Archive for June, 2008

We all love the sight and sound of babies laughing, like in the video I showed a few weeks ago of a bunch of giggly babies lying in a bed with their mom.

This one makes us think again. You will need the sound on to fully appreciate the sound of a baby laughing demonically in slow motion….

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with stories of his school days at Victoria Institution.

He writes:

So one early January morning, being the beginning of the school year I found myself seated in the classroom of Form One of the Victoria Institution. I was one of forty boys seated in five rows each with a desk in front of him facing the class blackboard. The form teacher was a late middle age male Chinese. All the teachers were male until a few years later when we had the first female teacher, a Chinese, a graduate from Raffles College in Singapore in her early thirties.

This male form teacher was very conscientious. He was a typical minor civil servant type who did not want to be involved in anything which may cause him any trouble. But he was a kind man. He did not aspire to teach any higher forms and he was, I guessed, happy to have his untroubled sleep at night. It was he who introduced the class to the mysteries of geometry and algebra which I took to very easily.

We were also introduced to general science which was a combination of very elementary chemistry, physics and biology. The science labs were amongst the best equipped of all the schools in the town if not in the country. We looked with awe and fascination at the rows of chemicals and the glass utensils in the labs and fancied ourselves as scientist decanting, bubbling and smoking chemicals from one test-tube into another. We used a textbook written by a former headmaster, the late Mr F. Daniel. He had written textbooks on the subject for use up to form five and these textbooks were used by all schools in Malaya whether government or non-government.

Mr Daniel had just retired before I entered the school. He was known to have been a very strict disciplinarian and the school had the reputation of producing students with a strong science background. There was no school uniform. Mr Daniel had required that boys wore white shorts or white pants, and white shirts tailored so that they were worn hanging over the top of the trousers and not tucked in. This was a very sensible wear in the tropics. After he retired this form of dressing gradually stopped.

Each period was of 45 minute duration. The most painful period for me was the one for art. The art teacher was very good at his work but he had a loud voice which he used to chastise boys who did not draw well. I received a great deal of his shouting and threats to throw away my eraser because I was using it so often. In the examinations I managed to obtain only enough marks to pass this subject.

At that time using the radio to broadcast lessons to elementary classes was in vogue. The teacher in charge would bring a radio and a loud speaker attached to it and plug it on and tune it to the correct station and someone will read out whatever the subject is, with some sound effects to make it more interesting. The subject for our class was “hygiene”.

Then there were the physical training periods. There were two periods in a week - each one on a different day. One was held in the school field and the other in the school hall. For the one in the hall we used the usual gymnastic equipment.

Once a week on a Friday the whole school assembled in the school hall. The school had a stage where all the teachers sat and the students sat on the floor of the hall. Notices of the main school activities were announced by the headmaster, awards were presented to athletes and scholars and one award was given to the classroom that was adjudged by the prefects to be the cleanest for that week.

All the boys took turns daily to sweep the floor of their classroom and shine the hinges and doorknobs. The prefects went around during the interval awarding points on each aspect of cleanliness. The award consisted of a framed picture of the school crest. There was one class whose monitor was so dedicated to these tasks that he would do most of the cleaning himself to ensure that his class won the award every week. In a recent visit to the school for an Old Boys gathering I was told that they had discontinued requiring the boys to do this kind of cleaning because, the school authorities were of the opinion that, the students should not be doing this kind of work. This gives an indication of the changing values. Instead they want classes to teach civic behaviour and responsibilities and how citizens must keep their environment clean.

So amongst the forty boys in the best class in Form 1 there were boys from the Pasar Road School and boys from the Batu Road School, both feeder schools of the V.I. the number from each school was not equal. According to my present recollection there were more boys from Batu Road School than boys from Pasar Road School in the proportion of about 30 to 10. It would be interesting to know what the past records were like. Were there always more Batu Road boys than Pasar Road boys and if so were there any social reasons for this?

Those 10 Pasar Road boys in the class came mainly from families of the junior civil servants, clerks and the like and there were a few Indians and Malays; this can be expected because the school was situated in the midst of government quarters where there were families of different races which the government employed. Also the boys were more studious and were quite unused to going out of the house for their amusements e.g. to the cinema or loitering in the shops because they could not afford to. All those in my year from Batu Road School were Chinese because the school was in the midst of a busy street in the town which had a predominantly Chinese population. Most of these boys were not very studious but they appeared to be sharp, with a little cunning, what one, I suppose, would consider as street-smart. Most of them were very good at mathematics. This I do not know if it is because they are Chinese or because they live in the town with the necessity for quick calculation of all kinds or a combination of both. They came mostly from families of small businessmen and were generally better off than the salaried minor civil servants.

memmlya

For all you web surfers out there, if you haven’t discovered the Firefox browser, now is the time to expand your horizons. In particular, if you are a blogger or keen on exploring and using social media, Firefox is excellent for integrating blogging and social media tools for a holistic viewing and interactive experience of the web.

Most people start their web explorations using Internet Explorer because that is the web browser that comes bundled with their PCs. Internet Explorer is pretty good as far as it goes. Firefox is a free, open source browser that you can download from the web - it is used and trusted by millions of people and because it is open source, there are a lot of extensions and add-ons that you can add to it to enhance your surfing experience. Open source means that they have opened up their software to the world so that anyone can develop applications to be used with Firefox - this contrasts with Microsoft’s proprietory model where the code is secret so you can only use products that have been developed under licence to Microsoft.

Firefox 3.0 has just been launched and you can download it free. Firefox has a number of nifty features such as zooming and a password manager but my favourite is the ability to type any keyword into the URL address bar without knowing the exact web address of what you’re looking for and it cleverly takes you straight to the website you want or offers up a list of options as a Google search would do. So just typing in “bbc” takes you straight to the BBC’s homepage without your having to manually type “www.bbc.co.uk”.

But where Firefox shines for me is in its intuitive functions that help with blogging and other social media interactions. To name a few:

Managing Images for Blogging

I use images regularly to illustrate my blogs and if I get them from the web, in Firefox all I have to do is right-click on the photo on the webpage where I’ve found it, select “Copy Image Location” and paste that URL into the “Add Image URL” of my blogging application and voila, the picture appears on my blog post. I also usually add a link back to the image and I can just right click on that webpage and “Copy Link Location” to paste in my blog post.

In contrast, to find the image location in Internet Explorer is unintuitive and fiddly - when you right click on the photo, you have to go to “Properties” to find the URL of the image location.

Blogging right from your browser

There is a brilliant add-on called Scribefire for Firefox that allows you to blog right from the Firefox browser - it opens up as the bottom half of the browser screen and you can drag-and-drop images and text from the webpage you are blogging about into the Scribefire. It syncs with your blog so that you can even choose the categories you’ve set up in your blog (or create new ones) and when you’re done, you can either save it as a draft or send it to your blog for immediate publication.

Twitter and Firefox

If you are a Twitter fan, there are a lot of applications that integrate Twitter with Firefox so that you can follow your Twitter buddies and also post “tweets” to Twitter without leaving Firefox. One such is Twitbin which opens Twitter as a sidebar in Firefox. I was using Tweetbar but it’s not yet compatible with Firefox 3 - hopefully, that will be addressed soon as I prefer that interface to Twitbin’s.

Annotating webpages

You can also annotate webpages with virtual Post-It notes and send the annotated page to friends, using Fleck. There is an integrated application with Firefox that makes it easy to do.

Firefox Add-Ons

I could go on but it’s probably just easier if you go to the Firefox Add-Ons page and check them out for yourself!

If you already use Firefox and have some favourite applications/ tools, do add a comment and tell us which one(s) you like the best.

Awhile back I featured a call for historical stories of Hong Kong by co-authors Carol Major and Hilda Tam who were working together on a novel inspired by events in Carol’s husband’s family.

Last week, Carol and her sister Alice were in London for a family gathering and to my great delight, they found a slot of time for us to meet up and have coffee.

Since my post about their project in March, Carol and Hilda have now started work on their novel, working together intimately although Carol is based in Australia and Hilda in Macao. When we met at a Cafe Nero in St Martins Lane last week, Carol explained how this collaboration worked. The protagonist is a Eurasian woman who has been adopted by a British family during the colonial occupation of Hong Kong and in order to integrate into the white world, she has suppressed her Chinese side until one day, events conspire to break through her white mask and she is forced to confront her Asian roots. Carol writes the sections of the novel that relate the protagonist’s white point of view while Hilda works on the Chinese point of view. The two writers have only met once face to face, spending one day together in Hong Kong, but apart from that, they have conducted this collaboration by email - they do not even speak on the phone.

To me, this is a fascinating creative process! This sort of collaboration could never have been possible in the days before the internet and email - nor in the colonial times when the story is set. I am really interested to see the outcome of the two voices, one Chinese, one European, each telling the story of one Eurasian. Also, what is the impact on the two writers themselves of conducting their collaboration primarily by written word, writing on their screens on emails in correspondence and also writing on their screens when they are inhabiting the character of their protagonist? Does this process help them meld into each other’s psyche and creativity? Do they respond to each other as Carol and Hilda or as parts of their character’s personality?

Meanwhile, Carol’s sister, Alice Major, is the first poet laureate of Edmonton, Alberta in Canada and has published numerous poetry collections and won a number of awards. We talked about the importance of sense of place in novels as well as in writing and how conjuring place in her writing was an important aspect of her role as poet laureate. The Edmonton city website explains the role:

“Historically, a Poet Laureate served as the official chronicler of state events and occasions. In ancient times, the Laureate was the central means for recording and communicating history. “Laureate” comes from the Latin word ‘laureatus’, meaning adorned with a crown of laurel, an honour also bestowed on the earliest Olympic athletes.

More currently, the role of a Poet Laureate is to reflect the life of a city through readings of poetry. As an ambassador for the literary arts, the Laureate incorporates poetry into a range of official and informal city activities.” [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to talk about all the things I’d have liked to have known about the poetry that “reflects the life of a city” and whether the role includes having to write poetry on demand about civic events - and if so, how difficult was that to be poetic on cue? They had to head off after our all-too-brief chat as Alice was giving a reading at Foyles bookshop from her new collection of poems.

I don’t know when we’ll all meet again as it’s not likely that I’ll be in Edmonton or Australia any time soon - so I will have to hope that one or other of them stops by in London again. The great thing about the internet and blogging is that it opens up so many possibilities to meet fascinating and creative people from all over the world - but then one is still stuck physically in the real world so that we can never truly “hang out” properly with each other in real space and real time.

We city dwellers live in filthy cities. Our pavements, calls and buildings are covered in grime and filth.

The proof of that is that reverse graffitti artist Paul Curtis aka Moose can create intricately detailed black and white graffitti art by cleaning the dirt away from the concrete. Watch this video of him and his team at work and see for yourself.

You can also find out more about Moose via an NPR (National Public Radio’s) programme on his reverse graffitti and how some jobsworth bureacrats have seen that as vandalism…

Knucker Press published James W. Wood’s new collection of poems, “Inextinguishable” on 22 May. A collaboration with young illustrators from a diverse range of backgrounds, the collection is accompanied by an exhibition which ran in Edinburgh’s Owl and Lion Gallery from 23 May to 11 June. James writes for us about the experience of working with visual artists and what has happened since the publication of his first collection, “The Theory of Everything”, eighteen months ago.

James writes:

My first short collection, The Theory of Everything, ran to thirty-two pages and was selected by the editor of the HappenStance Press from a sixty-four-page manuscript. Encouraged by the reviews of The Theory of Everything, I continued to write through a difficult period in my life that included the death of my father, to whose memory my new book is dedicated.

Between my new work and the poems I had written earlier, I had accrued enough substance to consider a second short collection in just over a year. I have always wanted to work with visual artists, and so I was delighted to be offered the chance of publication with Knucker Press – especially since their Editor, Jane McKie, is a prize-winning poet as well as a publisher.

Knucker Press was founded in 2007 and aims to pair the work of visual artists and writers with a view to creating fresh relationships between words and images. I watched fascinated as the collection took shape with almost no involvement from my side. Barring one or two minor changes, Jane McKie felt that my poems were, as she put it, “fully formed”, and so proceeded to work directly with the students and lecturers at the Edinburgh College of Art to generate responses to the poems.

Weeks passed and I waited patiently. Then one night after dinner at Jane’s house I was presented with the proofs of the book in a near-finished format. Barring a few further changes, this was the book as it would be published. I can remember thrilling to the perspectives the artists had brought to my work as I turned the pages for the first time. In some of the work, artists had perfectly encapsulated in visual form what I had imagined when writing the poem; elsewhere, the artists had opened up completely new meanings, or illuminated corners of the poem I had considered peripheral to the meaning of the piece.

Overall, the interplay between the verbal and the visual in Inextinguishable has enabled me to return to the poems with a fresh eye – even after having spent weeks (in some cases) writing them. For me, the best examples of this are “After She Leaves”, “Afloat”, and, “The Craws”, where the poem and artwork meld into each other on the page, and the traditional relationship between illustration and text is broken down so that the poem becomes part of the canvas.

This experience represents the fulfilment of a long-held ambition for me, and I am pleased that Knucker Press are able to offer three copies of my new book to the readers of Fusion View.

Click here to find out how to win a copy of Inextinguishable

Poet James Wood has donated three signed copies of his second collection of poetry “Inextinguishable” for the Fusion View prize draw.

Click here to James’s blog post about his new collection.

Three winners will be picked at random from the list of email subscribers to Fusion View. To get a chance to win a copy of James’s book, subscribe to this blog. Subscribe now.

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The Rules for the prize draw
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I’ve been invited to join a panel at “Digitise or Die: The conference for the book industry in the digital age” on 3rd July, held at the London Stock Exchange. The conference is organised by The Bookseller, the trade journal for the book industry in the UK. The blurb says:

The Bookseller is going to get to grips with the digital questions for the book industry once and for all.

Is the digitisation furore just a nervous reaction to experiences within the music industry - or is the heightening concern very real? Is eveyone prepared for the digitisation of the written word? What are the new technologies that publishers should be thinking about that could improve their online presence?

How can digitisation sell more books? What about digital rights and digital copyright? How do you find and develop communities of readers online? What are the differences in digital strategy of trade and non-trade publishing?

With e-books about to take off in the UK, isn’t it time the industry faced up to the changing consumer climate and technology?

These are just some of the questions that will be addressed at The Bookseller’s Digitise or Die full-day conference on 3rd July in London. It is fair to say, that you will definitely miss out if you are not there.

I’ll be on the panel discussing Digital Spaces, alongside Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, and Kieron Smith, managing director of BookRabbit, which is a cross between the book social network LibraryThing and online bookstore Amazon. The panel will be chaired by Jeremy Davis of Chameleon Net. You check out the draft programme for more information.

The panel topic will be:

Different kinds of digital spaces: @ home on PC, out on the mobile, paid for content, UGC what works on different platforms? To what extent do digital platforms fit into each other to enable content to live across hardware boundaries? How do young people in different cultures interact with digital platforms? (itunes, phones, PC, online etc…) and how does this culture affect the use of such devices?

This invitation came via a non-blog related route shortly after my series on audio downloads and ebooks so it feels to me as if there is some synchronicity going on right now. Given my background as a novelist and my current explorations of the social media sphere, what I’d like to contribute to the discussion, I think, is the use of digital spaces by writers and storytellers from a creative perspective. How can we use the new media to enhance the way we tell stories? How might the stories we tell evolve with new media channels? Is creating a story for online reading different from creating one for a physical book? Is it different for e-book reading? Is reading passe in the face of YouTube and Flickr?

I’ll be making notes and researching all this in preparation for the conference over the next few weeks.

If you have any thoughts, ideas or experiences of storytelling in digital spaces, please do get in touch so I can share your views at the conference as well. I’d also love to hear from you if you have views about ebooks and the current state of ebook publishing - and any thoughts about what you would like to see evolve in ebooks and digital publishing in the future.

You can get in touch by leaving a comment to this post, or emailing me via the Contact link above, or by leaving me a voicemail at http://www.jaxtr.com/yangmayooi. If I use your contribution at the conference I will of course give acknowledgement to you for the contribution so do leave a name as well.

If you’d like to come along to the conference, you can do so using the Bookseller’s booking form.

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Here in the West we have so little to worry about that we create health and safety nightmare scenarios (such as the local council that banned its staff from putting up Xmas decorations because someone might fall off a chair) to give us something to fret about. In contrast, life is much harder in Bangalore and there is a much more phlegmatic attitude to daily hazards - including the daily risk of being hit by a high speed train, if you live and work around a railroad junction.

When we use the phrase “Indian Summer” these days, it conjures up images of a long, lazy summer miraculously extending into late September and maybe even the early weeks of October. It is a luxury and a gift of sunshine in the Northern Hemisphere, even as the evenings grow shorter and winter is inevitable. For a few extra weeks, we can bathe in sunshine and delay putting on our cardigans or turning on the central heating.

I used to think that the phrase was derived from a likening of this long summer in the past to the then British colony, India - as in this summer is so long and hot, it’s like being in India. But, no, “Indian Summer” has a more sinister derivation - and it’s not from the East but from the West, from America.

I’ve been reading Daniel Boorstin’s cultural history of America “The Americans” and in the first volume, “The Colonial Experience”, which tells the story of the American colonials from the Pilgrim Fathers to the American Revolution, he explains the derivation of the phrase “Indian Summer”. It goes like this:

Picture the American backwoodsman and his family settled in homesteads in the Eastern States of America from the 1500s through to the 1700s - around Massachussetts and Pennsylvania in the days before the West was discovered. They would be farmers, mainly, living in isolated country, with the occasional garrisoned fort as the main fortification in an otherwise wilderness area. The Native-Americans, then known as Indians, populated that wilderness that had up till the arrival of the white man had been theirs.

The Indians would often raid the homesteads in the summer when the weather was favourable for such activity, much in the same way as armies would fight in the summer and generally bed down in the winter - especially as the American winters could be harsh, with thick snow hampering swift movement. So in the summers, many homesteaders would be fearful for their lives, either holing up in the forts for safety or exposed back at the farm, watchful for attack and exerting limited resources to fight off the Indians. They looked forward to the winters which, although harsh, gave them respite from the Indian attacks.

As the weather turned cool, the homesteaders would return to their homes from the fort and drop their guard, trusting to the snow to discourage the Indian attacks. But when the Indian summer unexpectedly revived the warmth and melted the first snows - those extra weeks of warmth and sunshine gave the Indians fresh opportunities to attack the vulnerable colonials. So when people back then spoke of an Indian summer, they did so with dread and fear.

I won’t be able to use that phrase again without thinking of tomahawks, scalps and the smouldering ruins of log cabins…

Picture: thanks to Harry Richardson from flickr.com (CCL)