Fusion View

I’ve been reading a fascinating real life account of a journey to discover the scientific and cultural roots of zombies and voodoo and I now know what it takes to make a zombie. Wade Davis’s account of his visits to Haiti in the 1980s, meeting with witch doctors, secret societies and zombies, combines scientific biological analysis of poisons, ethnography, history and personal narrative into a great read in “The Serpent and the Rainbow”.

Davis writes beautifully and the book reads like a novel, with lyrical passages describing the natural wonder of Haiti and mystery built into enigmatic encounters with various strangers. The book opens “noir” style with Davis being summoned to the apartment of a rich scientific investor for drinks, complete with the investor’s beautiful daughter. Thus, he is given the quest to find the elements that go into making zombies - a quest that leads him to participate in shamanic rituals, bargain with shady characters for poisonous powders, win a horse race through the streets of a Haitian town and penetrate voodoo secret societies. But this isn’t a novel - it’s fact, which is what makes the whole read even more engaging.

There has been some scepticism about the veracity of the tale because it all seems so fantastical - see Bob Corbett’s critique of the book. Corbett seems to be an Emeritus professor at Webster University so it’s a criticism to be taken seriously. However, on the page I’ve referenced, Corbett does give Davis the opportunity to respond and also acknowledges that “without sufficient evidence. I don’t claim to have any further evidence than I cited above”.

At any rate, it’s a cracking good read and I’m raring to put on my fedora and leather jacket, grab my whip and artefact-gathering sling bag and head off into the wilds…

This is a trailer for a BBC programme that uses satellite technology to visualise human communications activities in the UK from shipping traffic in the Channel, taxi movements in London, telephone activity around the country and more. It’s fascinating and hypnotic - and makes me think that the UK is such a small island and yet so crowded and frenetic!

Photo: thanks to steve phillips from flickr.com (CCL)

This is a great clip of comedian Russell Peters, who is Indian/ Asian-American, doing a stand up sketch about trying to bargain with a Chinese shop-keeper - his Chinese accent is superb!

Thanks to Silvia Cambie who first showed this video on her blog.

We have a publication date for the book!

I met with my co-author Silvia Cambie and our editor, Annie Knight, from Kogan Page earlier this week to discuss the next phase for the book now that we were nearing the end of the writing process. I’ve got one more substantive chapter and then I need to go through my manuscript and prepare a smooth second draft. Silvia has a couple more case studies and a chunk of final writing to do and we then both need to get together to write a concluding final chapter. We are due to submit the finished manuscript at the end of November. Based on that timescale, the publication date for the book is set for 3rd July 2009.

It was exciting to sit down together for the first time in several months with Annie and Silvia and really talk through the detail of the book. The last time we did so was back in the autumn of last year when the project first came together and our book proposal was accepted. At that stage, we had an outline of our ideas and argument for the book. Now, 9 months later, we’ve done a lot of research and interviewed many business people and communicators internationally as well as putting it all together into a coherent narrative and I think we have something that’s going to be really fresh and thought-provoking.

So what’s the book about? Well, the working title has so far been New Trends in International Public Relations. Silvia puts the case for the rise of the till now non-dominant cultures in global business and the need for cross-cultural engagement to be at the forefront of any enterprise that wants to make waves internationally. Her experience as a business communicator means that she has drawn together a range of case studies on leadership communication, corporate social responsibility and cross-cultural communications from all over the world. My sections on the rise of social media as a recognised communications tool complement her part of the book, taking the reader on an in-depth guided tour of the virtual cultural landscape of the interactive web. The web is another country - to misquote H. E. Bates - with a culture and etiquette of its own and to engage succesfully in that landscape, communicators need to do so understanding those “rules” of engagement.

We may be tweaking the title of the book to New Trends in International Communications, which reflects more accurately the breadth of the content. If we do, it’ll play havoc with all my links and the URL for my research wiki - rats! But it’s important to get the title right so it’s a small price to pay to have to go back and reset my links etc… Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

In the couple of months leading up to publication, we’ll be getting review and advance copies to send out to reviewers and also to take with us on speaking engagements at conferences etc. We’ll also be talking to the Marketing Executive in more detail about opportunities for promoting the book in the traditional real world way. We also hope to be able to offer additional online resources to our readers, perhaps via this blog and/ or the Kogan Page website eg links to the source material for my social media chapters, verbatim text from interviews, background research materials etc.

So, starting next week, my “honeymoon” is over and it’s back to hard work on the book to write the last chapter….

Do you have any ideas or suggestions for us about promoting the book? If you’re a writer or publisher, has there been a particular strategy that has worked well - or not so well? If you’re a reader, what kinds of activities would invite you take notice of our book - and even buy a copy…

I really am. No, don’t laugh, I’m being serious. I’m not being vain or making it up. I really am beautiful.

I have a Dulwich Picture Gallery fridge magnet* proving it. Look, there it is, there’s my name on it: the Chinese ideogram “May” that means Beatiful. It’s more usually written in the Western-style as “Mei” or even “Mai” but my parents spelled it “May” on my birth certificate. They had always thought they’d send me to the UK and they wanted to make it easy for the Brits to spell my name. But all my life in the UK, everyone exoticises my name and refer to me variously as Yang-Mei or Yang-Mai. Sigh.

If you meet a Chinese woman, there is more than half the chance that her name is Something-Mei or Mei-Something. In most Chinese families, there will at least be one daughter with Mei in her name. Why? Because every family would love their daughter to grow up beautiful, of course.

As for the “Yang” bit of my name, it means “reflection”. So putting both parts of my name together, I am technically the reflection of beauty and not beauty itself. To understand why this is so, I need to tell you about my grandmother and her elder brothers and a Chinese belief in the greed of the gods. For the Chinese, the gods are jealous and dangerous. If they see that you have something of value that you treasure, they will take it from you - just because they can. Back in China, when my grandmother was young, she had two elder brothers whom the family loved dearly. Being a Presbyterian minister, her father had turned to the Christian God and left behind old Chinese superstitions. He had named his beloved sons with names that anointed them heavenly and perfect. And for a few years, it seemed that he had been right to forget the old Chinese gods. But these his sons did not live past their twenties, one of them dying slowly and painfully of tuberculosis. The gods coveted the young men’s pure essence and took the boys for themselves.

So for the future generations in the family, to fool the gods, we have never been named for the pure essence and I am just the reflection of beauty - worth nothing to the gods - and not the thing that they might desire, beauty itself.

The fridge magnet is a souvenir from the Lion & Dragon exhibition of photographs from Old China, currently on at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

OK, Malaysians, what do you think of this programme where New York chef and author Anthony Bourdain goes to Malaysia and eats weird stuff?

In this episode, he tries out bull’s penis in KL and takes advice to find traditional “Malay” culture in an Iban long house in Sarawak. This experience of “Malay” culture includes getting tattoo-ed…

Curious how his version of KL looks so tatty and run down and exoticly Third World, omitting the very First World skyscapered and shopping-malled city centre…

I met Kieron Smith at The Bookseller’s Digitise or Die conference a couple of weeks back when we were both on the Digital Spaces panel and intrigued by his online social networking bookstore BookRabbit, I asked him to tell me more about it.

# What is BookRabbit?

BookRabbit is an online bookshop that dynamically connects readers, authors and publishers through the books they own.

Using BookRabbit, readers can share their passion for books, make recommendations to other readers as well as creating their own personal bookcase (using pictures of their real owrld book collections) and catalogues online – anything from medieval falconry, through bestsellers, to educational publications for schools. BookRabbit has a simple aim – to claim back book selling and book buying, enabling readers to discover the right books for them.

# How did you come to be involved / start BookRabbit?

I’ve worked in bookselling for many years for companies including WHSmith, Ottakar’s and Waterstone’s - I have felt for a while that online people don’t get the interesting and engaging side of discovering a new book to read. Instead they get one where books are commoditised and just about price. Although there are millions of titles available through the big bookselling sites, more and more it feels like we actually have less to chose from.

I was approached by an entrepreneur in late 2007 who asked me what I would do about this given a blank sheet of paper, I told him and he said he’d back me to do the lot - something of an offer I couldn’t refuse!

# For booklovers who are already signed up to buy books from Amazon, why should they move over to BookRabbit?

On the e-commerce side we’ve hopefully made it as painless as possible! We don’t require registration unless you want to take part in discussions or set up a profile, so no new passwords to remember! We’re cheaper than Amazon on the top 100,000 titles and take PayPal (as well as the standard cards) and have free delivery on everything.

BUT

I’d like to think you should give BookRabbit a go because browsing other people’s bookshelves and getting title matches with your own collection means you’ll discover something new!

# Is BookRabbit for UK residents only?

No anyone can use the site, we only have UK shipping at present but hope to add International as soon as we can.

# For those who have already got their libraries displayed on LibraryThing, why should they also sign up to BookRabbit? (This is my dilemma too!)

I wanted to avoid the whole painful data input thing - so you can start making useful and interesting connections from just a few books tagged on a shelf - give it a go and see who you match with!

# What are the benefits for authors for signing up?

There is an element of vouyeristic pleasure for authors in that they get to see what other books are sitting next to their own on people’s bookshelves - and if they wish start to interact on discussions. They’re also able to directly amend their title details on screen, including synopsis, jacket, catagory and even add YouTube videos all of which go live immediately.

# What are the kinds of discussions on BookRabbit?

We have discussions on three ‘areas’ they are either books, bookcases or categories and there is a summary of most recent ones on the homepage. It’s early days and we didn’t want to assume we would know what the community would discuss, but it seemed sensible to anchor them against a particular part of the site, rather than have one sprawling forum - we could be wrong though!

# I like the function for uploading a photo of your own bookshelf. What’s on yours?

I’ve got many, many bookselves, one of which can be seen http://www.bookrabbit.com/bookshelf/detail/bookshelfid/113 I’ve quite an eclectice taste in titles. We’ve a special offer on at the moment that if you upload a bookcase photo and tag at least five books then we’ll handpick you a free book and send it to you. You can see how we’ve been getting on with our selections at http://www.bookrabbit.com/help/showfaq/topicid/77/page/1 full details of the offer at www.BookRabbit.com/free