Archive for November, 2009

We were having dinner with some friends the other evening and talking about opera when someone mentioned Wagner. The reaction was visceral. None of us liked Wagner, it turns out!

The consensus was that the Ring Cycle is way too long, way too Germanic and well, The Lord of the Rings for Intellectuals. However, one of our party felt that it’s one of those 101 things that you need to do before you die - go to see it at the holy shrine of Wagner, Bayreuth, and to sit through the whole cycle, however long it might take (15 hours, according to Wikipedia; 20 hours according to Anna Russell - see below - taking up 4 or more evenings).

But until then, we can watch it on Youtube, reduced to 30 minutes by fabulous diva Anna Russell:

First 10 minutes:

Second 10 minutes:

Third 10 minutes:

The other evening, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I, along with corporate communicator Marc Wright, gave a talk at the Asia Pacific Technology Network (APTN) on Asia and the Interactive Web, at the invitation of Louis Turner, APTN’s chief executive. (Thanks, Louis, for inviting us!) APTN is a group for people interested in Asian technology and the evening’s guest included technology and patent lawyers, telecommunications entreprenuers and Asian affairs specialists.

Silvia spoke on the shift of economic power from the West to Asia and presented some case studies on use of social media in China by companies such as Toyota. I discussed the use of social media by the Asian diaspora and how the internet is helping an emerging class of affluent, influential and articulate Asians network around the globe. In counterpoint to the two of us, Marc gave the view from the West, highlighting that businesses no longer controlled their messages and the importance of engaging in social media with an authentic voice.

One of the things I enjoy about blogging and social media is how it has enabled me to connect with a range of talented and creative people whom I would never have met otherwise. As I went through my slides, I was struck that two of the three case studies I presented were due to Malaysians I had met via blogging:

• Photographer Steven Lee first approached me via my blog to ask if he could photograph me for his book on prominent Malaysians (as it turned out, I couldn’t participate in the end because, technically, I’m now British, but we’ve remained friends and hook on on Facebook, via our blogs and also in the real world). He was my first case study that evening - an example of how an Asian living in London networks globally through social media to raise the profile of his photography business.

• I learnt about Rantauan.com, the Malay social network, through journalist Zaharah Othman, aka blogger Kak Teh. I left a comment on her blog once and she then came along to read my blog. We corresponded via our respective comments pages and then by email and then finally met up in London for coffee. I’ve since interviewed her about political blogging in Malaysia for my book and she’s written a number of articles about my books for papers in Malaysia.

To top it all, I was really pleased to finally meet in person Chinese-English translator Nicky Harman who has written for this blog. She contacted me a few years ago out of the blue asking if I knew how she might find a publisher for her translation of Striking Root. Directly as a result of her blog post about the translation, a publisher got in touch and was interested to publish the book. As it turned out, Nicky went with another publisher in the end but there’s the power of blogging for you. Anyway, unknown to me, Nicky is a member of APTN and so the other evening, we were able to meet for the first time in real life!

Here are some pics of the evening, including one of me with Nicky:

One of the most interesting things about living in London is that history is all around us - often going back hundreds if not thousands of years. But I often tend to forget that history isn’t just about the great national monuments like Nelson’s Column or the London Wall and other tourist attractions. The suburb I live in in South London goes back to medieval times, I believe, though there are no visible remains of the Dulwich of that period. The current “settlement” arose in its present form in the Victorian times, created by developers out of fields and farmland for wealthy London businessmen and merchants who wanted to retire out of the smog-filled city to the countryside.

How do I know all this?

Dulwich has the good fortune to have a very knowledgeable local historian, Brian Green, who has written a number of books about the area when he’s not busy running the local art shop/ stationers. He gave a talk last weekend at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on Victorian Dulwich, which has changed the way I look at my little world around my house.

I tend to stride purposefully from home to the train station or bus stop and back again or hurry along to the local shops, not noticing much around me other than that I’m in a pleasant leafy suburb. After Brian’s talk and his brilliant collection of photographs ranging from fields and muddy lanes and a few grand Georgian houses (pre-1850s) to horse-and-buggies along the high street (late 1800s) and architectural details of terraced and semi-detached houses (as they are in the present day), I find myself looking at the houses and streets around me as if I were a tourist, ticking off in my head the various points he had highlighted for us. For example: ah, yes, there’s a Florentine style turret. And here’s a Victorian Gothic arch. There’s some Swiss hanging droplets. And some plaster heads and carved foliage - inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

These details were made available by builders in their catalogues to independent housing speculators looking to make a buck. The speculators developed clusters of houses (with a minimum of 6 houses per site) back in the late 1800s as an economic upturn fuelled a Victorian “buy to let” market. Aimed at the up and coming middle class family, the terraced houses in East Dulwich aspired to grandness within a modest budget.

But the market floundered as uptake of the properties did not meet initial expectations. The reason? Public transport to Dulwich was practically non-existent so the clerks and office workers targetted by the speculators didn’t come in their droves as hoped. It was only some decades later when the commuter railway was built in the wake of the Crystal Palace exhibition complex that this part of South London revived.

These days, we’re still cut off from the tube and it’s a hassle to get to and from London on the trains, with their ever reducing timetables, and on the buses, stuck in traffic endlessly along the Walworth Road. That’s the thing about Dulwich that we moan about - but it is also the thing that keeps this leafy “village” still village-like. So, while the Dulwich of today is home to both the wealthy and not so wealthy, at the end of our long days of slog in the smog-filled city we can still all enjoy feeling as if we’ve retired to the country for the night!

Photo of Lordship Lane: with thanks from ideal-homes.org.uk
Photo of Brian Green and me: my own collection

With my background as a lawyer, I always enjoy legal dramas and thrillers. While I’m carried along by the story, there is a part of me that often laughs at the unrealistic portrayal of what it’s really like working in the law. The fictitious lawyers often seem to prepare for a trial in a matter of days and the dramatic hearings are over in the time it takes for counsels to do their summing up. Oh sure, there is often a montage sequence of our dedicated legal hero/heroine at the law books late at night — beautifully-lit shots of them with a furrowed brow surrounded by books and occasionally leaning back to stretch and rub their temples to convey deep thought and hard work. But have you noticed how their files tend to be only a few pages thick?

In reality, lawyers files are stuffed full of papers and go on for volumes. Cases take months, if not years, to come to trial. And the trial itself could last for months or years. While I’ve never been a litigation lawyer, a property project I worked on started while I was practising as a senior lawyer, continued during the five-year break that I took to write my two novels and concluded only a few years after I returned to the firm — in the meantime the trainee who had worked with me qualified as a solicitor, took on the running of the project, had two children and became a partner!

And of course, I never come across any dead bodies, men with guns or murderous conspiracies!

One “lawyer in peril” series that we’re currently addicted to is Damages. The plot is impossible to summarise but suffice it to say that it is full of tension, blood, guilt and cliffhangers. The main reason that we are completely mesmerised is Glenn Close. She plays the senior partner of the firm and is a cross between Cruella DeVille and her younger bunny-boiling persona in Jagged Edge. She is at her most scary when she is being apparently pleasant and kind …

But the best thing about her character is her wardrobe of amazing power suits and crisply cut shirts. They exude power and confidence and stylishness. Even in the most tense and dramatic moment, I am often distracted, shouting out, “Look what she’s wearing! I would love to have that suit!”

In reality, of course, in my days as a lawyer, I often had difficulty maintaining the smart appearance that I started the day off in. The downward spiral would begin with the jacket coming off and going on the back of the chair. Then I would turn up my sleeves. My shirt would get creased. Sometimes, I would get covered in dust if I had to look through ancient property deeds. I’ve even managed to spill coffee all over myself and my desk during a long and difficult time phone negotiation — what a klutz!

In my current job, I’m no longer practising as a solicitor and there is a fairly relaxed dress code so I am often in jeans if we don’t have a business meeting. I feel less severe and more able to be chirpy, cheerful — and more myself — in casual wear. It doesn’t impact on how well I do my work — it just means that the boundary between my work and personal life is less sharply defined.

All of which makes me wonder: if I actually got myself togged up in Glenn Close’s intimidating, power suits, would my personality change? Would I become sinister, manipulative and murderous? And would I suddenly come into the office one morning and find a dead body?

Do I dare put this theory to the test…?

Photo: from Damages official website, with thanks

These days we grumble if our digital camera doesn’t quite fit into our pocket. And that the camera bundled with our mobile phone produces blurry pictures. We take cameras so much for granted and expect so much of the technology.

So it was great to be reminded how far we’ve come since the first cameras were invented in the 1830s at the Points of View exhibition at the British Library (it’s free and on until Sunday 07 March 2010). The history of photography began with the camera obscura, a darkened room with a pinhole allowing light from a scene outside to be projected onto the wall through the hole and the exhibition starts with a box sized one through which you can see a ghostly image of a statue. You’re then led through to the two competing technologies that battled it out in the early days of photography (the VHS and Betamax struggle of its day, I suppose) - the daguerrotype and the calotype. The dageurrotype (named for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre) could produce only one perfect, crisp and clear printed image and you had to have a camera the size of the print you wanted to create. The calotype, created by Henry Fox Talbot, could reproduce a number of printed images from a negative but the quality was more smudgy. For awhile the daguerrotype was more popular, especially for portraits commissioned by the wealthy, but we all know which technology won out and dominated for most of the next 150 or so years…

The British Library exhibition has a number of those original Victorian cameras on display along with the boxes of chemicals needed to develop and print the images. They are huge wooden contraptions and the whole process of taking a photo and printing copies took an inordinate amount of time. But the challenge was on to make them more portable and to speed up exposure times as well as the whole process - at one time, the fact that they could snap a picture with a 30 second exposure time was a huge achievement!

I was also fascinated by the photos of the far flung corners of the world taken by energetic and driven Victorian photographers, showing places like Cambodia, India and Africa before the influence of the West took hold. They had to lug all that equipment around and often had to develop and print the pictures in the field so they also had to carry tents and tables etc along with them - via camels or other beasts of burden through the wild places of the world.

There are also photos of Victorian celebrities, ordinary people, street scenes and labourers in the English countryside - wonderful evocations of the past. I was particularly struck by the picture of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square under construction - again, we take that landmark so much for granted: it was strange to see it as it was being put up.

I’m not going to moan so much now that my little digital camera is a little bit too boxy for my jacket pocket. It fits easily into my briefcase and day bag and that’s handy enough for split second snapshots!

(You can also check out the Points of View blog which has some fun past and present views of London.)

Photo: from Points of View exhibition website, with thanks

I’ve been invited to join a panel discussion on Asia and the Interactive Web at the Asia Pacific Technology Network on Wednesday. It’s open to the member of the public as well as to members of the network, so if you can make it, it would be great to see you.

Here are the details:

Speakers:

• Silvia Cambié, Director, Chanda Communications - co-author ” International Communications Strategies - Developments in cross-cultural communications, PR and social media”
• Yang-May Ooi, Writer, blogger & Podcaster, FusionView.co.uk - co-author ” International Communications Strategies - Developments in cross-cultural communications, PR and social media”
• Marc Wright, Chairman of simplygroup
• Speaker to be announced

Asia and the Interactive Web:

The world is undergoing a major economic and political power shift. China and other Asian countries are moving beyond their previous roles of ‘workshops of the world‘ to become key players in the international business arena.

Internet communication and social media are at the very core of this transformation. India is home to a number of innovative social networks. China has the world’s largest internet population and ranks number one in terms of online content creation. Nearly 60% of the country‘s purchase decisions are influenced by user-generated content like blogs and discussion boards.

This presentation will provide participants with:

* Overview of the social media behind Asia‘s internet world of mouth revolution
* Lessons from China and other countries on how to connect with empowered Web 2.0 consumers
* Examples of how Asia is using the internet community to gain consumer insight
* Insight into how social media is affecting corporate dynamics inside UK enterprises

Location: Kilburn & Strode, 20 Red Lion Street London WC1R 4P
Nearest Tube Station: Holborn

Time: 5.30 - 7.30 pm - followed by refreshments

Pricing:
* Free to APTN annual subscribers
* £40 + VAT (Executives)
* £20 + VAT (Asian citizens/institutions, officials, executives from Small Companies)
* £10 + VAT (Academics),
* Free for the Media.

To Register your interest: please send your details (name, institutional affiliation, email address, phone number) to biz@aptn.org

Silvia Cambié is a cross-cultural communicator and a journalist. Her career includes reporting from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for major British and German print media as well as managing communications for Brussels-based international trade associations. Silvia runs Chanda Communications and monitors global internet trends for clients, advising them on the integration of social media with conventional communication channels. She consults for organisations such as the European Parliament, the USAID, the Chilean Economic Development Agency and the Aga Khan University. Silvia is fluent in five languages and blogs about the cross-cultural communication challenges facing the business world at XCulture (www.chandacom-xculture.com), which is read by 10,000 each month. Silvia serves as a Director on the International Executive Board of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), a worldwide network of public relations and communications professionals. She is a recognised public speaker and has addressed audiences around the world, including Malaysia, Russia, South Africa, Dubai, US, France, UK and Spain. She is the author ( together with Yang-May Ooi) of International Communications Strategy - Developments in Cross-Cultural Communication, PR and Social Media, published by Kogan Page and nominated for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Yang-May Ooi is a business writer and social media specialist. She has worked with solo professionals, small businesses and non-profits in the UK to develop and implement their social media strategies. She is co-author, with Silvia Cambie, of “International Communications Strategy”, published by Kogan Page and nominated for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2009. With a background in law, Yang-May also works part-time at a financial institution in the City of London, where she manages the company’s blog, aimed at the financial sector. She speaks regularly on social media and has addressed audiences at the Copyright Licensing Agency, London College of Communications, Institute of Directors, London Metropolitan University and also in the museums and heritage sector. Â She is a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, Pan Asian Women’s Association and the Society of Authors. She blogs on culture, writing and social media at Fusion View (www.fusionview.co.uk). She is currently working on her second business book which focuses on social media strategies for small businesses and non-profits.

Marc Wright is one of the UK’s leading speakers on social media and what it means for large businesses. Marc Wright is an expert in corporate communications who has been following worldwide trends in Web 2.0 and setting the pace of social media in the UK. He is founder and publisher of www.simply-communicate.com the website used by 15,000 communicators each month to keep up to date with developments in the fast-changing world of internal communications. He advises on the implementation of social media inside organisations through his seminars and annual conference attended by companies such as Unilever, Barclays, Standard Chartered Bank, ING and Ofcom. Â He is the writer and director of the BBC TV series 20 Steps to Better Business and editor of the Gower Handbook of Internal Communications. Â He is in demand around the world presenting on latest developments in the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands,Russia, Bulgaria. He consults for companies such as Tetrapak, Vodafone, Lloyds Banking Group and EUROCONTROL, Europe’s Air Traffic Control organisation. Marc is Chairman of the simplygroup, a former Chair of the International Visual Communications Association and is currently Vice-Chair of the International Association of Business Communicators for Europe and the Middle East.

Photo: thanks to Durotriges from flickr.com (CCL)

Chinese-English translator, Nicky Harman, who has previously written for this blog, emailed me last week with some information about a talk she is giving tonight on literary translation. I’m sorry for the short notice about the talk, but if you can make it, it looks like a really interesting insider’s view of the world of translation.

~~~

The Meridian Society/BBCN will be hosting a talk on Tuesday 17th November, 2009 in association with the CSSA of London School of Economics. The lecture will be delivered by Ms Nicky Harman Lecturer at Imperial College.

The many lives of the literary translator

Nicky Harman divides her time between lecturing in technical translation at Imperial College, London and translating literary works from Chinese to English. Her recent book-length translations include Xinran’s Letter from an Unknown Chinese Mother, and Han Dong’s Banished! (awarded a PEN Translation Fund Grant and long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Award, 2008). She also works on the website Paper Republic, which promotes Chinese literature in translation, and is actively concerned with the need to encourage and mentor beginning Chinese-to-English literary translators.

Her research interests focus on aspects of Chinese to English literary translation, and she was Visiting Scholar in the Chinese Departments of Fudan University, Shanghai; and Peking University, Beijing, in 2008, as well as at the Research Centre for Translation at Chinese University Hong Kong, 2006.

Nicky says: “This lecture talk will look at a number of different aspects of literary translation. I will draw on examples from my own work to illustrate the linguistic and cultural challenges of Chinese-to-English translation, and will also examine how the translator needs to present their work to the outside world, that is, publishers and, beyond them, the readers. Just as literary translators have to assume many roles - talent scout and promoter, as well as translator - so this seminar will touch on a whole kaleidoscope of issues. The aim will be to communicate to the audience some of the passion which I feel for translation as a whole, and Chinese-to-English literary translation in particular.”

Time and Venue

Date: Tuesday 17th November, 2009
Time: 7pm-9pm
Venue: D302 in Clement House
Address: The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, WC2A 2AE

Transport: The nearest tube stations are Holborn and Temple (both are 5 mins walk)
The nearest Main Line stations are Waterloo and Charing Cross (both are 10 mins walk)
Buses go to Aldwych: 19, 38, 55 59, 68, 91, 168, 243, 341 & 521
Alternative: For more options please go to:
http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?language=en

Tickets are not required but you are urged to RSVP to reserve a seat.
Tel: 07973796866 or Email: themeridiansociety@gmail.com.
TMS/SACU Members free Non-members £3 donation
Note: This talk will be conducted in English

The Meridian Society is a registered charity (No. 1115664) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 5572806

My good friend and co-author Silvia Cambie had a week or more of the ultimate nightmare - her blog was down due to hosting problems. She has just tweeted that her blog is back up and running - what a relief!

In case you’ve had trouble locating her blog and website in the last little while, here is the URL again: www.chandacom.com

For those of you who’ve not discovered Silvia’s blog yet, you must go and check it out - she writes on cross-cultural matters from her own wide experience of working in Europe and internationally as well as being the kind of brilliant communications professional who can catch and analyse the latest trends in her field. Her blog also shares some of her personal stories and is a great example of blogging for business purposes without losing the personal touch. (OK, so I’m her friend and we wrote a book together and some of you might be thinking I’d be biased - but don’t take my word for it: read her blog and judge for yourself!)

There’s been a lot of focus on blogging for business recently on this blog, largely due to the research I’ve been doing in the last couple of years for my business book, International Communications Strategy, so it’s nice to be reminded that most of the 170 million blogs out there are by ordinary people writing about their daily lives and personal feelings. It was the We Feel Fine project that was the big reminder - it’s a project led by computer scientist, Jonathan Harris, that explores “human emotion on a global scale” by harvesting emotions expressed on blogs whenever the words “I feel…” are found.

The emotions are gathered and sorted in different ways and shown in six “movements” - madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics and mounds - which are essentially different visualisations of the data. You can see good feelings and bad feelings as well as the geographic location, age and gender of the person expressing those feelings. The project’s website suggests that this living artwork can offer specific answers to questions like: “Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest?”

You need to launch an applet - which can take up to 20 seconds to load - in order to experience this amazing artwork. Click on the image below and it should take you to the We Feel Fine page: to launch the applet from there, click on the last sentence of the first paragraph (”We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.”)

I love the way the bubble of feelings cluster round the mouse cursor when you click on the screen in Madness - if you hover it over one of the bubbles, it will show you the location of the feeling and a brief idea of what the feeling is.

Then in Murmurs, you can see each latest feeling expressed somewhere out there in the world appear on the screen and if you click on the phrase, you’ll be taken to the blog. So “i feel so detached from everything i used to stand for” takes me to a blog post You Are My Brand Of Heroin - tonight is the night to let it go by xshadowsoflovex.

So how does this artwork make me feel? I feel more connected with the millions of people out there in the world.