Petrona

Goodbye, but a new hello.

2006-05-09T08:41:00.000Z

Petrona has moved. I will no longer be posting on this site, but over at a different web host, Typepad. Petrona's new url is http://www.petrona.typepad.com , so please do bookmark the new site and come to visit. I very much welcome you there and hope you will continue to read and comment. My first post at the new site is about the move. I will keep this Blogger site live in case of any links "out there" to the postings contained in it. The whole archive has been copied over onto the new site. I will notbe making new postings to this Blogger site, though, so I suggest that you over-write its url in your favourites/bookmarks lists. I do apologise for asking you to change to a new url, as I know it is a pain to do things like this. But I hope you will have enough motivation to do so, and that you'll continue to visit me at the new site. Thank you very much for visiting Petrona. With best wishes Maxine.

Spreading the word

2006-05-06T19:36:00.000Z

Successful Blog - Helping Clients Get Past Blogaphobia In response to my precis of the recent Economist new media survey, Frank Wilson made a typically succinct and pertinent comment about the future of these media: "no one in fact knows how this is going to develop. But those who are participating have an advantage, because one can understand this phenomenon only to the extent that one participates in it." Frank has articulated very well a particular aspect of blogging: the ability to understand it by those who don't do it. It seems to me rather like trying to explain to someone who does not have children what it is like to have them. Liz (M. E.) Strauss, on her excellent site Successful and Outstanding Blogging, posted on this topic a week or so ago (link at start of this posting). In her article "Helping Clients get past Blogophobia", Liz discusses her huge enthusiasm for blogging and the effect this has on clients. "We who blog, learn blogging like folks who move to a foreign country learn a new language and culture — by immersion. The people that we talk to regularly are having the same experience as we are. They know the sense of community. They know the personal and professional growth that comes from putting things on the Internet rather than always taking things off. They know, as we do, that not every blog is a whiny diary or some sort of political flame war." But: "the people we meet who aren’t blogging have heard the stories without benefit our experiences. Pick the wrong example and we can scare the pants off the exact people we’re trying to invite." To advise the bloggophile on tempering her enthusiasm so as not to scare away the uninitiated, Liz links to a posting by Anil Dash on Moveable Type news. Anil says: "All of us who work with blogs, especially those of us who’ve done it for years, are excited about their potential. We can come up with lots of useful examples of how businesses can benefit from blogs, but sometimes our own enthusiasm gets the best of us. To put it more succinctly: A lot of folks who are blogging “experts” talk about blogs in a way that scares the hell out of normal business people." Anil lists some key points that can be used to help make the case to a client or employer, with the goal of showing that blogs are safe. In the comments to Anil's post, Celeste W of Studio 501C draws attention to her own post, A blog can be like a business lunch. She's talking about nonprofit organisations, but Celeste recommends that such organisations have a blog that acts like a business lunch -- a simple, general blog that chronicles life in the organisation. Such a blog can even (!) be that of PR or marketing people -- the Air Conditioning Contractors of America being given as an example. Celeste provides lots of good examples of the kind of item that could be included in such a blog. The bottom line is, those who blog know it is great. We know about the wonderful mix of self-expression and communication that blogging brings. We are aware of the power of the blogging movement (as articulated, for example, in An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds). But lots of other people don't know or understand about this power, and are suspicious. (Remember that "blogs are cannibals" article in the online part of the Wall St Journal.) These articles I've linked too here are useful examples of how bloggers' enthusiasm can be tempered and channelled so that more people and organisations can be persuaded of the power and usefulness of blogging. The prediction by the Economist -- one day soon, everyone will have their own blog -- is one with which I concur. I also think every organisation will have at least one, as more and more of us join the conversation.

Writing websites

2006-05-06T17:21:00.000Z

A website called YouWriteOn.com was mentioned in the Times the other day, so I went over to have a look, despite the offputting title (what self-respecting writer would call a site that?). The promise of the site is to help "new writers develop and talented writers get noticed and published". It is "sponsored" by the Arts Council, so I presume it is kosher, but it seems to be a sort of Connotea/Delicious for writers, rather than the writer's X-factor (as the site claims) or anything else. The homepage says that you review and rate other members' opening chapters, and then (upon completion of your task, preumably) your opening chapters are sent randomly to another new member to review and rate. The highest-rated chapters receive a "free critique from our literary professionals, who include established authors and a literary agent". The site says it will publish the highest rated book of the year -- however, this book will be "available to order from Amazon, WHS, Waterstones" et al., which makes it sound to me like a print on demand operation rather than a conventionally published book. Seems like a lot of effort to go through for something you could do yourself anyway. You can't seem to do much without actually becoming a member, but there is plenty of information on the site, so it should be fairly easy to find out if it is really offering nascently publishable writers anything useful, or not. In looking for YouWriteOn (ugh), I mistyped the url I had jotted down from the Times and arrived instead at YouWrite.com, a completely different site. YouWrite is not yet operational, but will be an exercise in global writing: "Welcome to YouWrite.com, an exciting new concept for people interested in reading books and in writing them. With YouWrite.com you will soon be able to join people from all around the world to write a book together. We will start the story and then you take over. Alternatively, if you have a great idea then submit it to us and we may choose your contribution as a starting point." At this stage, you can't find out much, but you can register and they will email you when they get to the next phase. This activity (group writing) is as old as the hills; my children do it at school sometimes, though via pen and paper, not on the web. There must be other websites around that are doing this kind of thing, but somehow I can't imagine putting the proposed output very high on my reading list.

What is it with these websites and running together words with captial letters in them?

(Spell-check suggestion of the day: "worried" for "YouWrite".)

Book review: a pair of pairs

2006-05-06T16:31:00.000Z

Preferring to believe in serendipity than a kind of internal morphic resonance, I have by chance read in direct succession two books by pairs of authors. One is a series, the other not. First up, Guilt, by G. H. Ephron -- actually Hallie Ephron (sister of Nora, Delia and Amy) and forensic neuropsychologist Donald Davidoff -- this pair has written their fifth Dr Peter Zak crime-fiction novel. I suppose I read the first, Amnesia, as a result of one of those Amazon recommendations leading on from Jonathan Kellerman, whose early books are just so, so good. I followed up immediately on Amnesia by reading Addiction and Delusion. All are excellent, featuring the aforementioned Dr Peter Zak of the Pearce Psychiatric Unit, and combine his working life at the unit with (you guessed it) a related crime to solve. Obsessed, the next book, left me with the slight feeling that the series may have peaked, but nevertheless I was very keen to read Guilt. I've been waiting for ages for it to come out in paperback, but thanks to an Amazon seller and the Palm Beach County Library system, who seem to have finished with their copy, I was able to get a jump on cheap publication. Unfortunately, Guilt confirms to me my impression that the series has become a tad mechanical. The authors have shifted the emphasis away from the Pearce (so we barely get any of Gloria or the rivalry between Zak and his colleague Dr Kim, and only a couple of patients feature; Peter's mother is reduced to a convenient plot device instead of a character in her own right), and away from Zak himself onto Annie, a character introduced relatively recently. Annie is a recognisable genre cliche: "perfect girlfriend/investigator/feminist" who can do it all without a man, but who would quite like to get married really. By focusing on her, Guilt becomes too much like all the other crime-fiction novels out there, and loses its distinctive neuropsychology "voice". Added to this, Guilt attempts to address post-9/11 paranoia via a plot about a Harvard bomber, which I don't feel is entirely successful. I don't mean to say the book isn't good -- it certainly is. But the authors have to fall back on the usual "girl in peril" angle to keep up the tension, and the tracking down and identity of the bomber is nothing like as nail-biting as some of the patient-related plots of the earlier books. I would recommend Guilt if you liked the earlier books in the series, but don't read this one first. I hope that if the authors write another one, they return to a Zak/Pearce-centered plot and cut down the Annie quotient (Sara Paretsky does the woman investigator thing so much better). The second paired novel is Catch Me When I Fall by Nicci French. NF is the husband and wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. They have written several excellent crime-fiction books together, each being a stand-alone, so each focuses on a different issue, usually of contemporary urban life. A woman is almost always the central character, but presented as a real, fallible person, not a superheroine, a good start. Catch me when I fall (another book obtained pre-paperback release but actually in paperback by some Amazonimagic -- I have my theories) almost blows it for me. It is written from the point of view of a character who is so unsympathetic that I fairly often lost interest and almost put the book down for good. Not that it isn't well written, but I just could not understand why anyone would put up with this stupid woman. Having to view the world through her perception was just so annoying! However, just as I got to the point of no return, we hit part 2, in which another character takes over the narration. This has the dual positive effect of allowing one to see the main character more at a distance, with the result that she is immediately more bearable; and increases the tension, because now we don't know if she is going to die at the end (as advertised in the prologue) or not. The plot outcome is pretty obvious (though I do read a lot of these books!), but that doesn't matter. As usual with Nicci French, the writing is so good, and the context of the book far richer than just the "crime" aspect, that one feels pleased to have read the book, and to have gained some insight in the process. It is not the best book of this collaboration, but definitely recommended. Incidentally, as I've mentioned previously, Nicci Gerrard has written two novels under her own name, Solace and Things we Knew Were True, which I highly recommend. They are not genre fiction. Both are excellent, extremely readable and perceptive portraits of women and the effects of their families on their lives. I suppose they are like Joanna Trollope but edgier and more intimate.

Web technology news

2006-05-05T20:29:00.000Z

Meredith Farkas is a switched-on librarian who is very keen on wikis. She has a blog called Information wants to be Free, which I read regularly and admire from afar, not fully understanding it. Later this month she is giving a talk in Vermont about using social software in academic libraries. It will be a great talk to attend, as she's aiming it at people who aren't previous users of blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, instant messaging and something called screencasting. She's asking readers of her blog to comment on which items are most likely to be helpful -- and there are loads of comments. Kind of makes English libraries look very behind the times. Most of them run to Internet access but that's about it. I hope Meredith will, as seems to be her usual practice, summarise her talk on her blog after she gives it, for those of us unable to travel to Vermont to hear it in person. Over at O'Reilly Radar there is a posting about the Google News alphabet. Brady, the poster, says: "When Google Suggest first came out one of my favorite pieces of commentary I saw was Erik Benson's Google Suggests alphabet in 2004. Now that News Suggest has come out it seemed like a fun exercise to compare the two alphabets. The first term is from News, the second is from Web." Go over to the O'Reilly site to see the paired comparisions such as H - heather locklear, hotmail; W - white house correspondents dinner, weather-- although they are interesting from a social trends point of view, they definitely lack the kind of dimension provided by Minx's lists --- naturally! Darren over at Problogger (the guy who helps bloggers to make money, or failing that, helps them make their blogs better) is doing a blogathon to make some money for charity. He's asked all his readers to ask him some questions, and then he's going to blog non-stop for 24 hours to answer them all. I think I am about no. 79. Will let you know if I get an answer. (Unsurprisingly, my question is about indexing.) On the important topic of net neutrality, Liz (M.E.) Strauss over at Successful and Outstanding Blogging has a net neutrality resource which she is regularly updating with new links. Everyone is campaigning to keep the legislators off the net, not least the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, so Liz's site is a useful resource both to find out why and to keep up with the latest on the topic. (A little-known fact about Tim Berners Lee is that his mother and mine were colleagues working on the Mark 1 computer in Manchester, UK, in the 1950s.) My erstwhile colleague Chris Anderson has a very interesting post about the long tail (what else?) and Google. Chris discusses how Google searches are time-agnostic -- "what matters to modern search engines is relevance." A little-noticed feature of this, Chris says, is that older content scores higher because it has had time to accumulate more incoming links. "Older is better" (right on!) As usual, Chris carries some interesting stats and insights into this long tailyness, the bottom line for him being that without search, only 12 per cent of his traffic is to his older posts, whereas with it, the amount goes up to 40 per cent. Old stuff really does rule! If you haven't seen Chris's blog before, take a look-- his book is out very soon, and his blog is the diary he kept while writing it. The Long Tail will be as influential as John Battelle's book on search, I predict.

London Underground fashion victims

2006-05-04T20:22:00.000Z

Annie Mole of the extremely delightful London Underground Blog has posted a 109-picture set of "London underground fashion victims" on Flickr. Or, as she puts it: "People seen on the Tube wearing dodgy clothes. Faces have been blurred to protect embarrassment or not shown at all." For some time now, Annie has been surreptitiously photographing fellow-commuters who have a strange dress sense, and posting the results on her blog. If you can face them in toto, take a look. If a less concentrated dose is more to your taste, subscribe to Annie's blog. I recommend it. And don't risk go ing on London Underground if you are wearing Ugg boots, especially if they are fakes (I don't know how she can tell but she can, and she will comment accordingly).

Small publishers

2006-05-04T20:15:00.000Z

Two links on publishing matters which offer a consistent message from different perspectives: Mediabistro links to a Businessweek article on the power of the small presses in publishing. Apparently there are nearly 63,ooo of them and they accounted for more than half of book sales (in the US, presumably) in 2005......"by trying out different economic models, small presses such as Archepilago, Toby Press and Akashic can publish a comparatively much smaller run of copies, a practice deemed too costly for the large houses, who must sell large volumes of copies to earn back their advances and stay in the black. And they have deployed innovative marketing strategies in order to penetrate a fickle market." Grumpy Old Bookman has a long posting containing his usual readable, informed and unique perspective on various publishing-related issues. In this context, I quote: "Yes, once upon a time there were lots of small publishing firms whose editors were interested only in finding good books -- a term which was defined as being the kind of book which they themselves enjoyed. Forty years ago, in the UK, it was possible to break even on a novel by selling about 2,000 copies; and you could usually shift that number to the library market. So the average book would more or less pay its way, and the occasional surprise hit would keep the firm in business. Nobody got rich, but writers could be kept going for half a dozen books or so while their promise was converted into achievement.That business has been dead -- totally and completely six feet under -- for at least twenty years. The library market has virtually vanished, and all the small firms have been bought up and incorporated into half a dozen big (by publishing standards) firms which are themselves tiny subsidiaries of much bigger (and often foreign-owned) companies -- companies which expect their small publishing sections to make substantial profits. Not publish literature, but make profits." ........ "If you want to please yourself, follow your own instincts, and write whatever inspires you, feel free. And when you've finished the book, there are lots of small presses and thousands of other ways to seek readers for it." Useful links provided on the original post.

(Spellcheck suggestion of the day: "modification" for Mediabistro.)

Economist new media survey

2006-05-04T19:21:00.000Z

Somewhat, but not very, belatedly, here is my summary of the Economist's new media survey: the survey itself is available to subscribers only. Introduction

Moveable type was introduced in 1448 and spread across Europe to allow people to produce texts that anyone could read (ie not in Latin). Radio and television contributed to the age of mass media, at its zenith in around 1960.
In 2001 “moveable type” was invented again as a better blogging tool, marking the gradual transition to a new era, that of participatory (or personal) media. The corporate media giants have yet to realise that this new media is not about what they distribute to users, but about users putting as much into the network as they take out.

Blogging

A blog is a personal, online diary, social by nature but the unedited voice of a single (usually) person, linking to other blogs that the author recommends via a blogroll. Blogging is a means of self-expression and a revolutionary way to communicate. Livejournal/MySpace blogs have an average of seven readers, personal blogs more typically a few hundred.
Blogs began in 1997. Everyone will have a blog within five years, and journalism will be a conversation, not a sermon. People will participate, connect and converse.

Journalism

Yahoo news is a mixture of professional and amateur content: during events like Katrina or the London bomb attacks, citizens uploaded and tagged photos on Flickr; some were posted on Yahoo news by the editors. This is an overwhelmingly positive movement.
Recent scandals have shown the fallibility of trusted mainstream media sources (eg Jayson Blair of the New York Times). Newspapers are downsizing. Classified advertisements are losing out to online services such as Craigslist and Googlebase.
The “old” media must evolve, remove subscription walls which bloggers will not link to, and join the conversation (encourage reader participation).

Wikis

The English-language Wikipedia has more than 1 million articles and is almost 12 times larger than the print version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it is only five years old. Its information is freely shared and is editable.
Wikis allow groups of people to share a page, for example team members in a company.

Podcasting

Podcasting began in 2004 and is when an audio file (recorded from anywhere) is posted on the Internet. People can listen to it, download it, and subscribe to feeds from a podcaster. Podcasting is therefore about “time shifting”—listening offline to something at a time of the user’s choosing.
Podcasting is a less social (and less revolutionary) medium than blogs or wikis, but it has immense power: listeners become their own programmers; they are freed from advertising; and they can listen when they want. The costs of producing content are dramatically lowered. Podcasting does not mean the end of radio.

Metaverse

Second life (SL) began in 2003; it is not a video game but a “metaverse” in which about 100,000 people live, make things and parcticipate in society as avatars (online extensions of themselves). Larry Lessig, an author, gave a talk in SL, and lots of avatars actually showed up.
Things created in SL are exported into real life – eg games, fashion, songs, films (of events in SL). SL reduces the costs of making a movie to zero.

What is a media company?

The Internet is a much larger change than the coming of television. The user is the programmer; and small audiences are good for advertisers. (The long tail.) Although there is professional media content on the web, the general trend is towards more user-generated content, such that the Internet will become more and more like a “stock exchange” in which users create (offer) and search, share, navigate and enjoy (bid for) content. Advertisers will also bid to have sponsored links placed in front of these users.
Google is a media company run by technology people ( a search engine with lots of free internet services). Yet it does not produce what media companies traditionally manufacture: content. People need help navigating round content (Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia). Yahoo, on the other hand, is a media company now doing research into the sociological aspects of the internet.
Network effects (eg telephone services) and exchanges (eg EBay) increase in value as the number of users increases. They also become barriers to entry by rivals. Hence YouTube (1 year old), which lets people share and upload videos, and Amazon are rushing to exploit network effects.
What will happen to the “old media” is unknown. Some will find niches (eg family content for Disney). Some will try to combine old empires with new marketplaces (MySpace/News Corp. and AOL/TimeWarner).

Revolution

Society is in the early phases of a media revolution on the scale of that started by Gutenberg in 1448. Benefits include the democratising effects and global reach; threats include pornography, religious fanaticism and terrorism.
Linda Stone argues that we are victims of “continuous partial attention” and long for protection, meaningful connections and focus. New media companies understand this – the era of participatory media could be more serene than the era of mass media. Nobody really knows, though. “Every society gets the media it deserves”.

The Economist survey ends with a list of sources and further reading.

Booksets

2006-05-04T07:26:00.000Z

Hard to Find Books from Booksets.com The Booksets website (link above) sells more than just second-hand books (though it sells a lot of those). From the homepage: we have a "huge stock of specialist extracts, articles, and offprints from hundreds of journals dated between 1650 and 1950. We have a terrific selection of Victorian material from the Edinburgh Review, the Dublin Review, and Blackwood's Magazine. " If you want an act of parliament, a pamphlet or antiquarian book, this seems to be the place to go. The company is UK based, but its international postage rates are extremely reasonable -- including discounts for multi-orders. One of my bugbears with Amazon is that if you order more than one item from a third-party seller, you have to pay the same postage (plus the Amazon cut) for each item. The Booksets site has a good search engine (search by author, title, description or ISBN), as well as browsing by category. There is a sister site called BooksetsExtra which sells discounted new books, cds, dvds "not featured on our traditional Booksets site".

Preparing for Divorce While Happily Married

2006-05-03T22:14:00.000Z

Preparing for Divorce While Happily Married: Tips From a Divorce Lawyer by Jonathan J. Fogel, Esq. I just had to draw attention to a review of the above book on the Armchair Interviews blog. As can be deduced from the title, the book is about preparing for divorce while happily married, to save yourself a lot of trouble and expense when the time comes....The review contains gems like: "If you're in the throws (sic) of a highly charged divorce, his book is a handy reference." (The spelling makes me wonder if they mean handy in the sense of chucking at the less-than-perfect spouse, possibly to keep him/her in order?) I love the way Armchair Interviews sums it up after the end of the review: "No one wants to think their marriage will fail but Fogel's book is a good one to have handy. " So now you know what to buy your friends and relations for a wedding present.

Magazines and blogs

2006-05-03T21:47:00.000Z

Is a blog a magazine? When the web started, online magazines were facsimiles of their print versions. Then “online-only” magazines started up, which looked and read pretty much like print magazines. Then came more and more functionality and the two formats diverged. I was reminded of this by an article called “Evolution of the online species - print periodicals versus online periodicals” which I read online (;-) ) in a publication called Brandweek, which in its turn exists on a giant aggregate site called Look Smart Find Articles. Where to look for what you need TM – a website that says it contains 10 million articles. This site is pretty good, actually – it is a searchable collection of magazines on any topic, including various online tools such as bookmarking on the web and one-click “print and share” format. I recommend a look at it next time you have a spare 20 years. To return to the subject in hand, is a blog a magazine? I think not. These days, the online magazine has evolved to use the networking capabilities of the web. The classic blog features analysis of (mainly) and links to what’s on the Internet, with various degrees of analysis or personal thoughts. An online magazine is struggling with the web’s “instantness” – surfers probably don’t want to read a 4000-word article online, most of them would print it out to read later (as I’ve done with the Economist’s recent New Media supplement, for example, not that I’ve got around to reading it yet). As J. C. Hertz, the author of the Brandweek article linked to several yards above, says: “How do you design a media product for networked information space? What exactly are the genetic markers of a successful online magazine?” His (her?) answer is that the online magazine has to be about social shared experience – outward, not inward, looking. Gossip is the key, apparently, or humour, or information about commercial transactions. Consumer Reports, says Hertz, is a better online than print product because it is searchable and because its ratings are updated as new models come onto the market. What of blogs, though? In an article in Opinion Journal (part of the WSJ) sent to me by Dave Lull, Daniel Henningner discusses the often-quoted statistics about the number of blogs out there—35.5 million a month tracked by Technorati, 75,000 new blogs a day, etc etc. (What should be measured is not total number of blogs, but number of “active” blogs – those that have been alive for more than x months and on which postings are made every y days – there are far, far fewer of these “sustained” blogs.) Henninger goes on to highlight a "Blogs Trend Survey" of last year, in which America Online reported that only 8% blog to "expose political information" and 50% of bloggers consider what they are doing to be therapy. He has a go at blogs in the rest of the article, mainly because some of them are vulgar and tend to swarm hysterically over some current scandal, and he gives as an example of a “therapy” blog one written by someone who turned out to be a cannibal. I’m not going to go on about that as his article has been, inevitably, vilified and chewed over by the bloggers. But to me it is interesting that so many people (according to America Online) regard blogs as primarily vehicles for personal expression. Very different from online magazines.

Tree of life

2006-05-02T22:05:00.000Z

Isn't this a beautiful picture? It is from the Tree of Life web project, which is a collection of several thousand (so far) web pages categorising all living things on Earth. See here for the goals of this wonderful project.

Blogger for Word

2006-05-02T20:05:00.000Z

I may be very out of date here, but I've just discovered that Blogger has an application for Word, so you can write your posts in Word, spell-check them there ;-), and then post them via a toolbar button (or save as draft). Here's the link to the application; another link to the details of how it works; and a final link to a list of FAQs and what Blogger ominously calls "known issues". Got to beat Blogger spell check!

Becoming a press expert

2006-05-02T19:50:00.000Z

In a post in March, Placeism in the Global Network, I referred to an insightful talk by Danah Boyd about the popularity of MySpace as a social networking phenomenon. Since then, I've been following Danah's blog apophenia :: "making connections where none previously existed". Immediately after a short but sweet entry about the two gifts one gives one's children being roots and wings, she has quite a long posting about what it is like to become a press "expert" . I think this is a characteristically excellent post, and I highly recommend reading it. The article works on two levels: first it is a primer for people who end up dealing with the press, and what to expect -- how much effort and time you have to put in to get half a sentence quoted. Everything that Danah says about her experience rings true. I imagine if you are a scientist who is just about to publish the biggest paper of your career in Nature (oh, OK then, or Science), and the accompanying press release is going to result in 500 media enquiries, it would be very useful to have read this piece. The other aspect of the article is that it provides a telling account of how the press actually works -- how a story that one might read in a newspaper gets put together in terms of content and, dare I say it, quality. From what I know about the process (some), it seems spot on. Danah Boyd says about herself on apophenia: "My name is danah boyd and i'm a PhD student in SIMS at Berkeley and a social media researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Buzzwords in my world include: identity, context, social networks, youth culture, social software, performance, Friendster, MySpace. I use this blog to express random thoughts about whatever i'm thinking about." She's a woman to watch -- she is widely admired in the community in which she operates and beyond, and I am sure she's going far.

Parrot held in prison

2006-05-02T19:35:00.000Z

Parrot held in prison April 28, 2006, © The Daily News A parrot has spent five days under police 'interrogation' in prison in Argentina. A judge ordered Pepo to be held in custody until he told police who his real owner was. Two neighbours, Jorge Machado and R Vega, were both claiming ownership of the bird. Judge Osvaldo Carlos decided the parrot should be sent to prison until he said the name of his owner. After five days, Pepo said Jorge's name and also sung the anthem of his favourite football team San Lorenzo. Machado said: "I knew he wasn't going to let me down, he is a real friend and we support the same football team." (Found on Perceval Press)

Readability levels

2006-05-02T19:25:00.000Z

A week may be a long time in politics but in blogging, anything that old is positively prehistoric. Never mind, I will nonetheless let you know, courtesy of a link from Dave Lull sent "ages" ago, that you need to have had roughly 11.5 years of "schooling" to be able to understand Petrona -- 13 per cent of words have three or more syllables, and there are an average of 15.6 words per sentence, according to the algorithm over at Juicy Studio , where you can see the full gory details (a table) for this or any other website. Just enter the url and off you go. The Gunning-Fog readability index of Petrona (11.47) is about the same as that of the Wall St Journal, apparently; this is higher than Time and Newsweek (10 each) and lower than The Times and the Guardian (14 each). I'm surprised that the index rates WSJ lower than the Times and Guardian. Academic papers weigh in at 15-20. Many years ago -- before blogs were a twinkle in the eye -- we ran a Commentary in Nature about an algorithm to measure readability of text, including scientific articles. The author, a Professor Hayes, created his own algorithm for the purpose, which last I heard is still going strong. But I think that it is impossible to rank the comprehensibility of a complex technical document by the length of words used, as opposed to the way in which the sentences are constructed. The Commentary certainly generated a lot of reader comment, though -- as was the intention. Juicy Studio is so named because it is run by someone called Gez Lemon (great name). It is a site that aims to promote "best practice for web developers in a fast moving industry" and has lots of articles about things like accessibility guidelines for Web 2.0 and Greasemonkey scripts. I think my archiving mission is too low level for them, unfortunately, as it looks like a very nice site. I ran the site through the readability test and it came out with a Gunning-Fog index of 10.5, slightly lower than Petrona. Which just goes to prove my point, as I cannot understand very much of what is on Juicy Studio even though I have at least 10.5 years of "schooling". No disrespect to them, it is simply that I lack the specialist know-how to understand the details of many of the posts, however few syllables per word are used. PS Blogger spell check, a rudimentary beast, wanted to replace Greasemonkey with gruesomeness.

Inner Minx and Little Minx

2006-05-01T16:57:00.000Z

Last weekend, while I was playing tennis, the Inner Minx gave birth to the Little Minx, a blog featuring "stories for those with a short attention span". I bookmarked the first offering to read when I had some leisure -- just now, in fact. The Heart of Quetzalcoatl is a haunting piece of fantasy writing that I highly recommend reading. I hope that the Little Minx will feature more writing, and soon. This author has talent. (Read her poems and humour on her main blog). Thank you, Minx, for sharing the story. Keep writing.

Nature content matters

2006-05-01T16:17:00.000Z

Content Matters is Barry Glaubert's blog for "occasional ruminations on the convergence of content and technology". Barry has been posting a series on "The 50 content companies that matter", and the other week he chose Nature (Nature Publishing Group to be more accurate). So I thought I'd share Barry's views with any Petrona readers who might be interested. As Barry says, "Nature is part of the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd. While many of the companies profiled on this blog are early stage, Nature dates back to 1869. With 400 employees, NPG publishes sixteen journals and four clinical practice titles." He goes on to highlight Connotea, with its recently launched community wiki pages (I have just started to play around with these, so do visit my Connotea wiki!) To quote Barry: "But, Connotea is hardly the only forward-thinking solution from Nature. They have been early adopters of RSS and podcasting, and have even launched a mashup of Avian flu reports with Google Earth. A number of Nature writers and management have blogs, as does even the CEO of parent company Macmillan." The NPG blogs are currently the news@nature.com blog, which is a very active forum for reader comments on Nature's daily, free, online, science news service; Nascent (Timo Hannay's web publishing development blog); Free Association (Nature Genetics blog); Action Potential (Nature Neuroscience blog, which has been rather quiet recently); and The Sceptical Chymist (a strangely titled chemical biology blog). The CEO's blog referred to above is called CharkBlog. I'm not going to provide links to all these, as they can all be accessed via Nature's website at www.nature.com/nature. Barry finishes up by mentioning the Open Access movement, and concludes: "In a market where a few large companies control access to much of the critical information, Nature is a shining star for their flexibility, their willingness to test new technologies and their efforts to keep the 'community' in scientific community. " Thanks, Barry! Many of Barry's other featured companies in his series are business-information rather than publishing companies. But I think his listings are worth a look; among those featured of which I have some personal knowledge are Flickr, Linkedin, Public Library of Science, Delicious, SixApart and Wikipedia.

Online books and a mystery site

2006-05-01T14:46:00.000Z

I've posted before about the website Associated Content, from the point of view of writing for them and getting paid for it. Since then I attempted to sign up, but flunked out as I was alarmed by their apparently stringent rights agreement. Seemed to me that if you sign up and write a piece for them, they can then do anything they like with it and, by contrast, you can't post it anywhere yourself, or have anything else to do with it. I sent them an email to ask them to clarify, but not surprisingly have not had a response. That story aside, Associated Content has a useful page about free online reading. I am not a fan of online reading, I prefer to read anything at more than a few pages in length in print rather than on screen. But if you are broke and/or don't mind online reading, the AC page links to some useful portals, for example Gutenberg, University of Pennsylvania and Questia, where you can read online books or find out whether a book you want to read is available online in full-text. Google book search is not on the list, nor does there seem to be a text ad to it ;-) One of the recommended sites is www.mysterynet.com. I went to take a look at that as it bills itself as "Online mysteries, mystery games, mystery books and resources. For everyone who enjoys a mystery... " My verdict: the site seems a great resource if you are interested in crime fiction, but it is not primarily a source of free online reading of mystery books. There are links to some stories online, for example Sherlock Holmes, but the site is mainly an online magazine. One resource on the site that looks very good is Mystery Books & Resources : "Uncover mystery book picks and authors by genre, and thoughts and perspective from today's mystery authors." There is a long list of articles, many of which look to be excellent --- one is by Jodi Compton, for example, who is a very good author based on the two books she has written so far. There are also articles by Laurie R. King, Lisa Gardner, Lawrence Block, an interview with Margaret Maron, and many others. On this same link, there is a list of just about all the classic as well as current popular crime-fiction authors, each with a link to a page about their books -- blurbs, author biographies and purchase options. Together with resources (eg awards), puzzles, games, etc, this site seems a brilliant one. It is now listed on Connotea Detective. (Not quite sure how I managed to miss listing it thus far.)

Paperback colours

2006-05-01T14:23:00.000Z

Continuing to enjoy the luxury of a bank-holiday Monday in the UK, and a bit of "through the day" posting, here is a post on Paperback Writer that is perfect for Jenny (my daughter that is, not Jenny D, though I don't know whether or not Jenny D is colour-centric). The posting is a list of ten links to sites about various aspects of colour. Paperback Writer has found most of these links via The Generator Blog , so I went over to have a look at that, and find that it is "not about those machines used to change mechanical energy into electrical energy. It's about software that creates software. Software to play around and have fun with." (Malcolm will be pleased that he's still in a job, then -- which is to find out how muscle crossbridges convert chemical into mechanical energy.) The Generator Blog looks fabulous -- full of lovely widgets, logos and gadgets that you can use to pretty up your site -- random cat-name generator, famous logo generator, flip-flop squirrel generator -- you get it. I now realise where quite a few of the cute pictures and cartoons I've seen come from! A useful post on Paperback Writer that has nothing to do with generating blog titles or suchlike is "Know thy industry", which dissects out the six "major publishers" for all those of us who might avail ourselves of their services one of these days. PBW defines "major publishers" as "who does the most business and can potentially pay me the most money for what I write." So far as I am aware from my own knowledge acquired from who knows where over the years, PBW is spot on with the first three in the list: Bertelsmann, CBS Corp. and Holtzbrinck (nowadays my own employer since its purchase of Macmillan just over 5 years ago). Next are Lagadere, Pearson, News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch). PBW provides useful links to these publishers' websites and lists a few of their better known imprints.

Witches and confessions

2006-05-01T11:20:00.000Z

Macbeth cannot hold a candle to my favourite three witches in the world. Two of them are fictional: Hermione Grainger and Ginny Weasley. The third is very real: the Wicked Witch of Publishing, who is currently featuring on her blog a characteristically excellent post about her experiences in a cigar bar with Ron Hogan. The posting covers a range of issues, which I'm glad to say the Witch will discuss in more detail in future, but I was struck by one comment she made, on the Kaavya Viswanathan affair. All the blogs have been buzzing with this story for the past week or more, and I for one find these obsessive chewings-over of the unfortunate or the thoughtless completely missable. However, one can always rely on The Wicked Witch not to follow the crowd: she has her own take on it, in feeling sorry for the "Indian princess" because, for the rest of her life, Kaavya V. will be associated in people's minds with this event. The Witch specifies Ted Kennedy in this context, but she could also have included James Frey, P G Wodehouse, Bill Clinton --- people who, whatever else they do in life, will always be associated with one foolish act. Of course, this also happens to people when something happens to them that is completely outside their control. Life is tough. Changing the subject to something more upbeat, Ron Hogan's partner in GalleyCat is the wonderful Sarah Weinman, who has posted on her blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind a link to a picture of herself at the recent Edgars. She looks absolutely lovely - I am sure she is too modest to ascribe all the credit to the photographer. The next posting on Confessions is Sarah's weekend round up of literary links to the weekend papers. You could spend the weekend just reading that one set of links.

Successful and outstanding blogging

2006-04-30T17:54:00.000Z

A really fantastic piece of news: I have been awarded the title of SOB (successful and outstanding blogger) by M. E. (Liz) Strauss of "Successful and Outstanding Bloggers" (subtitle: a community of leaders) -- for one week only. And among several others. I can't believe that Liz has even heard of Petrona, let alone reads and likes it. However, I found out last night that she's included me in the 28 April week roll of honour. Liz says of SOBs: "They take the conversation to their readers,contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger. I thank every one of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community." When I found she'd included me this week, I said: Maxine Says: April 29th, 2006 at 4:50 pm I can’t believe that you’ve featured Petrona on this posting. I am so honoured. I have no idea why you put me there, but thank you so much! With best wishes —reeling off now Maxine. She replied: ME Strauss Says: April 29th, 2006 at 5:08 pm Petrona!You write well and with passion about things that bloggers need to know. Sounds like a successful and outstanding blogger to me. Congratulations, Maxine! Well, she said it, not me! It is so cheering and motivating to have someone think and say this about one's blog. Liz even has these delightful "SOB" buttons that she invites winners to put on their blogs. Of course I can't work out how to do that, but if I ever do, I'll post it. I hope anyone reading this does not think I am blowing my own trumpet too much -- my excuse is that feedback of this nature is pretty unprecedented to me. I can't recall winning an award before, and it is doubly nice to win one for an activity I enjoy so much. Thank you, M. E. Strauss.

Books, Words and Questions

2006-04-30T17:13:00.000Z

Amy of Books, Words, and Writing has another blog called Amy on the Web. It is Sunday and I have just played yet another game of tennis so am exhausted at this unnatural effort. Before checking to see if Minx has given birth again during this interlude, as she did last time, I took a look at Amy's blog and found one of those questionnaires on it. I think this has evolved from a nascent form that I saw a few weeks back, as I recognise some but not all of the questions. So, moment of trivia, I've filled out my answers. That's it for quizzes for a while now, unless I find a really irresistible one. (the asterisks in Q1 are a spam avoidance tactic). 1.YOUR P*** (or romance) STAR NAME:(first pet and current street name) Booey Canbury 2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME: (grandfather/grandmother on mother's side first name, favorite candy) Edith Crunchie 3. YOUR "FLY GIRL/GUY" NAME: (first initial of first name, first three letters of your last name) M. Rke (don't know what a fly girl is either, Amy, but mine sounds like a character from Alexander McCall Smith) 4. YOUR DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite animal, name of high school) Cat Headington 5. YOUR OPPOSITE SEX NAME: (name of dad/mom, cell phone Company you use): Adrian British Telecom (6 missing!) 7. YOUR STAR WARS NAME: (daily prescription medicine, make of car) None Currently Thankfully Peugeot 8. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, street you grew up on): Lavinia Sundial (OK OK, I didn't give myself my middle name any more than I gave myself my first name, and until now it has been a dark secret) 9. YOUR FASHION DESIGNER NAME: (first word you see on your left, favorite restaurant) Leon Wagamama 10. MY TRAGIC HEROINE NAME: (favourite flower, word off nearest book spine) Speedwell Way Ahead Disclaimers: I don't ever go to restaurants unless it is with the girls, and they aren't bothered about fancy eating, plus one is a vegetarian. So not much choice. And I haven't eaten a Crunchie bar for ages and ages, honest!

Libraries (should) rule

2006-04-29T19:31:00.000Z

An excellent blog that has started fairly recently is The Good Library Blog. In it, Tim Coates is writing about the absolutely disgraceful, parlous state of UK libraries. Plagued by funding cuts and lack of support from politicians local and national, the reading habits of us all in the UK are under threat. Maybe Tim Coates will provide a focus for action in our most notoriously apathetic nation (animals excepted). He has already provided statistics as to real cuts in funding in central London, outer London and boroughs elsewhere, in successive posts. He's also articulated the scandalous fact that if you live in London, you can't even have a library card that will work throughout the whole city, you need a different one (with all the associated bureaucracy) for each borough. As most people don't work in the same borough in which they live, you begin to see the problem. The situation seems very different in the USA, or so it seems from reading the many fearsomely impressive technical blogs out there, for example The Shifted Librarian, Information wants to be Free, that impressive guy from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and others. (See Petrona 2, or just key in "libraries" into Bloglines and see the riches.) As Mr Coates points out, "One of the underlying causes of the collapse of the public library service is that it has lost contact with the people it is there to serve". The system has no public accountability, so what information is available tends to be that obtained by the media. As he says, "The Times discovered that publishers charge a higher price for a book if it is supplied to a library than if it is supplied to a book shop. There's no reason, other than that they can get away with it." Why aren't librarians themselves agitating about this, Mr Coates asks? And so do I. This week, with local elections coming up and with politicians coming knocking at our doors for a brief few days beforehand (we won't see them again until the next election) , is an opportunity to ask them what they are doing about local libraries. Not only is it election time, but for many students across the UK, exams are coming up in the next weeks (two of them in this house for starters). The indefatigable Mr Coates states: "There isn't a public library in London open on any bank holiday and hardly any of them are open in the evenings. Few of them have the books and other material that are recommended or discussed on the thousands of study courses that are available in London. London is the learning centre of the world, but our public library service is an international disgrace. The public library ought to be the place that everyone needs at exam time, but such is the low standard of service that is offered that no one even thinks of them as a place to use. Somewhere you can get out of the house, or your flat and a bedsit and make a little corner with your books and notes in a quiet well lit place. That's what a library should be. " If you are in the UK (or even if not), go and visit The Good Library Blog. It will rile you up, provide links to some interesting books, and maybe give you some ideas about what we can all do about this parlous state of affairs. In the Royal Borough of Kingston, where I live, the council is always doing surveys and consulting residents (and then, it seems, ignoring what they say and introducing stupid residents' parking schemes or selling off yet another piece of land for an office or luxury housing block, rather than a park or a school). A few years ago, RBK (as it calls itself) included in one of these surveys a comparative question in which local taxpayers were asked to rank services in order of value to them. On the list were schools, hospitals, care homes for the elderly and so on. But it was a monotonic list, i.e. all these facilities were listed and you had to rank them in comparison to each other. Of course, the library and museum did not rank that high when compared with your child's school or your old granny's quality of life for her final years. Guess what, the jobsworths at the council used these answers to cut funding to the museum and library, including closing them on certain afternoons of the week. They have now realised that they asked the question in the wrong way, as a result of much campaigning from the museum group, but I ask you! Books are what we all need to provide colour and imagination to our lives, not to mention education in the broadest sense of the word. Not everyone lives with an Amazonaholic like me -- libraries should be there to provide everyone with the chance to stretch their mental wings in whatever direction they like, most particularly children.

Google 0 Google 2

2006-04-29T17:05:00.000Z

Hooray, the increasingly unstable Blogger is allowing postings and comments again! A quick update/link: Darren Rowse has finished his series on blogging credibility over at Problogger. There are a total of 11 tips. It can be read and enjoyed irrespective of one's views on the subtitle of Darren's blog "helping bloggers to make money". And a bit of nice googley stuff -- I had noticed a week or two ago that they'd launched Google Calendar but inwardly shuddered and ignored it in favour of my 100 per cent reliable A5 notebook week-to-a-view office diary. But Ian Hocking of This Writing Life is using it and says it is quite good so I thought I'd at least set it up to see for myself, which I've now done (v easy). Cathy and Jenny have both enthusiastically joined in, so our 3 calendars are now synchronised in multi-colour format (luckily, Google's palette is similar to Jenny's approved colours, or the application would not stand a chance in her book). Only problem now is Malcolm, who is probably far too independent to want to switch over from the system he currently uses. As the main point of having the diary in the first place is to ensure that he or I leaves work in time to pick up Jenny from childcare, synchronisation of some kind is necessary. Bit difficult for two independent beings, so maybe we'll continue on with our current system of a weekly Sunday manual synch. of Malcolm's Outlook with my A5 with all the numerous school letters, etc. Cathy and Jenny will no doubt increasingly use Google calendar to check whether the taxi and chauffeur are available before fixing up social events at "point of invitation".... The other application announced a day or two ago is Google sketch-up (or SketchUp (R) as Google calls it). A three-dimensional modelling tool for designers, architects et al., Cathy and Jenny have both immediately downloaded it and got stuck into the video tutorials. They are both very keen -- Jenny has already created a wave. Next stop, theme parks. On a more serious level, a Mac version is said by Google to be available very soon, and the whole thing will be mashable upable (I know all the correct terminology, you see, even though it reminds me of potatoes) with Google Earth before too long. Google Earth, incidentally, is now available for three other European countries as well as the UK. So Google is not doing well in my book at the moment with Blogger, Gmail or Reader (seems always to be down), but Calendar and SketchUp(R) seem good so far -- maybe the problem is that these applications are fine at launch, but can't cope when millions of people sign up. And as they are all firmly labelled "beta", they are not exactly "supported". But they are free, so one can't complain too much -- and they are a whole heap better than not being able to blog at all or having to put up with all those hotmail irritations to get a free email account.

Blog help wanted

2006-04-28T08:11:00.000Z

On my travels in the world of the blogs, I frequently (let's be honest, almost always) admire and wonder at the beautiful blogs people have. Certainly aesthetically, but perhaps more important (to me), functionally: most particularly in terms of tagging. What I would like to do is to be able to tag (and hence categorise) articles on my blog so I can aggregate them for various purposes -- not least as a traditional index so I can follow my own threads of logic. I am not very technically able myself, and don't have any time to get into this. So how about some help? Can anyone refer me to an organisation or better, a knowledgeable person who could come and visit me to set up a blog for me along the lines I envisage, and show me how to use it? I will pay the going rate! (Time is money). I know that it is possible to tag on Blogger without driving the clicks away to an alien site like Technorati, but I can't work out how to do it. I can see from other people's Blogger blogs that you can do lots of interesting things with tags and categories, as well as design. I have played around with a Typepad blog, as I think the tagging functionality is built-in, but I have not got very far on the prototype -- I can't seem to make anything happen. SixAlert (Typekey) is highly thought of if you believe what you read, but you have to pay them up-front (they say you can have a free trial but you have to pay first), and though I am happy to blog via paid subscription, I want to be sure that this will give me the features I want before signing up. Then there are blogs on platforms I haven't heard of, such as Tribe's, which have tabs as well as lots of other nice tagging/categorising features. All sane suggestions for what I can do are more than welcome. (I live in Surrey, UK, or "outer London" as it can otherwise be known.) Please provide some contact details in the comments in the wonderful event that you are reading this and are a person who could come over and show me what to do! But even if no such person reads this posting, I am sure there is collective experience about how to find a technical expert who can help you to set up a blog, so I do hope very much to hear about it. Thank you.

Time off for good behaviour

2006-04-27T22:15:00.000Z

No time to post tonight: I went straight from work to an "Arts Evening" at Jenny's school which over-ran by an hour. It was very pleasant to wander round the classrooms looking at the displays of art and sculpture; to watch the drama group and all the various talents on display, as well as the pride and engagement of all the teachers. Wonderful. Jenny and her friend Lydia sang a duet, the "Fruits Basket" theme, which was unaccompanied as the piano teacher had never heard of Fruits Basket (what?! where has he been all his life?) so did not know the tune. Lydia is a very assured singer who has an operatic voice, so she and Jenny were very sweet to listen to. I'll just ask the question: Can newspapers do blogs right? (via USC Annenburg Online Journalism Review). Robert Niles has emailed this question to several prominent journalists in the wake of a couple of recent scandals: plagiarism at Washingtonpost.com and posting comments under false identities at the Los Angeles Times. Read the answers by Anthony Moor, Xeni Jardin (of Boing Boing), Lisa Stone, Chris Nolan and Nick Denton (links to their blogs or publications are provided on the source blog), plus, of course, the comments. I agree with Xeni Jardin (who must have one of the coolest names in blogging) : "I think the fact that people make such an unnatural distinction between blogging and writing for a newspaper is part of the problem. Behave in your blog as you would in the paper. " That's it for tonight. I'll hope to return tomorrow.

Book sites and more

2006-04-26T21:45:00.000Z

Please delve some more into some of the treasures I have found on the internet -- accumulated while I was away. Blog metablog. This link is to a posting on an ultra cool, tecchy blog that seems to be called Unqualified offerings. You must scroll down the comments on the linked post to get the full effect (well, maybe not all 1046 comments to date, the first 10 or 20 will probably be enough), but it is just so much the wittiest comment on blogging that I've yet seen. Is it dry or is it dry? Another site I have discovered, and I am afraid I have forgotten how, is Armchair Interviews (TM symbol-- yes, really!), a site that is a "fun, convenient way to access your favourite author or learn more about those who write in a specific genre" (I quote). Despite this marketing air, the site is a really useful resource, though I think still rather nascent. It is a searchable index of book reviews by genre -- 181 for mystery/suspense, for example. The reviews are listed alphabetically by book, which is a bit odd: if you are like me you are more likely to remember the author than the book title. There are also audio interviews, publishing news for authors and readers, rss feed, etc. Well worth a look for the bookaholic of whatever persuasion. Here's an article from the BBC about the virtues of offline life -- er? and they might be what? I like the parts in the piece about how the author Bill Thompson and his daughter coordinated their calendars despite different platforms. Malcolm and I coordinate our calendars each weekend to arrange who takes Jenny to school and who picks her up (a lot of logistical challenges re. work meetings and so on). I always get out my battered A5 office diary and pen; he gets out his latest notebooky palmy thingy and accesses his online calendar -- if the internet is there! Despite the many advantages of fast connections and the plethora of associated new products that add to the joys of life, Bill says, "while these new services are clearly exciting, and the sorts of integration they offer are providing a great example of how standards and openness encourage innovation, I'm not convinced that the time is right to move my entire life online. The most obvious problem is what to do when connectivity is limited, since if your e-mail is all on a server somewhere in the continental US, it is rather hard to get your hands on it without a reliable internet connection." He's also concerned about the confidentiality of information one uploads into social services such as Flickr and so on. You can see his point, as many of us have struggled recently with Blogger (I find gmail less reliable now than it was when I first signed up to it). Use the internet as a toy rather than something you have to rely on to run your life, is Bill's message. Here is a site, sudoku craving , that claims to be sudoku for web 2.0 but I don't see how it is more 2.0 than other sudoku sites. Sudoku craving is a free daily puzzle by Australian web developer Adam Lyttle. It is great of Adam to provide this site, but I don't really "get" the 2.0 angle. I have had Wayne Gould (Sudoku king)'s programme www.sudoku.com downloaded onto my computer since November 2005, and it is great. Well worth the very low price (a few dollars) . Adam's site is free, and might be good for those of us who don't think sudoku is for creatives (yes, Minx!) to try it out. However, I see that you can also link to a daily sudoku puzzle now via Deblog -- a brilliant blog in which Debra Hamel links to some daily puzzles and keeps you posted as to her scores. Note to said creatives: you don't have to be able to add up to play sudoku. It is a game that you do best at if you are good at intuitive pattern recognition -- which is a description that certainly fits creatives, I think.......see what you think, Minx, give it a whirl! (Deblog's link is to a pretty fearsome level of puzzle, I warn you, though.) Finally, for this post, here is a link to Lee Lowe's blog "into the lowelands" (good title), which goes by the description "original and eccentric fictions for young adults of all ages". Lee was kind enough to comment on my posting about InfoNeoGnostic's futuristic visions (Evolution of Books) , and I'm now going to keep an eye on his blog for any fiction he (she?) writes about this vision of books as evolving organisms in their own right. I'm also going to ask Cathy, my favourite young adult, what she thinks of Lee's blog.

While I was away, part 94

2006-04-25T18:46:00.000Z

OK, I'm going to just zoom through these bookmarked posts otherwise I am never going to make it to the finishing post. Grumpy Old Bookman has rightly praised Skint Writer's writing -- go for it, Skint. He has also told the story of the Star Wars fan's "tribute book" which was all over the blogs at the weekend but has probably all disappeared now for legal reasons. The GOB has some telling observations about Amazon sellers' tactics revealed by this book's listing. Via the Big Bad Book Blog, I discover a site called Self-Publishing, and a posting about why one can't make money out of print-on-demand publishing. It is a very useful post about the financial perils of POD (as it is called), and advises authors instead to use a "self publishing" service or advice. As Ron Pramshufer, the blog author, says: "As a self publisher, you will put in the time as the author as well as the money as the publisher but remember, you are not only making the royalty, you are also making the profit." There is a healthy debate in the comments. Incidentally, look here if you want to know why there is no comma in Big Bad Book Blog. Here is a beautiful site on book cover design, via Books, Words, and Writing , a blog whose title has a plethora of commas (to English English eyes, that is). Books, Words, and Writing is a lovely blog which I came across via Books, Inq, who featured an article on it about gardens and reading. Here is an entry about rogue agents and other nasty life-forms -- there sure are a lot of sharks out there preying on poor authors. What a life. A more upbeat entry on the same blog concerns a reading list to help you save the world. Dave Pollard lists "80 books and articles that have forever changed my worldview and my purpose for living. The fifteen most critical readings have a numbered triangle in front of them, with the numbers reflecting the order that, I would suggest, it makes most sense to read them in." Very useful, also useful is the one-sentence summary of the books on the list ;-). Dave Pollard's blog is called "how to save the world", consisting of his environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays. Impressive stuff. Via Brandywine books, I discover the WritingFix site, which among other things provides automatic plot creator. I think I'll just set it up and send off the result to those rogue POD publishers and agents.... The Brandywine books posting is worth a look, as it is Lars Walker's first anniversary blog, and he lists the sites from something called "writer's digest 101" that caught his eye, as he puts it. The links are in his posting, and many of them look well-worth checking out. One of these is "bookcrossing" -- Minx and others have commented about leaving books behind after one has finished them and lurking to see who picks them up. Well, bookcrossing is an actual organised site for this activity, with labels, stamps and indexing, so that a book's journey can be followed after you leave it. A really lovely idea. How am I doing? There is one of these "memes" on Collected Miscellany (list at this link) which looks quite fun. You have to look at a list of books, make the ones you have read bold, italicise the ones you might read, underline the ones you have on your bookshelf, and put parentheses round the ones you have never heard of. I don't often like doing these memes, as they often tend to be rather too self-referential for my taste, but this one looks quite interesting, if I could ever find the time to do it. Mapletree7 over at Book of the Day has a great review of Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. I laughed at the part about her mother (Mapletree7's, not Rebecca's or DuMaurier's). I know just how it feels. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, I did not remember how many of Muriel Spark's books I had read until I read the obits.) Maud Newton has a very interesting post about Affluemza, a link to an excellent deconstruction of the "mommy wars" debate, by Sandra Tsing Loh. "Twenty years later, gone are big hair, big diamonds, and big shoulder pads. In their place, among America's most affluent mothers, is a kind of gnawing, grinding anxiety and a mediacentric conviction that this fretfulness is somehow that of every woman. Or so it appears in the just-published Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner. " See here for a link to the full review in Atlantic Monthly -- and at Powells.com. Maud concludes: "The review includes some unfortunate generalizations about red staters and about "rabidly focused women." Also, the conclusion is confusing and it doesn't present a solution. (Universal child care, anyone? Financed by repealing all those tax cuts for the rich?) But there's some powerful writing here, and I share the disgust she leads with." I'm almost there now! There is a fascinating account on that wonderful blog Deblog (discovered via Ian Hocking of This Writing Life) of what happened to Debra Hamel when she posted a negative review of a book on Amazon. But not as bad as the legal action threatened to Read Roger under similar circumstances. Amazing. My head is spinning from this whirl through the many, many interesting blogs and posts that happened during my absence. There may be one or two more, but for my own sanity I have to stop here. Back soon (maybe)!

Blinded by science

2006-04-24T20:37:00.000Z

Lablit is publishing a series of "science in fiction" short stories by Harrison Bae Wan, following the career of a scientist called Fluke "from graduate school to Nobel prize". (Arrowsmith, anyone?) The first episode is called "The Coomassie Blue Kid" and the second, just out, is "The CBK and the plasmid of doom". I haven't had time to read them yet, but they look good, so, in link rather than think mode, I'm bookmarking them here so I can return. According to lablit, you don't have to know about science to read and enjoy these stories. Worryingly, though, they provide a glossary. Now when was the last time anyone had to have a glossary to understand a piece of, say, science fiction? If you don't understand the technicalities, you gloss over them, you don't need to get a degree in the subject before you can read the next sentence. Much of my education about the USA has come from reading crime fiction novels and picking up alien cultural references, it is all part of the fun. When I first visited New York, I fulfilled a longstanding ambition of going into a deli and asking for a "pastrami on rye" (which at that time you could not do anywhere in the UK, though you probably can now). Of course the guy there did not understand my stupid English accent and I could not do a passable Jimmy Cagney, but it was great to give it a whirl. I'll reserve judgement on lablit's glossary until I've read the stories myself, but I don't think it bodes well for unfettered reader enjoyment.

Improve your blog!

2006-04-24T19:25:00.000Z

Back on track, I want to write about some excellent postings on the Problogger site. I discovered this site via Dave Lull, and though it has the off-putting (to me) subtitle of "helping bloggers to make money" I find it has many excellent posts about how to improve your blog and your blogging techniques, which are applicable whether or not one wants to make money out of one's blog ;-). It has been on a roll recently. Here's a posting about sending readers deeper into your blog. In this post, Darren Rowse (Problogger) links to a page offering advice to new blogs on Liz Strauss's "Successful and outstanding bloggers". Darren continues: "Simply search through your archives for key posts that would be relevant to first time readers and put them together as a post that ties them together. Then it's a matter of linking to that page in key places on your blog." Well, I couldn't agree more, though I imagine it will not be easy to do, but I will try. I still have not managed to collect postings on Petrona by tag (Tribe's blog does it fantastically), but Darren's method sounds possible for the technically marginally competent. So I will give it a go, as I would like to collect up my themed posts. Another of Darren's posts is on how to grow your blog's readership. (See what I mean: another worthy goal irrespective of trying to make money.) In the post Darren provides comments on each of 10 things Guy Kawasaki has learned on "evangelising" in his first 120 days of blogging. These include: "think book not diary"; collect email addresses and links; acknowledging and responding to commenters, and so on. The posting is worth reading for its common-sense advice, even if some of it ("getting a scoop") is a bit ambitious. Next in my collection of Problogger posts is on blogger credibility. One of Darren's readers asks this question: how to make yourself a credible source? For example, when I came across your site, I got the impression that you had no experience with blogging, but found your niche in making money from blogging. But since you had never actually done it, I'm curious as to how you made yourself the source that you are now. You have very good tips and information, but obviously didn't have them to begin with. Darren's answer: "I think it gets to the heart of a really important issue for bloggers and one of the things that is often at the heart of a blog's success or failure - the credibility of the blogger." He says : "Obviously when I started blogging three and a half years ago I had no experience in blogging and started out like a newbie like everyone else - but my first blog wasn't actually on the topic of blogging. It was a personal (ish) blog. Then over time I added new blogs to my blogs and learned as much as I could about blogging and blogging as an income. Gradually over a number of years I built a way to make a full time living online through a variety of blogs. It was at this point that I launched ProBlogger.net (in September 2004) after I'd been blogging almost two years." Darren says that over the next few days he is going to post on items that can add to a blogger's credibility. First up: longevity. The "money" question here is whether you are committed to your blog for the long haul. Second: experience. This is the "write what you know about" advice we all received at school -- but this does not make it less true, particularly for those of us who are not regular writers. There will be more of this series ("expertise" will be next), so if you like the style, follow it on Problogger. The last Problogger posting I want to mention for today is on two styles of blogging. My subtitle on Petrona is "linking and thinking", as that's essentially what I like to do -- find interesting material on the internet and write about it. Darren discusses the two "classes" of blog, the "linker" blog (I think of Instapundit, for example) which is largely an information-provider collecting up links on a topic of interest for the reader to get a snapshot of an area and save time; and the more personal, "thinking" site -- many of the literary, library and science blogs I subscribe to (see Petrona 2) are like this. Darren calls these styles of blogging "referential" and "experiential", and posts his thoughts on them and their various degrees of overlap.

Not supposed to be a review of the Constant Gardner

2006-04-24T18:45:00.000Z

I never got back to posting last night as "The Constant Gardner" had arrived from the Amazon DVD rental service, and Malcolm and I decided to watch it after I finished being in taxi mode. This is a bit of a turn-up for the books -- usually we cannot watch movies that we don't want to see with the girls because by the time they are in bed we can't stay awake for another hour or two (given the time we have to get up in the morning). However, last night, Cathy was already watching a DVD on her own laptop (Enigma -- she's studying GCSE history so relevant, right?) and Jenny was absorbed in Flickr/Fruits Basket. A girl called Molly from the USA had swapped some of her Fruits Basket pictures with Jenny's, so their interactivity kept Jenny happy for the couple of hours it took to watch the movie (and would have done for longer had we let it!). I'm not going to review the movie here because my reactions to it are fairly similar to those I've read elsewhere. I did enjoy it, but felt it did not live up to its own moral position. Also I found the incriminating letters by senior diplomats skilled in the devious arts, conveniently hand-written on office notepaper, were unbelievable in the context of the movie. And out of the context of the movie, I just don't think government officials or drug companies are as evil as portrayed. I am happy to believe there are serious problems in both areas, but not happy to believe that they are all part of a global conspiracy that requires anyone challenging them to be murdered. But the acting was good (that annoying woman played by Rachel Weisz was just the kind of person I've met a few times), and the usual crew of excellent acting Brits did their bit. I felt a bit sick at the hand-held camera technique, and uncomfortable at the general smugness of the main couple's lifestyle versus their politics. But I should stop moaning; the movie is a good deal better than most; it was serious in intent and I did think it a worthy effort. And in the end it was a true tragedy. If you only see 10 movies a year, I recommend this as one of them. Malcolm says the book is a lot better, and more subtle, than the film. I haven't read the book; I used to enjoy all Le Carre's and read them as they came out, but I was disappointed by his last couple so stopped. Now I have gone and reviewed the darn movie so will have to stop this post and start another one to post what I was going to post about.

Which cell organelle?

2006-04-24T12:18:00.000Z

Here's a test with a science twist: which cell organelle are you? (At OK Cupid via Adventures in Ethics and Science)

Mitochondria You scored 63 Industriousness, 16 Centrality, and 15 Causticity!

You're a mitochondrion! The mitocondria is a "power plant" of the cell. Nothing could ever get done in the cell without you creating energy. Since both the Citric Acid cycle and Oxidative Phosphorylation happen inside the mitochondria, you are critical to every eukaryotic cell. You are always a hard worker, no matter what you are tasked to. Most of the time, you tend to be working in the background, but that often suits you just fine. You get along with almost everyone, and aren't these the most important things?

While I was away, part 2

2006-04-23T15:49:00.000Z

Michael Allen, who I think of as the "not very grumpy" "not very old" bookman, has found a blog called the Bibliophile Bookpen which I agree seems excellent, and a bit creatively manic. It is apparently focused on used books, but it seems to me to have lots more about books, arts, listings and culture in general, with a hefty dose of satire. Mr Allen also has a doubly (at least) interesting post about fulfillment of Amazon sales and "the longest 200-page book" that the translator Viktor Janis has read. The Amazon posting continues a theme developed in an earlier post "Hot Cross Buns", which has several comments on the perennial topic of independent vs online booksellers, including a couple from me. The Hot Cross Buns post links to one of Minx's lovely lists. Since then, Minx has added to her reference theme with a "blogology": an in-depth study of the blogger and their habits, which is, as ever, delightful and pertinent -- it will make you smile a lot more than Wikipedia's effort. I'm interrupted here to "person the taxi". Back later, if I'm lucky.

Interlude on stereotypes

2006-04-23T13:58:00.000Z

Reel fanatic reviews Thank You For Smoking, which has not yet made it to the UK so far as I know (and is not on Amazon UK's DVD section). The movie sounds as if it is funny at the level I would like, i.e. not aimed at 15 year olds and not being heavy handed. Added to that, Maria Bello and Rob Lowe are in it. In fact, I might even add the book, by Christopher Buckley, into my shopping basket. Amazon keeps telling me I should, in any event -- even though Reel Fanatic links to a blog entry by a couple of disillusioned former fans who didn't like Mr Buckley's talk/signing. And I hate smoking. While on the topic of not being politically correct, Sara Gran -- on her own blog this time rather than being interviewed on someone else's -- has joined the many other women-authored blogs in the USA indulging in the pastime of Caitlin Flannigan-bashing. As far as I can make out, CF is one of those women who comes along every few years and tells other women to spend their lives being subservient to men rather than being independent. When I was younger I used to be incensed by this kind of person. Then I learned to ignore them. These days I have a sneaky, shameful hankering not to have to earn my own crust if someone would do it for me (they aren't lining up). But I guess I'd then have to learn about things like make-up, how to do my nails, and accessories, which does not seem worth the effort. (;- ) ) Sara Gran quickly nails the fundamental weakness of CF's argument of "telling other women not to work and to raise their kids themselves... as she's writing books and a nanny is watching her kids." She also makes the point made by others that CF is being hired by male magazine editors to write her material. She says that this misogynistic impulse reflects "the world I grew up in; one where women were expected be accessories to the artist, never the artist themselves". This is the world I grew up in, too. But Sarah doesn't end at this usual point. Instead, she says: " Fine, yeah, cry me a river: I had more or less every other advantage a person could possibly have otherwise, so let's not feel to bad about that. But not everyone has it as easy as me. Some people need all the encouragement they can get in life, and they might look to these very mainstream publications to help with that." This is just so right. I didn't have "every other advantage" when I grew up, but I had the crucial ones of a system sufficiently enlightened to provide me with opportunity -- a good education, leading to a good job for which I use my brain, and which enables me to support myself and my family. These days, it is not so easy. We haven't yet got to the situation of the young post-revolutionary workers described by Pasternak in Dr Zhivago, but I concur with Sara when she ends her post with a comment about the way in which mainstream media perceives women by hiring a writer like Caitlin F: "Maybe the solution is to stop pretending that these are general-interest publications, and for women to make their own magazines--but isn't that awfully third-grade? It just seems like we should all be past this now, and I don't understand why we're not. " In the UK, "laddish" magazines sell strongly compared with "meterosexual" offers -- the new man either doesn't exist in enough quantities to keep a magazine afloat, or he doesn't want to be seen buying it. Show me a mainstream magazine branded "for women" which is not full of diets, handbags and Kate Moss -- in the UK there are none. I think that the answer is not to buy magazines aimed at men if you're a man or women if you're a woman, but stick to "topics" (current events, science, movies and so on). Otherwise, you just get gender stereotypes reinforced, and end up actually wanting a new handbag every week. Though where all this handbag obsession comes from, and where Caitlin Flannigan fits into all this, confuses me too. Maybe a zine-blog combination could develop from a round-up concept, such as Natalie Bennett's "Friday Femmes Fatales" , now up to no. 53.

While I was away, part 1

2006-04-22T17:36:00.000Z

Note to self: don't go away and have so many rss feeds. My mind has been blown by all the fascinating posts on other people's blogs that have happened during the week I've been either away or offline. What is manageable on a daily basis in that sweet solitary half hour inbetween the end of duties and sleep, is too rich a mix when concentrated. Omitting all the big news, for example the many tributes to that excellent eccentric writer Muriel Spark (I had completely forgotten how many of her books I read and enjoyed until I read the obits), I'm going to post on a few personal highlights of the past week. I'm not counting Dave Lull's emails in this, I'm saving those up ;-) Tribe on zines. Tribe has a rather dangerously attractive blog. It reminds me of being about 16, watching all the cool people at someone's house and wondering how I could ever be like them. Of course, I now realise they probably felt just as uncool as I did -- or that's what I tell myself anyway. Tribe's blog is nothing if not cool. On the left-hand vertical nav bar I notice he has this incredibly long list of zine links, and at the link I have provided at the start of this paragraph, you can go to all his postings on zines. On a quick look at some of the zines in Tribe's list, I think they would not qualify for Jenna Freedman's Barnard collection because they have things like production values. So there is obviously a granularity in the definition of a zine. Be that as it may, if I ever get a day with nothing else to do, I would have a wonderful time looking at all the zines in Tribe's list. There is quite a bit here and there about Sara Gran, pegged to the paperback publication of Come Closer, including this interview by David Thayer on his blog The Untrained Eye. I get a bit confused by multi-blogs: I've been following Collected Miscellany for a while, but have recently discovered that its author (the aforementioned David Thayer) has another blog (the Untrained Eye) on an aggregate called The Publisher's Marketplace. Convoluted enough for you? The interview was not for me but for the in-crowd. Here's an example: "Q: Dan Conaway blogged about Dope before anyone knew he was Dan Conaway and before anyone knew he was blogging about your novel. Was that weird for you or fun for you to know what Mad Max was on about before all was revealed?" No idea who Dan Conaway is and I assume that Mad Max is not the Mad Max I know and love. What is the point of an interview if it can only be appreciated by those who are "in"? Ho hum, just glad to read that Sara is happier than she was in her postings on her own blog about the publication process. Skint Writer, whom I discovered via Minx, has just started a blog which promises to provide food for thought. She (is she a she?) posts about the "you" of blogging: who exactly is one talking to in one's head when one posts on a blog? She sees it in terms of animals, whereas I'm in Petrona mode (think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban). Some blogs are information-providers (Instapundit et al), and the "you" is clearly the reader. Others are more like diaries in which the "you" is the internal persona. Linking and thinking. Inconclusive musings aside, I love Skint's posting about not getting published -- as I read it I was thinking of the Grumpy Old Bookman's views on the publishing mafia, but clearly so were all the other people reading the posting (see comments) . Moral of the story, don't go away if you want to make an (in retrospect) obvious point on someone's blog ;-) Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind) is one of several bloggers to note the new Mortalis mystery and thriller imprint of Random House -- mainly the publisher's backlist but Sarah notes some new titles. Another of Sarah's postings that caught my eye concerned the spring edition of Demolition Magazine which apparently contains seven (count 'em) stories by women. Must check those out. (I don't feel uncool for never having heard of Demolition Magazine as the spring issue is only its second.) To be continued......

Holiday reading

2006-04-22T11:07:00.000Z

A million things to catch up on, but while I've been offline I have read: White Skin Man by John Baker Dead Simple by Peter James The Black Angel by John Connolly (half-way through). As an aside, I always think that I'll have a lot more time than usual for reading when I am on holiday, yet in the event it does not happen. Free time these days is further curtailed by the wretched killer sudokus. I have been addicted to them since the Times first introduced them. Recently, the newspaper has changed killer sudoku provider (great job title! beats being any other sort of provider I suspect), with the result that three or four of the week's offerings are either impossibly frustrating or take hours to do instead of 10 or 20 minutes. A brief recap of these books. White Skin Man wins hands down out of the three -- the author writes so well, and he can put a pretty good plot together as well. I came across this book because John Baker, the author, linked to Petrona, so I discovered his blog, which I highly recommend as an excellent literary blog -- there is some great writing on there, in particular a couple of recent posts about his early experiences of communal living with which I strongly identify. Although John writes two series and I intended, in my usual "over-ordered" manner, to buy book one of series one to start with, somehow I managed to buy book two of series two --- which I didn't realise until about one-third of the way through. No matter, the book is excellent. I'll certainly read more. Unlike Dead Simple, White Skin Man is a slow burn, gradually drawing in the reader until you just have to keep reading on. It is as much "social comment" as a crime story, in particular about racism in various aspects and manifestations. I don't know how this book compares to John's others in terms of quality but it will be good finding out -- he's very assured on atmosphere, plot and character. This is an author who gets inside everyone's heads. The book does not end with all loose ends tied up, and the series main character, although mostly tangential to events here, is both sufficiently unusual as a character and within his own developing story, to create reader-demand for the next installment. My only caveat, and it isn't really a caveat, is that the book has on occasion a slightly preachy tone. I am reminded a bit of "Strife" by John Galsworthy, and similar writing of that era, in which the working class is earnestly noble under the capitalist yoke. In White Skin Man, relatively minor characters analyse their sociopolitical place in the universe, and similar, for a couple of pages here and there, for no apparent reason. It is interesting to read these diversions, but they don't seem very realistic to me, and they detract somewhat from the focus of the book, in particular lessening the impact of the author's treatment of the relationship between the photographer and her doctor husband which increasingly drives the plot forward -- the least successful part of an otherwise excellent novel. Dead Simple has received "rave reviews" in the crime-fiction world, and indeed is a racy read: hard to put down once started. But unlike White Skin Man, the book kind of peters out in the middle once the reader (this one, anyway) twigs the basic plot twist. For the first third, James maintains the tension incredibly well to an almost unbearable point: I kept thinking "blimey, he's as good at this as early Stephen King" -- until the author blows it by having a character opine that events are like a Stephen King novel. The author goes on to make several other literary and movie comparisons as the story goes on -- always a mistake in my opinion -- in particular when authors explicitly compare their characters' looks to film stars, I always "come out of the book" as it makes me think that the author is more concerned about selling the movie rights than in holding the reader in the world of the book. However, the police detective, Grace, is an interesting character, and carries the book. The plot, as I say, degenerates into predictable cliche at the end, so I lost interest in it. But I would be quite keen to reacquaint myself with Detective Inspector Grace if James writes another episode. The Black Angel is a book I wasn't going to read until I saw it in a bookshop the other week at a ridiculous price. I enjoyed Connolly's first book in this series very much indeed, but each subsequent book has been less successful as the detective aspects have reduced and the supernatural ones increased from being mere hints to fully blown plot elements, in parallel with the writing style becoming less careful. The books are quite gruesome, and while I can stand that for a "rooted in believability" plot, I can't be bothered with it once you get angels, demons and devils in the mix -- it seems to me then to become just an excuse for shlock. The Black Angel is racy but clunky -- it is one of those books where every so often you get a few pages of italics about some medieval middle European monastery-sacking, to explain why in modern-day America strange murders are happening as unpleasant men seek mysterious relics. I am hanging on in there, but only just. It looks as if the main character's new wife is going to ditch him for being too obsessed with detection and murder, which is sad as the first book was a poignant description of how he coped with the death of (and tracked down the killer of) his first wife and young daughter. My "formula alert" antennae are definitely up, as Connolly seems to be heading down the Kellerman route.

Back online tonight

2006-04-21T12:12:00.000Z

I returned home on Monday night to find a "technical hitch" preventing interactive Internet access. We are working on the problem and almost have it fixed. I'll aim to post some items either tonight or at the weekend. In the meantime, thank you to Minx for your kind thoughts (yes, I've had withdrawal symptoms!); and to Frank Wilson for so kindly posting on Books, Inq. an alert about Petrona's longer-than-planned silence. Back later!

Holiday weekend

2006-04-13T21:06:00.000Z

We're going away tomorrow morning for the long weekend, to a place where I don't think they have heard of the Internet. So Petrona will be quiet for a few days. Enjoy the holidays!

Reading "serious" books

2006-04-13T07:45:00.000Z

Reading Middlemarch: Muse-ings I'm linking (above) to a lovely post on the excellent blog "Reading Middlemarch". The post, by Diana, is mostly about being a muse, stimulated by her reading a novel called "Memoirs of a Muse", and her thoughts on Dorothea in that connection. However, the main reason I wanted to link to Diana's post is that I do so identify with her second paragraph: "I am absolutely shocked to see how many of you have actually finished the entire book already. This has been an interesting and eye-opening experience for me; I can see that my attention span has dwindled from years of reading breezy, modern, fast-moving literature. In the words of Dorothea, "I am very slow. When I want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts." I often have to go back and reread an entire page when I come to the end of it and realize that I have no idea what I just read." Although I do agree with Diana's sentiments, I also find that as I get older my short-term memory (if not, thankfully, my attention span) is "not as good as it was". In my "zine" posting of last night, for example, when I lost half of it thanks to Blogger disconnecting, I had difficulty in remembering all the things I'd said -- and I know I didn't remember the entire thread of logic in the lost bit, so the posted version is not as satisfying (to me) as the lost version. This is one reason I tend to read more "bright and breezy" fiction these days than I used to. But these Middlemarch posts, and much of what I'm reading on the many excellent blogs about books, are making me think I should perhaps return to being more ambitious about reading "serious" literature -- even though the Grumpy Old Bookman would not have much truck with it. I know, however, that I will be like Diana: "As so many of you have said, there is much deep thinking represented here. I am contantly scribbling profound passages into a notebook, and still I get the feeling that in trying desperately to keep hold of the story, I'm passing over more of these passages than I'm catching." Yes, definitely a case of "notebook at the ready"!

Zine archive at Barnard

2006-04-12T21:44:00.000Z

One of the many fascinating links sent to me by Dave Lull is to a New York Times article about "zines". Dave is an intuitive person who has a knack of sending me links to articles that seem "just right for me", in this case, evoking memories I had forgotten I had. "Zines" are self-published personal, political and artistic writings. But they aren't electronic, they are what is charmingly called "analogue", i.e. objects written on paper. They most emphatically are not blogs, instant or otherwise interactive (though they can feature letters from readers). The NYT article is about a librarian at Barnard College who has made a scholarly online catalogue of these zines -- searchable, with instructions at the link. Because the zines are do-it-yourself, counter-cultural and anti-commercial, they tend not to be archived or otherwise collected and preserved. For similar reasons, they tend to be highly personal and individual (the NYT piece lists some titles). The Barnard librarian, Jenna Freedman, produces her own zine (Lower East Side Librarian) and is part of a group of radical, militant librarians called Radical Reference, and does great work in preserving this art-form (if that is the correct description). She looks very nice from the picture of her in the Times piece, and the photograph of part of the zine archive in a link within that article, shot through with pink bindings, definitely beckons. Barnard's zine archive is of titles "primarily in the area of women's studies, featuring personal and political publications on activism, anarchism, body image, feminism, gender, parenting, queer community, riot grrrl, sexual assault, and other topics. They are created by women of color and NYC and other urban women. The term "woman" applies to anyone who self-identifies as such." What's the point of zines? One author writes: "I'm not even trying to be dramatic, but to the world at large, I am a freak. My voice is downplayed, ignored and/or made into a joke in the mass of verbal and physical disapproval that bombards me every day when I leave the safety of my house or make the stupid decision to read a newspaper, magazine or turn the television on. When I am out of my element, I am told that my very existence is wrong or problematic because I am a fat, queer, mentally ill, politically radical woman with very little money and little to no regard for beauty standards and so on and so forth. But you know what? I am so NOT fucking SORRY. As long as myself and others are disrespected, invalidated, unsafe and ignored by the masses, my experiences, ideas and opinions need to be heard and I will keep on talking this shit and it is not going to be pretty. Besides, how else are these stories going to be documented? " I don't know if I know just how she feels, but sure I feel as if I do. I had written quite a lot more about this, but when I tried to publish the posting, unbeknownst to me, Blogger had cut out and I lost it from the middle of the above quote. I'll try to re-create the train of thought in the rest: I wrote that these articles remind me of my childhood when my sisters and I obsessively made "zines" in school holidays and weekends (though we didn't call them that, of course). These objects were home-made, pure self-expression, unfettered by what anyone else thought outside our own imaginations. They were grand in concept but less so in reality as the sheer effort involved in filling eight pages made from a large folded-up piece of paper became painfully apparent once we had started. Yet we were never daunted --- next opportunity, we were starting again. My childhood life must be littered with these half-completed creations. What happens to that purity of expression? It fades out, as the child gets older, more homework, hormones hit, adults start focusing the child on "career" and so on -- most people modulate their creative impulses into something more tempered, more suited to "life skills". Though not, perhaps, in the case of the Bronte sisters and brother, with their feverish creation of little home-made books covered in tiny writing. Zines can exist only if they have very small circulations, manageable by the author concerned. If the print run gets large enough to require more people, then other interests come into play -- commercial, advertisers -- and this can affect content. The zine stops being a zine. Here is an excerpt from the Barnard archive: Of & about Letters: Love-letters & Passed Notes & Everyday Declarations of Friendship. I just need now to get there to read some of them -- to see for myself this highly personalised "outsider art".

Book review: The Mercy Seat

2006-04-12T20:44:00.000Z

Well, I am most tempted to eat a piece of chocolate to celebrate, but I'll reluctantly resist -- I've had a book review published! I've been writing quite a bit on Petrona about my crime-fiction interests, and Frank Wilson of Books, Inq. and book-review editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer was sufficiently intrigued to ask me to review "The Mercy Seat" by Martyn Waites. Not only that, but he published the review! I'm very grateful to Frank for the opportunity. See what I thought of the book by clicking on the link in the preceding sentence. Frank has also mentioned the review on Books, Inq., as has the erudite Jenny D on her blog "Light Reading", which I admire greatly. The tantalisingly mysterious "Inner Minx" (see her lovely blog) has also written nice words, as well as the very kind and stalwart Dave Lull. So I'm feeling pretty good with all these generous friends. Still managing to resist the chocloate, though. (Pity I can't say the same for the glass of wine sitting next to me.)

Reverse books

2006-04-11T20:46:00.001Z

In my (still successful) efforts to avoid joining and re-joining book clubs, I forgot one book club that I'm delighted to remain in: the reverse book club. The marketing line is: "4 books for £5 a month and you'll never receive any of them!" The reason: the organisation gives them away on their members' behalf. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, more than half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, and a single book can cost more than a month's wages. Refugee camps in Kenya, colleges in Malawi, primary schools in Somaliland --- all benefit from the fantastic work of Book Aid International. In February, J. K. Rowling and other authors auctioned various literary items to raise £63,000. Book Aid International have just sent supporters like me their newsletter detailing how they are spending this and other donations to improve literacy and education in as many places as they can. The reverse book club has enabled the organisation to send 81,000 books with donations received so far --- not publishers' remainders but mainstream, current reference works and novels, educational and vocational textbooks, children's fiction and more. It's an impressive outfit and well-worth supporting -- as the slogan states: "books build futures".

Cultural visits

2006-04-10T20:22:00.000Z

Between 1662 and 1795, China was ruled by its last dynasty -- the Qing. There were only three emperors during this time. The dynasty and its artefacts are subject of a current exhibition at the Royal Academy. Inspired by two posts (part 1 and part 2) by Giles G-B at New Tammany College (he visited twice) , we visited the exhibit the other weekend. The links give a magnificent illustrated tour of the exhibition, so I won't write more here about the wonderful scrolls and other artefacts. What stood out for me at the exhibition was the cultural adaptability of these emperors. Even though firm and controlling Buddhists, " The Qing were curious about foreign dress and practices and recorded them in several paintings. The Jesuits had gone to China to seek converts in the 16th and 17th centuries and remained important members of the Qing Court. They were technical advisors on scientific instruments and inspired Chinese court artists to emulate foreign traditions. This room displays some magnificent paintings by the famous Jesuit Court artist Lang Shining, known by his western name of Giuseppe Castiglione. Paintings by foreign artists are included alongside comparable examples by Chinese court artists. Clocks were welcome gifts and some quite extraordinary clocks made in Britain, France and Germany have only survived in China." (Quotes from the RA catalogue, which is the first link in this post.) Isn't that just fantastic? Certainly beats execution, either of the missionaries by the host culture, or vice versa, which is the more usual account one reads or sees. The scientific instruments, and the ceramics inspired by a fusion of East and West, are well worth a visit for themselves alone. More (later) weekend attendance at the Science Museum's Pixar exhibition. Pixar has been making animated movies (including shorts) for 20 years, and following various similar popularist shows, the Science Museum is now giving Pixar house-room. Although very much looked forward to, the exhibition was only given an "ok-ish" verdict by my daughters and friend. Perhaps predictably, I found it disappointing. The artwork was good, but the amount of information provided risible (forget about anything approaching "science"). I suppose Pixar doesn't want to give anything away about its methods, but the lack of any technical information at all (other than the initial post that "Toy Story was the first fully computer-generated full-length movie, but still used conventional film") rendered the experience little more than a marketing exercise, an impression added to by the fact that no leaflet was provided despite the steep admission charge. (You couldn't even pay extra to get a catalogue, unlike the Three Emperors.) The zoetrope was great fun for 5 mins, and the final "art-movie" of two- to three-dimensional transformations OK (although any longer than 11 minutes would have stretched the patience), but I felt the exhibition scored low for interest and zero for scientific content. We stuck at it for an hour, but only because there were loops of about 5 animated shorts that some of our party wanted to watch in their entirety. I am sure others have said this before me, but what is the Science Museum trying to achieve by this type of exhibition? It has recently had an exhibit (in the same space) for Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and previously featured the likes of Dr Who and Star Trek. Of these, I have only seen the first, but again, the scientific content was zero -- though the interest-level verdict by my companion was higher. The idea cannot be to educate (scientifically). I presume these exhibitions are money-spinners for the Science Museum, which is otherwise free entry. (Optional paid extras include an IMax cinema and flight simulator). However, the museum is never empty, and I wonder if the organisers might just re-think a tad -- especially as Pixar was not well-attended and Hitch-Hiker's barely attended at all, on the days we visited.

101 screenplays and The Village

2006-04-08T10:07:00.000Z

Here's another list, via Brandywine Books: the 101 "best" screenplays as selected by the members of the Writers Guilds of America (East and West). Cue a lot of US screenplays, inevitably -- with the odd UK effort sneaked in (eg Shakespeare in Love). The list starts with 101, Notorious; 100, Memento; 99, The Wild Bunch; 98, The Grapes of Wrath; the Sixth Sense weighs in at no. 50; and the inevitable top 4 (in reverse order) are Citizen Kane, Chinatown, The Godfather and Casablanca. Nothing unpredictable, then. The list does not seem to distinguish between original screenplays and adaptations of books, plays and the like. The WGA has provided a table of the "top 25" films (in alphabetical order) with links to biographies of the writers and "film facts" for each one. You don't get a link to the screenplays themselves, but you can find some scripts on the web. I once watched a rented copy of "The Village" which was damaged into unwatchability after the first half, apart from odd snatches here and there. The movie was certainly not good enough to re-order and watch again, so I read the script to find out what happened in the famous "plot twist" at the end. I was not much the wiser when I had finished, but I appreciated the option of not having to sit through the movie again. (Note: despite the rest of the movie, the actress Bryce Dallas Howard was very good in it, I thought.) P.S. I thought I read the script on the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) collection, but when I looked just now there was no script collection there. Either I have misremembered or the IMDB has a script collection but has put it behind a firewall or similar.

Wikepedia, blog terms and quotations

2006-04-07T20:57:00.000Z

I love the idea of Wikipedia, and use it quite a bit for information, but would not be too sure of it in a life-threatening situation. It is brilliant on many things (the Colorado River for example), and incredibly topical compared with a traditional reference work, even other online ones, in terms of how quickly it is updated. I suppose, therefore, it was inevitable that Wikipedia would come up with a listing of blogging terms. A bit earlier on today, when I first saw the list, I put in a footnote to ask someone to enter "carnival", as I keep coming across them and don't know exactly what they are (though obviously they are some kind of aggregate -- but blogs, postings, links? And are there rules?). By the time I next came online, someone has inserted it: "Blog carnival A blog article that contains links to other articles covering a specific topic. Most blog carnivals are hosted by a rotating list of frequent contributors to the carnival, and serve to both generate new posts by contributors and highlight new bloggers posting matter in that subject area. " Thanks, Wikipedia-- and thanks for the great list of blogging's specialist vocabulary. Now I know there is a "momosphere" (blogs written by mothers); that a "shocklog" is to produce discussion by posting shocking content; and that to be "slashdotted" means to be temporarily (one hopes) slowed down by a major website sending huge loads of content that can slow down the server. Unlikely in the extreme to happen to Petrona, but interesting nonetheless. All this and more at the Wikipedia link. While on the topic of useful reference sources (well, "useful" may be stretching it a bit in the case of the blog listing), I've come across a site called Bigcite.com, which is a massive collection of quotations (more than 66,000, says the site). On the homepage are random quotes, popular quotes and recent quotes. One of popular's: "If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe. -- Abraham Lincoln (bio) ". "who is bigcite.com? This site has been around in my head for years, long ago I lost literally thousands of quotes in an old sharp 128k "electronic organizer" I had, dead batteries = lost data, bummer! At any rate after seeing many of the social bookmarking sites pop up I decided to throw some code at an attempt to take my quotes (and those of my friends) online in a searchable and shareable way... bigcite.com was born! Found lots of quotes sites out there, but many left much to be desired. Here is my spin on how it should be..." One aspect of the site that attracted my attention is the tag clouds. These are on two pages, "authors" and "tags". On the "authors" page are the 250 most popular authors. By far the largest (i.e. most popular) author is Ambrose Bierce. I am not surprised, but only in retrospect. Judging by eye, next (equal) are Ralph Waldo Emerson and someone called Jack ~~Hanley~~Handey* (Deep Thoughts) of whom I don't think I have heard (~~Hanley~~Handey, that is, not Emerson). Next , at roughly the same size, are Oscar Wilde (I'd have guessed him to be the most popular), Shakespeare (or him), Mark Twain, Goethe, Shaw, Franklin and Einstein. Anonymous and the Bible don't appear until the next tranche, together with a lot of others. On the "tags" page is a cloud of popular tags (search words, mainly). Largest by some way is "men" (!), followed by "wisdom", "life" and "knowledge" (roughly equal), followed again by the similar in size "miscellaneous", "age", "art". Women are pretty small, I'm afraid. There is a nice tools page where you can obtain code to paste into your site, so you can have either random or tagged (you can choose the tag) quotes of the day. *See comments

The Jane Austen Book Club

2006-04-06T20:13:00.000Z

Book of the Day: Reading Journal Entry: The Jane Austen Book Club There is a characteristically insightful review of "The Jane Austen Book Club" over at "Book of the Day". Reading Mapletree7's review reminds me that I found the book itself disappointing but the perspective of the Jane Austen characters in the book fascinating. I've read Jane Austen's novels so many times now that I see all the characters in a certain way. Reading the Karen Jay Fowler's characters' views of them was quite shocking, in a nice kind of way, becuase they were perceived very differently from the way I see them. I think this is a fun way to write literary criticism. I am such an admirer of Jane Austen that I have ploughed through several "professional literary criticisms" of her books, mainly because she did not write enough of them to satisfy me and I wanted more. But these tomes were written in the dead hand with which "professionals" ignore the reader who loves the subject and wants more depth in favour of the coded obscurity of impressing fellow-specialists (scientific research paper, anyone?). Other novels are whacky and borrow well-known characters from novels for their plots. (Can't think of any examples just now apart from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and that movie about H G Wells in Los Angeles or somewhere, niether of which I count.) I'm not too keen on this approach either. The Jane Austen Book Club approach is a potentially fruitful one. As Mapeletree7 says in her excellent review, the book is about a group of people who meet every so often to discuss a Jane Austen novel. So you get a double offering of a novel plus an analysis of the Austen oeuvre as seen by the characters in the book. If you haven't read Austen, it doesn't matter too much. Thanks, Mapletree7 for making me remember this. I didn't think the Jane Austen Book Club was a particularly memorable book, but I did like the Austen novel bits. I wonder if there are other books that use this approach?

Nostalgia for the Northern line

2006-04-05T19:36:00.000Z

London Underground Tube Diary - Going Underground's Blog: "Delays on the Northern Line...... Because one of our staff is missing If I'm late for work this morning it's because there were delays on the Northern Line this morning due to a missing member of staff. Staff were searching for a 'lost' colleague at Clapham South station today, (which for some reason caused disruption to the whole line) and in the end it turned out that he'd simply failed to clock in for work! Only on the Northern Line!" Yes indeed, makes me feel quite nostalgic. The previous entry on the London Underground blog is a shot of a sign at Penrith station (in Cumbria). It says "Keep back from the platform edge. Or you might get sucked off." See link for other similar pictures.

Women and the publishing business

2006-04-05T08:41:00.000Z

Two great posts from two excellent blogs. Lynne Scanlon, self-proclaimed wicked witch of publishing, describes her experiences at a breakfast meeting of the Harvard Business School at the Harvard Club in New York. Wonderful stuff, I can imagine just how she felt. This is perfect blogging -- apt and informed analysis of the publishing industry conveyed by a clever turn of phrase, and humorous yet undaunted personal reactions. Jenny D, on Light Reading, draws attention to a New York magazine feature called Brainy Young Things, in a post entitled White Guys are Still in Charge . The NY magazine features four relatively new male editors of "serious magazines", one of whom, the editor of Harper's, is quoted as saying: “We’re all sort of the anti-blogs,” .....“And I think we will eventually triumph over the blogs!” The article points out that all four magazines lose money. As pointed out in the comments to Jenny D's posting, the accompanying "death mask" photo of the four editors, whether intentionally or accidentally looking that way, says it all.

Evolution of books

2006-04-03T18:24:00.000Z

"Biotechnology is governed by ethics committees, and rightly so. If some ultimate, sci-fi horror in which the books re-write themselves at will, destroying thousands of years of culture in a mad iterative process, is to be guarded against, perhaps – it may sound Orwellian – but perhaps an ethics committee to look after our cultural electronic heritage is needed." Sounds crazy? Chris Armstrong of Infoneognostic fairly often posts about e-books, and has written a couple of extremely interesting articles recently. In the first of these, rich with fascinating links, he discusses how publishers "add value" to books (he does not discuss journals, but it could apply) by allowing bookmarking and other social web interactions, and by building in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. But this is nothing, he says, compared with plans to enable readers and writers to "have conversations inside of books". Examples of "books talking to each other" include creating links inside and to each other, or organising and adding to an individual's collection. In the second article, Mr Armstrong looks at the social implications of this process, concluding with the arresting paragraph that started this post of mine. He discusses the technical possibilities of digital libraries in which books "read each other" ("already beginning to separate action and intelligence from the human brain"), as well as scenarios in which books report on the sites downloading them, or use being made of them, to allow automatic delivery of new books (again, I suppose this could apply to scientific articles, or any piece of digitised text). This is where the ethics come into it. By analogy with biotechnology, links added within or between books can be seen as like DNA modification, first the document (now) or the content itself (that's the futuristic bit) --- "so that we wake up one morning and discover that, worldwide, every Shakespeare, Blake or Hopkins had lost its essential English heritage (glister to glitter, tyger to tiger; windhover to – I don’t even want to hazard a guess, but vacuum cleaner seems likely!). " Hence the proposed code of ethics for this "cultural genome project" of book cloning. "Is instant access to a pre-digested, proto-analysed and ever-mutating version of the world’s literary culture beneficial? I doubt it. " Those who are thinking about or reacting to universal book-scanning projects in the shorter term may find it a stimulating intellectual exercise to try this type of imaginitve yet informed speculation. Not being very imaginitive, I had got as far as wondering what would happen if the current Wiki-mania were applied to one of these digitally scanned archives, but that's all about human intervention, not about the system self-evolving. There must be a novel in this, somewhere.

Sudoku puzzles

2006-04-03T17:15:00.000Z

Killer Sudoku Blogger - Blog Case Study: ProBlogger Blog Tips I have been very keen on Sudoku since November 2004, when the excellent Wayne Gould introduced the puzzle to the Times. Since then I have done one, leading up to two or three, puzzles a day, as well as investing in Wayne's online version of the game (randomly generate as many as you like at whatever difficulty level you like). Wayne also kindly supplies versions of his puzzle to us for Nurture, the Nature authors' magazine, and many other outlets besides, probably. Although many have leapt on the Sudoku bandwaggon since that day when Wayne visited the Times to see if the newspaper would be interested in it (see the newspaper's archives for several articles), the only version that I really like compared with the original is "killer" Sudoku. In this variant, one has aggregate boxes to fill in within the main grid, rather than individual boxes, but the principle is the same. When the killer Sudoku variant was first introduced, it was rather thin on the ground, so I searched the web to find some additional puzzles. The only reliable site I could find is Su-doku-net, which provides a new killer puzzle every day. The Times also now does the same, at first running hand-made killers from a Japanese company, but now running computer-generated ones under contract with a company called Puzzlemedia -- they are a lot harder than the hand-made ones, and I mean a lot. Now comes this post on Problogger from someone called DJApe (real name provided!). In it, he explains how he began his Sudoku blog, "the home of perfect sudoku" in his spare time, and how he now generates a good income from it. Good work -- though I thought his tactic of posting a puzzle that is impossible to solve to drive up his traffic a bit cruel on us poor bepuzzled. There is something particularly attractive about Sudoku. But I don't know why: I am not, generally speaking, that interested in puzzles. Before Sudoku, I was quite happy doing the daily Times 2 crossword on the way to or from work. Now I do the two Sudokus supplied as well, and if I have any time before getting to my destination, I complete the "polygon" puzzle (make as many words as you can from a limited number of letters, always including a central letter). I don't understand the appeal of these puzzles to someone like myself who doesn't buy puzzle magazines or have any urge to do other types of puzzle. In addition to Wayne's book collections, I do have a couple of books of Sudoku "spinoffs" in case the supply ever runs out. Having had a look at DJApe's site, and with the other links mentioned here, I don't think that is likely to happen.

Books kept by most libraries

2006-04-02T17:28:00.000Z

The Online Computing Library Center (OCLC) has updated for 2005 its list of the "top 1000" titles owned by its member libraries. (Dave Lull sent me the link.) According to OCLC's website, these are the "intellectual works that have been judged worth owning by the 'purchase vote' of libraries around the globe." The top 10, in order, are: The Bible, the US Census, Mother Goose, The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Lord of the Rings (trilogy), Hamlet and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I find this mixture a somewhat eclectic mix, so thought I'd note the next 10: Don Quixote, Beowulf, the Koran, The Night Before Christmas, Garfield at Large, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Macbeth, Gulliver's Travels. Of the books in the top 20, the Bible, the Koran, both Twains, the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote were once banned. It is a relief to know that Garfield never suffered this fate. The ranking in the list is determined by how many libraries own the title in question. I don't know if multiple titles at one libraray are counted, or if there is any weighting for the number of times a title is borrowed. But the list seems to be created from more than 53,000 libraries in 96 countries. Here's a link to some more information about OCLC and how it works. Dave Lull has also provided a link to some "fun facts" about the list. Here's a couple of sample entries: What is the highest-ranking work written by a woman? Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, ranks 28 on the list. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, is ranked 30, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ranks 32 Who is the top monster? Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Ranking 43, he beat both Count Dracula (75) and Edward Hyde (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ranked 141). This year the vampire, Lestat, ranked 927 on the OCLC Top 1000 list, but Shrek didn't make the list. There is also a brief comparison of duplicate titles on the OCLC list with various others. Thanks, Dave, I enjoyed the rather crazy experience of looking round the OCLC site.

A Woman from Cairo, cont.

2006-04-02T10:36:00.000Z

The extremely generous and energetic Val Landi kindly sent me a copy of his book "A Woman from Cairo", which I have now read. (See earlier post for an update on the events surrounding publication of this novel.) The book is certainly, as promised, a racy read. It is not a genre I read often, so don't know how it compares with others covering similar themes of Middle East/Western conflicts post-9/11. Mr Landi's own blog, subtitled "Notes on technology, politics and religion") describes the publishing industry's reaction to his book on the topic, so there may not be many. As a reader I have some stylistic quibbles with "Cairo", but in the face of Mr Landi's generosity and enthusiasm, I'll draw a veil over those. He asked me to write a customer review on Amazon if I liked the book, which I have done, reproduced below. "The last book I read that was as good as this on the topic of Middle East conflict and terrorism was "The Little Drummer Girl" by John Le Carre. Val Landi has written a post-9/11 conspiracy thriller that also tries to imagine "what happens next". It is an ambitious premise, and one Mr Landi carries out with energy and verve. As a reader from the UK, I was struck by the author's empathy for all viewpoints. He does not judge, but shows the reader how people can become prepared to take what seem to us to be desperate measures, but which seem to them to be a logical extension of their histories. Well done to Mr Landi for publishing this book; I wish him all success with this volume and the novels he will no doubt continue to write and publish in future." Readers of Mr Landi's blog will be able to see what he's planning next. As he puts it, it is , for him, all about "the clash of media, technology and civilisations".

An Army of Davids

2006-03-31T17:52:00.000Z

An Army of Davids, by Glenn Reynolds, is the "Small is Beautiful" of the Internet generation. The book has been extensively reviewed; Mr Reynolds links to these on his blog Instapundit.com. An Army of Davids is really two books, I feel : the first section describes the economic changes wrought by the decline of the big corporations, yet how the Internet is enabling "laid-off" employees to invent their own cottage industries and, in the process, become liberated and empowered. The second part is a review of the future of science and technology, again pursuing the "small will win" theme by featuring developments such as nanotechnology. I felt this part of the book was least successful. The first part, however, is an articulate analysis of the Internet society; of bloggers as a "pack" not a "herd". (The examples, however, as in the second part of the book, are selected to make the point.) It is fascinating to read about the evolution of the Web in ways that nobody could have predicted or planned 10 years ago. Why can one find any piece of information on the Web? Not because anyone planned to put it there in some massively expensive, long-term, mass-digitisation project, but becuase lots of individual people were enthusiastic enough about some piece of information to put it online. And this collection of what he calls "horizontal knowledge" is how Mr Reynolds sees the Internet enabling individuals to evolve in a kind of globalised self-expression; we can all become musicians or film directors or published authors or journalists (or, of course, terrorists), without requiring the resources of big corporations, or suffering their bureaucracy (but lacking their health-care plans). Powerful concepts, far more of them than I can summarise here. I highly recommend reading this book -- certainly the first half.

How and why Lisa's Dad got to be famous

2006-03-31T09:53:00.000Z

Grumpy Old Bookman: How and why Lisa's Dad got to be famous Michael Allen's new book (title as this posting) is about to come out. He has a lovely blog entry about this event, in which he provides a synopsis of the book, some thoughts about marketing, and an interview with himself. He's going to serialise the book on his blog over the next five or six weeks as part of his marketing strategy. In the intereview with himself, Mr Allen covers a theme he has written on before, about the rewards of writing and publishing. Are they financial? Or personal? He is in no doubt: "So, to sum up, you prefer to publish your own work, and have complete control over it, even though you sell fewer copies and make very little money?" "Exactly." Exactly.

Waterstone--Ottakars merge draws closer

2006-03-31T07:44:00.000Z

mediabistro.com: GalleyCat "Now that the Competition Commission has essentially given the go-ahead for HMV to buy Ottakar's -- merging Waterstone's and Ottakar's in unholy matrimony - reactions from the publishing world are very mixed, to say the least." For a round-up of the reactions to the news, and predictions of its effect on book selling and buying in the UK, see the Galley Cat link above. The final report is due out at the end of May, and "interested parties" may send comments on the draft until 19 April.

Reading Middlemarch

2006-03-30T21:07:00.000Z

Reading Middlemarch: March 2006 I've been so busy this week I haven't had much time to browse around the blog world, sphere, cornucopia, whatever it is called. So I've been bookmarking items on Bloglines to return to "at my leisure" (ha ha). Gmail is down just now so I have just been to have a look at this charming blog, to which I was alerted by a piece on Chekhov's Mistress. (That is, CM the blog, not CM herself.) Reading Middlemarch is exactly that, a collection of people who are all reading Middlemarch, a book which I think is wonderful. But long -- would I ever have time to read it again and blog about it at the same time, on top of everything else? But it is a book I enjoyed so much, for the character and attitudes of Dorothea and for the wonderful portrait of a crank (Chasaubon) --- people like him exist today! I have spent years being written to by people like him, convinced they have a better theory of evolution or have solved Fermat's Last Theorem*, and it was such a shock of recognition and humour to read about him in this book. Back to "Reading Middlemarch": Isabella wrote the opening post on 4 March, asking "Is Middlemarch a women's book?" She points out that it scores high as "women's fiction" but less well on general "male-dominated 'best novels' lists" (oh? news to me.) . There is some preamble about rule-setting and editions, and then they are off - with side-tracks on the way, often on feminist issues. What a great blog, I shall enjoy reading it. *When someone really did solve Fermat's Last Theorem, it must have been a great disappointment to these people, and a great relief to the postman. (These guys don't believe in email but in registered, signed-for-on-receipt packages.)

Grammatical episodes

2006-03-30T20:52:00.000Z

mediabistro.com: Articles: Excerpt: Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies Despite the somewhat off-putting title, there is some useful advice in this excerpt from a new book, which explains when to use "that" and "which", a distinction that is meat and drink to subeditors (copyeditors to US readers) and like-minded people. I haven't looked it up in Hart's Rules but if I did I imagine it would be one of those typical Hart's entries that says, in effect, everyone disagrees and so latitude is allowed. (Such entries enrage the type of person who is insistent that one should never split an infinitive, for example.) Here is June Casagrande, author of the strangely titled book, on that/which: "Which" sets off what are called "nonessential" or "nonrestrictive" clauses. (It’s the same principle as the one we learned about in chapter 10 regarding how to use commas.) In simpler English, "nonessential" or "nonrestrictive" clauses are simply clauses that can be lifted right out of a sentence without changing its primary point. The college, which you are attending, admits anyone who can spell her own name. The main point of the sentence is that the college admits just about anyone. The fact that you are currently attending it is an extra bit of information, an aside. Everything in between the commas can be surgically removed from the sentence without changing the simple point that the college admits flunkies. More of the same at the link, which I found via Booksquare. Incidentally, note that I did not hyphenate "strangely titled book". Another grammatical point is that you don't need to hyphenate a noun qualified by an adverb and an adjective, becuase there is no ambiguity. You do need to hyphenate a noun qualified by two adjectives only if there is an ambiguity, for example the red-nosed reindeer. Here is a web article by Richard Mason entitled "Isn't it painful to see "they" used in the singular?" I always thought that the answer is "yes", and frequently tie myself up in editing knots on this point. But according to Richard, the answer is "no". He says: "You should not feel any pain from the use of "they" as a singular pronoun, for instance to refer to a person of unknown or unspecified sex, since it is perfectly correct English." I am going to seek advice on this one, it seems a bit radical at first glance -- but there does seem to be plenty of blue-chip support (note hyphen) for the usage, not least from Jane Austen.

Honesty again

2006-03-30T19:37:00.000Z

Two stories from today's Times. One reports that various attractions (zoos, theme parks) in the UK have withdrawn free entry for holders of "Blue Peter" badges, after it has emerged over the past few days that people are selling them on e-Bay, with the sellers specifically mentioning the free entry perk. "Blue Peter" is a children's TV programme which rewards viewers with a badge if they have done a good deed or created a piece of artwork. The article states: "On Sunday there were 20 Blue Peter badges up for sale for between 99p and £30 but yesterday there were 275 badges for sale and the top price was £130 — including an authentic letter from the programme". The amount you would save on a child's ticket to an attraction cannot be more than about £20. Another story in the same issue is entitled "Honest man hands in $1m bag". John Surhoff found a Louis Vuitton bag in Sausalito, California, containing a 12-carat diamond ring, Cartier jewellery and other items to the value of $1 million. He handed the bag in to the local police station. It belonged to a Canadian who was in town for a wedding, and has now been returned to the owner. "Every person I know or associate with would have done the same", Mr Surhoff is quoted as saying. Funny old world.

Colour of Law

2006-03-29T21:07:00.000Z

I read The Colour of Law (yes, with a u) by Mark Giminez on Sunday. This is the book that got published by Doubleday becuase John Grisham was, that year, writing a non-fiction book. The Colour of Law was marketed as "as good as Grisham or your money back". I was waiting for it to come out in paperback, but a shop in Kingston was selling the hardback for £5.99 (big yellow sticker). As another, silver sticker on the cover said "As good as Grisham or your money back -- £9.99", I thought I could not lose -- in fact, I could only win, surely? Well, it isn't as good as Grisham. But I'm not going to ask for my money back either, as it isn't that bad. It is just totally predictable as soon as the set-up is described: rich, handsome young lawyer with adorable cute daughter, gorgeous wife, red Ferrari, mansion; earns tons of money working for evil corporations; is manipulated into defending a heroin-addicted prostitute accused of murdering a good-for-nothing son of a powerful senator/presidential hopeful. I won't say any more, but if you had to guess the rest of the plot from that sentence, you would be quite correct. (You probably would not also need the prologue "To Kill a Mockingbird" heavy hint.) The book is readable enough, and short, but so utterly predictable in absolutely every way, it is kind of hard to see the point. OK for a flight if you've already read The Da Vinci Code, I suppose ;-)

15 City Skylines

2006-03-27T20:23:00.000Z

15 Best Skylines in the World At the link is a beautiful series of photos of city skylines by Luigi Di Serio at his blog diserio.com. (There are actually 18.) I was referred to these pictures by Steve Rubel at micropersuasion.

Scott Adams' opinions

2006-03-27T19:36:00.000Z

In common with hundreds and no doubt thousands of other people (if the comments are anything to go by), I enjoy reading Scott Adams's Dilbert blog. Today he has a great posting about his opinions. Yesterday, he said he would give his true opinion on as many topics as his commenters asked (and he could find time to answer). He's responded today, at the link above. I just love it. Here are a few examples, but read the whole thing. Q. What do you see as the greatest problem facing the world today? A. Religious nuts (assuming global warming gets fixed). Q. What is your opinion on the nature, constancy, and relevancy of time? A. Ask me again yesterday. Q. What's your opinion on abortion? A. It’s bad for the fetus. It’s convenient for the adult who wants one. Arguing about when “life begins” is an attempt to offload a tough question on the dictionary or the courts or a superstition. I support the majority opinion in favor of keeping abortion legal. I value the quality of life for adults higher than the unrealized life of a fetus. And I trust the majority (the mob) to figure out the most realistic place to draw that line. Q. Who, out of any person, would do the best job of dictator with total control of the world, and please give a real response. A. Bill Gates. He’s rational, experienced, and has a good track record of helping the disadvantaged through his charitable trusts. Q. Do you think people can be 'born gay', or is it developmental? A. I think people are born with specific sexual preferences, including being on the fence about it. I think that the people who are naturally bisexual might pick one side and go with it depending on their life experiences. It’s those fence sitters who make it seem like a lifestyle decision for everyone. But the people who have never been attracted to the opposite sex are clearly born that way. Sometimes I think Scott Adams just likes to wind up his audience -- posts a provocative argument and watches all the commenters jump around or wrap themselves in knots. But the "opinions" pieces are great: he's connecting with his audience; answering some hard questions (eg about use of torture) very well; and being funny at the same time. Just one more example, which I think is a pretty good life position: Q. What's your opinion of yourself? A. I’m good at some things and bad at others. I’m lucky that there’s a market for the things I’m good at.

Flickr on cover of Newsweek

2006-03-27T19:12:00.000Z

Niall Kennedy has noted that Flickr is on the cover of this week's (3 April) Newsweek. The full article is available online, covering the success of startups like Flickr and MySpace. I love Niall's favourite quote from the piece: "The Living Web means that there may be plenty of opportunities to become the next Flickr, and hundreds of start-ups are trying to do just that. At Tim O'Reilly's recent Emerging Technology Conference, it seemed that 1,200 people had signed on to some collectively generated business plan: starting a company in a spare bedroom, outsourcing the programming to some Indian company they found on the Web, getting content from users and then having users organize the content by tagging, pocketing money from Google ads placed on the Web site and, finally, selling the company to Yahoo. (Bad news: Yahoo's Horowitz admits, "We can't buy everyone.")" Thank you, Niall.

Still waiting to download DVDs

2006-03-26T19:58:00.000Z

According to an unattributed brief in the Times last Friday (24 March) , "film fans will be able to download DVDs to own from next month". Wow. This is said to result from a deal between Universal Pictures and an online DVD rental firm called Lovefilm. No source was given for the story, but an internet search reveals a BBC online news story giving some more details. Does not sound great. King Kong and Pride and Prejudice are given as examples of the first tranche of movies that will be available on the AOL website (aol.co.uk from 10 April). According to the BBC, "Fans will pay £19.99 for a DVD of their chosen film plus two digital copies to keep indefinitely - one for their home computer and one for a portable device." Users won't be able to burn their own DVD copies of the films, and they are compatible only with Windows/PCs (not Macs). So what's the good news? 19.99 is the price of a DVD, and one can almost always get it cheaper right away, not only via Amazon but also in the shops (12.99 is typical -- Pride and Prejudice is already available for that in the shops and less on Amazon -- for one copy only ;-) -- truly awful US ending in the extras). Although there is lots of blather in the BBC article about a new revolution, start of a tranche of new services, etc, there isn't much to get excited about for the average user like me. I am not interested in having several copies of a movie to watch in micro-form on some phone, I am interested in downloading a movie or TV programme/series (one copy) so I can watch it when I want to --I don't particularly mind whether or not I can burn it onto my own DVD, and I sure don't want to pay 19.99 for the privilege. I can't be the only person who wants this. The BBC also says: "Last month, another UK website, Wippit, started offering permanent downloads - but only independent movies are currently available. " (Sounds a bit like that Google service.) On a quick look, the Wippit site is only about music downloads, nothing about DVDs.

Fraud in science

2006-03-26T15:54:00.000Z

Book of the Day: Reading Journal Entry: The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science by Horace Freeland Judson "Book of the Day" features a thoughtful review of Horace Freeland Judson's latest (?) book, on fraud in science. Mapletree 7 is (rightly, I hope) sceptical about Judson's claims that there is much unidentified fraud commited by scientists. (One of those "how can he know?" questions.) Mapletree 7 comments on Judson's identification of peer-review of grants and of publications as the two key areas in need of reform. She is absolutely right to say that scientists are just like everyone else, and hence no more or no less likely to cheat as everyone else; the difference lies, she says, in that scientists deal with experiments and data --- the interpretation of evidence. She concludes that Judson's book would have been better had it focused more on science and less on becoming a "general polemic" about fraud in other areas of society. The peer-review system is not designed to detect fraud; it was designed to judge results that were obtained honestly. I think it is very hard to design a workable system that is going to detect fraud in the first place. It is less hard to design a system that reacts to fraud once it is suspected -- the Hwang (Korean stem-cell) affair will add impetus to current efforts, I am sure. Journals can act promptly when informed of suspicion of fraud, and can use the power of the internet to label retrospectively the online version of suspicious papers. Abstracting and indexing services such as Medline can do the same, so that "suspicious" science is clearly identified to any future reader. Funding bodies, whether of grants or employers of the scientists concerned, can also act promptly. Plenty of minds and committees are currently focused on this question, and plenty of electronic and real ink is being expended by journalists, who have a range of opinions about what should be done. At the end of the day, catching anyone cheating is difficult in any profession. Proving a suspicion without a witchhunt mentality is also difficult, although as Mapletree7 implies, scientists should always keep accurate records of their research and be prepared to show them if asked. It is interesting in this context that scientific journals are often accused of failing to appreciate the importance of innovative research. Nobel prizewinners nowadays often tell of the difficulties they had in getting their groundbreaking research published. (My own journal, Nature, famously rejected the Krebs cycle, and reduced the report of the discovery of monoclonal antibodies from an Article to a Letter.) Everyone agrees that scientific research is about innovation and discovery. But there is no simple answer to the question of how the entire system of professional science can be designed to welcome unexpected new discoveries, yet be responsible about ensuring such claims are justified.

Feminism at work and in the newspapers

2006-03-26T13:25:00.000Z

Philobiblon: Time to boycott the anti-female Observer Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon earlier in the week drew attention to a daft article in Prospect about females in the workplace. She has summarised the article so one does not have to read it ;-), and succinctly dispatched its main arguments. I wish everyone in the world thought as clearly as Natalie on this topic. Since that posting, the Observer has picked up on the Prospect piece and published their own daft article on the topic, again as pointed out at Philobiblion. There is a lot of incoherent comment on the Observer's blog about the article, but Natalie has it right on the nail. My general opinon of Sunday papers (in the UK) is that they are a waste of time: they don't have any news to report that can't wait until Monday (or read online if you are a news junkie), and the Saturday papers contain supplements for everything one could possibly want to read about and plenty more that one would not. There are plenty of good blogs publishing roundups and highlights of weekend papers. I have, as noted, long since given up on the Sunday Times, so it is good to have it confirmed that not only am I not missing anything by not reading the Observer, but I am gaining something by my abstinence. Incidentally, in the link at the top of this posting, Philobiblon also links to a (Sunday) Times piece on online shopping. This is what I mean about not having to read the Sunday papers -- with people like Natalie Bennett and Sarah Weinman around, no need ;-) . The online shopping piece is quite readable, though did not tell a veteran like me anything I didn't know. Useful for people considering whether to dip an electronic toe into this cyberwater, though.

Randomness as book plot

2006-03-26T11:43:00.000Z

I was thinking about the use of randomness as a plot device in fiction. Thornton Wilder used it to good effect in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which five people die when a bridge in Peru collapses. The protagonist decides to investigate the lives of these five people to see if there was a purpose to their deaths. (I can't remember the answer but I remember enjoying the book.) Another book that used this device well (or so I thought at the time) was John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain , in which a few (5 again?) people are "trained" to see into the future. As a result they are all able to read the newspaper for a brief time on a certain date one year ahead. The story tells of what each one read (two of them read their own obituaries, I recall, another a business opportunity, but I forget the rest), and follows what happened as a result to each one over the year to the appointed date. Pretty good stuff.

One-book authors

2006-03-26T10:51:00.000Z

Creating a list of books I've enjoyed reading in my life (which I've split into those I've enjoyed reading and those that have left a lasting impression), made me think about authors who have just written one book. Immediate examples are Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) and Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind). Much has been written on the topic of "one-book" authors who don't stop writing. I thought I'd try to list authors who have written one good book but in my opinion could have stopped there. They might have written other quite reasonable books, just nowhere near the class of their "magnum opus". Or they might hvae been better advised not have bothered with further books.

Jay McInerny -- Bright Lights, Big City
Zadie Smith -- White Teeth
Irvine Welsh -- Trainspotting
Tama Janowitz -- Slaves of New York
Donna Tartt -- A Secret History
John Irving -- The World According to Garp
J D Salinger -- Catcher in the Rye
Kurt Vonnegut -- Slaughterhouse 5
Aldhous Huxley -- Brave New World
Philip Roth -- Portnoy's Complaint

There may be others in this category whose "main" book I have not read: Brett Easton Ellis (American Psycho) , Kasuko Ishigura (Remains of the Day), Louis de Bernieres (Captain Correlli's Mandolin), Patrick Suskind (Perfume), Iain Banks (The Wasp Factory), Jonathan Coe (The Rotters' Club), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections). Also others whose "main" book I haven't liked so could not read others -- for example, Flann O'Brien (the Third Policeman, currently enjoying a renewal owing to "Lost" being allegedly based on it) and Richard Ford (Sportswriter).

Other authors, whether or not they are to one's taste (some of the below are emphatically not to mine), write plenty of books -- some may be "better" than others, but one does not stand out from the rest. Examples (of living authors) include:

Ian McEwan
Julian Barnes
Nick Hornby
Nickki Gerrard
Anita Shreve
Sebastian Faulkes
Anita Brookner
Margaret Atwood

Most Wanted

2006-03-26T09:24:00.000Z

Yesterday I finished the highly recommended (by afficionados of the genre) Most Wanted by Michelle Martinez -- it is one of those books that can be read in a few hours. It isn't bad: the angle is "prosecutor with straying husband and six-month baby" while dealing with violent crime, paranoia about trustworthiness of investigating team, and a hard-nosed female boss playing politics while compromised by a personal involvement. So far, so good: a mixture of enough angles, even if individually cliched, can be heady if well-combined. However, the book ain't that great. The identity of the bad penny in the investigation is immediately obvious, removing one big chunk of dramatic tension at the outset and meaning that the heroine has to be obtuse in some situations (where she'd guess the identity of this person if she took a particular logical step) whereas able to make brilliant deductive leaps in others. The "baby/babysitter" subplot is also unrealistic in the same way -- sometimes the heroine is excessively anxious about her childcare, other times she seems to have forgotten that the baby is there. The writing just isn't good enough to sustain reader interest (John Grisham, for example, has weak plots that just don't hang together, but his writing carries you through) . Yet there are some good points, and the book is left with a triangular dilemma that has scope for interesting developments in future books. It just depends on whether the writer evolves (Most Wanted seems to be her first book). I might give the second in the series, The Finishing School, a try when it is available in paperback on Amazon UK, but it won't be highest priority on my list. On the cover of Most Wanted are enthusiastic quotes from Iris Johansen and Tess Gerritson. Given the number of times I read blurbs from these authors, I wonder if they have taken a leaf from the excellent book of David Montgomery, who is now producing a "blurb machine" (great idea!) on his blog Crime Fiction Dossier.

Place and community

2006-03-25T22:26:00.000Z

Books, Inq.: Read ye, read ye ... I have just returned from an evening of mixed pleasure and pain: a concert at my daughter's local primary school. The concert was in a good cause, for the British Heart Foundation, but there was a lot to endure for the three songs I saw and heard her sing as part of the choir. During the gaps (i.e. other children's solo performances of varying degrees of quality), my mind was free to wander -- an enforced space where I could not read or do anything execpt sit and think. I thought about the connections I have made since beginning blogging: the very good friends I've made as well as the "acquaintances of ideas" I regularly meet on my trips brokered by Bloglines. The concert was an enforced, and unusual, period of quiet after a week's work and at the end of a Saturday spent doing the end-of-week domestic tasks and errands, admiring progress on the ongoing Colorado River project (let me tell you, this is a very, very long river indeed), and so on. As I sat listening to the out-of tune soloists and the fumbling fingers of the pianists, adored by the parents concerned and politely tolerated by the rest of the audience, I reflected on how agonised I might have been had I been sitting in that seat six months ago. My thoughts would have been rushing round in my mind, worrying at things beyond my control. I reflected on a stress-management course I attended last summer, and what I learned there about slowing down, appreciating the small things, learning to accept and to be, in an attempt to control the restless escalation of various internal crises. How the perceptive psychologist there defined me as having "relaxation-induced anxiety", and how I'm working on that. (Honest!) My young daughter rose with her fellow choristers for the final song. It was Lennon and McCartney's "Let it Be": "And when the broken-hearted people, Living in the world agree, there will be an answer, Let it be." The tears poured down my face at these simple words. Just let it be, I tell myself, let it be. We walked home; Malcolm and the girls went upstairs to watch the latest episode of Planet Earth (featuring tonight, I am just told, the Colorado River). Downstairs alone, I switched on my computer for the first time today, and there is this wonderful, generous posting from Frank (Wilson), linking to my placeism post -- not just generous but "getting it" in his usual economical, on-the-nail style; writing of the "connectiveness" and sense of community he has encountered by the unconventional means of blogging. Also, I have come home to an email from Dave (Lull), sending me some links on "slowing down", and writing in terms of the "hurry sickness". Here is someone else who really "gets it". Yes, it is wonderful to have such friends, generous and intuitive. Thank you. I feel Frank is completely right when he writes about the international community of bloggers: "And this connectiveness I think may turn out to have great power." For me as an individual, I feel the power. This is an extraordinary thing for me to admit: I could not have anticipated it back in December, and I am not the kind of person to "feel stuff" in this way ;-) . I have taken refuge in science and pragmatism in part, at least, because it is (in my mind) a safe refuge. I am an eldest child, living with an eldest child, in a serious and responsible environment we have created for our children. I believe in duty and stoicism, and am usually dutiful and stoical -- or at least, as much as I can be. Yet I'm feeling this power. I can't analyse it and have no idea where it will go on the large scale (like Frank, I feel that it is so powerful at the individual and small-group level that it must evolve into something on a larger scale). Perhaps the effects will be similar to the society-changing effect of mass introduction of TV. This new power, however arises from not only being a mass media like TV but by being an open, interactive system, controlled at the individual's level; enabled by information technology, not a passive recipient of it. I sometimes wonder what Orwell would have made of it all.

Self-publishing books and articles

2006-03-23T16:17:00.000Z

Self-publishing is the in-thing, and a good thing too. AssociatedContent is a hybrid web-publishing and content sharing platform. It has been going for a year now and has quite a collection of content. Clicking on "books", for example, brings you to a collection of book reviews ordered by date of posting. The collection is eclectic, and unless you are happy to get a list "by most recent" for its search categories, a bit haphazard. A more fine-tuned tagging system would help, such as Amazon's ability to let customers browse broad categories and then fine-tune down within the category. Of course, the website is by no means limited to book reviews, content covers just about anything, written, video and audio. Each (written) article has plenty of features, for example a reader scoring system, comment facility, links to related articles, links to previous articles by that author -- and the inevitable ads (courtesy Google). The owners, Softbank Captial, say they have invested 5.4 million US dollars; users and conent providers are said to be professionals of various descriptions. There's a whole range of material the site will consider publishing and, it says, pay for (hmmm). Their tagline is "Soon, everyone will be published on AssociatedContent". I'm going to add it, or rather a bit of it, to my rss reader for a while to see what the output is like -- the site itself is a bit "busy" for my personal taste so it is perfect for rss. The more conventional ("moribund" as one of my colleagues flippantly has been heard to call it) medium of paper lives on. In one of those free glossy magazines that comes through my door every month and generally goes straight into the recycling box is a feature about Grosvenor House Publishing, which is run by someone who lives locally, it turns out. GH is one of many such ventures: the trend started in the USA but has caught on, enabled by the internet, and this particular example seems not bad on the face of it. G. P. Taylor, who writes best-sellers such as "Shadowmancer", is a featured author. This company charges 495 pounds sterling for a professionally finished book, Amazon distribution and limited UK bookshop distribution. They are cagey about the print run but I would guess it is essentially a print-on-demand operation. I'm impressed by their website, service to authors (marketing guidance provided) and testimonials by published authors. More power to Grosvenor House and to outfits like them; more power to authors.

Placeism in the global network

2006-03-23T13:20:00.000Z

A few weeks ago, Dave Lull introduced me to the concept of "place-ism", specifically a book by Bill Kauffman called Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette. Mr Kauffman's book is about staying in one place, not going anywhere, and being the richer for it. He tells many anecdotes about his own place, Batavia in New York State, some amusing, some wry. There is a strong sense of nostalgia for the small-scale, personal way things were done in the past (similarly addressed, also with some lack of objectivity, by John Grisham in, say, The Last Juror or the Broker). There is also a deep thread of personal history. Read the book (I can't do justice to all its aspects here): it's funny and instructive, neatly capturing, for example, the ambiguity of personal choice versus the expectations others (our families, mainly) have of us. I believe, if memory serves, that Dave recommended this book in light of some discussion we were having about the "small-scaleness" of blogging. I probably mentioned (or droned on about) how after I started blogging I rapidly found the Internet to be a small place, against my expectations. Blogging is a "placeist" activity, in that one can use the technology of the Web to fall into a localised yet intense sphere that is common to you and a very few other people. It is a placeism of the mind, in which one's fellow travellers are not living in the next street and whom you never see face-to-face. Another aspect of placeism is the strong sense of "home" infusing Mr Kauffman's book (and indeed, John Grisham's). As has been pointed out many times, far fewer people have this sense of "place" and inner stability today compared with pre-industrial pasts. But one can make one's own place. In the morning on the way to work, I stop off at an Italian coffee shop for my only allowed cup of the day (in preference to using the free machines at work). I don't go to this place every day, but I never have to specify the way I like my coffee, because the guy always remembers. At Christmas time, he gave me a large pantotte. On his counter, he has an Internet connection open showing his website: not google or a news site, but a slideshow of his own sandwiches to order, his Vespa for sale, and so on. This is a "place" for ex-nomads such as myself who do not have a Batavia or a Silloth; one goes through life collecting them up. MySpace and place I came across another article, this time as a result of thinking and discussions about MySpace, whose "overnight and complete" market success among the young is of intense interest in many established companies who wonder how MySpace did it. As well they might. At the recent O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Danah Boyd gave a talk about "glocalisation". As she says, a grotesque word, and defined by her as the "ugliness that ensues when the global and local are shoved uncomfortably into the same concept." Her perspective is that of web design of social software, but she makes some very insightful comments about customers, particularly young ones, and by extension, placeism. "When mass media began, people assumed we would all converge upon one global culture. While the media had an effect, complete homogenisation has not occurred. And it will not. While some values spread and are adopted en-masse, cultures form within mass culture to differentiate smaller groups of people. Style-driven subcultures are the most visible form of this, but it occurs in companies and other social gatherings". Ms Boyd is not talking about the company of bloggers/army of Davids, but she might as well be. Her article, as I say, is directed towards use of social space from the company perspective, and her comments about customer service should be required reading by any business ;-) . Leaving that aside, and many fascinating observations which make me urge you to read her transcript, DB goes on to say: "Just becuase people can connect globally does not mean they want to. People are more drawn to those who are like them, who share their same values and cultural norms. In this way, people don't have to explain the foundations of their thoughts. They feel more closely aligned and more willing to share with people who are more like them." "People collide on Flickr becuase they took similar photos; they find wonderful blogs through search." I won't go on to paraphrase DB's developing argument about random collisions and rareness, as if you've read this far you'll know if you are with her and want to read the article. I also lost touch with the piece as it ended with an analysis of language and symbols. But my summary of her bottom line, "designing for glocalisation", is placeism through and through:

Empower users to personalise and culturalise their spaces online (blogs, MySpace, etc)
Provide the cultural environment where people can accidentally connect with strangers over meaningful things (public not private networks)
Empower individual users to be cultural spokespeople (modifiable systems)
It's all got to work and the network builders have to really, really care about it working the way the users want (good customer service, as exemplified by MySpace, Flickr, Craigslist)

One final quote: "Organic community growth, embedded design and the ability to connect culturally local communities through global network[s] are the way to form large sustainable communities."

Lawrence, Kansas

Finally, and I am almost at the end now, a kind of postscript to this posting is The newspaper of the future, once again via a link from Dave Lull. This long article in the New York Times business section describes the Journal-World of Lawrence, Kansas. This newspaper, via profits from its broadband holding, is providing interactive, imaginative and multimedia information for the town of Lawrence "however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible." There are lots of Kauffmanian examples in the piece linked to here (not (yet?) behind subscription wall). Pace Glenn Reynolds, journalists providing the information have retrained to become multi-taskers, and investment is being made in all types of information technologies to convey and receive the information (customer feedback, note, being a significant part of the equation). At the end of the day the financial constraints may be limiting. But the Lawrence experience is definitely one for the placeists among us to watch.

Night buses

2006-03-23T11:59:00.000Z

The excellent Richard Morrison (the Times music critic but so much else besides) had a lovely article in Tuesday's paper about his experiences getting home after reviewing a performance in the provinces. Well worth a read, but I was particularly struck by this paragraph near the end: "To me, the night bus is a metaphor for so many useful public domains in Britain, from comprehensives and hospitals to swimming pools and parks, that are falling into terminal squalor because the middle classes have shrunk from them in horror, and decided to fund far more expensive private alternatives for their own exclusive use. The result is that Britain is increasingly two nations.I don't like that. Which is why, as a token gesture you may consider ludicrous, I still use night buses." I also like his subsequent paragraph: "Besides, there’s a good chance that, among the dishelleved revellers returning from the grungy dives of Camden Town, I will bump into my own children. And as sociologists are always telling us, no father should spurn the opportunity to spend quality time with his offspring. Even if it involves lurching through the mean streets of North London as dawn breaks over Kentish Town."

Googlepage links, maybe (update: yes)

2006-03-22T21:06:00.000Z

I was exicted to read a few weeks ago that Google has introduced a web page builder. I was too late to sign up, but I registered and was thrilled yesterday to receive an email from Google inviting me to try the Page Creator service, still in beta. I've created a couple of web pages already (and, inevitably, so has Jenny, though she finds the Google service pretty tame compared with Yahoo: Geocities, in which you can make your mouse track anything you like and generally do lots of "jumping up and down" (as I call them) things). I've attempted to link to these pages in the right-hand nav bar of Petrona, but the links go to 404 errors. I don't know if this is me or Google (as the function is still beta), and their help pages aren't much help, as such pages rarely are. So I'll attempt to link to the pages from here, just to see if that works. If not, I'll keep working on it: Clarke-Irving page and About Connotea Detective . (And, for luck, Jenny's page.) Note: the links don't work (apart from the Page Creator link). I've sent the Google technical support people a help request, and will fix the links if I hear from them or if I otherwise have an inspiration. Update: The links above now work, and the link to the main Clarke-Irving page in the sidebar now works, thanks to Dave Lull for the tips. The "About Connotea Detective" link in the sidebar is still being stubborn but I am working on it.) Final update to this post: All working now.

Nostalgia already

2006-03-22T20:38:00.000Z

The paucity of choice in Waterstones, etc, is a recurring theme, one with which I don't entirely agree. But the downside has never been more clearly demonstrated to me than yesterday, when I popped in en route to an Iranian new year celebration (;-) ) to see if I could buy a book about blogs or blogging. Not a one (and not one in WHSmith either). The reason for my attempt was because I had just read a book on the topic, The Weblog Handbook, by Rebecca Blood. It is a readable and interesting book, and one I recommend, but it was published as long ago as 2002. The famous but misattributed quote about Harold Wilson's week being a long time in politics does not quite apply to blogging, but it was a revelation to read in this book that everyone with a blog knew each other (online), and that there were web directory sites for blogs that listed them all. The principles of blogging so ably and clearly set out by Ms Blood still hold, but having read her book I was keen to fill in the gap to the present. I felt like an illegal alien in Waterstones. I am clearly a creature from another world now. (And have since hived off to planet Amazon where I will find what I need if it exists.) Some words of wisdom from Ms Blood: "Weblogs are not, as some people say, a new kind of journalism. Rather, they supplement traditional journalism by evaluating, augmenting and above all filtering the information churned out by journalists and the rest of the media machine every day. Mass media seeks to appeal to a wide audience; weblogs excel at creating targeted serendipity for their individual constituencies." "....there are only three movitivations for keeping one [a weblog]: information sharing, reputation building, and personal expression." "..each one, whatever its nature, provides for its readers an intimate portrait of its maintainer, a portrait drawn over time. Random observations, selected links, extended diatribes --- accumulated, these elements resolve into a mosaic revealing a personality, a self." "The Web has circumvented all the gatekeepers, and now everyone with a webpage has the means to reach an audience of like-minded individuals." "Your goal is to attract a core audience of readers in tune with your way of seeing the world. Their number is irrelevant." On webloggers: "I have found them to be, without exception, very nice individuals. Several of these have been webloggers with whom, politically, I could not disagree more strongly.....In each case we have met each other with great pleasure, our differences far, far outweighed by the things we have in common: a love for the weblog, the unwavering belief in the value of every individual's opinion, and an absolute commitment to the right of each of us to publish our thoughts." "Those who grumble at seeing the same site linked on a dozen weblogs rail against the most fundamental attribute of the Web itself -- its ability to allow people to share information easily. And those who decry cross-blog talk have not yet understood the value of bringing a dozen lively minds to bear on the same subject." Thank you, Rebecca Blood.

Literary culture

2006-03-22T16:46:00.000Z

Taking advantage of a day's holiday from work to catch up, I have read an interview with Gabriel Josipovici on Ready Steady Book, link kindly sent to me, with some excerpts, by Dave Lull. I hadn't heard of Mr Josipovici before (I hope that does not make me a Philistine), but he is a French writer who has spent most of his adult life in the UK. This last point is relevant becuase GJ is rather critical of the UK cultural scene; as he lives here, then that's OK;-) Much of the interview on Ready Steady Book is about GJ's writing, old and new. The conversation takes a general turn: "MT: In this country we tend to see literary novels as ‘heavy’ and popular fiction as ‘light’. Yet you have referred to the ‘lightness’ of The Iliad. What is this quality exactly? Are there modern novels that are light in this way?" The first part of the response is one that Michael Allen would endorse: "GJ: There may be two or three different issues here. I find contemporary works that take themselves terribly seriously a pain, as I’ve said. I’d much rather read a good thriller or a good comic novel than one that is bidding to become a Booker prize-winner (and often succeeding)." GJ then goes on to say that (American, he says) thriller writers these days want to show that their work is important, which he calls a "disaster for their work". This is an intriguing view: which thriller writers can he mean, and why a disaster? (He doesn't tell us.) The most famous and successful thriller at the moment remains the Da Vinci Code, and I don't recall the author claiming it as important (though some religious organisations have erroneously taken it seriously, but that's different). In my opinion, among the best current US thriller writers are the likes of Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, Karin Slaughter, Philip Margolian, Robert Crais ... I could go on (see Connotea Detective). My point is, I have not known them to take their work "seriously" in what they have written or said about their books. (Karin Slaughter in particular is great copy as an interviewee). GJ's examples of modern authors who write "light" novels are Malamud, Shabtai, Simon, Perec, Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Kundera, Joseph Heller and Peter Handke. I am ashamed to say I have not read, or even heard of, many of these. I went through a phase of reading Kundera and enjoyed a few of his, though I found I'd had enough after a while. I read one Malamud ages ago (his most famous one, called "The Fixer") but do not remember much about it. Catch 22 (Heller) I found a bit of a curate's egg (though was only a teenager when I read it, and knew nothing about the culture or events depicted). The rest I have not read. I admit I am not a literary intellectual, so do feel somewhat intimidated by this list of "light" reading. GJ also mentions Spark, Bellow, Nabokov and Thomas Bernhard. I've read a lot of Spark in the past, I read one or two Nabokovs and didn't like them (probably did not "get" them -- he seems a creepy kind of person to me but I know he is much admired), and have not read the others. I guess there is little hope for me, as these days I fear I would not now have the concentration to read these no doubt extremely clever books. Another point GJ makes, as highlighted by Dave Lull, is about the paucity of British (literary) culture: "MT: In the past you’ve said that, from your perspective, British culture appears to be "narrow, provincial and smug". How would you say this manifests itself when it comes to literature?" "GJ: Coming to this culture from the outside I’m amazed at how mean and provincial it is. What do I mean by that? It’s difficult to put into words. It’s like a fog that has covered the British Isles and people go about in it and think that’s how the world is. Look at the bookshops. I lived in Paris for a few months two years ago, in the Montmartre area, not a particularly intellectual quarter, but there were four independent bookshops within five minutes walk of my flat. Their owners had run them for ten to twenty-five years and, while they of course had all the latest works, they also reflected the owners’ tastes. ‘Içi, moi je suis la reine’, one of them said to me one day. Here, every town you go to has the same dreary Waterstones with the same dreary books piled high on the tables, two for the price of one in some instances, supermarket style. I wonder if it is the first time in history that the line between fashion and culture has disappeared. Disappeared in the minds of the reading public, of literary editors, of prizegivers, even of writers themselves." Well. And again, well! Of course GJ is right to observe the sad decline of the independent bookseller (someone has made a similar comment to my chick-lit posting immediately before this one). When I moved to Kingston 15 years ago, for example, there were 7 or 8 different bookshops in the town, now there are three, and yes they are Waterstones, Borders and WHSmith. But I don't think this is symptomatic of any problem for the consumer of books (though of course it is for the independent booksellers). Although GJ sneers at the 3 for 2s (very fashionable to do that), Waterstones and Borders offer a large choice of standard books. And where they don't, there is online. As has so often been said, Amazon offers any book you can think of, in or out of print, 24 hours a day. (Abe books and other online booksellers similar.) I have bought more books in the past 5 years from a huge range of small bookshops and individuals in the UK (and elsewhere) than I ever did before I got hooked on the Internet. The variety is unbelievable. One of my favourite blogs, admittedly not UK, reviews "a book a day", mostly obtained from the public library. Other bloggers do the same. (Doubtless non-bloggers too;-) ) That isn't to say that independent bookshops aren't great -- they are. Whenever I am in a town where there is one -- Keswick, Tenby, Chipping Norton -- and have any time (and they are open), I go in and invariably buy some books that I hadn't previously thought to buy. There are plenty in central London too, but I tend not to go there even though, technically, I live there. It is sad that these shops find it hard to compete. But GJ is wrong, I think, to imply that their absence signifies a literary desert. My theory is that in Paris and in other cities in mainland Europe, independent booksellers have a better time of it because the Internet has not caught on there to the extent that it has in this island nation, and becuase English is not the first language. Online retail in mainland European languages does exist, but on a much smaller scale than English. I think if GJ waits a few years he will see things change. I am not saying this is a good thing, but I think it may happen. (And I think he's probably right that the standard of literary debate in the media is higher in parts of mainland Europe and South America than it is in parts of the USA and UK.) GJ talks about sameness of literary prizes, and so on: I am sure he is right to imply a level of product placement and commercialism, from what one reads. But is he aware of the blog world, and the absolutely first-class standard of literary comments and debate that exists, on books old and new? He fails to acknowledge it. So I think GJ is incorrect to say: "English literary culture, in sharp contrast to the musical and fine arts culture, has retreated into a safe little Englander mentality, imagining that merely by writing ‘about’ great events and deep subjects you are producing great and deep works of literature." I think it is still there, just as it always was. It may not be the literary "club" of London publishers and authors he no doubt is attacking (another fashionable activity). But I wonder if he is aware of how many book groups exist - -I know of several locally, among parents of school-age children. Informal, unnoticed by anyone but themselves, yet there for the love of reading. Is the "Richard and Judy" book club beneath the notice of GJ? (It is modelled on Oprah, I believe.) I don't watch R&J but the books they select are promoted in the dreaded Waterstones et al. I have bought quite a few for my teenage daughter, as she moves into adult reading, and she's enjoyed them, and found that they have raised questions for her to consider. I don't think the R&J selections are "safe choices" from well-known authors, but are quite individualistic, on the whole. There is another aspect to GJ's comments, but which I am not going to discuss now as this post is too long, and I am currently cooking someone's tea, doing a load of washing and have to collect a child from somewhere. Such is the fractured life of the "attempted intelligent" person with domestic responsibilities. Petrona will have to retire for the moment. My message to GJ is: in a culture dominated by instant, digestible media, I am constantly impressed by the variety of reading and thinking done by the people I encounter in daily life. Most of whom are completely unaware of literary prizes and the "scratch my back" nature (we are told) of book publishing. There is hope for us yet! Note: I see that Ready Steady Book does not have a comments facility ;-)

Saturday books part 2 (final)

2006-03-22T13:51:00.000Z

I intended to write two postings yesterday about the Times Saturday books section, but only got as far as the first. Here's the second. The other item in the paper that interested me was a piece about "chick-lit", specifically a review of two books, one by Kathy Lette and the other by Gigi Levangle. As might be expected, I am not a fan of the chick-lit genre, and yes I have read some of it, not particularly being aware that I was embarking on a formula read before starting out. I don't much like the books I have read, for example the first of what became the "Shopaholic" series, because they seem to take part in some alternative universe where the heroine is charmingly ditzy but somehow manages to make a billion bucks by accident before her boss discovers her silly mistake, which she made because she forgot she left her baby on the train or was busy applying her mascara at the time --- you get the picture. The last one I read (being unaware in advance it was going to be chick-lit) was "The Ivy Chronicles", about someone in New York whose husband left her, so to regain her Manhattan lifestyle she set up as an agent to get 3-year olds into private school (or something). Despite being penniless she instantly finds a great apartment above a delicatessan shop with saintly owner, has a best friend for all emergencies, on-tap babysitting, lending gold Rolls-Royce, etc etc. So the problem with the genre is that you can tell on page 1 (ish) what is going to happen, and the deus-ex-machina plot devices remove any dramatic tension --- which renders actually reading the book rather pointless. The angle taken in the Times last Saturday is that chick-lit has now come of age. The Kathy Lette book is given as an example. I have never read a KL book, but I know of her becuase she has a knack with titles ("Foetal Attraction", etc). Her latest is called "How to Kill your Husband (and other handy hints)." Not too enticing, and not even a witty title, but I read on. The point made by Sarah Vine, the reviewer, is that the chick-lit heroines have, 10 years later, become like Bridget Jones: older, fatter, managing jobs, children and so on. These two new books are said to break ground by showing how these "ex heroine, now married with two kids" characters cope when their husbands run off with the new generation of ditzy, mascara-applying.....you get the picture -- the is tale told from the wronged woman side instead of the gay young thing side. All sounds pretty missable, but for the reviewer's comments about the books. (Or book as it turns out.) "Lette crystallises all the pitfalls facing the modern working couple: work tensions......sexual tensions..... -- and more darkly, what becomes of two people who have lost all respect for each other." Well, OK, but that isn't exactly an original literary theme. (Madame Bovary, anyone?) Vine goes on to say "But what really makes Lette such a pro is that, as well as insight, she provides her reader with that rarest of things, a good plot. Fundamentally, this is a well-constructed, tightly written thriller." Hmmm, I'm mildly interested, now. I should note that the other book reviewed by Vine seems to be exactly like every other chick-lit book, so the premise of the reviewer is not borne out. In fact, why package the review as chick-lit "growing up" when the sample size is one? (Rhetorical question.) A note on pricing: once again, Amazon (UK) has the book in hard cover at a crazy price: 6 pounds and 49 pence. The list price, quoted on Amazon and in the Times, is 12.99, or 11.69 if you buy it from the Times. I wonder if Amazon scans all currently reviewed books and sells them cheap for a set time, as it knows there will be a demand? Something is going on, anyway -- half price is a whacking discount. (The book isn't part of any special Amazon promotion so far as I can see.) Maybe it is just competition with Tesco. Another note: on Amazon you can see the cover of the book, which is the usual pink chick-lit cover with cartoon characters and girly writing. In a bookshop I would walk past such a book on display without even looking at it. Even if Sarah Vine thinks the book is "chick-lit grown up", the publisher does not seem to agree: or perhaps it is just going for the known market irrespective of content. Or perhaps the content isn't really "grown up". Is it worth finding out? (Rhetorical question again.)

Newspapers in Trouble?

2006-03-22T13:08:00.000Z

TCS Daily - Newspapers in Trouble?: "Paper is just an increasingly obsolete delivery platform. It's expensive, and on the way out. Get rid of it, or start a new 'paper' without it. " So says Glenn Reynolds. He's probably right: publishers of newspapers, magazines and journals will probably increasingly move away from paper products. Mr Reynolds hopes, optimistically, that publishers will invest more in journalists, and in more flexibility -- getting said journalists to photograph, use video clips, etc. (I suspect the publishers will be more interested in profit margins, as has been demonstrated to date, but I'm a bit of a cynic.) With e-book functionality still not at breaktrhough yet -- Sony's product came in for some stick recently--- I guess those of us who like to read their newspapers (accent on the "paper") on the way to work in the morning are saved for a few years yet. But it is sad. I read a lot online and work all day online in some form or other. I love the Internet, the Web and email (well, email is a curse as well as a blessing, to be honest). I am by no means a luddite, but "I love paper" --- there, I've written it. I hate the thought of having to read everything in e-form, and I don't believe all the many people who say soon(ish) I won't be able to tell the difference between an e-reader and paper. I think e-reading will require a compromise on the part of the (human) reader, not to mention demanding yet further adaptation of the visual system beyond that which it was designed for. I will miss that particular type of browsing that is possible when reading a paper product, which is rather different from online browsing (or e-browsing as I suppose I should call it). Economics will out, eventually, and newspapers will die, I suppose, as everyone says they will. I for one will be very sad when that day happens.

Book publishing and the GOB

2006-03-21T09:16:00.000Z

My estimable friend and colleague Giles Goat-Boy has commented on my "Not so Grumpy Old Bookman" posting. Because the comments are a bit long now, with Dave's fascinating extracts there also, and because Giles G-B has (in my opinion) hit one nail right on the head, I'm going to copy his comments and my reply (my reply edited slightly) here. Hope that does not break some cardinal (but unknown to me!) rule of blogging etiquette. Giles G-B said... There is a ring of truth to the lessons learned from GOB [Grumpy Old Bookman] but I don't want there to be. I find it endlessly puzzling that so many people yearn to be writers and so few can be. That this is a seeming pre-condition of existing in our society worries me.Why is it that so many of us want and try to do this same thing of writing but the privilege of being published and read falls to so few? I know that's a trite question but it feels so poignant to me somehow.I'm trying to understand how this paradox relates to the long comment above - I suspect there's a kind of answer in there somewhere... 10:07 PM Maxine said... I empathise with your slight sense of melancholy. Although this is perhaps a rather pragmatic and over-simplistic response on my part, I believe that blogging and self-publishing are one answer to your question. Blogging is a great way to hone one's writing skills and to gain a small but focused community of readers, who, being bloggers, will comment and help for free! The readership of one's blog, however small, represent people who find your content interesting and not only provide constructively critical feedback, but who will send you related links, material and ideas that they think will interest you by what they read. Once the book is written (;-) ) ,with the Lulu awards bringing this into focus for me, one self-publishes one's book and sells it on Amazon. This is going to require some (but not a huge amount) of resources, and will generate a very small (but targeted readership). The alternative is to go through the soul-destroying and ultimately random process described by Michael Allen. One might be lucky, but it sounds as if one's psychological well-being would be better served by my suggested approach rather than relying on an incestuous publishing community. Also, if you believe Michael Allen, book publishers will soon all be out of business anyway, unless they evolve drastically different publishing models. They'll be scooped by other types of publisher who have evolved to deal with the web and the supermarkets (or the supermarkets and "the web" (Amazon/Google) will become the publishers and distributors) . This is why I think that bold initiatives like Macmillan's new writers scheme (crucially, tied in with "Richard and Judy" to select the books to publish) are great. (Michael Allen has recently been reviewing the first crop on his blog (in two tranches, here and here, with a third to come); they sound pretty readable, on the whole.) This kind of approach will break the mould and is the way the book publishing industry will survive. (You only get a J K Rowling or a Dan Brown every so often, and they are not enough to keep all "conventional" publishers in a moribund industry afloat for ever, even with celebrity "auto"biographies and the like.) Of course the idea of self-publishing and self-distributing is hopelessly uncommercial. But it gets you noticed, gives you the opportunity to build up a readership and, ultimately, an offer from a publisher who, if nothing else, is open to persuasion by a business opportunity. Plenty of authors seem to be using this approach, if the Lulu awards and other initiatives (some described on Petrona) are anything to go by. One or two authors doing or considering this approach have contacted me or commented as a result of items I have written. I've mentioned Val Landi, who is doing very well with his "A woman from Cairo". Disclaimer: Macmillan is owner of the Nature Publishing Group, which is my employer.

Saturday books part 1

2006-03-21T08:43:00.000Z

There wasn't much that interested me in last Saturday's (18 March 06) Times Books supplement. I did note a new thriller, "The chemistry of death" by Simon Beckett. Apparently there is blurb praise from Mo Hayder, which is a good sign. On the other hand, it is clearly a very gruesome book --- "repulsive" the Times reviewer (Peter Millar) calls the content. The main character is a forensic archaelologist (yawn); the author's angle is to have him living in the Norfolk Broads as a result of a tragic personal event (yawn). Cue serial killer in village, ritual murders, "doomed inevitability" of a romance. Sounds pretty routine, although Millar does say that it is a "classy debut from a welcome new British voice" so might be worth a look when it is in paperback (skipping the gory bits). Having looked at the book on Amazon, the hardback is priced at 5.99 pounds, which is the price (or less than the price) of a paperback in the UK. The Times is quoting 10 pounds in its review (or 9 pounds if you buy the book from them). Pricing apart, Amazon pair the book with Robert Crais's latest, a standalone called "The two minute rule" (recommended by a colleague who has just finished it). As I've been following Val Landi, I know now that this means the publisher has paid for a pairing with another book at a certain selling level, but was not able to choose which book. Robert Crais was a good result for Beckett, in terms of market exposure. There is one customer review on Amazon so far (as well as the Hayder endorsement and one from Tess Gerritson, which is a very good sign); someone from Surrey in the UK (not me!) likes it a lot. Maybe I will buy the hardback at the Amazon price, then. Incidentally, in searching for the Times link to the Beckett review, I found an archive of selected crime-fiction reviews on the Times site. I imagine most of these are by now behind the subscription wall along with the Beckett review, but here's the link. It is a useful list of recently published books to put on your reading list, if you like crime fiction.

Insecurity rules

2006-03-20T18:53:00.000Z

Dave Lull has pasted some fascinating excerpts from "Fooled by Randomness" in my posting about the not-so-grumpy bookman. (Thank you for persisting, Dave, seems like blogger has been having some technical problems.) The first excerpt is about the author, Taleb, and his friend's comparison of two philosophers: "We surely closed our minds by following Descartes’ model of formal thinking rather than Montaigne’s brand of vague and informal (but critical) judgment. Half a millennium later the severely introspecting and insecure Montaigne stands tall as a role model for the modern thinker." The second excerpt contains some thinking about science. "Science is a fundamentally skeptical enterprise. How? By some fallacy of aggregation (i.e., the sum is not the parts), empirical-experimental science is not the sum of scientists but the upper bound of competing results; scientists are in a ruthless contest, frequently at each other’s throat. Each individual is disciplined by a few annoying peers going after the robustness of his results, not by his own intrinsic devotion to truths, a system quite similar to the assumed role of competition in a capitalist system." Yet science must evolve in this direction if we are to make advances -- in some key areas, at least. My posting about the future of science alluded to this necessity, in the context of biology. Biology's future lies in "big science" --- analysis of nature's unimaginably complex systems and networks and their perturbation by chemicals, currents and other environmental factors that cause a cell to move or a protein to form, for example. Our relatively new knowledge of genome sequences is the tip of this particular iceberg. So vast is the challenge that more and more leading scientists are becoming keenly aware of the value of this uncertainty and introspection that Dave has highlighted. The science of bioinformatics has developed this way, with its roots in the open-source free spirit of the Web, but a problem for this field has been persuading the 'at each other's throat' biologists to provide their data (genomes and so on) for the analyses. And who can blame the biologists, who are forced into the "ruthless contest" by the career structure in which they exist? (That's where the Taleb extracts come into it.) But things are changing. Systems biology is a nascent discipline but growing. And an example of the collaborative, as opposed to the competitive, approach to science is demonstrated by the Alliance for Cell Signaling , whose goal is to understand not only how cells interpret signals, but how they interpret them in context -- that means looking at signalling networks and how they are affected by minute changes in circumstance. Many world-leading, 'in competition' laboratories have signed up to the alliance, and share out the work, as they know the challenge is too vast for one person or lab to get anywhere alone. Disclaimer: if the above posting reads a bit incoherently, forgive me. While writing it I have also made dinner for my daughters, read an essay on Pride and Prejudice by one of them, listened to piano practice, helped the other one create a "links" page for her Fruits Basket website, and fixed up by phone for a friend to come and play after school later in the week. Networking, schmetworking -- such is the multitasking life. Space to think is at a premium. Thanks again to Dave Lull for providing these highly pertinent extracts.

Not so grumpy bookman

2006-03-19T14:40:00.000Z

An rss reader (bloglines in my case) makes it beautifully easy to become involved in blogging at your own pace. You can search and sign up for blogs that might interest you, cancel subscriptions in an instant, and look at your subscriptions when you want to instead of being bombarded by emails. (And, blessedly, no adverts if you read blogs via rss, though static ones creep in occasionally and doubtless plenty of people are working on ways to disract the reader further by this method.) It didn't take me long to focus on a few blogs about books and book publishing that I really like. My very favourites are in the right-hand navigation bar of Petrona. One that isn't, but will be after I've finished this post, is Michael Allen's Grumpy Old Bookman. I think the only reason it isn't there is that I don't like the title of his blog (more on blog titles in future). GOB is a consistently interesting blog. If you are a writer, reader, in publishing, editing and/or otherwise interested in books, I highly recommend it. The author is an experienced hand in varoius walks of life: higher education, a published author of novels, a publisher himself, etc. He has an admirably down-to-earth (I would not say grumpy) perspective on publishing and writing. He's funny, experienced, opinionated but organized. If you read his blog entries regularly, you'll find they form a thematic pattern; they are not streams of consciousness or relatively random pickings, as are many blogs (perhaps this one, for example, as although I am finding features to put on it, I am a long way from being happy with its content organisation). To return to GOB. Reading blog postings as daily (or thereabouts) scans via bloglines means that consistent patterns and themes that might exist on one blog don't readily stick in one's mind. But Mr Allen has written a book, also called Grumpy Old Bookman, and I enjoy his blog sufficiently to have bought it and the other day finished reading it. The book is a chronological selection of his blog entries from the launch of the blog in March 2004 up to September of that same year. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which contains a mix of reviews of books Mr Allen reads (old and new), and his observations on the publishing industry (and other things too, sometimes). The book ends with the the first hints of the now fully blown (and ridiculous, if amusing) Da Vinci Code plaigiarism case. Some things I learned from this book:

If you are a writer you won't make any money from it.
Whether or not a book gets published is random. (There is a series of fascinating postings about a book Fooled by Randomness, by Nicholas Taleb.)
If you want a good cultural grounding in your education, read History not English Literature at university.
Creative writing and similar courses are a waste of time.
Publishers can't predict which books will sell.
If you are in the small "publishing circle" of literary editors of newspapers and similar, and write a book, you are likely to have it published and reviewed (glowingly), but this won't make it sell better.
A good book can and probably should be short. Most books being written today are too long.
Authors should not write to express themselves but to arouse emotion in the reader.

This last point was the main theme that interested me about the book (though I found it all interesting). In one of his posts of 1 June 2004, Mr Allen analyses the state of alienation (in the marxist sense) many of us live in today, and leading on from these thoughts, in a subsequent post of 2 June, he quotes from a book review by Poe: "A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale........which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it...a sense of the fullest satisfaction. " (I recommend reading the whole quotatation, and post, to get the full effect.) As Mr Allen says, "In this one paragraph, Poe has condensed almost every important truth about the writer's task and the role of emotion in art generally." And "To paraphrase Poe in more modern English: The writer's job is to decide what emotion to create in the reader, and then to invent a series of events -- otherwise known as a plot -- which will generate that emotion." This is why Mr Allen enjoys reading thrillers and spy novels, and has little patience with much of the "literary" fiction being published nowadays. Mr Allen has written several thrillers and other books himself, using various pseudonyms. He's also written a writers' handbook (The Truth about Writing) and a collection of short stories. I think I recall from his recent blog entries that he has a new book coming out soon. I'm going to put at least some of these on my list. I also hope they are published by Kingsfield, Mr Allen's company: it was a pleasure to read a book with decent-sized typeface and white (not grey) paper.

Future of science

2006-03-18T22:20:00.000Z

EDGE: SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE By Kevin Kelly Before chancing his arm on what will happen in the future, Kelly looked at how scientific study has developed over time. Fascinating to note the temporal spread of the first three entries, then an intense cluster over the 100 years of the age of enlightenment. Then not a lot else until modern times. The world must have been more focused on political and technological upheavals than scientific ones in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if you agree with Kelly's analysis. After all, there was no technical advance, such as the invention of electricity, preventing the concept of falsifiability being articulated 250 years earlier than it was, taking Kelly's timeline at face value. 2000 BC — First text indexes 200 BC — Cataloged library (at Alexandria) 1000 AD — Collaborative encyclopedia 1590 — Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon) 1600 — Laboratory 1609 — Telescopes and microscopes 1650 — Society of experts 1665 — Repeatability (Robert Boyle) 1665 — Scholarly journals 1675 — Peer review 1687 — Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton) 1920 — Falsifiability (Karl Popper) 1926 — Randomized design (Ronald Fisher) 1937 — Controlled placebo 1946 — Computer simulation 1950 — Double blind experiment 1962 — Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn) Kelly's five projections for the next 100 years of scientific study can be read at the link above. His first point seems very conservative, that there will be more change in the next 50 years than there was in the past 400. Ten years is more likely than 50, if you ask me. Next he says that the next century will be the century of biology. Certainly the bioinformatical challenges are laid out before us: if the standardisation of measurement (annotation)and the necessary large-scale collaboration between groups of scientists happen, I think he's probably going to be right on that one. There turned out to be nothing simple that could be said when the human genome was sequenced: no amazing drugs have yet been predicted and developed by use of genomics , and post-translational modifications between genome and phenotype serve to maintain the mystery of the relationship between DNA sequence and and protein function. (Who remembers when people thought that knowing the amino-acid sequence of a protein would allow us to predict its three-dimensional structure?). Kelly's third point, that computers will lead the way, goes with the second (above). We won't have advances in biology without computation: powerful, intelligent and novel types, at that. Computing is and will be to biology what Google was and is to search. (But there is still just as much scope as there ever was for curiosity-driven research to yield wonderful breakthroughs, in all fields of natural science. Kelly does not allude to this, but I believe it will be a large factor in the future, in harness with intelligently driven and novel types of informatic analyses.) I heard David Lipman, head of the US National Library of Biomedicine, give a talk the other week about how scientists can (but tend not to) use the data available to them in the Medline database to make discoveries -- this is a small example of the kind of computer-enabled advance Kelly is talking about. I kept meaning to post about it but never got round to it. Timo Hannay has now done so, far better than I could have done. Kelly goes on to speculate about "wikiscience" and how science will create new levels of meaning via the power of the Internet. That's all getting a bit beyond me: read his essay.

Short stories and movies

2006-03-18T17:06:00.000Z

"Because they wanted to" is a great book title. It is a collection of short stories by Mary Gaitskill, including "Secretary". After seeing the DVD a year or two ago, I was intrigued and bought the book but, inevitably, never got round to reading it. I was in a short story mood the other day, so read a few of MG's collection, as well as some of Annie Proulx's (including Brokeback Mountain). Secretary is what I would call a perfect short story. The reader is left intensely curious to know more about this character, her family and how they became stuck in this tortured set-up, but sure ain't going to find out. (For me, this kind of thing is why I can't read too many short stories close together.) The piece is a bare, focused account of a young woman's inability to act on her confused emotions -- or maybe I should say, responses. The author is particularly precise at depicting, with a light touch, the turmoil beneath the apparently placid exterior. What struck me, as would any reader I am sure, is the contrast between the movie and the story. In the story, the main character is indeed briefly a secretary in similar circumstances to the character in the movie, a similar crisis-event occurs, but from there on the two are polar opposites. The message of the story: the guy is a pervert; the message in the movie: celebrate it. I enjoyed both, but in the movie, the writer and director have taken the premise of the story and imagined the opposite -- a case of "inspired by" rather than "based on". Sadly, the only place this inspiration took the film-makers to eventually was to a disappointingly Hollywood-inspired ending (I say disappointingly as it was an indie film, wasn't it?). Never mind, it was still a good movie and if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. I quite liked Brokeback Mountain (and a few of the others in Proulx's book), but not all that much. I imagine the movie is more in line with the story than is Secretary, though I have not seen the movie, I'm just going by the reviews. Although I can easily relate to stoicism I could not identify much with the characters. I was mildly intrigued by the women but they barely registered as people, as opposed to plot devices. Unlike Secretary, whose author has that lovely knack of enabling the reader to fix a character, even one that doesn't really appear, using half a sentence. Jenny D said in a comment to an earlier post, "Don't read The Shipping News". I don't think I will.

Good woman (not)

2006-03-18T15:16:00.000Z

I haven't written anything about books or films for a week or so. Last weekend we all watched "A Good Woman" via Amazon DVD rental (a very good service). We all liked the previous two Oscar Wilde adaptations so thought we'd try this one. However, I'd recommend either of those (The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband) over (as it is renamed) A Good Woman. Briefly, as no need to dwell on the mediocre, the movie is like a made-for-TV episode. The story has been updated to the 1930s and set in Amalfi. The script is biphasic: Oscar Wilde jewels crop up now and again (sometimes for a whole conversation, sometimes for one piece of wit), but the rest of it is of the "Oh, OK, then" variety. Similarly the actors - Tom Wilkinson (excellent as ever), John Standing and a couple of other "old boys" lounge around being frightfully English and Oscar-Wildy, spouting witticisms. The rest of the time, young, good-looking US actors who can't act (including Scarlett Johanssen, who wears not very much in quite a few scenes very well, but is not equal to much else), aided by a dreadful script, mangle the rest of the story. The whole is embarrassingly atrocious. (Helen Hunt, in the title role, is the exception to her compatriots-- she acts almost too feelingly, exposing even more the cardboard of the rest of it.) A quick look in DVDs in Amazon UK reveals no returns for "A Woman of No Importance", so as mentioned above, if you are in an OW mood, don't go for this, go for one of the previous two. Neither of those is classic (the most stand-out dreadful moments are Reese Witherspoon's fantasy scenes in "Earnest") , but they are both streets better than this missed opportunity. Just off to take Cathy to a party.

Networking

2006-03-18T13:43:00.000Z

Philobiblon: Tick off the new experience The thoughtful and feminist blog Philobiblon has a weekly (?) round up of women's blogs, as apparently women are not renowned for their presence in the "blogucopia" (my word for blogosphere) . I sent her (I assume Philobiblon's blog takes the feminine rather than the gender neutral) some recommendations, as requested, last week. Much to my delight, she has not only picked up on a couple of those but also on Petrona! I am so touched. It is a great sensation when you know someone has read your blog. Thank you, Philobiblion. While on the topic, my friend Giles Goat-Boy (Giles G-B for short) has encouraged me to re-try Performancing's web metrics. I have not been interested in monitoring visitors (as I don't suppose I have many, and Petrona is for my own thoughts as much as anything else). However, On G G-B's recommendation (as he does this kind of thing professionally and so knows what he is talking about) ,I gave it a whirl last night and put the code into Petrona, but nothing seemed to happen. I put this down to my technical incompetence, but on logging on today -- there it all is! So now I know I have visitors from France, Australia, USA etc -- and Giles G-B is right, it is heady (even when there are only a handful of viewers). Thanks, Giles G-B. (And I can recommend Performancing, linked in the right-hand navigation bar.) What a wonderful place is the company of bloggers!

Thunderer

2006-03-17T22:11:00.000Z

Comment and opinion from the Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online The invited opinion in the Times has a go at Arianna Huffington (who I still mentally call Stassinopolous as I first heard of her when I was working as a student in Blackwell's bookshop and helped to sell her dubut book), and blogs in general. Thunderer is one of those "printed blogs": like many articles in the Spectator, Thunderer pieces are opinionated, and the opinions expressed excite responses in the reader. Oliver Kamm, today's author, disagrees with Ms Huffington's view that blogging is the new black: "Mrs Huffington has traced a long political journey from obscurantist Right to populist Left, but at no time has she deviated from enthusing for the fad du jour. Her latest is the notion that the internet — and specifically the type of online diary known as a weblog, or blog — has changed the way that news is gathered and reported. Whereas newspapers address readers impersonally, the blog “draws people in and includes them in the dialogue”. " This is nonsense, says Kamm. I'll extract the thrust of his argument here, as the link will be behind a subscription wall ere long: "What blogs do effectively is provide a vehicle for instant comment and opinion. Some newspapers have established blogs for their journalists or other commentators. But the overwhelming majority of blogs — no one knows how many there are — are set up by amateurs using software that is easily available and almost free. These are not a new form of journalism, but new packaging for a venerable part of a newspaper. Even the best blogs are parasitic on what their practitioners contemptuously call the “mainstream media”. Without a story to comment on or an editorial to rubbish, they would have nothing to say. Most blogs have nothing to say even then. Without editorial control, they are unconstrained by sense, proportion or grammar. Almost by definition, they are the preserve of those with time on their hands. Blogs have a few successes in harrying miscreant politicians or newspapers, but they are a vehicle for perpetuating myths as much as correcting them. In Mrs Huffington the preposterous term “blogosphere” has a worthy champion. " One can't disagree with much of this. (Well, I can't anyway.)But blogging has many more dimensions to that described by Kamm. I would not see blogs as a primary news-gathering function, I'm with him on that. They are great at fast, unfettered analysis. The trouble is, filtering out the rubbish. RSS helps immeasurably there, it would be impossible to manage without it. And as mentioned previously, blogs are not great for joined-up thinking, of presenting a reasoned argument having weighed up all the factors properly. That will probably come with Web 3.0 ;-) Of course Kamm is right to say that blogs lack the resources of newspaper and other media publishers, and to a large extent are parasitic -- they couldn't exist without the media and essentially form a reactive medium. But bloggers can keep "conventional" (Kamm dislikes the term "mainstream") media journalists on their toes, they can unearth connections and perspectives that did not get picked up by the regular lot, and they can keep up the pressure on smug politicians and the like. I think they are a great force to the good -- I personally find the political blogs a bit tedious and predictable, but I am glad they are there, the Robin Hoods of cyberspace. (Do I mean Robin Hood? Probably not, but I don't mean Cassandras either, and it's too late to think straight.) Blogs aren't all about news and politics. There are blogs for everything: self-expression for egoists and others, sure, but also they are a great way to educate and connect people with similar interests, as I have found. I've enjoyed, developed and learned so much since I started blogging 4 months ago compared with any phase of my life since my last "wide education", which was at school. (University was narrower, my first few weeks of enforced general cutting-edge science education at Nature came close.) Blogging can allow you to follow your own interests at your own pace, the potential for learning about anything is infinite, and you can add in your voice too! This last aspect is a rush to the head for a longstanding disciple of M. Scott Peck's concept of "delayed gratification". Even Oliver Kamm has a blog, so he's probably not being entirely serious in his rant. I have not kept in touch with Ms Huffington's doings (other than inadvertently reading a few extreme gossip items) since my student days and her Bernard Levin phase, but I suspect, based on that, that Mr Kamm may be on the button about her. Mind you, it is no mean feat to have a blog as successful as hers, and I suppose I should check it out. (Although I am already suffering a bit from blog burnout -- 'blog cornucopia' is a more descriptive term than 'blogosphere'.) I have just received an email from Amazon to say that "An Army of Davids" has been dispatched, so no doubt I'll soon be properly clued-up.

Which book to read

2006-03-17T14:37:00.000Z

whichbook.net Can you believe a website that automatically generates recommendations of books for you to read? Well, that's what whichbook.net purports to do -- you can define four categories from a menu of paired opposites, and it chooses you some books. So I've had a go. "Sad, disturbing, beautiful, unusual" returns "Swimmer" by Bill Broday. Never heard of it, but "Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) is in the close matches. "Serious, larger-than-life, violent, bleak" returns "Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science fiction author. "Safe, beautiful, gentle and optimistic" returns something called "Signals of Distress" by Jim Crace, with "The Shipping News" (Annie Proulx) in the close matches. I am in no need of book recommendations, just of time to do the reading, but one could get quite distracted by mixing mad combinations and seeing how the whichbooks search engine copes. I think I'll pass. Fun, though.

Drug testing

2006-03-17T13:24:00.000Z

Comment is free: The same difference There are some fantastic responses to Peter Tatchell's ill-informed arguments in his posting about drug testing on the Guardian's new metablog "Comment is free". Well done to the scientists and others who responded so clearly and factually to these fallacious arguments, made by someone who has not bothered to do any research before putting finger to keyboard. (I hate to be rude about anyone, but really!) Slightly earlier on the same day, on the same blog, Tim Radford posts a very different article on exactly the same topic. (Tim was science correspondent of the Guardian before blogs were a twinkle in the eye.) The comments to Tim's post are absolutely fantastic -- both in terms of general debate/opinion, and of scientific argument. The debate between Gareth58 and others is an excellent example of a scientific to-and-fro -- courteous yet robust. Taken together, these postings and comments are a good example of the power of blogs -- a piece of sensational news, some commissioned articles, and lots of targeted, informed comments -- all in a matter of hours. And their weakness -- where is the connectivity, or "joined-up thinking"? Nowhere. But that's Web 2.0 for you, information is free, instant and accessible; we just (;-) ) have to work out what it means, irrespective of our personal expertise.

Best parts of scientific life

2006-03-17T12:54:00.000Z

The Daily Transcript: The Best Parts of the Scientific Life Having written about the worst things about scientific life, Alex Palazzo now shoots for the best. For Alex, there are three best things: discovery, discussion and creativity. Fewer items than his worst list, but he's written more about each. If he's like me, that figures -- I know instinctively why I don't like something (and if you can't change it, move on) but if I like something, it is worth spending a bit of time thinking or writing about, to pin down why. (Useful to apply in other walks of life, maybe .) There are some nice comments. I'll copy a couple here -- but go and look, there will probably be more by now. (Acme's point 4 is a subset of Alex's point 1, I'd say.) Comments Oh, my! Your extensive arguments AGAINST the scientific life seem so overwhelming compared to those FOR. Do "discovery" and "creativity" trigger some sort of neural pleasure centers that override the overwhelmingly negative features you outlined? Polly All I will say is that the number one, two and three reasons I love science vastly overwhelm all the things I hate. It would be hard for anything to top the feeling of discovery. apalazzo Yes discovery. It's great, that is until you've discovered that you've been scooped! Perhaps there are fewer items on the bright side of science, but they're worth it IMHO. Again if the thrill of discovery isn't good enough then you know that basic science ain't for you. Speaking of basic research, how about for #4 - cure diseases. Okay it doesn't happen often, but ... Acme Scientist

Templeton prize

2006-03-17T12:01:00.000Z

I was alerted first by Dave Lull (who always seems to get news before the rest of the world, or blogoshpere, anyway, and is very generous about sharing it) to the fact that John Barrow has just won the 2006 Templeton prize (said to be worth 1.4 million US dollars) for "progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities". This award was controversial from the start. Scientists don't like it, being naturally suspicious of anything smacking of supernatural phenomena and not being too happy about such a huge amount of money going for something that they rather feel they could make more use of in their own studies, if offered the chance. So how useful is the award from the scientists' perspective? What do they think of the work of the people who win it? P. Z. Myers, on his active scientists' blog Pharyngula, is in no doubt in his posting "I'm in the wrong business", subtitle "the God racket". Myers says: "it's all for peddling a garbage interpretation of the anthropic principle. I've gotta wonder: would it be worth 1.6 million to get a lobotomy?" There is a great set of comments to go with Myers' posting: the usual full and frank exchange of a range of views on the topic you might expect on an active blog, but as they are by scientists, the perspectives (not all negative about the award in general or Barrow in particular, though many of them are) are particularly pertinent. News of the prize is also posted on Books, Inq. , with a comment (so far) that Barrow writes well. This is true, he has written many books over the years, which people actually walk into bookshops to buy -- and there are not a great many scientists who can say that. (Let's not have a list -- or on second thoughts, maybe let's --- if time permits). While I'm on lists, here is a (fascinating) list of the previous winners. The first winner, in 1973, was Mother Teresa. Subsequent (annual) winners were firmly in the religious, ethical, philanthropical or social-work sphere until 1985, when the famous marine biologist Professer Sir Alistair Hardy was awarded the honour. Since then, the award has been divided pretty much equally between professional scientists and "other good people" for want of a brief characterisation. The current count (including Barrow) is "good people" 23, scientists 11, of whom 8 are physical scientists (theoretical physicists and cosmologists in the main) and 3 are biologists. Of the biologists, there is Hardy (1985); Professor L. Charles Burch, a "biologist-geneticist" (1999); and the Rev. Canon Arthur Peacocke (2001), a "biophysical chemist". I am afraid I have not heard of these last two or of their contribution to biological knowledge.

Advice to bloggers

2006-03-17T07:51:00.000Z

Blogger Help : How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog This article (from the Google Blogger help pages) is useful but an odd mix. The title is self-explanatory, but is it a way to guide people to avoid inadvertenly breeching company and legal issues (for example posting pictures of colleagues or articles giving confidential details of company projects); or is it a way to advise people of how to blog at work without an employer noticing; or is it advice as to how bloggers can persuade a company to encourage blogging/and or have a blogging policy? As it is part of a help service, I think this article is presenting a confusing message, and that Google Blogger needs to get its ethical act together. I was directed to the article on the assumption that it was going to be policy and legal advice, and largely it is. But if that's the intention of the article, Google blogger should not also within the same text provide explicit cheats, such as how to switch screens if you see your boss approaching. Fair enough to do that, but in a separate piece, please.

Rules for detective stories

2006-03-16T22:14:00.000Z

Twenty rules for writing detective stories (1928) by S.S. Van Dine Over at one of my favourite blogs, Another 52 books , Bibliophile reviews some novels by John Dickinson Carr and Georgette Heyer in detective mode. Bibliophile mentions the classic 1928 rules for writing detective stories, by "S S van Dine"(although she mentions the rules in the Heyer post, they apply also to the Dickson Carr post from what she says and what I remember of DC's plots). I have read these rules before but, being reminded of them, went to read them again. They are still pretty cool today, on the whole. Bibliophile refers to Heyer breaking rule 3 "There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar". Well, that rule would eliminate the vast proportion of post-1928 crime fiction. Bibliophile says she may return to this list in a future posting: I hope she does as what she says will be a good read. In the meantime, many current authors of the genre could do well to remind themselves of these rules. It is frustrating when they are broken (well, not rule 3), for example when the villain is unmasked and you can't remember who they are because they appeared briefly in chapter 2 and not again thereafter (Janet Evanovich); or when the denoument relies on a conversation between two characters that the reader is not told about (Laura Lippman). Also of delight is rule 20, which lists "a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer wil now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime." One of these is the dog that does not bark in the night, a cliche even in 1928, it seems.

JFK and Martyrs'

2006-03-16T21:11:00.000Z

I read today that the people of Dallas, Texas really do not like the JFK memorial and want to replace it with something less like a giant egg box (or Lego as some have it). Apparently the reason it was done that way is becuase Mr Kennedy's widow liked the style of the architect. Most other people think Kennedy deserved something better, according to an architect called Witold Rybczynski. It is said that nobody much visits the memorial, preferring instead to see the grassy knoll where the assassination took place, and where the only acknowledgement is a "barely visible" cross on the road. This immediately put me in mind of the Martyrs' Memorial in Oxford, a beautiful local landmark in the centre of the city, looking like the sunken spire of a cathedral ("meet you at the Martyrs' ", say the locals). This memorial is, of course, to bishops Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer, who were burnt at the stake for their Protestant beliefs in the time of Bloody Mary. No doubt St Giles was a busy Victorian thoroughfare when the gothic landmark was built, as it is a short walk from the actual site of the execution. At that sad place there is a plain iron cross bolted into the road. In some ways, the cross is more poignant, and memorable, to me than the "real" memorial, despite its beauty. Maybe the people coming to remember Kennedy feel the same way.

Honesty pays

2006-03-16T20:42:00.000Z

Beatrix Potter's letter to a six-year-old fan apologising for writing and pubishing "The tale of Pigling Bland" has been sold at auction for 8,200 pounds sterling. Apparently the author was under pressure to meet a Christmas deadline, was not well, and so submitted an inferior work -- which was duly published. The letter, decorated with pigs, was written in 1913. Apart from the obvious points about authors who produce a book a year after they attain the bestseller charts, irrespective of maintaining quality, the Beatrix Potter letter made me wonder how many children's authors are still so popular 100 years after their books are published. Children in the UK are still bought up on Beatrix Potter. Peter Rabbit and co were my first books. My sisters and I shared my mother's childhood copies. We still have those, which were read by our own children (though my children preferred modern copies). But it isn't just my family: Beatrix Potter is everywhere in bookshops, libraries, people's houses, etc. Apart from their shared Lake District origins, my mother always rated the books because Beatrix Potter did not use simple language: she wrote using complicated words and assumed children would absorb the sense, or be stimulated to ask what the words meant. One reason I liked the books as a child is that the animals were so naughty -- Peter Rabbit and the lettuce, Hunca Munca's faux housekeeping, Tom Kitten's ruining his best clothes, etc. The books are short, beautifully illustrated, and written in such a refreshing, direct style -- the authorial voice treating the child-reader as another sensible adult in a joint observation of the quaint doings of the animals. And unsentimental, too -- Jemima Puddle Duck's eggs being a case in point even though Mr Tod did not get to have them for dinner. Pigling Bland also -- his mother packing her innocent offspring off to the marketplace -- this one is longer than the average, but I quite liked it despite the revealed apology by the author. One child I know was quite obsessed with it. I think Beatrix Potter was right to use the language she did, as when I came to read her books to my own children, not only did I witness their enjoyment, but I found I had remembered them well (though I can't have understood quite a lot of the words), whereas those by most other authors read at a very early age are forgotten. If Beatrix Potter's books aren't a great example of what children are capable of enjoying without receiving patronising, dumbed-down input, I don't know what is. And apart from fairy tales, which don't really have "authors", I can't call to mind other "very young children's" books that have endured on the same scale and over the time period of Beatrix Potter's.

A woman from Cairo

2006-03-15T21:14:00.000Z

For some time I've been reading Val Landi's blog about his book "A Woman from Cairo" which, of course, is not available on UK Amazon unless you want one copy (that's all there is on there) for 56 pounds sterling. Val's is an interesting blog about writing, publishing and marketing (or attempting in the second two cases) your novel. Val has been going great guns recently on selling his book via US Amazon.

Today, Val has an amazing post: "Post A Woman from Cairo on your website or blog through the Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Alibris affiliate programs along with a jpeg of the cover, and I'll send you a free autographed copy of the novel. Post it and send me a link and your snailmail address and I'll mail it off."

Well, I can't do this as I'm not set up for it, and the offer may only be good for US addresses (though I have my methods!). I thought I'd post this information so anyone in the US who reads this, and has the set-up Val describes, can take advantage of his generous offer.

If nothing else, Val is a fan of "24", which has to be good.

Another list -- women this time

2006-03-15T21:09:00.000Z

Ten Current Women Writers You Should Read Yes, it is another list. To celebrate "women's history month", About Literature lists 10 women authors whose work we should read, apparently. Who are they? Isabelle Allende, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Dunant, Cornelia Funke, Ursula K LeGuin, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith. I've read at least one book by most of these authors, sometimes more than one. Some of these women are, in my opinion, pretty much "one book" authors -- I loved "House of the Spirits" by Allende, and her second novel (forget the title), even though it was not a patch on the first. I read a couple more but found them increasingly disappointing. Atwood I've never liked (too determinedly making feminist points and "being clever"), Dunant was good when she wrote detective stories but I'm not tempted by her reinvented historian persona. Both my daughters quite like Funke but in their estimation absolutely not a patch on the wonderful J K Rowling (why on Earth is she not on the list? What a crazy omission.) I think on balance I would prefer to read a few dead women authors than many of the above, eg Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte. Or, more recently, Carol Shields. Of living authors not included, I like Marge Piercy (mostly -- have not read her historical books but like her "modern" fiction), Nikki Gerard (who writes "straight" fiction as sole author and, collaboratively, "crime" fiction with her husband Sean French under the name of Nikki French), Anita Shreve, Joanna Trollope, Sue Miller, Maggie O'Farrell (have read only one of hers, but have more on my pile). Possibly Anita Brookner, I used to read each one of hers as they came out, but it is a while since I've wanted to do that. There are probably other women authors I like reading outside the sphere of "genre" fiction. I'll probably remember their names as soon as I finish writing this post. C'est la vie with lists.

Company of bloggers

2006-03-15T20:44:00.000Z

Micro Persuasion: Blogger Firings Down, Hirings Up? Steve Rubel reports good news for bloggers -- some statistics to show that there is a "decrease" the numbers of people being fired by their companies for blogging. Actually, the "statistics" seem to be a trace of the number of posts matching the search term "fired for blogging" in the past 360 days, so much may have been missed. If it is a real decrease, Steve thinks it results from fear of bad publicity, increased tolerance for bloggers, and/or the fact that companies may actually be hiring bloggers. He doesn't think that the figures result from more companies having blog policies, though I agree with him that it would be good if they did. Or would it? The poor World Weary Detective was not fired (I hope), 'merely' forced to shut down by the introduction of his employer's blogging policy. If these policies, where they do exist, are such that blogging employees feel too constrained to continue, then there seems something askew in the particular company's employee-employer culture.

Being a scientist

2006-03-15T17:41:00.000Z

The Daily Transcript: The Worst Parts of Scientific Life Are scientists like everybody else? Of course they are, but what is it like to be one? Like any specialist profession (lawyer, accountant), how can people outside the specialism understand what it is like to be one? The post I've linked to here, by Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript blog, sums it up excellently. His entry is a list, but it is a thoughtful list, and you certainly don't have to be a scientist (as I was) or a camp-follower (as I am now) to 'get' it. Alex's post counters the popular misconception of scientists as "men in white coats" or "unhinged megalomaniacs". Maybe one day we'll routinely read books or see films in which scientists are characters, not cliches.