled the issue delicately, Dave could easily misinterpret my reasons for being with him and the whole deal would be off. I turned to Dave and said "Dave I've got something to tell you", and mentally prepared my defence. But Dave just looked at me and said "Is this something to do with a bet?" I exclaimed "What? How did you know?" and Dave explained that after we'd snogged for the first time in the club, Dave had bumped into Manish who said "Damn, looks like I've lost £10."

The next day we got up at around 3pm, met everyone in the Watershed for a very late lunch, and then I drove Ashley and myself back to Birmingham. Next day I had 2 text messages from Dave (he later said he knew how much I liked him when I gave him THREE phone numbers, my full postal address and email). After a few days, I wondered how I'd feel if I got home from work one night and there wasn't an email from Dave waiting for me. But that never happened until Dave got a job in the Midlands and moved in with me 6 months later. 6 months after that we were engaged.

And that is how I won my husband in a bet.

As for my winnings, Dave and I drank the £35 at a party a few weeks after meeting.

Good grief

2008-10-08T01:45:00.000-07:00

It's October 8th, so Happy Birthday to my wonderful Dad who would have been 71 today. Dad set off on Bank Holiday Monday, May 1999 with his best friend, cousin and cousin's best friend, for a game of at North Manchester Golf Club and never came back. He collapsed suddenly and died at hole number 7 (see pic) in spite of the best efforts of everyone who was on the course at the time, notably two heart surgeons who had been playing just behind him, and who opened him up on the spot.

We still miss you, Dad. And we still hate anything to do with golf.

Michael Frayn at Birmingham Book Festival

2008-10-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've just got home from an evening out with Sandra, seeing the playwright Michael Frayn speak with David Edgar, as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Michael Frayn is an elegant self-effacing man who proved to be a reasonably engaging speaker. Sandra and I have seen at least two of his plays in the past. We saw Copenhagen, which is a dramatic representation of the meeting of two nuclear physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohrs (thanks Wikipedia) in Copenhagen in 1941, at Malvern a few years ago. We unfortunately drank enough white wine to fog our already questionable intellectual powers, and both fell asleep during the first half hour, destined never to master what is quite a demanding play. We saw Noises Off, described this evening by David Edgar (who was interviewing Frayn on stage) as the world's funniest play, at the Birmingham Rep, and yes it was very very funny. So that's why we were there this evening.

On Copenhagen, Frayn made the point that according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics there is a theoretical barrier to knowing everything about a moving object, and that this reflects broader intellectual currents, in the sense that we now acknowledge the impossibility of understanding everything about the motivations of another individual (tell that to educational technologists). This is important to Frayn as a dramatist, and he went on to elaborate that in plays we don't know what is going on in the heads of all the characters. And this makes plays more like life itself than novels. Novelists like Philip Roth (most successfully, imo, with American Pastoral) have constructed sophisticated narrative structures to get over the problem that it's no longer acceptable for the narrator to delve confidently into the inner mental machinations of all its characters. In the 19th century, on the other hand, novelists like Tolstoy did just that. To what extent is this change attributable to the breakdown of intellectual confidence during the course of the 20th century? Frayn made the point that although quantum physics paralleled this broader trend, they did in fact have divergent causes, though Frayn didn't actually elaborate further on that point. Six years ago (actually the night before I met my husband for the first time), I went to see Jeffrey Eugenides (author of Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) speak at the Orange bar in Birmingham, again as part of the Birmingham Book Festival. Eugenides stated that the generation of writers to which he belonged rediscovered the great novels of the 19th century, jealously realising the narrative powers of those novelists with their untrammeled access to their character's thoughts, and that was why novelists like Roth were so inventive in terms of narrative structure, as they would want to somehow position himself to get similar access, but in a more credible way.

We left the event at around 9pm, both feeling that the festival as a whole would benefit from improved promotion and communication, and that the organisers are clearly missing a trick, as venues such as the Birmingham Conservatoire Recital Hall will realistically only attract the usual suspects (like me and Sandra) when they could be holding events in city centre bars or out in the suburbs, attracting new audiences. This is all the more pitiful given the stellar lineup of this year's festival compared to more lacklustre events elsewhere.

This morning's conversation

2008-09-13T02:49:00.000-07:00

Dave: Did I try to have sex with you in the middle of the night?

Sarah: Yes! It was great! And then suddenly you just stopped.

Dave: I thought you were asleep.

Fiona is 40

2008-09-07T04:32:00.000-07:00

This morning Dave and I are well and truly wrecked. How we imagined Fiona's 40th turned out to be sharply at variance with the way the night turned out.

What we imagined: a restaurant table full of posh party girls from the publishing industry quoffing sauvignon blanc, making polite conversation, and pretending to be interested in a couple of middle-aged middle-achievers (us). Home by midnight.

What really happened: Got the train into Birmingham and met up with everyone at the bar of Hotel du Vin and the small select gathering was genuinely friendly. [In passing, if you ever feel that impeccable service has gone out of fashion, head down to the wine bar at Hotel du Vin, Birmingham. The adjective "attentive" doesn't begin to cover it.] We knew Lindsay, Eamonn and John Bennett already as they all used to work at Talis. We didn't know Ros and Ben, but that was about to change.

Walked down to St Paul's Square, and the eight of us dined at The Rectory. Fairly standard bistro food reasonably well executed. Lots and lots of wine. No real surprises so far.

At around 11, six of us decide to go onto The Jam House. Manage to grab a table, belatedly realising that we've gatecrashed into a private party but not caring. Table quickly becomes a morass of beer and sambuca shots. Live music act is playing an eclectic mix, and Fiona quickly rediscovers her inner rock chick, which to be honest is always close to the surface. Apart from one fairly involved conversation with John, I don't recall doing much beyond dancing (in heels) and drinking, until 2 when the place closed. I do recall marching to the bar to complain that my cointreau had been cleared away by one of their staff. When this was denied I shouted "OH THAT'S BOLLOCKS AND YOU KNOW IT" and stormed off. An hour later I watched Fiona's friend Ros (former Marketing Manager for Ministry of Sound and one-woman party-generator) indiscriminately slamming down all the drinks within her reach including mine. I also remember Dave turning into a disco diva at around 1am. Dave is binary when it comes to dancing - it really is all or nothing. Last night he gave it his ALL. Last week at Boogie Shoes he was in NOTHING mode, and went home early on his own without dancing a single step. Everyone who was with us last night will remember Dave's flamboyant disco-fuelled staircase dance act. I have no idea where this comes from.

At 2am, at the taxi rank, we were invited back to Fiona's in Harborne for more drinking and dancing. I watched incredulously as Dave readily agreed. Perhaps Dave's best mate Manish would like to add a comment to this post confirming how out of character it is for Dave to want to do anything at all after midnight apart from sleep. So off we went. Dave then spent two hours bonding with his new best friend for the night, Ben, Ros's husband, while Fiona, Ros and I alternatively chatted, danced, drank and all five of us vied for supremacy in the past sexploits stakes. Fiona flirted with Dave; Dave flirted with Fiona. We all loved each other.

It all had to end at some point and at 4am we bade farewell and taxied back. Feeling slightly nauseous I reached out for that well known hangover prevention treatment - Heinz tomato soup, and finally hit the pillow at 5.

No headache today, miraculously, but my feet have never felt so sore.

By a country mile this was the best night so far of 2008.

I heart Boogie Shoes!

2008-08-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Boogie Shoes at the Moseley Dance Centre. For the uninitated, Boogie Shoes was the epicentre of dancing in South Birmingham for most of the 1990s, especially if you were a 30 something Moseleyite like me. When my brother went to a rave in about 1990 and had to be ambulanced out due to an adverse reaction to Ecstacy, I knew that I was biologically unsuited to anything more hardcore than vodka and disco. This was confirmed at a party in 1999 when I managed to get high on Tizer - it must have been the sunset yellow.

Featuring a playlist of mainly 1970s tracks, some more leftfield than others, Boogie Shoes attracted a very broad clientele, and I personally had some of my best nights there of the decade. I lost track of the number of men I snogged in what was basically a glorified community centre.

My best friend Sandra, from school, was living with (now married to with a couple of kids) Andy Collins, and Andy together with his brother Sid, were the DJs from the beginning to the end of the Boogie Shoes decade. I was still living in Manchester when I came over to Birmingham with Bill for the first time to Boogie Shoes. And I loved it. In September 1994, I met a psychopath called Mike there, and following a destructive but thankfully short-lived romance, I moved to Birmingham and that's how I came to be living here. Two months later, on November 5th 1992 Boogie Shoes, our romance came to a spectacular end as Mike poured petrol all over his back garden then set fire to it, and later that night, after Boogie Shoes itself, threw out all my belongings onto the street at 2.30am, leaving me (pregnant) and my friend Jo with no obvious place to go. [ A few years ago I told this story - on request - when out eating with a group of people, and my husband Dave ended up in tears listening to it, so hey, happy endings do happen.]

But all of this is just a self-indulgent digression.

Last night Boogie Shoes reformed, for the second time, at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath. Definitely scaled down compared to the cavernous MDC, the new 21st century Boogie Shoes did alright on the night, and we had a great time. A lot of people I knew were out, which is always an agreeable surprise when you're washed up and in your mid-40s like me. I danced myself dizzy like Liquid Gold (not on the playlist thank god) and here is my top 10 of all the tunes Andy and Sid played (not in order):

1. Last night a DJ saved my life - Indeep

2. You've got the love - Candi Staton

3. The Night - Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

4. I feel love - Donna Summer

5. Step on - Happy Mondays

6. I believe in miracles - Jackson Sisters

7. Superstition - Stevie Wonder

8. Everybody dance - Chic

9. Thinking of you - Sister Sledge

10. Is it love you're after? - Rose Royce

Thanks everyone for a great night. Knees were twinging by the end though.

My favourite things

2008-08-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

I've just been onto Amazon and I've ordered everything I want at the moment - that is the following three things:
- Bartok's Viola Concertos
- The Wire Series 1 on DVD
- De Profundis by Oscar Wilde.
I am officially happy, and I'm off for a run.

I've got the fantasy football blues

2008-08-25T04:22:00.001-07:00

Andy Collins has just sent out the first fantasy football email update of the season and it's bad news for me. I'm currently positioned 18th out of 22 in our league. And there was me thinking that my finely-tuned research methods were infallible. This is my worst start since I can remember and in 2 or 3 weeks, when the season has settled down a little, I'll have to do a bit of analysis to see which players are letting me down. In the immediate term, hopefully Gerrard's goal yesterday will have made a bit of a difference.

Both the initial selection of players and transfer decisions in fantasy football would be a lot easier if the data were open. I've been arguing, at an informal / social level, for some time within Talis that the biggest semantic web opportunity out there is not education, but is in fact sport. Sport is something that loads and loads of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, are interested in, and certain sports in particular, e.g. football; cricket; baseball, lend themselves to both statistical and qualitative analysis. Crucially, it's not just the sports professionals that engage in that analysis, but lay people as well. The ongoing success of fantasy football / cricket / baseball and so on demonstrate a widespread hunger for active engagement in professional sports, and many many people like myself are part of leagues that may be organised by the media, notably the Telegraph and the Times in the UK, or more grassroots e.g. the league that Andy organises for his friends. It's easy to see that there would be considerable demand for semantic data services around sports, but equally, there's a significant number of people who would be willing to contribute data, in my opinion. Neither the Telegraph nor the Times provide APIs for people such as Andy, and as a result he has to perform a lot of the calculations manually, and the data is nowhere near as rich as it could be. The semantic web could enable relationships to be discovered in the performance of individual players, clubs and countries that aren't immediately apparent, as well as making statistics more accessible. My friends and I each pay £23 a year into Andy's league, so monetisation possibilities are readily apparent.

To the "player" who successfully develops a semantic platform for sports lovers, then, the spoils.

New running shoes!

2008-08-24T02:45:00.001-07:00

This morning I've been out to "test drive" my new running shoes - Mizuno Wave Rider 11. I bought them yesterday at The Birmingham Runner Shop and they cost my £80, which for some reason is cheaper than my last pair of Mizuno running shoes.

Earlier on in the week, I went onto www.physiosupplies.com, and ordered some new insoles (in common with 70% of the population - apparently - I have dropped arches and need support when I'm running to avoid over-pronating, which is when your feet sort of roll inwards, causing tendonitis and shin splints in my case). My friend Graham, who's a physiotherapist in Manchester, recommended the site. He also has dropped arches and pointed me towards the Orthaheel Sports Orthotic Insole. A snip at £20. Incredibly they arrived less than 24 hours after ordering, on a standard delivery charge. These people should be running the country.

So out I went this morning on a 2.2 mile run. A pathetic distance I know, but I'm building up my fitness again and I'm very overweight. Well the Mizunos gave me the comfort that I'm used to now (the first time I tried a pair of Mizunos on, it felt like my feet were enveloped in a combination of air and cotton wool) but the insoles were the real stars. My feet feel properly supported for the first time ever and it's so reassuring. Maybe I'll never suffer the agonies of shin splints again? Who knows.

Overall, though, I felt like shit. It's hard to believe I'm the same person who ran the Manchester 10K race effortlessly as recently as June. But thankfully it's like childbirth (not that I'd know) - by the time the next run comes along, I've forgotten how awful the last one was. Time for a shower.

Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir

2008-08-20T12:39:00.000-07:00

Like most hispanophiles of my generation, I’ve always been struck by the utter appaulingness of Spanish pop music. Basically it’s poor quality heavily derivative soft rock, as John Hooper notes in the latest edition of The New Spaniards. I spent 6 months studying in Santiago de Compostela in 1985, and the only pop music I liked, apart from British stuff, were records that reminded me of great nights out – so that was a handful of Alaska y Dinarama tracks and the very acceptable (at the time at least) Colecciono Moscas (I collect flies) by Golpes Bajos. [I wouldn’t mind betting that if I played Colecciono Moscas on Youtube I would be horrified, so I think I’ll let the good memories lie.]

I reflected on this most disappointing aspect of Spanish culture over the summer as Dave and I spent a happy 3 weeks touring around Galicia – the first time I’ve been back to that part of Spain for 23 years. I needed to listen to the radio to try to “retune in” to the Spanish language, but the music nearly drove us both insane. This came as a genuine surprise to me, as I’d assumed that globalisation, and the internet in particular, would mean that previously heterogeneous countries would be levelling out culturally. After all, France has produced Air, Daft Punk and more besides, whereas in the 80s French pop music was more or less as dire as that of Spain. Spain clearly hasn’t moved on though, even though it’s a strikingly musical nation.

So why is this? When trying to understand why it is that British music is so effortlessly superior to any of its European counterparts, the conventional wisdom seems to highlight the urban concentrations of Britain’s population. But does that really explain the chasm-like gap? Spain has, since Franco’s death in 1975, become almost overwhelmingly urban, and this is particularly true of the younger generations. Spain’s got loads of cities and the vast majority of them are growing at an impressive rate. Admittedly it’s not always easy travelling between them, simply because Spain is incredibly mountainous, but that doesn’t strike me as a defining factor, especially in this day and age.

What I think might be the case is that there is almost too much continuity in Spain between its old traditional musical forms and the present. My friend Bill and I went to a fiesta in Granada in the early 1990s and flamenco was clearly in vogue among young people, for example. British teenagers and pop artists, on the other hand, aren’t constrained by the past, for reasons that will be culturally and historically complex but probably have a lot to do with the rapid industrialisation that Britain underwent and the rupture with feudal traditions that resulted. It’s only an idea and I may be wrong, but I do think I’m onto something.

Towards the end of the trip though, I finally heard a Spanish pop record that I liked. In fact, I absolutely love it. It’s called “Pretendo hablarte”, it’s by Beatriz Luengo, from the album Carrousel – yes, thanks to a combination of http://www.google.es/ and Youtube, I’ve managed to track (sorry) it down. It has the heart wrenching chorus “Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir”, which doesn’t translate well but basically means “You want to want me; I don’t want to suffer”. It’s the perfect articulation of the painful yearning of love so if you’re feeling lovesick, or if you’re simply curious, go enjoy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prfdtq3_EXs. Apparently they love her in France as well.

Books books books

2008-07-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

Got this from Nadeem's blog, so I'm following suit.

The rules are:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE (can't underline with this editor so I'll put them in red)
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated (by implication it's all the rest and I can't strike out either!)
5) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (many, many times)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Debating Matters

2008-04-17T13:36:00.001-07:00

I spent today at University of Birmingham, judging in this year's regional finals of Debating Matters. Debating Matters is a national schools competition that has been running for a few years now. I got involved this (academic) year for the first time when I attended a meeting of the Manchester Salon about social software last year. It was there that I met Helen Birtwhistle, and she invited me to judge in the first round of the competition.

To be honest, I wondered what on earth I'd agreed to. You see, my life is rather grown-up, extremely so in fact. I work in an office, Dave and I are childless, and I wouldn't dream of going swimming outside adult-only sessions. Dave and I occasionally take my friend's son, Ben, out on a Saturday morning, but definitely not as often as we should.

One of the great things about Debating Matters is that they put together excellent subject guides for the judges and debaters. In fact, I used one of them at work, on public libraries, a couple of years ago. They produce a summary of the principal arguments, and then provide an exhaustive list of URLs linking of good quality free of charge web resources.

The first round, which took place last October at Aston University, proved to be highly enjoyable, and was definitely my most rewarding experience of 2007. The quality of debates is staggeringly high. I still find myself wondering how it's possible, in such a dumbed-down society, that these sixth formers are able to navigate through complex debates such as stem cell research, and switch easily from abstract concepts to detailed examples and back again. That's really why I like Debating Matters so much - it gives me hope for the future. And to be given the chance to further develop the talents of those sixth formers by offering feedbacks baseed on my own life experience is simply a privilege.

So now when I sit in my Hall Green grown-up enclave wringing my hands about intellectual decline, I remind myself of the resilience of humanity, and that even at dusk there is still light.

What I learned about China this weekend

2008-02-04T03:42:00.000-08:00

Spent a bit of time learning about China this weekend. I've been fascinated about China since attending a series of meetings in Manchester in the early 1990s about the emerging Asian economies, prompting me to visit Beijing in 1995. So through a few hours reading on the China area of The Economist website, followed by a telephone conversation with my very good friend Dave, this is what I've ascertained. BTW the following points may not be all consistent, but my priority is merely to record key points at this stage:

China's economy is three times the size of India's. And Sino-Indian collaboration has been over-estimated.
There has been a recent re-evaluation (downwards) of China's GDP, by applying what the World Bank and IMF call "purchasting-power parity" i.e. factoring in the price differences between the two countries. China is generally happy to be considered "poorer" as it provides a negotiating tool with US over exchange values etc. This revision downwards doesn't change the fact that China's growth has been nothing short of phenomenal.
8% of China's exports are to the US. This compares with Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong (20% apiece), Brazil (just under 20%) and perhaps surprisingly India (only 2%).
Although Asian markets have not "decoupled" from the US economy as predicted, they nevertheless have acquired a degree of insularity that will stand them in good stead in the coming period as world markets react to America's woes. This is true even though this recession is more severe than the last, and Asian economies are more integrated into world markets.
Domestic demand will remain strong in Asian economies and Governments now have more flexibility.
US has been applying pressure for the Chinese yuan to be devalued. And indeed the Yuan has been climbing against the dollar since October, but this may not be a direct result of US pressure. Chinese policymakers now believe that the benefits of a stronger currency outweigh the risks. To date, a weak currency has benefited China, helping to grow exports further. But a stronger currency will reduce the costs of imports, especially food and raw materials, and curb the build-up of foreign exchange reserves. And the costs of holding the Yuan down are rising. China has to date held the Yuan down by purchasing foreign currencies very cheaply. And as a result a lot of people have a lot of dollars with very restricted options as to what to do with them. The resulting liquidity in the economy has been absorbed to an extent by selling Government bonds.
If China were to let their currency inflate more, they could afford more imports which would in turn improve their international standing. Every time they increase their currency, though, their exports have suffered and their own internal economy isn't sufficiently broad and robust for them to stand on their own two feet at the moment. Compare this to US at the end of WW2 - with a huge powerful internal economy, they were in a position to assume global hegemony, which China certainly isn't at this point in time.
China has had a dilemma regarding what to do with their considerable foreign exchange reserves. These have tended to be invested in Western banks, which has been welcomed as Western banks need capital right now to shore up their positions e.g. UBS which lost so much money on sub-primes.
Is the Chinese phenomenal economic growth dependent on exports? Some commentators are saying this might not be the case, and that in fact, the growth is more dependent on investment.
Asian markets recently went down as a result of the US crisis mainly because of the general fear of a global recession. China's companies are small, public-owned and therefore quite unstable. Plus, if we say that a big part of the global crisis is down to over-complex financial instruments which spread risk right across the market, then we can say that China is a part of this - it's part of the same markets so those same over-complex instruments also find their way there.
Is there a case for saying that China is being over-hyped? Is the discourse slightly reminiscent of the way the Japanese economy was being discussed around 20 years ago?

The Horizon Report 2008

2008-01-31T09:11:00.000-08:00

The Horizon Report for 2008, looking at emerging technologies predicted to hit mainstream take-up in the next 5 years in education, is out.

It looks at six technologies which are spread along three "adoption horizons" over 5 years.

It predicts that grassroots video and collaboration webs will hit the first horizon which is in the next 12 months. Grassroots video is almost a non-brainer - already easy to create and edit, videos are being nudged into mainstream use in education with services such as YouTube which eliminate the need to invest in expensive infrastructure. Collaboration webs are small inexpensive tools which facilitate collaboration in terms of exchanging information, data and ideas. Of these two, collaboration webs are more interesting in their potential to disrupt and transform educational practice. Grassroots video is arguably only an additional medium which will leave the basic structure of the HEI untouched.

The second adoption horizon brings in two further technologies predicted to achieve mass educational takeup in 1-2 years. These are data mashups and mobile broadband. Mobile technology is about as significant than grassroots video, in the sense that it still doesn't threaten the fundamentals of HE, but it does make education more portable and ubiquitous. Data mashups may clarify some ideas and enable some imaginative re-presentation of data, but again no real change.

The third adoption horizon, a couple of technologies about 4-5 years away, is quite different though. First up is collective intelligence, knowledge and understanding derived from large groups of people, which may be explicit (stand up wikipedia and community tagging) or implicit (such as search behaviour online by large groups of users, or purchasing behaviour on sites such as Amazon over time). And secondly, and more controversially, I think, are social operating systems, sort of next generation social networking. The underlying premise is that networks of the future will be people-centred rather than content-centred. I'm struggling to see how true this is for scholarly output, and I don't think (I hope) that I'm being some sort of luddite.

For example, the report states:

“Every idea, paper, experiment and artefact is, in reality, attached to a person or group of people who helped to bring it about. Imagine the impact of tools that place those people and relationships at the center of any research inquiry: concepts clearly linked to people; connections between those people and others clearly indicated; a much more complete picture of the topic would emerge.”

How much value is this really expected to yield over and above a traditional content-based approach? Isn’t it the idea that has primacy, rather than the underlying relationships. For half a century now we've had citation data. The beauty of citation networks is that they remain idea-centred whilst allowing for the deep and meaningful links that only humans can create. In fact, most of the criticism of citation data is focused on the subjective relationship between the citer and the cited, which is usually seen as a drawback of citation in information retrieval terms. Nevertheless they are more about the academic subject than they are about the surrounding human relationships. I can only see limited applications for such as relationship-based approach. I can appreciate the fact that to have access to more human-based intelligence would have its uses in the collaborative research arena, in terms of helping to make judgements around trust. But surely, even in this intellectually-impaired era in which we live, the idea still has primacy in scholarly life? Or am I missing something?

Control

2008-01-15T19:39:00.001-08:00

First of all, what the hell am I doing blogging at 03:40am when I've got work tomorrow morning?

And on the subject of mental anguish, Dave and I went to see Control - the film of the life of Ian Curtis - on Sunday afternoon. That screenshot on the left is pretty much how I feel right now.

As a Mancunian in exile, currently living in Birmingham, the film was a reminder that there is still a lot of Manchester within me. But the film also demonstrated to me that I'm very much of my time. It was absolutely brilliant hearing Joy Division again, leaving aside the over-played "Love will tear us apart". I always did love the echoing minor chords that characterised the indie / alternative guitar bands of the late 70s and (particularly 80s), but there are a small number of bands that really stand out. For my money, they include Joy Division and Magazine - both years ahead of their time. New Order was never going to live up to Joy Division; I think in retrospect that their sound was too thin to stand the test of time.

The film was wonderful. The cinema was packed on a Sunday afternoon, mostly with 40-something saddos like me and Dave. The performances were amazing. How the hell did Sam Riley get the voice and body language so close to the original Ian Curtis? And John Cooper Clark was breathtaking. The only character who didn't come over well was Tony Wilson. Tim at work says that the actor in question was basing the role on Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson in 24 hour Party People rather than on Tony Wilson himself, and the diluted secondary nature of the interpretation really showed.

I didn't realise until the end that it was co-produced by Deborah Curtis. I did a Google image search and she now looks incredibly conventional. She said in interview that she didn't really recover from the Ian Curtis years until she met her current partner who's never heard of him. As she said, when someone takes their own life, they are effectively having the last word. The residual anger must have been almost intolerable.

I found the film's ending to have an almost genius-like beauty. It showed smoke coming out of a crematorium chimney against a backdrop of Macclesfield hills, reminiscent of the chimneys of the holocaust, to which the name Joy Division was a deliberate reference.

It's now 04:15 and time to renew my attempt to get some sleep...

My fab new running gloves

2008-01-10T11:04:00.000-08:00

As you can imagine, the cold weather is a bit of a problem for us runners at the moment. And never more so than first thing in the morning when you can actually hear the howling wind before you even step out of bed. So I've treated myself to a pair of Vangard lightweight gloves. I did a Buy Now on eBay, for £9.49 and gave them a test run yesterday morning.

They're fantastic. or at least that's how they seem, though the test run did coincide with a particularly good performance from me, especially for a morning run (must have been the pasta I had the night before at Sophie's).

I'm pretty sure they're designed for cyclists - at any rate I bought them from an online cycling store. Well I think they work just as well for runners if not better. When you're running in the UK, even on the coldest wintry days, most people will only really need gloves for the first 1o minutes or so. Because my limbs are constantly moving, I'm pretty warm all over after that. Whereas cyclists arms and hands are more stationary, so maybe these only work as liners for them. However I only need these lightweight gloves, and because they wick properly, I don't overheat later on in the run. Previously I was wearing fleece gloves and then finding that I had to take them off mid-run.

So that's £9.49 well spent. Vangard lightweight gloves highly recommended and not just another gimmicky running product that we don't really need.

Slaughtering the Arts to pay for the Olympics

2008-01-05T14:54:00.000-08:00

For two consecutive days now, I have stumbled accidentally on arts projects or organisations being decimated through the starvation of arts funding that seems to be a direct consequence of the spiralling costs of the London 2012 Olympics. Yesterday at lunchtime I was browsing the Birmingham Post in our downstairs cafe area when I saw to my horror that the Birmingham Opera Company was threatened with closure due to the stoppage of its funding from the Arts Council. Whilst I'm not opera-literate myself, a condition that I have no wish to defend, I'm aware of how innovative the productions of Birmingham Opera Company are, and as they said themselves in the Birmingham Post, once you get rid of organisations such as this, you can't get them back.

This evening, I went onto the website of my favourite theatre company, The Wrestling School, which performs the works of Howard Barker, arguably Britain's most innovative playwright. On the home page, was news that for the first time, The Wrestling School had failed to obtain the necessary funding for one of its productions. I remember very clearly the first time I saw one of their productions. It was at The Door studio of the Birmingham Rep (who usually premier their productions), and when it began, it was so different from anything I'd ever experienced in a theatre that it was like breathing in oxygen for the very first time. The Wrestling School urged people to sign the online petition on the Downing Street website calling for The National Lottery Fund to stop funding the Olympics. This petition has now closed.

But it's not an either or situation. I am a big fan of athletics - I attend live athletics events in Birmingham whenever I can, and last year sat in the NIA for three days with my friend Sally watching the European Indoor Athletics championships that Birmingham was privileged to host. Athletics is about the physical nobility of being a human being. It's about competing, but it's also about demonstrating the human potential at its finest. The arts is something different. It takes us out of our mundane lives and raises us up into a higher sphere. In 1997, when my life dipped into what I hope will be an all-time low, I was in Cornwall, and went to the Tate St Ives on my own. Just for two hours I was able to revel in the light and beauty of the St Ives school of painters and leave the utter misery of my existence behind.

Individuals and society need both the arts and sport. British society could benefit considerably from hosting the 2012 Olympics in so many ways. It's not just about regeneration and improved facilities. At the European indoor athletics, the renaissance of Spanish sports as a consequence of the Barcelona Olympics was there to see in terms of the success of its athletes and the passionate fervour of its supporters. The arts in Britain, already weakened by decades of funding cuts since the Thatcher era, is now severely under threat, and that that is a problem for all of us, not just those employed in the cultural sector.

A personal review of 2007

2008-01-03T09:21:00.001-08:00

Every year, on New Year's Eve, Dave and I each write a list of the most positive outcomes of the past year, plus a list of the bad things. In my quaint little way, I then put the lists into a box labelled "Nostalgia" in our study. So this year I decided to blog our lists.

Sarah's Best of 2007 List

Our one-week holiday in Morocco (Marrakesh) in February, including picking up over £500 from British Airways for agreeing to get a later flight than the one we were booked on.
Dave's outlandish huge Afro wig that he wore at Christian's 40th (seventies fancy dress) party.
Dining at Simpson's in Birmingham with Dave after my Marketing exams in June.
Wave jumping on the island of Koh Chang, Thailand, in August.
Thai cookery course at Chiang Mai, Thailand, in August.
The whole of our weekend in St Ives, Cornwall, in the middle of December. Wintry walks on the beach, Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden and the Alba restaurant were all highlights.
My relations with my in-laws improved considerably over the year, due mainly to activities around Dave's Dad's 80th birthday.
Debating Matters - I was a judge in the West Midlands round of this inter-school debating competition, and it was enormously fun and rewarding.
Sitting with Dave and Elsie at Hilary's barbecue. I hadn't seen them for years, and we chatted the afternoon away in the sunshine. Dave died a few weeks later.
Going to the Take That concert in November at the NEC with friends.
Kevin Rowlands (ex Dexy's Midnight Runners) DJs at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath. When I heard him play Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, I thought that anything could happen next. And when I saw Shug dancing to Eddie and the Hot Rods 70s hit "Do anything you want to do", I knew I'd been right.
My paper is accepted for the ER&L conference due to take place in March 2008 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Dave and I treat my brother to the 7 course taster menu at Juniper's restaurant, Altrincham, one of the best restaurants in England.
Working on Project Xedio for Talis.
My social life improves immeasurably, for reasons I've not altogether worked out, but maybe it's something to do with good luck.

Some bad things in 2007...

Gina Owens dies.
Dave Hallsworth dies.
The CIM Marketing course took up far too much of my time.
Too ill to run the Manchester 10K race.
Car crash at Five Ways, Birmingham. A taxi driver runs into the back of me while I'm waiting at the roundabout.
My head splits open at home when I bash my head into an item of furniture, and I end up spending a whole Friday evening in A&E.
Dave was too ill to go out exploring Kuala Lumpur with me, and I had to go on my own.
I faint on the Bahrain - Bangkok flight due to dehydration.
The bathroom, which was supposed to be done in 5-7 days, wasn't complete for 4 months, and was an absolute nightmare, in the midst of which we started contacting the media.
My Dad's brother, my Uncle John, sent my Mum the nastiest Christmas card imaginable. It began "To Dora. What a shame you haven't got any grand-children at this time of year." And then got even worse...

The optimist goes into a dark place and comes back with hope

2007-10-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to see Jim Crace speak at the Birmingham Conservatoire, an event scheduled at the tail-end of this year's Birmingham Book Festival.

He was introduced by, and later entered a staged dialogue with, John Dolan (of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council - or MLA - and formerly Head of Birmingham Libraries). It's always interesting to see people in different contexts. I last saw John Dolan speak at the PLA public library conference in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago. Last night John seemed equally at home chatting to a prominent author, and it suited his relaxed style.

But the star of the show was Jim Crace, who turned out to be a very engaging speaker. It's one thing to have a local author (Jim lives in Moseley, not far from my house, and where I socialise), but it's another thing entirely to have one of international literary renown. I've read two of his novels, Quarantine and Being Dead, both of which stand out as very well-executed works of contemporary fiction. Even his speech glitters with metaphors and is perfectly composed.

There were two particular strands in his speech which interested me. Firstly, he declared himself to be the "least autobiographical author you're likely to encounter". This made me think about the nature of contemporary fiction. I daresay that George Eliot's Middlemarch was not so autobiographical either - it's hard to imagine a woman in early 19th century Britain being able to experience directly those of an up and coming doctor, such as her character Doctor Lydgate. My Dad used to say that no-one put into words the experience of being a research scientist better than George Eliot. But then 19th century writers such as Eliot, Dickens and Tolstoy were using an authorial voice, a voice that they must have been completely comfortable with. In contrast, today's writers usually write in the voice of a character. Crace spoke, unusually, about some work in progress - a novel in which he's exploring the realisation that in his own political past, he wasn't as courageous as others were. To have written about a highly courageous political activist, therefore, would have moved him away from his strength and range, and was therefore not feasible .

The second main strand of his speech was no less than the USA. His latest novel (of which I now have a signed copy following a pleasant little chat with him at the end) is called The Pesthouse. This came out of Crace's ambivalent feelings towards the States. On the one hand, he professes a love for the States, for providing a home over centuries to various groups, from the Irish escaping the potato famine of the 1840s, to the Jews arriving from the East European Schtetls. And yet, it is also strongly associated with cultural invasions - the coca cola can in the South Seas, as Crace said. So to address these feelings, Crace has, in The Pesthouse, invented a future where the USA has become a failing nation from which everyone is fleeing. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this paradox is realised in the narrative. Crace concludes this strand by suggesting that maybe the things he loves about the USA are eternal, whilst the things he hates may only be the duration of one single presidential term!

And as for the quotation from Crace in the title? Well that didn't have anything to do with either strand of the talk. It's just a good quote.

Misleading Amazon Star Ratings

2007-10-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

I have been a member of a book group for over 5 years. There's been a few personnel changes during that time - one or two people have moved away, one person found that she couldn't find any reading time once she'd had her first baby, and we welcomed two friends, one of whom had just moved into the area, and the other approached us as she was fed up with her current book club which was little more than a dining club for middle-class mothers. But essentially we've remained constant. In May this year we celebrated our 5th birthday with a long weekend in Hay on Wye. It was lovely. Over the lifetime of the reading group, we've evolved a number of rules of engagement. First of all, we take it in turns to host the meetings, and the hostess (we're female only) has to make a meal as well as serve drinks and so on. For about the past year and a half, the hostess has additionally had to propose three books for election, the book receiving the most votes being the one that we'll all read the following month and review at the next hostess's home. You get the picture, I'm sure.

So as the beginning of September loomed, and with it my hosted meeting, my mind started turning around suitable books, and much perusing on Amazon's Listmania! ensued. I felt that it would be interesting to put a work of non-fiction for the first time, and evolved various criteria for how I would select such a book. It had to be reasonably accessible, for example. And not too long - 30o pages max. The right non-fiction refused to materialise.

Finally, I was waiting for a train one day at Birmingham New Street station, when it occurred to me that any non-fiction book for sale in a train station bookshop should be intrinsically accessible. I started browsing through the History session and my attention was drawn to "The Thames : England's River" by Jonathan Schneer. My interest in the history of London was crystallised about a year ago when I discovered that until relatively recently, the Thames was only one of a number of rivers in London, and I've always thought it a privilege to be living so close to one of the greatest cities in the world. So maybe this book on the Thames was it. This is when a further selection criteria came into play. I had decided that I would only pick a book with an average 5 star rating on.

When I got home I found Schneer's book on Amazon and browsed through the reviews. To my pleasure, I found that every single reviewer had given it a star rating, and there was a number of references to how readable it was. I had found my non-fiction book.

On Sunday September 9th, we all met at my house, and after discussing the last book (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) and eating dinner, I presented my three options. There was slight consternation at the appearance of a history book, but people had open minds and it was voted in (by a narrow margin, it has to be said, and I had to use the deciding vote which is the hostess's perogative!)

A couple of weeks later, then, I started reading The Thames. The first chapter, which went through the prehistoric era, was fascinating, but as we progressed, it started getting a bit hard going. My head was spinning with the speed of the narrative, with important eras such as the Tudors flashing by in less than a page. I experienced mounting panic as I thought of my friends struggling through this stuff, knowing it was all my fault. The narrative did settle down a bit, for example the Blitz had its own chapter, and was incredibly interesting. I did learn quite a bit, but the book was definitely faulty - it was episodic and the metaphors of the river were a bit laboured to say the least.

Last Sunday we all met up at Sally's house to discuss it. We all agreed that it was pompous, with no real narrative flow, and dubiously selected historical episodes, well those of us who had managed to read it agreed anyway. Everyone really wants to choose the book that is unanimously loved and remembered (even though these make for pretty dull discussions), and I'm no exception. Truly on the back foot, I explained that I'd made sure that it had an average 5 star recommendations on Amazon before selecting it. We all speculated about how couild this be so? The best explanation we came up with was that the recommendations might have been from Anglophile Americans. I agreed to go back and check.

So this lunchtime I've been onto Amazon to revisit those recommendations, and am disappointed to find that the 6 reviews have been written by only two people. In fact only two people, namely Kurt Messick and J Chippendale (who incidentally are both English) are responsible for all 6 reviews. Each have written one review and then posted it three times.

Are Kurt and J. friends of the author or are they working for the publisher, perhaps? I think we should be told.

Shouldn't Amazon be checking for duplicate reviews that could be (deliberately or otherwise) distorting the overall rating, perhaps? Yes definitely. The average star rating is displayed prominently with the book's description, right from the initial search results onwards. I for one, use it as a guiding factor when purchasing all sorts of stuff on Amazon, including books. Next time, I'll check the reviews a little more carefully, especially when it's not just my own enjoyment but that of other people that's at stake.

Be who you are, 100%

2007-09-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I went to the funeral of Dave Hallsworth, aged 78. He died a few weeks ago, on 30th August, but the donation of his body to medical research - his express wish - lifted the usual constraints of time and place, so we were able to celebrate his life and mourn his passing on a Sunday in the majestic surroundings of the Palace Hotel in Manchester.

Dave, like his wife Elsie who survives him, was a life-long fighter. He was entirely true to himself, ruthlessly honest with everyone he engaged with, and battled to change the world in line with his beliefs.

Dave and Elsie had two sons and some (at least two - not sure how many exactly) grandchildren. Part of Dave will undoubtedly live on, then, in future generations.

But Dave's legacy transcends the biological. Mick Hume, one of the speakers at the funeral (who also gives Dave an honourable mention in Monday's Times), described Dave as the most vehement and uncompromising atheist that he had ever known (never having met my Dad, presumably). And yet Mick expressed his hope that Dave's spirit was at work in some way in that room on Sunday.

When someone like Dave Hallsworth, one of the great men of the British 20th century imo, dies, the sadness that we feel should gradually give way to something more enduring and edifying. Whether we remember the things someone once said, using them as a tool to fashion our own thoughts and ideas, or somehow try to incorporate something of the essence of that person in the way we live, we should apply more than a narrow biological definition to Legacy. We all have a legacy to build and offer to future generations, whether we are parents or childless.

Today, as I remembered the man who was famously court-martialled for attempting to set up a trade union in the Royal Navy (!), I thought of Dave's energetic fearlessness, his tireless drive for a more just world, and I felt that the day became more intense, more purposeful, as I endeavoured to be what I am, 100%, and all of the time.

Impressions of Thailand

2007-08-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

I got back from our three week holiday in Thailand on Sunday (19th August – same day as their referendum on the constitution). I had a great time, especially in Bangkok which is such an exciting city (though loads of people we met couldn’t get out of the place quickly enough). I remember clearly the point, in the early 1990s, at which I realised that something really dynamic and exciting was going on in South East Asia, and I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get out there and see it for myself.

I particularly enjoyed getting to grips with a country about which I previously knew very very little. I read the Bangkok Post most days and tried to piece together some robust impressions, combining my reading with my observations whilst travelling.

Obviously the referendum was the most significant theme in the country and was on the front page of the Bangkok Post most days. It wasn’t difficult to get a sense of censorship and manipulation in the media’s treatment of the issue, and this impression was confirmed by my friend Supanza, who has been following the news avidly from her new home here in Birmingham. I look forward to discussing this in greater detail when she and her husband Mark come over to our house for dinner in a couple of weeks’ time. I’ll try to resist making one of the dishes that we learnt to make on our Thai cookery course on an organic farm just outside Chiang Mai.

I think that the most acute comment I read about the new constitution was in Bangkok Post about a week ago. It said that if a group of military chiefs can stage a coup simply on the basis of corruption and write a new constitution for the nation’s consideration, then the biggest problem that arises is one of ongoing instability. Because if one group of military chiefs can do that, then presumably in a year or so, some other group, making the same perception of corruption, can just go ahead and do the same thing all over again.

Of course, one of the most striking elements of Bangkok is the sex tourism. According to a thriller I read called Bangkok Eight, if you take the whole of the Thai female population that is reasonably physically attractive, 20% of them will prostitute themselves at some stage in their lives. And the second statistic that I found amazing, is that the West2East prostitution in Thailand, so prevalent in areas such as Sukhumvit Soi 4, represents only about 5% of the overall sex tourism of Thailand i.e. the rest is Thais serving Thais, in venues such as barber shops. That makes for one hell of a sex industry. The novel explores (in a fairly superficial sort of way) how Buddhism can accommodate prostitution to an extent. This made me remember our trip to Cuba a few years ago, where there was unquestionably more social tension around prostitution than is the case in Thailand – and I see that as a combination of the Catholic Church and the Revolution (which justified itself partly on the basis of eradicating exploitation of Cubans by Americans).

Another interesting discovery I made in the Bangkok Post was that the “happiness level” of Thailand (the so-called Land of Smiles) is actually quite low. The article attributed this mainly to economic factors, specifically to job insecurity (fear of low labour costs in China) and the credit boom which is engendering high stress levels over debt payment.
Maybe one of the effects of the Thai credit boom is the impressive retail sector of Bangkok. I’ve honestly never experienced anything like it. The most recent shopping mall to spring up is called the Siam Paragon (see image above), and it’s wonderful. Highlights for me were the Ferrari showroom (on the second floor!!), the amazing bookshop on the fourth floor (where I bought a disappointing Thai novel called Chalida – a Thai family drama), and the cinema on the top floor (where we were initially tempted by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 3D, but settled for The Simpsons. It was fascinating to see every single person stand up for the Thai National Anthem – I myself have only once in my life stood up for the British National Anthem, though I accept that I’m exceptional in that sense). And Siam Paragon was only one of a whole series of malls in Bangkok, many of which ran into each other, and all of which were several storeys high.

Consumerism in both Thailand and Malaysia (we stayed in Kuala Lumpur for a few days in the middle of the trip) seemed to be conducted exclusively in English language. I couldn’t help feeling that some of the impact of the branding would be lost in translation. For example, Bobby Brown’s eye-shadow colours have English names, and I wonder how many Thais will appreciate the nuances of a colour called Heather.

There are definitely pockets of poverty in Thailand, but the Economist reported last week that the rich – poor gap is not as wide in Thailand as it is in some other Asian countries.

Thankfully my enjoyment of Thailand was not confined to reading Bangkok Post. The Thai cookery course I alluded to was a fantastic day spent with a lovely international crowd, mostly childless which is always good. You can’t fail to be impressed by the ultra-modern skyline of Kuala Lumpur, and we ate wonderful food in both countries. I’m glad we tried Malayan food, which is a bit more elusive in Malaysia than Thai cuisine is in Thailand. We spent 6 days on a lovely island called Koh Chang, which is very close to Cambodia. We made friends with a really nice couple from Vienna, who were staying in a nearby resort, and we enjoyed the time we spent with them. The malls of Bangkok and also the night market of Chiang Mai are both great shopping experiences. And Thai people are really really really friendly and polite, and they’re living in one of the safest places that I’ve ever visited.

The disappointments were few and far between, but I suppose the Floating Market didn't really live up to expectations - it's little more than a tourist trap these days, elephant riding is definitely over-rated, but bamboo rafting is the experience you should avoid at all costs, as it's simply the most tedious way of spending 40 minutes that the tourist industry has yet to come up with.

Revish raises interesting branding issues around Web 2.0

2007-04-26T03:39:00.000-07:00

My colleague Richard Wallis yesterday pointed me to a book review site www.revish.com which has been set up by Dan Champion as a serious book review, filtering out lite reviews by imposing a 250 minimum word count on each review. Intrigued, I had a look.

I spent a fair while browsing around the site, but I was more or less immediately struck by how solidly middle-brow the reviews were. As far as I can see, and I've had a good look, this seems to be quite consistent across reviews and reviewers. There were one or two heavyweights with reviews of novels such as Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (reviewer didn't like it; I loved it, but the review was solid) and Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow (reviewer loved it; I'm scared of it, having read Pynchon's The crying of lot 49, nearly losing my sanity in the process). So what I'm saying upfront is that this isn't about me thinking that I'm too good for www.revish.com, although in passing, it's a shame that the reviews aren't really much better than Amazon's.

The really interesting thing is from a marketing perspective. If you decide to target a particular market segment, in this case serious readers, to a Web 2.0 (therefore defined around participation) site, then how to control that effectively. I'm not sure whether the measure of imposing a minimum word count was effective in differentiating www.revish.com from Amazon et al. Some reviewers just fill the space with a summary of plot, rather than engage deeply and critically with the text. You may have a particular niche in mind for a Web 2.0 site, then, but the all-important participants may have different ideas, and ultimately they will determine the natureof the site, the creator of the site merely setting up a shell for their content. If the site really takes off, and the creator wants to advertise, then how to define the audience. This point is a general issue in marketing with the "new media" but I think that participative sites such as www.revish.com raise particular issues.

Gina Owens

2007-03-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Gina Owens died late last night at the Macmillan Unit, Frenchay Hospital, Bristol. She had her closest friends and relatives around her.

When I visited her, two weeks ago, it was clear that beneath her dressing gown she had become thin and frail. She put her hands to her bald head whilst articulating her fear of dying.

But I will remember the Gina I knew in Manchester in the 1990s, with her clear and incisive mind, strong and healthy but never overweight physical frame, and shiny thick blonde hair. The Gina that thrived before the ravages of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and two punishing rounds of chemotherapy took hold.

Above all, I will remember that it was Gina who told me that 20th century international relations wre centred on the containment of Germany. That food production and market dynamics are fundamentally incompatible. And the biggest point of contact that I had with her when I visited her two weeks ago - when I said that everything in life was about people, and she looked at me and nodded in fierce agreement.

Collaborative fiction using the blog medium

2007-02-01T04:32:00.000-08:00

My friend Bill and I have embarked on a really exciting adventure.

Bill set up a fictional blog back in 2005, and the narrative is basically set in a futuristic institution, where a number of imprisoned inhabitants use a blog to communicate with each other, moderated by the institution's staff. It is partly a satire about New Labour forms of authoritarianism. It is called Community Fair, which as you can see features on my blogroll.

Bill is an expert on 18th century culture, and has told me in the past about novelists at that time being far more collaborative than they would subsequently become in the 19th century when individualism truly took hold on society. When Richardson, for example, was writing his epistolary novel, Clarissa, in serial form, he would receive letters from readers when it was still incomplete and this would guide the denouement of the plot to a certain extent. Bill was hinting very heavily for such feedback on his blog, but was doomed to be disappointed for a long time.

It was only when I started this blog that I saw very clearly what form such collaboration should take.

On Sunday, I decided to put a comment on one of the postings of Community Fair. I have always been particularly intrigued by one of its characters, Roxanne, who is quite feisty, so I decided to pretend that I was a long lost friend of hers and sent a posting along the lines of "Roxanne, is that really you... where have you been all this time", without telling Bill that I was doing it.

An hour or so later I received a text message from a very excited Bill, and we began to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of developing this fictional collaboration.

We briefly considered the idea of agreeing in advance a meta-narrative that would guide interactions between Sarah (it's funny being a real person AND a fictional character at the same time and it'll be interesting to see how that pans out) and Roxanne. But we dismissed that approach because it's been done before. It's basically the approach that Mike Leigh takes in his improvised plays and films. We want to do something truly experimental. For us it's not enough to do something that's more or less been done before but on a new medium.

So now that Roxanne has replied to Sarah, I have to look back at all Roxanne's previous postings as well as the reply, and compose a response that will move the narrative forward whilst remaining consistent with her past.

The novel has always been connected to a specific period in human development, and maybe it's a bit tired by now, so will it start to be superseded by more collaborative forms of story-telling? Only time will tell.

The Holocaust on YouTube

2007-01-28T04:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, in a marathon 4 hour successful attempt at study evasion, I sat and watched almost endless videos on YouTube.

It was Holocaust Day - something I always remember because it's my brother Richard's birthday, and besides, we have a grandparent of Jewish lineage.

After watching God knows how many music videos, and a handful of entertaining home-made ones (I can certainly recommend Bride has Massive Hair Wig Out), I remembered it was Holocaust Day. Unusually there seemed nothing on the TV to commemorate it, so I searched for original footage on YouTube.

I found, without much difficulty, a series of videos called Nazi death camps : Cruel British footage of liberations. These clips each had a huge warning about the shocking nature of the material, how it was completely unedited, and this seemed to be borne out by the comments on the first page.

It's 8:45 long, longer than I'd usually tolerate on YouTube, and I prepared for some seriously shocking stuff. It showed the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen in Spring 1945. The thousands of emaciated corpses that awaited the liberators must have been shocking and unforgettable. However, 62 years on, to anyone who's ever watched a documentary or read about the Holocaust, it's nothing that hasn't been exposed thousands of times before.

[I'm running the risk of sounding jaded here, so I should emphasise that the Holocaust never ever should lose the capacity to shock, and indeed it hasn't. See the powerful novel Fugitive Pieces for further details. ]

So for me, easily the most fascinating material wasn't the video, but in fact the comments. So far, there are 144 comments on the first clip of the series alone. It was surprising how many nazi-sympathetic postings there were. Dare I say how refreshing it is to have uncensored access to these idiots? It's only by exposing this stuff to the oxygen of rationale to comments such as "Sieg HeiL, Sieg HeiL, fuck all jews!!" that these backward ideas will finally die.

But the stuff that shocks me again and again is something rather different. Am I alone in finding mundane responses to events such as (and not excluding) the Holocaust almost intolerably inappropriate? Is "How cruel" a comment more suitable for an incident of playground bullying than for one of the most barbaric episodes of human history? My friend Carolyn and I went to see the excellent film The Pianist a few years ago at the Mac, an arts centre in Birmingham. The scene where nazis throw an old man out of a first floor window in the Warsaw Ghetto was greated by tutting from a number of audience members! I struggle to think of a greater insult to the victims. Tutting is a response I would expect to receive if I dropped litter in the street.

In If this is a man, Primo Levi notes that if the Holocaust had continued, then over time a completely new vocabulary would have had to develop. Because the word "cold" doesn't really come close to describing spending a winter in Poland in the open air wearing only a thin shirt. And hunger is what we feel when we've skipped a meal, and to a concentration camp inhabitant would have been something of an enviable condition.

But enough of diversionary tactics such as genocide and mass suffering. It's time to do my marketing homework.

A blog wouldn't be a blog without some self-referentialism

2007-01-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

This morning my friends Kevin and Kathy in Manchester sent my husband Dave an email saying "Word has reached us that your blog-hating wife has set up a blog."

Obviously, in the past few days, since setting up Traffic Light Musing amid a level of self-publicity that friends and family alike have come to expect from me, I've been reflecting upon the whole nature of blogging afresh, as an "insider", as it were.

The World in 2007, published by The Economist, contains an article on Web 2.0 entitled When the hype dies down. It predicts that in 2007, the Web 2.0 hype will abate and meanwhile "the rest of the world - people who may be hearing the words "blog" "wiki" and "podcast" for the first time - will begin to use the new media as they become simple and ubiquitous..." As an aside, the whole point of blog software is surely that it is simple in its essence - taking the complexity out of creating a web content and simplifying stuff like adding graphics and so on..

Back to the main thrust, as an outsider, I made the mistake of seeing blogging as an atomised activity, like a diary. But now that I'm a blogger myself, I see clearly how sociable blogging really is. Since starting my own blog, I'm much more likely to engage in other people's blogs such as my colleague Nadeem's. Instead of being an inward introverted activity, it's just a novel form of communication. Actually, I hardly know Nadeem, as he's fairly new at Talis, and we work on different teams. However, I have insights about his beliefs and thought processes through reading his blog that I would never have obtained from office small-talk, or more arguably, from a personal website.

So if The Economist is right, we'll soon be able to communicate routinely at a new level of depth with pretty much everyone.

Mud blood and poppycock

2007-01-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading a great book on World War One called Mud blood and poppycock. The author, Gordon Corrigan, with an entire career in the upper echelons of the armed forces behind him, sets out to destroy a number of the persistent myths of WW1 in a robustly argumentative but persuasive style.

Most memorably, he challenges the idea of there having been a "lost generation", arguing that, in fact, both German and French fatalities were significantly higher. He has a raft of statistics to support his argument, for example for every 12 men mobilised, only 1 was killed. He suggests that the reason for this perceived "lost generation" is the way that Britain mobilised troops i.e. usually by geographical location, so The Battle of The Somme, for example, will have produced a concentrated number of casualties in specific communities.

This really surprised me. But not so much as his contention that it was not the generals who were to blame for unnecessary bloodshed. Rather, the meddling politicians of the era, especially Lloyd George, had more blood on their hands than history admits. The most memorable scene from Blackadder Goes Forth, for me, was the scene on the eve of the battle, where a group of NCOs are standing around a map of the battlefield with tin soldiers arranged, and one of them simply picks up a pan and brush and sweeps all the soldiers into the dustbin. This seems to resonate with people. But a few years ago, I read The Wipers Times, a series of satirical journals produced in the trenches, and I was struck how much criticism was meted out to Lloyd George compared to the military leaders.

This was a good read, though quite hard work as there's quite a lot of military detail, and I particularly enjoyed the occasional lapse into military vernacular such as a soldier's biggest fear being the loss of his "wedding tackle"!! How quaint.

Five things - ok it's my turn

2007-01-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

Here are five things that you might not know about me. On the other hand, you might already know them, given that I have a marked tendency to go on and on about stuff...

1. Let's go for the jugular and start with the most dramatic one. In early 1990, I got held up by gunpoint in a pub in the West End. It's a great story.

2. I owe my marital status to a bet. I won £30 AND a future husband!

3. My favourite form of stressbusting is to read lesbian detective novels. I love them.

4. I once had plastic surgery (ok so most of you already know that).

5. I am an ex-page three girl! When I was a baby my photo appeared on page three of the Sun, on the letters page!

So there you go.

Disintermediation of political parties?

2007-01-11T07:20:00.000-08:00

I'm reading the Lyons Review of Local Government "National prosperity, local choice and civic engagement" at the moment. It's a fairly seminal document, and a lot of the ideas contained within it were destined to reappear in the Local Government White Paper "Strong and prosperous communities", published in October 2006.

Both the Lyons Review and subsequently the White Paper, are concerned with levels of civic engagement in British society. They both reference the problem of low turn-out rates in local government elections.

But an interesting thing happened to me this week. Within the space of 24 hours, I received two completely separate emails, each asking me to sign the Petition Against The Road Tax on the Number 10 website. I duly signed. It seemed quite popular - in fact the TV news that night reported that a phenomenal 253,000 have signed it so far. I also signed the petition to get rid of British Summertime. It seems that, in spite of all that we say about political apathy in the post-cold war period, people still have opinions about particular interests, and want to make a difference if they can find a way of doing so.

So is the problem, in fact, political parties? That would seem to make sense, given the broad detachment from big ideas that is characteristic of post-Cold War intellectual life. Let's say that political parties have traditional been about a recognition of collective social interests and a formulation of over-arching ideas that meet those interests.

In a fragmented society that no longer believes in either broad social groupings or big ideas, could electronic petitions, and other micro-forms of consultation, in fact be the way forward for modern democracies? Not forever, I hope. I like to think that humanity will one day find it in itself to put the traumas of the 20th century behind it, and rehabilitate the Big Idea. But for the time being, it keeps the grey cells active, and maybe maintains the idea that people can make a difference.

To be honest, I don't even know whether or not it's a good thing. That's not the point of this entry. But that might be where things are headed. After all, librarians have to cope with disintermediation, so why shouldn't politicians feel some of the pain?