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Web 2.0 - A Strategy Guide

2008-05-10T14:59:00.004+01:00

People who read Chris Anderson's enormously influential The Long Tail will know that Web 2.0 has revolutionised eCommerce. Companies make more money by lowering their prices; they get rich by giving things away free of charge; and they invite their competitors to share information for mutual benefit. What is Web 2.0 exactly? And how does all this work? Well - Web 2.0 is the latest manifestation of web applications which allow its users to upload information and interact with each other, as well as downloading it, which we did with Web 1.0. And it is a technology which builds on economies of scale. If your web site makes 1% profit from 250,000 visitors a week, imagine what happens if you start giving things away and get a million visitors. The chances are your profits will increase by 400%.

Amy Shuen's new book examines this phenomenon from a business point of view. She presents a series of case studies which illustrate the novel forces at work - and you don't need to know the technical details of modern Internet technology to understand how it all operates.

Flickr, for instance, the photo-sharing service, rapidly generated a user base of two million users who uploaded 100 million photos. The setup costs for this business were very low (no shop, no physical stock) the service was free (Flickr made money from its premium services) and the customers were not only providing the inventory free of charge, but giving it added value by tagging the photos. Flickr was eventually bought by Yahoo! for $40 million, and it continues to prosper.

Shuen also draws on the strategic lessons from these entrepreneurial success stories. It doesn't matter if you are a big time Web business or just running a one-person site, she asks "Do you allow your visitors to participate in your site? Can they share their own questions and ideas there?"

She has a chapter on Google that provides an interesting example of what's called a 'tippy market'. That's when a company corners a certain percentage of the market which proves fatal for the competition. (The VHS/Betamax rivalry was a case in point). To reach this point Google paid a lot of money to AOL, but it tipped them over in active users to become the dominant search engine - a position which still holds today.

Next she looks at the social networking sites and explains how they establish their phenomenal growth rates. They all have features in common: they're free; they grow by one subscriber recommending to friends; and as soon as they reach the tipping point they can generate huge incomes from advertising and selling web services. I also noticed that they tend to identify niche markets. Facebook is largely for college graduates keeping in touch; MySpace is for bands and artists publicising their work; and LinkedIn is for business people who want to find useful contacts.

Finally, she offers a five step approach to using Web 2.0 strategic thinking on your own business. This means applying the principles, rather than spending a fortune on complex software. She reminds us that a single extra line at the end of each Hotmail message - "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" - was enough to give them a huge success in viral marketing.

And if all that's not enough, she also provides two comprehensive bibliographies which list the key texts and resources - including papers from the Harvard Business School, where they practice Web 2.0 strategies by putting all their published research papers online at prices anybody can afford.

Amy Shuen, Web 2.0 - A Strategy Guide, Sebastopol (CA): O'Reilly, 2008, pp.243, ISBN 0596529961

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Dongle Testing

2008-05-07T18:54:00.002+01:00

I'm test driving a cute little USB modem that you stick into your laptop to get Mobile Broadband wherever you go. No need for a wireless hub - and you don't need to be near a hotspot. The software installed in moments without a single hitch, and it made an immediate connection for me. Connectivity is available as Pay As You Go or on a contract. Cost varies depending on usage, with deals at £10, £15 and £25 per month. And the dongle itself is free on one of these contracts. Next week I'm going to try it in the car - to see if it can hold a connection whilst I whiz my babe magnet round the M60, which is Manchester's answer to the Boulevard Periferique. Details at www.Three.co.uk

Architecture by Donkeys

2008-05-06T20:26:00.003+01:00

Manchester Airport has been a shambles for years. It's been expanding its premises, re-shaping itself to cope with more traffic, and giving its customers grief in the process. But the latest developments now make it a uniquely depressing experience. All passenger check-ins are regulated by a series of barriers which force everyone into a single file queue which snakes back and forward on itself. Nobody is left in any doubt that they are being treated like animals, herded through stock markets.

Security checks are now a ritual humiliation, with people undressing on the whim of some twerp who doesn't like the look of your face. But the crowning glory of the latest changes comes immediately after that.

When you've put your shoes, your belt, and your shoulder-pads back on, you emerge into a bloody department store. There's no such thing as walking down a corridor with signposts saying "This way to Gates 20-32". No - you emerge into ladies cosmetics, followed by duty-free booze, past trashy holiday 'gifts', then electrical goods, and so on. There are quite deliberately no straight walkways. You have to slalom past islands of commerce with sales assistants doing their best to stop you getting to your point of departure.

It is commercial greed on an savage scale - a vulgar, disorienting, and excruciating piece of organisation, customer-hostile, and bad planning of the worst possible kind.

It almost spoiled my departure for another Andalusian reading week - and I know that there will be the same thing on the way back.

Working at Home

2008-04-30T17:14:00.003+01:00

This is the second book on the interior design of working office space I have recently consulted as research for a move of office premises. Like the first, Working Spaces, it offers a powerfully stimulating set of examples, generated by people with imagination, flair, and in some cases, courage. If the selection of examples are typical of interior design today, the cities pushing this trend are New York, London, Berlin, Barcelona, and Tokyo. And the fashion is for old industrial spaces preserved for their high ceilings, big room spaces, and vast windows. In each case they have been transformed by adding luxury furnishings, yet the original features have been preserved - so that there at first appears to be a tension between domestic and commercial purposes.

The examples show interior design solutions for writers, artists, musicians, architects, graphic designers, a printers, business people, and a textile designer. And in most cases the usual clutter which blights commercial offices has been purged - to good effect.

It has to be said that most of the samples illustrated are examples of minimalist design - plain walls and floors, no decoration, wood in teak or beech, lots of opaque tinted green glass, polished chrome fittings, simple halogen downlighters, chairs with tubular chrome legs, and giant settees in black leather.

There are architectural plans reproduced in each case which illustrate how the overall space has been used and how the parts relate to the whole.

One of the recurring features I spotted here was floors covered in epoxy resin - which results in a hard, shiny surface which is practical and easily cleaned. Not everybody would wish to settle down for a cozy evening in such surroundings - but the results look great.

What conclusions can be drawn from the examples on display? In almost all cases there are few decorations in the rooms: no pictures or shelves or decorative brackets. The rooms, with their pale walls and clutter-free surfaces are left to speak for themselves.

You might imagine that people working in the creative industries would want to decorate every inch of their surroundings with objects which expressed their tastes and cultural values. But the opposite appears to be the case. And these might indeed be shining examples illustrating Mies van der Rohe's mantra - Less is More.

Aurora Cuito, Working at Home, New York: Loftpublications, 2000, pp.175, ISBN 0823058700

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Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life

2008-04-27T18:00:00.004+01:00

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Beckett's amazingly difficult yet consistent life, which was unrelenting devoted to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Beckett is a well-known author, but not much is generally known about his personal life. He avoided interviews and shunned publicity - even sending his publisher to collect his Nobel Prize. This short book isn't an attempt to deliver a full scale biography (that has already been done by Deirdre Blair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson) but it offers a potted account of his life accompanied by the most original set of photographs that I have ever seen - some from his personal life, and others from stage productions.

Beckett was from a fairly well-to-do family; he had a privileged, well educated upbringing, and by the time he graduated with first class honours from Trinity College Dublin it looked as if a standard academic career was his natural progression route.

But he had won a lectureship at the Ecole Normale Superieure - and during his time in Paris he fell in with fellow Dubliner James Joyce. This experience led him to give up his work as an academic and to embrace the Bohemian life of being a poet, a critic, a translator, and a novelist - from which activities he made no money at all. He lived on allowances from his family until he was middle-aged.

The 1930s passed in a flurry of Bohemianism, occasional publication in obscure magazines, and a fair amount of hardship. He suffered from a number of what seemed to have been psycho-somatic ailments, and even spent some time in psycho-analysis. He also had a rather complex personal life - a wife who he married for 'testamentary' reasons, and overlapping and simultaneous relationships with other women which required 'timetabling'.

The war years were a period of hardship and bare survival. He spent time hiding from the Nazis (and fighting with the Maquis) in southern France, then working with the Red Cross. After the war he returned to live in Paris and began to write in French.

The period immediately after the war he called 'the siege in the room', where he shut himself away and produced an enormous amount of writing - none of which was immediately published. This period lasted for about four years. And then in the early 1950s he had his first successes - novels published in France, followed by a big breakthrough with Waiting for Godot.

From that point on, his star rose, and yet his work was always surrounded by controversy. People found his writing difficult to understand; theatre directors weren't sure how to stage his plays; he had different publishers for the three or four genres in which he wrote; and rather like Vladimir Nabokov he spent a lot of time translating his work from one language to another - and sometimes back again.

As he got older his works got shorter, more compressed, and eventually reached the point of silence as he produced mimes and silent films. However, it's quite possible that his oeuvre will continue to grow, even after his death, because he wrote so much which never got into print. This is a short but very attractive publication that's worth it just for the photographs.

Gerry Dukes, Samuel Beckett: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press, 2004, pp.161, ISBN 1585676101

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Charleston: Past and Present

2008-04-24T14:23:00.002+01:00

Charleston is the country house in Lewes, Sussex which was established as a family home by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She was married to Clive Bell at the time and had children by both men, but this was how things were done in the Bloomsbury Group. They lived in the house for over fifty years, covering the walls and furniture with their paintings, designing ceramics and furniture, making rugs and wall hangings, cultivating the gardens - and generally forming what became a unique collection of domestic and interior design. The house also became the country retreat for many of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa raised her children Julian, Quentin and Angelica there, and she was visited by her sister Virginia Woolf, as well as by her ex-lover Roger Fry, and at weekends her husband Clive Bell and his lover Mary Hutchinson.

These people in turn brought their friends such as John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M.Forster, and David Garnett. Their personal lives and relationships were rather complicated, but this joint artistic venture was one which helped cement their common interests in design, decoration, painting, and domestic arts. The Bloomsberries were great supporters of modern art, and many of them had made judicious purchases long before the artists became well known. Consequently, the walls of the house came to be decorated not only with their own paintings, but with works by Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Modigliani.

The main part of the book is the official guide to the house and gardens, written by Bloomsbury expert Richard Shone. This contains details of the contents of all the main rooms, and is well illustrated by colour photographs of their principal features and objects.

The latter part of the book is a collection of letters and memoirs, written by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett, who was his sister but who didn't know that her father was really Duncan Grant until she was eighteen.

Quentin Bell's memoir is of an idyllic childhood, largely spent with his brother Julian, unsupervised by his semi-absent parents. He gives a Swallows and Amazons type of account.His sister Angelica's is more seriously thoughtful and reflective. It combines observations on Vanessa Bell's fabric designs with psychological analyses of her relationship with Charleston and its other inhabitants.

She captures the spirit and the development of the house as if it were a living being. She also draws an interesting socio-political contrast with her Christmas visits to the conservative house at Seend, which was the home of Clive Bell's parents:

Even though it was at Seend that I celebrated my birthday - a birthday that belonged by rights to Charleston...the atmosphere of Victorian constraint could not have been tolerated for longer than the three or four days we spent there ... it did not contain, as Charleston seemed to, the secret of creativity and renewal.

It's also a paean of appreciation for her mother, as the presiding spirit of generosity and creativeness which permeated the house. This chapter is an interesting addendum to the account of her childhood that she provides in Deceived with Kindness.

Miraculously, the house survived the second world war and was kept in more or less its original condition. Quentin Bell (who grew up there) describes the practical difficulties and strategic frustrations of restoring the property. Fortunately for the historical records of English modernism, the house was completely refurbished, then purchased from its original owners, and is now governed by The Charleston Trust.

There's an arts festival scheduled for 16—25 May 2008 if you're in the region.

Quentin Bell et al, Charleston: Past and Present: The Official Guide to One of Bloomsbury's Cultural Treasures, London: Harvest Books, 1988, pp.180, ISBN 0156167735

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Tools for Complex Projects

2008-04-21T14:29:00.005+01:00

This is a book about project management - but the management of complex and large scale projects. That complexity might be structural (building a large engineering plant) technical (developing a major new chemical) directional (a cross-national political initiative) or temporal (national oil supply during a time of war). The overall strategy of Kaye Remington and Julien Pollack's approach to this subject is to examine the nature of these complex projects in some theoretical detail and then to offer a series of practical tools for dealing with them. There are of course other ways of categorizing complexity - most commonly by scale or cost of a project, its duration, or the degree of risk to its owners. Their claim is that the four categories they have chosen are more fundamental and will cover any project.

It has to be said that the theoretical part of the book is extraordinarily dry reading:

During implementation, variance control must be vigilant so that stakeholders are kept informed of possible cost blow-outs. Techniques like Earned Value Management (EVM) a tool which links scope with time and cost, can be used to translate schedule slippages into budgetary terms.

Discussing the features of large and complex projects only really comes to life when concrete examples are used to illustrate the argument. It's only when a chemical refinery, an ocean-going oil tanker, or the production of a full-length feature film hove into view that the picture snaps into focus.

The same questions are posed in each of these cases. What are the implications for communication and control within the project? What does the project manager need to do to in terms of team support, finance, scheduling procurement, and risk analysis?

In fact the larger the project, the more likely it is that these issues will be delegated to individual experts. The project manager however must have the skills to keep the larger picture and the smaller details in mind at the same time. S/he must have the capacity to be one moment an eagle, and the next a mouse.

The second part of the book looks at a number of 'tools' for dealing with the problems generated by complex projects. These in general are suggestions for defining the problems that arise using charts and ratings boxes; drawing up one-page 'maps' which show the 'anatomy' or connections in a complex system; and collaborative working arrangements (CWAs) instead of adversarial lump-sum contracts in the construction industry to reduce budget over-runs.

Some are fairly obvious such as splitting a large-scale complex problem down into a series of smaller discrete projects which are easier to manage and complete. Another is defining quite carefully the roles and responsibilities of project team members.

Multiple tools may be employed where uncertainties are created in long term projects (due to political or environmental changes, or financial problems arising out of volatile stock-markets. In such cases, a cost review might take precedence over an examination of delivery dates.

Risk-assessment maps can be drawn up to calculate the possible effects of worst-case scenarios. These look something like TV weather forecasts, where the arrows get bigger and are packed together more tightly - to show where the danger lies and where an emergency procedure needs to be put in place.

It occurred to me whilst reading this book that one of the largest and most complex projects I could think of was governing a country. I wonder if Gordon Brown or George Bush use any such management tools whilst simultaneously running democracies and waging costly wars - which we pay for. Somehow I doubt it, but maybe they should.

Kaye Remington and Julien Pollack, Tools for Complex Projects, London: Gower, 2007, pp.211, ISBN 0566087417

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Marcel Proust: an illustrated life

2008-04-17T13:19:00.003+01:00

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Proust's strange life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Mary Ann Caws admits from the outset that with so many other excellent biographies of Proust available [by George Painter, Ronald Hayman, and William Sansom] there's no point in writing another. Instead, she produces an account of Proust which takes themes and motifs from his life as a starting point for meditations upon them - some of them not much longer than a single page, and others stretching out in more leisurely fashion to make well-informed reflections on the social context which gave rise to his work.

For those who don't know Proust well, she includes a sufficient number of tantalizing biographical details to whet any appetite for more. He slept between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon, then worked late into the night, fueled (like Balzac) by strong coffee and a variety of drugs. He turned up to the best restaurants in the middle of the night and paid for special dinners to be laid on. He left some of his best furniture to a male brothel which he frequented.

Caws is steeped in knowledge about Proust and his background, and her account moves easily from his personal life to cultural issues. Her most extensive chapter is a lengthy analysis of Proust's relationship to music, and the influence of the Ballets Russes on Paris and London in the early years of the last century. She also discusses the influence of the English art critic Ruskin on Proust's literary style, and notes in addition his enthusiasm for the work of Thomas Hardy.

The beginner expecting a chronological introduction to the main events in Proust's life might be disappointed, but by way of compensation it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a charming experience. The images of late nineteenth century Paris which inspired so much of his work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, paintings of the people who inspired his characters, and photographs that you rarely see elsewhere.

Mary Ann Caws, Marcel Proust: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press. 2005, pp.112, ISBN 1585676489

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Dying Media - New Media

2008-04-13T17:55:00.006+01:00

Downsizing my office has meant clearing the library. What do you do with all the books you've read and accumulated over the years? Sell them to a second-hand bookshop? They hardly exist any more. Sell them on eBay? Do me a favour. Do you want to advertise, describe, bubble-wrap, package and schlep to the post office for a title that can only sell for two quid at the most. Taking out a paper round would be better business. It would seem that second hand books have virtually no value, unless they're rare or special. If you don't believe me, so a search for a classic novel on Amazon. Prices start at one penny.

So you end up taking your unwanted stock to the charity shop. Yes, the little old ladies (of both sexes) who run them are actually grateful for all those web design manuals, dictionaries of foreign terms, essays on literary theory, and old novels you need to ditch.

The experience led me to reflect on the nature of books and the collecting of them. Most of my life has been spent surrounded by shelf after shelf and room after room lined with books. It's part of the cultural world one inhabits. And it has to be said, it still remains a sort of a cultural status symbol. Yet for all the space they occupy, how often does one ever take a book down from the shelves and re-read it? Very seldom, if ever.

Yet I kept my serious works of reference - especially the big dictionaries. But even as I was lowering them tenderly into their temporary packing-cases, I was thinking - "What do you do today if you need to know anything?" The answer is - you type a search term into Google, or you go to Wikipedia.

Books are still a very convenient medium for conveying issues on which the reader might wish to dwell, or which take some time to absorb. But once that process is finished, they've done their job and are just taking up shelf space.

It's all a powerful argument in favour of what Nicholas Negroponte calls 'bit versus atoms'. What he means by that is anythig which is delivered to us as atoms takes up space - whereas bits are virtual. They occupy no space at all. Whole libraries are now available to us all, on line. So maybe we don't need our own any more?

This phenomenon was reinforced by the same thing happening with recorded music. I hesitated for some time, wondering if I could muster the energy to transfer huge numbers of vinyl LPs onto CD - but in the end they went to the charity shop too. The young man in charge was pleased to inform me that he'd checked out their value in record catalogues, and was pleased to put high-ish price stickers on them.

So - goodbye to the era of LPs. I knew I wouldn't be the first person to make this transition. But at the very same time, as I boxed up my CDs, it struck me that I now prefer listening to music on line. The sound quality is better; the selection infinitely varied; and I can switch from classical to jazz and back again whenever I wish. More than that, Last.fm creates my own personal radio station for me - so I can choose music like Prokofiev or Michel Petrucciani, and I can skip over artists I don't like whenever it suits me.

So maybe we're entering a new age of online media, which certainly takes up far less space - leaving me room for the three shiny new black monitors I've got on my desk, looking like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.

Teaching Academic Writing - book review

2008-04-11T17:33:00.005+01:00

No matter what subjects students engage with in further and higher education, they will be required to produce written work on which they will be assessed. This could be the formal academic essay, a lab report, a project, a case study, or even a reflective journal. This book is designed to assist subject lecturers and writing skills tutors whose job it is to help students develop their written work and grasp the conventions of academic argument and expression. The need for this assistance has arisen as larger and larger numbers of students enter F & HE - often from non-traditional backgrounds, and sometimes with English as a second language. The authors (a group of tutors from the Open University) start off by suggesting that teachers should make explicit the writing tasks they set for students.

It can no longer be assumed that students will already know what an academic essay requires them to do - or that they will pick up the idea as they go along. Next comes making them conscious of the appropriate academic register, as well as eradicating grammatical errors. There's no quick fix for this: it requires a lot of intensive marking and supportive feedback. But I was surprised they didn't spot the time-saving device of putting guidance notes on line.

However, their suggestions on pre-writing (notes), brainstorming, and planning should be useful as tools for teaching students that almost no form of successful writing comes fully-formed, straight from the head of the writer.

At a time when modular degrees are becoming more popular, it's important that students are aware of the differing conventions which obtain in various subjects. These can vary from the 'hard evidence' required in sciences to the 'well-informed opinion' which is accepted as persuasive argument in the arts. Somewhere in between are the social sciences which attempt to combine the two. Once again, they argue very sensibly that these conventions should be made explicit to students if they are to have any chance of succeeding in their work.

They also show examples of such work and offer exercises which are designed to raise students' awareness of what's required. The close examination of a case study in business studies reveals the particular difficulty of writing for two audiences at the same time.

The next chapter deals explicitly with the issue of assessment. Once again the advice is to make the assessment criteria clear to both students and tutors alike. And their advice on providing feedback on assessed work is excellent. It would be good to see the marking pro-formas and guidance notes in more widespread general use.

However, what they don't take into account is the important factor that making assignments thoroughly is a time-intensive activity, and many tutors can skimp on this part of their duties because they know their work will not be closely monitored. Moreover, since much direct teaching and assignment marking in F & HE is now done by hourly paid post-graduates, they are place in the invidious position of working for the rates of a domestic cleaner, exploiting themselves in order to stay in employment. [This is a subject close to my heart, which I discuss in my own book on Marking Essays.]

They finish with a first rate chapter on academic writing in an electronic environment. This covers all the digital tools available - from word-processors and email, to conferencing and discussion forums, and online writing laboratories (OWLs) and the strategies by which materials located on line can be evaluated for their usefulness.

Tutors at any level of F & HE would do themselves a favour by rehearsing the issues raised in this book. It might be written by what is almost a committee, but it's got a collective's combined experience written into it.

Caroline Coffin et al, Teaching Academic Writing, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.175, ISBN 0415261368

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Visualizing Data - book review

2008-04-06T16:23:00.003+01:00

The doyen of data presentation is Edward Tufte, but even he has (so far) only dealt with the display of static information. Ben Fry's new book combines similar aesthetic principles with the technical knowledge of how such presentations can be made dynamically. He uses a simple programming environment and API called Processing (which he developed as part of his PhD research). This is a free downloadable open source program too based on Java (at Processing.org). He's an excellent communicator, and introduces his topics in gradual stages. The first few chapters are a gentle introduction to presenting data, and then gradually he presents more technically advanced approaches. What he proposes embraces a number of disciplines - statistics, data mining, graphic design, and information visualization - but he insists at the outset that the most important thing is to ask interesting questions. It's all very well having huge amounts of data, but you need to ask 'What is meaningful about it?'.

The process of creating a visual presentation is a logical series of steps. First the data is acquired: (he uses the US system of zip codes as an example). Then the data is parsed: that is, changed into a format that tags each part with its intended use. Next, any unwanted data is filtered out, then the data is mined - in this case to show its maximum and minimum values.

The next stage is deciding how to present the results - as a table, bar chart, graph, or diagram. Then the results can be refined. And finally, because this entire process is conducted digitally, drawing on processing power which is now available on even a standard computer, the data can be interrogated interactively. We can zoom in on maps, or refine searches by name or size.

In the next part of the book he offers an explanation of how to use the Processing software to create your own displays and visualize your own data. This is done in a straightforward manner that even someone without programming skills could follow. He also provides guidance on the philosophy of designing this type of software. Keep your designs as small and re-usable as possible. Work with samples of your data to begin with. Don't start by trying to build a cathedral.

Subsequent chapters deal with different types of exercise - showing data as a physical map (the population of the US in states) then a time series (national consumption of tea and coffee 1910-2000). Next comes data with complex inter-relations (national results of all baseball teams in a single season).

As he says in his introduction, he is not offering a series of ready-made programs for presenting data. Instead, he is demonstrating the general principles by which such design problems can be solved, and leaving you to create your own.

Tree maps and network graphs are shown displaying word usage in a literary text (Mark Twain) and he even shows examples of results which are not useful - in order to emphasise the point he makes over and over again: you must ask the right questions of the data you are interrogating.

He ends by returning to the earliest stages of his thesis with some quite advanced level guidance on the acquisition and parsing of data. If by this time you're not convinced (as I was) that he knows exactly what he's talking about, have a look at his stunning personal web site at www.benfry.com.

Ben Fry, Visualizing Data, Sebastopol (CA): O'Reilly, 2007, pp.366, ISBN 0596514557

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Reading week in Andalucia

2008-04-02T10:57:00.006+01:00

It's always good to get away from the basically grim weather in Manchester UK where I live to the welcoming climate of the Costa del Sol. The skies are blue, the people are friendly, and even with a weak pound against the Euro it's easy to live on good quality fresh food at less than in the UK. It's not been the most exciting week intellectually, but I've enjoyed Ben Fry's Visualizing Data, and Christopher Reed's Bloomsbury Rooms has been an interesting take on the politics of interior design. I've read Steve May's book on Doing Creative Writing, and a book on Teaching Academic Writing written by a team from the Open University, where I teach part-time. A short biography of Marcel Proust kept me occupied on the flight over here, and a study of Tools for Complex Projects kept me pinned down in abstraction for longer than it warranted. After a tutorial this morning with the local estate agents on a content management system for their new web site, I settled by the pool with a book on Translation Studies which will keep me busy until it's time to fly back to what we call 'Prison Island'.

Bloomsbury Rooms - book review

2008-03-28T18:06:00.005Z

This is a beautifully illustrated book which explores the relationship between Bloomsbury notions of aesthetics and the actual interior designs of the homes in which its members lived. Christopher Reed takes their various houses as starting points - 46 Gordon Square, Asheham, Brunswick Square, Charleston, 52 Tavistock Square - for meditations on their socio-psychological development and the notions of art practised by Vanessa Bell, Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant. It should be said from the outset that although this has the size and has the high production values of a coffee table book, it is not a casual or an easy read. Christopher Reed situates Bloomsbury within theoretical concepts of art that were competing with each other in the early phase of European modernism in a serious and heavyweight fashion. And these theories themselves are analysed in a political and ideological manner. In fact his study is not only about Bloomsbury's domestic interiors.

He is profoundly well-read in the whole Bloomsbury oeuvre, and right from the start he emphasises the political radicalism out of which much of its artistic practices sprung. He engages quite passionately with art theory, social criticism, and the philosophic relationship between politics and human relations to which they gave expression in their domestic lives. He sees this as an early version of an idea we now express as 'the personal is political'.

His study challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from orthodox modernism. He argues that their aesthetics were formed by fully conscious choices, made by people who were often more politically radical than was generally acknowledged - both then and now.

Whatever you think of the book's theoretical arguments, it's a beautifully illustrated production, full of fascinating paintings, fabrics, decoration, interior design, and original graphics. It's meticulously researched, fully annotated with extensive notes, an enormous bibliography, and a full index.

And Bloomsbury was a world of graphic and interior design, as well as literary culture. Vanessa Bell was a painter and book illustrator, Duncan Grant was a painter and interior designer, and Roger Fry was a painter, art critic, and at one time advisor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Many of their designs for the Omega workshops are in evidence here, as well as the decoration of their own homes in both London and the countryside. Artistic theory aside, for most readers it will be the photographs, illustrations, the paintings, ceramics, and textile designs which will be the main attraction here. There simply aren't any other books in print offering such a rich glimpse into the visual world that Bloomsbury represents.

Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, New York: Yale University Press, 2004, pp.314, ISBN 0300102488

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Grand Designs

2008-03-20T11:54:00.005Z

I've enjoyed watching the latest series of the one TV series concerned with contemporary architecture. Channel 4 presenter Kevin McCloud is an enthusiast; he's not uncritical of pretension; and he has a professional eye for detail. More than that, he has the vision to see the modern living space which is being sandwiched into the eighteenth century barn or a Victorian pumping station. What I find slightly amusing (and amazing) about these programmes is that a completely new, enormous six-bed, two-bath house can be built for as little as 400K. But when all the extras are added, the clients suddenly become a bit coy about how much they have spent. Moreover, there always seems to be a sleeping partner whose parents own the land or who has inherited wealth in pockets deep enough to fund the re-building of a wall or the tiling of a bathroom in Egyptian porphyry.

Working Spaces - book review

2008-03-17T14:41:00.003Z

Lots of people work from home today. In the world of an email address, a broadband connection, and a laptop on your coffee table, nobody knows you're a consultant dog on the Internet. But if it gets more serious and you want to establish a grown-up home office, you might want to create a professional workspace. Many people start from a small study or working in a corner of the spare room, but if your business grows, I guarantee you'll feel more professional with a proper office. This book is visual proof that you don't need to be surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets. The examples illustrated include quite small family homes which have been adapted to the demands of creating a working space within a domestic environment.

They also recognise that people working from confined spaces may need to put a single area to different uses at different times. A workaday meeting room might become a weekend lounge; or an office might need to be converted to accommodate guests from time to time.

What I admire about these Taschen publications is that although they have the outer glamour of coffee table luxury, they do in fact deal with real-life examples. There are plenty of cases here of one and two-roomed apartments which have been adapted to maximise space and preserve elegance, whilst at the same time functioning as proper offices with computers, storage for box files, and desks with telephones and wastebaskets.

The photography is superb throughout; the text is in English, French, and German; and every example is accompanied by architectural plans showing the floor layout. It's also bursting with good space-saving ideas - foldaway beds; hinged partition screens; and lots of tables, chairs and bookshelves with wheels. Another common design feature if you've got the courage to try it is white floors. White everything in fact.

How can you make your own working space more pleasant, more aesthetically soothing? Well, ask yourself these questions. Do you really need ugly filing cabinets immediately to hand? Why not conceal them or put the contents somewhere else? Why not have bold decorative features in your workspace, to make it more individualised and humane? Large pictures and big pots of flowers will do the trick.

Most of the owners seem to be graphic and interior designers, and architects - which might be cheating somewhat. I know a number of professional writers who operate out of spaces far less elegant (and that's putting it mildly) . But this gives an idea of what is possible, and moreover attainable without a great deal of expense.

In fact I'll summarise it all in one tip which is guaranteed to make your own working space more pleasant and more effective in one quick step: Get rid of all the clutter- now!

Simone Schleifer, Working Spaces, London: Taschen, 2005, pp.384, ISBN 3822841862

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Moving Office

2008-03-12T12:44:00.005Z

After ten years in the same location, I'm going to a new office space. It's just like moving home - fraught with all sorts of logistical problems. But as I've always liked working somewhere which has visual style - whether at home or off-site, I thought it was time to upgrade. If you spend eight hours a day (or more) at a desk or in front of a computer, there's no reason why you should be surrounded by all the clutter which litters most office spaces - the curling calenders, bulging folders, tangled wires, and trays of old visiting cards and paper clips that accumulate whilst your back's turned. I've started by throwing out all things that don't actually get used - the old conference papers, the government reports, the brochures, and free presentation folders and DVDs that clog your bookshelves. I've even bundled masses of unused pens and pencils and taken them to the charity shop, since i now use the elegant Schaffer set my daughter gave me for Xmas: two single, solid black objects on the solitary blank pad that sits alongside my keyboard.

I also thought I would do some research on how other people organised their working spaces, and came up with some excellent suggestions from the New York magazine, and a book I happened across in Manchester Deansgate Waterstone's, Working Spaces which is so good I'm going to review it in a separate posting.

The examples have several things in common, which is just the guidance I am looking for as I prepare for the Big Day. I've got the meeting room and kitchen-diner sorted out already, but I notice that designers and architects don't do clutter, they don't do carpets, and they don't feel compelled to display walls full of books which I've always done. This picture is the office of New York interior designer and architect Robert Couturier. Now that looks like a fair working environment to me.

Picture courtesy of Lisa Kereszi, New York magazine.

Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

2008-03-04T18:55:00.006Z

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Nabokov's amazingly varied yet consistent life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Even though he came from a rich and privileged background, Nabokov's life was one which was beset by the tragic events of the age in which he lived. His childhood was idyllic - well educated, and loved by both parents, he was taken to school in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz. When he was only seventeen he inherited a mansion, a country estate, and a fortune . Within three years however he had lost it all in the revolution and he was forced to leave Russia, never to return. In the 1920s he painstakingly established a reputation for himself as a Russian novelist, writing in the first city of emigration, Berlin, and making a living by giving tennis lessons and setting chess problems and crossword puzzles for newspapers.

When the Nazis came to power he hung on as long as possible, but was eventually forced to move to the second choice for Russian emigres - Paris. He realised that he had lost forever the audience he had spent almost twenty years cultivating, and he started writing in French, knowing that he must start all over again.

Then, with only days to spare before the Germans occupied France in 1940 he escaped to the USA and began the entire process over again, writing in English and struggling to make a living by teaching literature in a girls' college.

Once again he succeeded in adapting himself to his surroundings, but he felt unappreciated in a literary sense - until he threw down the gauntlet by publishing Lolita. This book changed his life.

He was able to give up teaching, and interestingly, for all his fondness for America, one of the first things he did was to return to Europe. He booked into the Palace Hotel in Montreux and lived there for the rest of his life.

Jane Grayson's account of his life is interspersed with accounts of his major works - The Gift, Pale Fire, Laughter in the Dark, his stories, most of his other novels, and his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which caused such a scholarly controversy when it appeared. I was slightly surprised that she skirted round the over-indulgences of Ada, his last major work.

But it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a charming experience. The images of old Russian estates which inspired so much of his work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, book jacket designs from the first editions of his work, and photographs which you rarely see elsewhere.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life, Overbrook: NY, 2004, pp.146, ISBN 1585676098

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The Rest is Noise - book review

2008-02-28T12:05:00.004Z

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker magazine who blogs prolifically at The Rest is Noise. And even though he doesn't have comments switched on at his site, his postings are required reading for anyone who wants to keep abreast of classical music - especially as seen from New York city. His tastes and references are amazingly eclectic and unstuffy. One minute he's analysing the latest staging of the Ring Cycle and next he's reporting on developments in contemporary rock music or a recently discovered private recording of a John Coltrane radio broadcast. This is his long-awaited first book and major oeuvre as a critic, tracing the development of twentieth century classical music from the first night of Strauss's Salome (no accent) in 1905 to John Adams's Nixon in China in 1987.

He has an amazingly developed sense of cultural history- reminding us whilst discussing the development of Thomas Mann's traditional musical ideas in relation to Schoneberg that Leon Trotsky spent the years 1907 to 1914 in exile in Vienna where these modernist moves were being played out, alongside the work of Karl Kraus, Oskar Kokoshka, and Egon Schiele. He darts back and forth in time in a way which is at first bewildering, but there's a good reason for doing so - usually to show how far back cultural convergences began.

His narrative is spiced by what might be called the higher musical gossip. He slips in references and anecdotes which sparkle like gems on the page. Schoneberg's bon mot on his exile in California: 'I was driven into Paradise', and Charlie Parker spontaneously quoting from The Firebird when he spotted Stravinsky was in the audience at Birdland one night.

It's an approach which relies heavily on anecdote and cultural montage - but his juxtapositions are all backed up by scholarly references which are kept wisely at the back of the book, They don't encumber the narrative.

His descriptions of symphonies and major orchestral works are a mixture of technical analysis and an impressionistic account of what is going on:

In the last bars, the note B aches for six slow beats against the final C-major chord, like a hand outstretched from a figure disappearing into light.

Maybe the mixture is just about right. After all, it's difficult to write about music, which is essentially abstract. When you think about it, music doesn't mean anything, even though it can be incredibly moving and beautiful. Though that, of course, is meaning of a kind.

The Spirit of Schoenberg presides over the first part of the book: all other music seems to be measured against his purist ethos and practice. This phase ends with the premiere of Berg's Lulu in 1937. My only disappointment in this section was his account of Duke Ellington, which concentrated on his not-to-be-performed opera Boola and failed to bring out the element of small-scale symphonies or concertos which characterised much of his sub three-minute compositions for 78 rpm recordings.

In the second part, Shostakovich is let off the hook somewhat. As a way of explaining his capitulation to Stalinism, Ross describes him as having 'divided selves' - though to do him credit, Ross doesn't try to conceal the privileges he enjoyed (spacious Moscow flat with three pianos, for which he thanked Stalin personally) whilst his contemporaries were being led of to the Gulag or despatched with a bullet in the back of the head.

It's interesting to read of the style wars of the 1940s and 1950s with the benefit of half a century's hindsight. Major composers such as Stravinsky were being written off by people who are now forgotten - and it's even more amazing to read that the champions of atonal music and the concerts arranged to promote them were funded by the CIA.

Ross clearly has his heroes - Strauss (despite his Nazi associations) Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. And even though he may not have intended it, Pierre Boulez emerges from the narrative as a distinctly pushy, unpleasant piece of self-aggrandizement.

I was surprised that he took John Cage so seriously - somebody who has always struck me as completely bogus - but he gives a touching account of Aaron Copland, who suffered harassment and criticism in his own country during the McCarthy trials for his leftish sympathies, despite his having written such iconic evocations of America as Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man.

There's a whole chapter on Benjamin Britten, where I was glad to see that Ross doesn't shy away from the much-ignored fact that much of Britten's work deals with the sexual and emotional violation of young boys. He even reveals that Britten (in a Michael Jackson moment) took the juvenile star of his 1954 The Turn of the Screw (David Hemmings) into his own bed. But Ross's account of Britten is far from smutty. There's a several page long account of Peter Grimes which is the most extended musical analysis in the whole book.

He ends his narrative with an account of the American minimalists - the music still apparently split into two camps, but this time 'uptown' and 'downtown' - and he has a roundup of developments in Europe following the collapse of communism and the Berlin Wall.His story concludes with a part-wish, half-expectation that classical and popular music will somehow embrace each other in a way which will create new forms in the twenty-first century.

This is a very readable, indeed a compelling work which combines love of the subject with a detailed knowledge of its history and cultural context. It's the sort of book that makes you feel like reading with a piano keyboard to hand in order to follow the formal sequences and chord progressions he describes. Unmissable for anyone interested in twentieth century music.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: listening to the twentieth century, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007, pp.624, ISBN 0374249393

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Wikipedia - the missing manual

2008-02-25T14:41:00.004Z

Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the world. It's currently twenty-five times larger than Encyclopedia Britannica, and expanding with every day that passes. That's because anybody can add entries, edit the content, correct mistakes, or contribute new materials.But if you go to Wikipedia and try to start adding your own entries, supplementing other people's contributions, or correcting mistakes - it's not quite as simple as it might seem. There's online help, but it's rather deeply buried. That's why books such as this one from the 'missing manuals' series have come into being. They provide the user guides which nobody in open source projects has got round to writing yet.

This one doesn't just tell you about how to create new Wikipedia entries or edit ones that already exist, it explains what types of new material will be acceptable, and which will not. For instance, I found an entry recently which gave information about the main road which runs through the suburb of south Manchester UK where I live. It listed public buildings, a little local history, and topographical details.

But if I had a dog called Bosun and keyed in an entry on his appearance and habits, that would be removed. The reason? It doesn't pass the 'notability' test. In other words, who cares about your pet dog, or your lovely daughter, or your taste in wallpaper? Yet if you happened to have some botanical information about sycamore trees, or the statistics related to voting patterns, that might be welcomed as new material.

John Broughton covers all the essentials a beginner will need to know - how to add or edit entries; how to create hyperlinks and footnotes; and how to add graphics. So if you would like to join the tens of thousands of (unpaid) volunteers adding to the six million articles in 250 languages - this is a great place to learn the rules of engagement.

The whole of Wikipedia is supervised by volunteer editors; everything is checked; and a record is kept of any changes made, plus when they were made, and who made them. If you were to insert a paragraph saying that Elvis Presley had recently been seen in Tesco, it would immediately be deleted. And if you mischievously added links to your own web site hoping to drive up traffic, these pages would be 'reverted', which is Wikispeak to say that they would be wound back to what they were before.

These are some of the reasons why readers can trust Wikipedia more than is sometimes thought. It is a self-regulating mechanism, and vigorous systems exist to combat mistakes, vandalism, and spam. Even the editors have other editors, checking their work.

Even though anybody can add entries to Wikipedia, it's quite interesting to note what is not allowed. The list includes presentation of original ideas, routine news coverage, self-promotion, instruction manuals, plot summaries and song lyrics, announcements, sports, and gossip. That's why my dog Bosun doesn't get a mention.

John Broughton leaves the technicalities of how to create pages and arrange tables of contents until the end. These sections also include some interesting details on Wikipedia's house style - no definite or indefinite articles in titles for instance, and bulleted lists are discouraged.

The latter part of the book deals with issues which will interest information architects - the classification of data, how articles are categorized, and how Wikipedia deals with 'disambiguation' - which occurs when a single term can have multiple meanings. For instance 'mercury' could be the liquid metal or the mythological messenger. Wikipedia deals with these cases using what's called 'the principle of least astonishment' - in other words, what would a reader most likely expect to see listed first.

He ends with some interesting tips on editing and what are essentially collaborative writing skills, plus guidance on checking sources and links, and striving for accuracy in all things. This is rather like an excellent potted course on online journalism. So if you fancy making a contribution, just sign on and get started. Wikipedia even lists articles which are waiting to be written.

John Broughton, Wikipedia: the missing manual, O'Reilly, Sebastopol: CA, 2008, pp.477, ISBN 0596515162

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Writing Short Stories - book review

2008-02-21T17:54:00.003Z

Can creative writing actually be taught? There is some debate about this question, but the number of university departments devoted to the subject is expanding so rapidly, many people must believe it's possible. And why not? After all, we believe that the skills of painting, music, and architecture can be taught, don't we. Ailsa Cox teaches creative writing, and this book is her version of a seminar - analysing the technical details of stories, then suggesting exercises which students (or readers) might complete to develop their own skills. She kicks off with a good shot at defining the short story. How short is short? How long can a story be before it becomes a novella or a short novel? There are no simple answers to these questions. As soon as you think of an answer, you'll realise there are exceptions.

She sets out a series of chapters which explore various types of short story: the suspenseful narrative, the fantasy, the comic yarn, and so on. Her approach is to explain the genre, outline its rules so far as they might exist, then look in detail at examples from masters of the short story, from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary writers such as Stephen King and even her own work.

She deals with the plotless story - the 'epiphany' as deployed by James Joyce in 'The Dead' and Katherine Mansfield in 'Bliss'. Actually, she skids around quite a bit from one genre to another - from the tall tale, to the horror story, and back again via the anecdote - but there are lots of examples enthusiastically presented in such a way that I imagine they will appeal to the aspirant writers at whom the book is aimed.

She's very keen on fantasy and science fiction, so Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' and Jorge Luis Borges' 'Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' are given close scrutiny, alongside stories by H.G.Wells and William Gibson. Each chapter ends with a series of practical exercises. These are designed to provide ideas and prompts for the would-be writer - to start the imaginative pump working.

She makes a reasonable case for considering the higher journalism as a form of creative writing, and rightly points out that some of the best reportage can be considered as short stories if seen in a different light (or published somewhere other than in newspapers). She's not so convincing on her claims for erotic fiction, but fortunately she redeems herself by a sensitive reading of Chekhov's 'The Lady with the Dog'.

The book ends with several useful lists of resources for writers: magazines in print and online which accept short stories; prizes for short story writers; and organisations and databases - though for the ultimate list of resources readers will still need to consult The Writers' and Artists' Yearbook or The Writer's Handbook.

Ailsa Cox, Writing Short Stories, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.197, ISBN 0415303877

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Franz Kafka - an illustrated life

2008-02-16T19:42:00.007Z

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Kafka's tragically short life and the formative influences on his work. It's written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Kafka's own story is fairly well known. As he himself points out, he was born, went to school and university, then lived and worked within the radius of a few miles all his life. He had a passionate desire for independence, but lived most of the time even as an adult with his parents or his sister. He had a love-hate relationship with his father which dominated his life, and he took very little interest in the publication of his work, even though he was regarded by others as the most important writer of his generation.

Many other seminal figures in the modernist movement leave their traces in passing through Kafka's life - the writer Karl Kraus, philosopher Rudolph Steiner, artist-writer Alfred Kubin, and even Albert Einstein. Prague in the early years of the last century was at the heart of European developments in art, literature, and music.

He had a lifelong friendship with the writer Max Brod, who was instructed to destroy all Kafka's writing on his death. He reneged on his promise to do so, published Kafka's work, and made him famous throughout the world.

Adler's portrait humanises Kafka, making him seem less neurotic than other accounts - even including Kafka's own version of himself in his diaries and notebooks. He emphasises Kafka's skills as a lawyer, his professional experience in commerce and industry, and his active travelling as a risk assessor. He even points to Kafka's fascination with clothes - described by a friend as 'the best dressed man I ever met'.

Kafka captured like no other writer before him the angst and isolation of the individual confronted by the arbitrary and unjust forces of society. And yet in his personal life (despite the anguish he wrote about so eloquently) he enjoyed modern novelties such as the cinema, aeroplanes, and motor-cycles; he went swimming and followed the vogue for nudism; he had his fair share of sexual affairs, and he supplemented those with visits to brothels.

Adler traces Kafka's tortured relationships with Greta Bloch, Milena Jesensksa, and Dora Dymant through to the tragic year of 1924 when the devaluation of the German Mark, the cold winter, and coal rationing left its mark on everyone and contributed to his death. Kafka even recorded the coal rationing in a small piece called 'The Bucket Rider'. In typical Kafka-esque contradiction, he died just as he found his first taste of real happiness.

I was also glad to see that Adler records in an endnote the fact that so many of Kafka's intimates, including his three sisters, were murdered in the Holocaust. It puts things into modernist perspective.

Adler offers en passant light readings of the major works in the light of Kafka's life without plunging into the rather over-simplified biographical interpretation which affects so much Kafka criticism. But it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a pleasing experience. The images of old Prague streets which inspired so much of Kafka's work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, book jacket designs from the first editions of his work, and photographs which you rarely see elsewhere - except on YouTube.

Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka, Woodstock NY: Overlook Press, 2001, pp.164, ISBN 0715632957

Sweeney Todd - film review

2008-02-11T18:41:00.007Z

As a fan of Stephen Sondheim's music, I was keen to see what director Tim Burton made of his musical Sweeney Todd, and ventured uncharacteristically forth to my local multiplex recently, little knowing what a surprise I was in for - despite the avalanche of pre-release publicity. It's said that some early viewers walked out of the film, unaware from the trailers that it was a musical. But I nearly walked out, not realising how horrifying it was going to be. It must be one of the most disturbingly unpleasant films I've ever seen - and I'm sure Tim Burton would take that as a compliment.

Let's get the positives established first. There were first rate performances from Johnny Depp as Sweeney, Helena Bonkham-Carter as Mrs Lovett, Alan Rickman as the villainous high-court judge, Timothy Spall as the obnoxious Beadle, and Sasha Baron-Cohen as the mountebank Signor Pirelli. No problems with casting, acting, or mise en scene. Burton is obviously a master of Victorian grande guignol, and the audience in the cinema viewing I attended were young folk, lapping up the gore and the shock effects.

And yet the settings are curiously unconvincing and cardboard-like. Given that spectacular effects are achievable using computer-generated imagery today, I was surprised that he went for sets that might have come from a film made fifty years ago. Unless that was a deliberate effect on Burton's part. It's hard to tell if he's trying to create a credible nineteenth century London or the stage setting for a musical about the same subject, full of gloomy paint effects, plastic cobwebs, sewers, scuttling rats, and dusty wigs.

But the story is tightly controlled. Sweeney returns to London after fifteen years of deportation after a false conviction, intent on revenge. The corrupt judge who sentenced him has raped his wife and imprisoned his daughter. Sweeney sets up shop with Mrs Lovett and then murders selected victims, waiting for the judge. She bakes them into meat pies, and as a couple they prosper. So far so good - though Johnny Depp never smiles once throughout the whole film, whilst Bonkham-Carter pouts seductively as she does so well, and works her push-up bra to maximum effect.

It's Sweeney's unrelenting anger and thirst for vengeance which fuels the narrative. And it's this, plus the betrayals and savagery which make the whole thing such a gut-wrenching experience. The horror of all the throat-slitting, and the immense thuds of the bodies hitting the cellar floor are difficult to bear. In fact the hyper-realism of these scenes struck me as at odds with the stereotype Dickensian London in which it all took place. The horror, the horror.

I was relieved to read afterwards on Wikipedia that the whole Sweeney Todd story is more or less a fiction. It's a myth, cobbled together from nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls, but given a very skilful twist by Christopher Bond in 1973 to create a play on which Sondheim based his successful 1979 musical. One might wonder why these people wish to resurrect such an unpleasant story just at this time. Pause for thought.

The music was good too, though I couldn't understand why one of the best songs from the original musical - The Ballad of Sweeney Todd - wasn't used in the film. It sums up the whole story - which as the show's original prologue it was designed to do. "Swing your razor wide! Sweeney, hold it to the skies" - which Johnny Depp does repeatedly. Maybe that would have given too much away to the young blood-thirsty, horror film devotees who were the majority of the audience, stuffing their faces with so much junk food and popcorn that a small army of cleaners were waiting to clean up as the credits were rolling.

The scenes are quite (unfortunately) unforgettable; the performances are good; the theatricality well worked to provide the audience with a shock-horror experience - and maybe I'm a bit insulated from this modern cinematic genre - but when I came out of the cinema I felt like going home and watching Bambi or The Sound of Music. But I'm glad I saw it - honest.

Open Office Online

2008-02-10T16:00:00.001Z

The Open Office suite is already free at OpenOffice.org but now you don't even need to download and install it on your computer. Ulteo.com are offering a free online version, with 1GB of storage space where you can store your data. This means you could access your data files from anywhere in the world; you're safe from a hard disk crash on your own machine; and it's a terrific facility if you were into any sort of collaborative writing project. And just in case you didn't know, Open Office is more than just a word-processor. It has spreadsheets, presentation software, and a database. In other words, it's a free version of the Microsoft Office Suite, which would cost you nearly a hundred quid otherwise. Nudge, nudge.

Manchester Poetry Prize 2008

2008-02-07T12:56:00.000Z

We're quite well off for universities here in Manchester - four if you count Salford which is next door. And they're all keen on writing just at the moment. The 'old' university has employed Martin Amis as a creative writing fellow, and it's had Terry Eagleton as a 'real' professor - both paid three thousand pounds an hour. Now the 'new' Metropolitan University [the Poly to you and me] has raised the local stakes by creating a poetry prize worth 10,000 pounds - which is a lot of moolah just for writing a few po-ems. They've even thrown in a study bursary for the best entrant 18-25 years old. Full details from mid-February onwards HERE