I am working on my final project for ETEC540.  It’s about Graphic Novels and literacy.  So far I have a website, a lot of quotes and a pile of books I still want to read.  This is my weekend to write all the content.  The formatting will come later.

I am pleased to see many of my colleagues are visiting my blog since I posted the link on the class weblog.  I’ve received some lovely comments too.  Thanks for those.  It truly brings home the value of feedback.

I should have the link to my Graphic Novel site up later this week.

I was reading the comment section of a fellow blogger and found one comment indicating the difference between ‘literate’ and ‘educated’. With the number of literate people increasing, it’s time we understand the difference between the two. After finishing my M.Tech, when I look back, I realize education word had more meaning than the literal meaning.

To me, education is following points and the day I will be master at them, I can call myself  ‘educated’  in place of  ‘literate’.

Education is :

• To understand what words or action will hurt the other person and to stop urself from doing that just to feel oneself better.
• To understand that there is more to education than bookish knowledge or skills helping to earn money.
• To understand that keeping  the public transports like trains and buses clean is our duty and we need to  get rid of attitude that it’s government’s headache to maintain cleanliness
• To stand up against bad customs happening around and accepted just because they have been happening for years.
• To be able to do what you think is correct on moral and human grounds.
• To help the people in need who require it most.
• To speak and act after putting urself in other person ’s shoe.
• To understand the difference between one’s ego and one’s self respect.
• To have ur own judgment of a person independent of other people’s opinion.
• To try to implement all the moral science lessons that we crammed in school for getting marks
• To maintain a balance between ur desire and greed.
• To be able to add few more points to this post on ur own
• To be able to differentiate my post from austerity

Sometimes I find having a small debate or even a conversation with certain people very hard to do.  Not because I’m too shy to speak to people, but it’s because I have a problem where I find that even though I know what I want to say in my mind, it doesn’t come out of my mouth as eloquently as I like.  I stumble my words, get them wrong and often it takes me a lot longer to form a sentence than most people.  Most of the time it’s fine and I’m coming to terms with this side of me a lot more than I used to.  However, there are people who seem to have trouble adapting to this when in conversation with me, even in they’ve known me for years.

Sometimes I just get so sick of being talked over or not listened to, or largely ignored because they are too busy to be bothered.  I know that a lot of the time it takes me a while to get my words out, my sentances aren’t structured as well as they should be or I’m using all my words in completely the wrong context but surely, as decent people, you should over look this.  You should WAIT until I’ve finished speaking to then interject instead of speaking over me as if your opinion is more important.  You shouldn’t assume what I’m going to say because you think I have a lower intelligence than you.  You shouldn’t finish my sentances because once again I’m having trouble finding my words to finish it.  Be patient, think about how I feel.  I’m not as gracefully literate as you are but that doesn’t mean you have the right to voice your opinion louder.  It doesn’t mean that my view doesn’t matter.  Think about how rude you’re being to me.

Perhaps I’m stumbling with what I’m saying because you’re the one making me nervous, I can see a look in your eye which suggests some note of urgency is needed because you need to get your own opinion heard.  If you just realised how obnoxious you are in conversations then maybe I wouldn’t shy away from having them with you.  If you have no time to let me finish what I’m saying and just listen to me, then I have no time for you full stop.

I’m learning to accept my illiteracy and lack of eloquence in conversation very slowly, as I know that it’s not the most important thing in the world, I have other things to offer.  I can express myself a lot better in other forms.

So if you’re reading this, and your the other person on the other side of the conversation to someone like me.  If you can see someone is having trouble getting their sentences out or they keep using the wrong words, then stop and think about how they feel if you immediately spoke over them, or finished their sentence for them.  You are not being helpful, you are being obstructive and arrogant.  They won’t respect you or your opinion if you keep doing this, they will just slowly shut their ears to you over time.  Think about all the people in your life now, there must be one person who struggles in conversation?  Now, next time you bump into them in the street, have them round for dinner or just call them up, LISTEN to them.  Let them SPEAK.  I guarantee, that the conversation will flow much sweeter and they will enjoy speaking to you all the more, because right now they don’t.  Sorry to break it to you, but you’re the person people hate talking to.  You have too much self importance and people hate that.  So stop it.  STOP TALKING AND LISTEN.

The theory of the Great Divide advanced by many cultural evolutionists would have us view world history as being the evolution of a primitive society to one where literacy is its hallmark. Primitive societies, with their rich oral traditions, their prodigious memorization skills, their ability to keep large audiences rapt during discourses and storytelling are contrasted with literate societies whose characteristics include the ability to free up the mind spaces for exploratory thinking, the necessity of record-keeping to preserve details of times gone by and the ‘decontextualizing’ ( Peter Denny, 1991) of words to the extent that reference books are required to interpret the author’s meaning.

Oral societies are deemed to be pre-literate, lacking the ability for logical or rational thinking, humanized and immediate. (Ong, chapter 3) In contrast, literates are isolated, often abstract, can manipulate data beyond the boundaries of context and are finally freed of the need to store historical or practical knowledge. In so many of the descriptions, oral societies are thought to be less capable, perhaps even less able than literate societies who are seen to be generally superior.

Ong advances that both societies are not only different in their presentation of world knowledge but that the thinking process is actually altered as one moves away from Orality. “Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form.” (Ong, p. 78)

This polarized view of cultural evolution is flawed for many reasons. Chandler remarks that a more moderate view of the world is more accurate. (Chandler, p. 5) There is no evidence to suggest that primitives are less capable of logical or rational thought. “Those in non-literate societies do not necessarily think in fundamentally different ways from those in literate societies… Although one commentator, Peter Denny, argues that ‘decontextualization’ seems to be a distinctive feature of thinking in Western literate societies, he nevertheless insists that all human beings are capable of rationality, logic, generalization, abstraction, theorizing, intentionality, causal thinking, classification, explanation and originality (Olson & Torrence 1991, p.81) All of these qualities can be found in oral as well as literate cultures.” (Chandler, p. 4)

A more precise view would be to admit that most societies are operating in a mixed mode. Michael Clanchy uses the term “the growth of a literate mentality. “He…argues that the shift [from memory to written record] was facilitated by the continuing ‘mix’ of oral and literate modes and that written forms were adapted to oral practice rather than radically changing it.” (Clanchy, 1979)

“The reality of social uses of varying modes of communication is that oral and literate modes are ‘mixed’ in each society. There is nothing absolute about a shift to a greater use of literate modes, which is better described as a change in the ‘mix’. Oral conventions often continue to apply to literate forms and literate conventions may be applied to oral forms.” (Olson & Hildyard 1978 cited in Street 1984, p. 19)

Furthermore, it is difficult to reconcile Ong’s view of primitive societies when approached from a practical sense. All societies, no matter how self-sufficient, must have the ability to register trade, administrative functions and perhaps legal data. This quantitative data requires some recording process that is more permanent than an accounting of family histories or heroic exploits; a method that is not be dictated by the need to please the audience. (Ong p. 67) It requires a practice that has more permanence than the spoken word, than sound itself. (Ong, p. 32)

Brian Street writes that even in oral societies, there is a component of literacy that is present. He describes two kinds of literacies. The use of record keeping for commercial events, such as transactions, and all sort of bureaucratic events is called ‘Commercial literacy’. (Street, p. 157) The ‘maktab’ literacy, the one taught in schools, is more representative of the arts, humanities and literature we would expect. The first literacy is meant to support the social structure, the other as a way of distinguishing social classes. (Street p. 13)

So why then does the use of text seem the indicator of a higher civilization? First, let us define text. “Texts are material artifacts that take many different forms: cave paintings, tattoos, stone tablets, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, manuscript books, musical scores, maps, printed books, engravings, newspapers, photographs, films, DVDs, computers. Every kind of text is produced by a special technology, but all those technologies share a simple purpose: they were designed to supplement the fragile human mind by providing a more durable artificial memory system. Those technologically preserved and transmitted memories are the foundation of all human culture.” (Pathways)

Ong uses Homer’s writings as evidence of a clear distinction between oral and literate thinking. And indeed, Greek civilization is thought to have been one of the most advanced of its time. But it is not the ability to suddenly free up their cluttered memory and launch into unprecedented creative and rhetorical thought that makes their society so exceptional. Nor does it make them the prime example of shifting from oral to literate thinking. The basis of their sudden evolution from Orality to Literacy lies in their reinterpretation of the Phoenician writing.

“The changes introduced into the Phoenician script by the ancient Greeks should not be regarded as ‘improvements’, but as a revolution that forever altered the Greek society and the human history by creating a new state of mind, the ‘alphabetic mind’.” (Havelock, 1982a, p.7 cited in Jahandaríe, p. 12)

The Greeks created syllabries, comprised of the actual sounds of human speech. (Jahandaríe, p. 12) “The new script also democratized literacy.” (Jahandaríe, p. 12) The simplicity and ease of use of this new alphabet meant that priests and scribes were no longer the only ones able to utilize this technology. And thus, Greek and Roman civilizations became the first on earth “to be equipped with the means of adequate expression in the inscribed word; the first to be able to place the inscribed word in general circulation; the first, in short, to become literate in the full meaning of that term, and to transmit its literacy to us.” (Havelock, 1976, p. 2)

This does not mean that the characteristics of their mind were altered but that they finally had a method to record, in a permanent and accurate fashion, the intricacies of human thought and the nuances that make up all cultures. And so, the newly literate were to become a society of “Conservators of knowledge”. (Jahandaríe, p. 13) Their alphabet, which allowed a faithful reproduction of the range of sounds and “the preservation of the subtlest of linguistic nuances” (Jahandaríe, p.14) provided the means of converting heretofore oral poetry into historical records. It is interesting to note that other societies may have had as sophisticated and advanced a culture as the Greeks and Romans, but their permanent records, by virtue of the shortcomings of their own alphabets, lacked the sufficient details to document its glory.

As an illustration, Havelock argues that “the Old Testament, the Vedas, the Koran, and the Epic of Gilgamesh are less sophisticated in both language and content than the Homeric texts not because they are the products of simpler minds, but because they were inscribed in scripts that…[could not convey] the full richness of the original oral tradition.” (Jahandaríe, p. 15)

Ong’s illustration of the Oral mind as contrasted to the Literate mind is enlightening as an illustration of how cultural evolution is affected by technology. And indeed, the invention of the Greek alphabet may have been one of man’s most significant innovations. But it seems unlikely that any civilization could be so primitive as to not require some form of recording device beyond oral tradition. I cannot conceive of a time when there is a clear line between Orality and Literacy.

References:

Chandler, Daniel (1994): ‘Biases of the Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism’ [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral.html [28 Sep. 2009]

Goody, Jack (Ed.) (1968): Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Jahandaríe, Khosrow. “Spoken and written discourse: a Multi-Disciplinary Perspective – Google Books.” Google Books. 3 Oct. 2009 .

Olson, David R & Nancy Torrance (Eds.) (1991): Literacy and Orality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Ong, Walter (1982): Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen

“Pathways of Excellence.” Pathways of Excellence. 1 Oct. 2009 .

Street, Brian. Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 1984.

In the meanwhile the summer is doing its business as usual. Every once in a while summer rains break up the predominantly hot days and so now and then a cool sea breeze full of oxygen makes you go light in your head. Clear thinking, peculiarly enough, is not happening for the most of us since spring. Successes taste different. The smell of friendship, love, danger and risk is in the air.
A lot of us come back from more beautiful and warm places. Places where things like passion, temperament and love have a complete different meaning and significance. Places where we might never come back again, and where we adapted our behaviour there to that knowledge. With our return stories come back with us. Stories of large and small dimensions. Strong and weak stories, but also stories that deserve several pages in a novel…

Me? I went to Serbia. And no, I did not behave like I would never see the place again. Many, many more times I will visit this place. I will find a way to stay there more than in any other place on our beautiful little globe. Which reminds me…

It was an early Saturday morning. Most Belgrade rooftops were complimented by the orange glow of sunrise. It must have been the sixth time that holiday I saw the sun rise and, I assure you, it was not because I woke up that early. That morning I was walking back from bringing a special girl home after an odd night’s out.
Temperatures did not drop below 28 degrees Celsius that week, not even at night. This particular morning however, a perfect temperature was surrounding my skin. While I was making up my mind whether I was feeling, hearing or smelling happiness, my heart told me this was the place it calls home. A shiver ran down my spine.
Walking and then stopping at a corner to look up once more, I realized I still had to find my friend before we could both drop into coma on our beds. Our ways had split earlier when a girl he met that same night took him inside at her place, to be precise.
Suddenly a quote jumped in my mind: “No matter how you shake and dance, the last few drops land on your pants”. Simply brilliant. I didn’t remember where I heard it though. Immediately I decided to pee against the corner I was standing at. When you have to go, you have to go. Shaking and dancing I looked up my friend’s name in my phone. Joe. Joe Srbija. Joe’s one night Hottie. Yes… that’s how her number was saved in my phone. Why I couldn’t call him on his phone was a wild guess for me, but I was still a bit too drunk mind. Nevertheless I pressed the green button. She picked up the phone and I told her I’d be there in a few. Joe took over her phone and prematurely told me what had just arisen on his side of the connection. We hung up.
Trying to catch a sniff of pljeskavice while passing Loki I saw them at a distance standing outside. I waved. They waved back. As I came closer I asked them how it was. She looked at me a little suspicious and told me she was sure I already knew what happened.
‘I do. But did you have fun? Did it feel good?’ I asked while looking at both of them. It did. I asked her if she wanted a last kiss, at which she replied positively. Slowly I moved my lips towards hers. She turned her head away. The joke was clearly not appreciated. As she leaned over to kiss Joe goodbye I noticed her right breast showed a bit of nipple sticking out above her top.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said. He didn’t, but he later assured me she had his e-mail address.
While we were searching for a taxi, Joe told me all about his little adventure. The blowjob got ranked in his top five. And the top five did not mean by five different girls. The blowjob ranked in the top five of times. He furthermore liked it because she was a highly educated girl. I believe her name was Tanja. She claimed to be promoted in Art history.
‘Girls who can do it like that in the Netherlands are usually pretty dirty, uneducated kind of girls. Or just disciplined but still a little dumb’, he claimed.
‘With this one you can at least talk before, after and in between.’ Yeah right, as if that was possible. But still, it does not weaken her claims.
It had all taken place in the entrance hall of Tanja’s building, as she was afraid to wake up her roommate. Joe liked the setting. ‘The old communist entrance hall’, as he referred to it, was also ranked top notch in his book. As a big surprise Tanja’s roommate came in during the action. While we were both laughing about the image of Joe trying to (as fast a he could) get his tool back in the orange and white swimming pants he wore that night, we walked up towards the Kalemegdan citadel in search of a taxi there. Still none around. The roommate, as the story goes, had been laughing really hard, while Joe’s girl got pretty angry. Why didn’t she let her know she wasn’t home? A question she spoke out. What would have been if they could have had access to her bedroom? A question she did not speak out.

And me? I couldn’t care less… I had something different on my mind. All I could think about was the girl I just brought home and her enchanting pit black hair…

it has been recently reported that the literacy rate in Barbados is in the upper nineties in terms of percentage and that as a people, Bajans should be proud. i have to seriously question that statistic. is someone trying to pull wool over our eyes? could some fiend out there be trying to make Bajans comfortable in a false security?

i happen to know a few teachers and the more i speak to them, the more i think that our future is in jeopardy. the teachers paint a picture of students unwilling to learn anything for themselves. it seems that the student of today just wants to be spoon fed academics, while concentrating on sex, bling and PPAARRTTYY!!!!

so what are we to do as a people? who is to blame for what is going on with the school children? and finally what is going on with that report of ninety something percent? true or false? we need to know! ah gone!!!

Back in the late 1980s Dave taught me photography at the Hammersmith and Fulham Community Resource Centre. At the time I was still in secondary school. Dave lived locally, in fact just down the road from my Mum and Dad’s. He continued to school me in photography, encouraging me to go out there and practice taking photos and think about photography.

I since looked him up on the net and through the wonders of E-mail asked my old mentor and friend to contribute an interview to this blog.

1. For you, what’s it all about? with reference to the field of photography and your practice in it.

For me photography was initially about trying to decipher or deconstruct the world from my position i.e. as a black subject in the world but specifically London. Most of the images I had seen from day to day tell a story largely from a white middle-class European/North American perspective. You could argue that little has changed. Therefore photography was a tool that I could attempt to be literate with and explore other stories about individuals and place. My practice until relatively recently has therefore concentrated on the ‘constructed image’; images that are largely created within a photographic studio or in a site that has particular relevance to the issues I am discussing with an audience. I like to think that 20 years on my practice has changed. My approach is more sophisticated and subtle. Because of the college I attended (Polytechnic of Central London) I consider research to be a vital strand in my photographic practice. Here I’m not talking about research and theory in terms of photographic technique (which is vital to learn) but rather in terms of semiotics, psychoanalytical theory, visual studies etc. I try and use these disciplines (if and when I choose) but not be stymied by them. So I like to consider my work as adding to the visual language of contemporary social and historical issues although I also make photographs just for the sake of making photographs.

2. Can you supply 3 images and tell me something about why these ones. (favourite ones, significant ones).

This image of this door handle is important to me. It is one of a series of images from an exhibition called ‘Wall’. The concept of a ‘Wall’ is used as a metaphor for a social/political structure that you cannot pass through. The images center around the Stephen Lawrence Report and the sites featured were all involved in the public hearings in London. The door handle is the entrance to the Crown Prosecution Service building in Ludgate Hill. It is a ’wall’ in that it is an obstacle to rights and justice – at least in this particular case at a certain period in British social history.

I photographed the building a few times before focusing on what I thought was significant in terms of a referent. Seeing this handle (we all know) is more than likely to be a public building than a private one and hopefully, within the series, the implications of law, justice and race, in this case as well as others, will provoke the viewer to think about the relationship between the individual and the State.

The image of the golly in the snow was from a series called ‘In the Palm of My Hand’. The images consider the collection of black figurines (negrobilia). I have tried to recontextualize them through additional text. This image is called ‘Second Worst Nightmare’. I used the figure to play around with the idea of a being a black policeman and representing a non-negotiating force no matter what the circumstances. Throughout my youth, like countless other black people, I was stopped and searched constantly. From the few black policemen at the time the experience seemed so much worse to be ‘pulled’ by them. I’d like to think that this image within the series enscapulates many different ideas to do with race, authority and assimilation. When it was reproduced on the cover of Artists Newsletter I had a little chuckle to myself.

This image of a black man lying naked on a table, ‘Untitled, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland’ beneath a portrait painting was in a group show at The Photographer’s Gallery, London. I visited post the private view night just to see attendance and how it looked amongst the wider exhibition. I ended up standing next to two men. One was explaining to his friend what the picture meant. It was something on the lines of the modern black person turning his back on the establishment. Which wasn’t a bad attempt. His friend burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the statement and said ‘it’s taking the ****ing ****. How is it art?’ Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion I supposed.

The image was made in the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. The portrait is of A.C. Haddon who was a president of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The model is my mate and fellow photographer Ajamu. I wanted to explore the site of ethnographic production by having black subjects explore the archives where ‘their images’ were held, classified and archived. I hoped it would make viewers think about the history of representation and colonialism as well as ongoing debates about who has access to archives and artifacts and who determines the future of these objects.

3. Photography can make you scared. It’s almost akin to being in a running race. Can you comment on the demands, the fears of being a photographer.

I think you can get over precious about taking a photograph – not that it should not be taken seriously but you also need to relax and enjoy the act. Whole canons of theory and criticism have grown around photographic practice – not too mention curators, galleries and collections. I also realized some years ago that too much research and ‘theory’ can freeze spontaneity and you can become quite fearful about what you are putting ‘out there’. I recalled one reknowned writer and lecturer saying to me ‘..express your desire, you can edit it later’. So I just try and shoot whatever I feel I need to and put fear aside until later. Easier said than done I know.

But it’s funny you mention ‘being in a running race’. In some ways this analogy works on different levels. One is fear of being ‘beaten’ by your competitors. That is seeing others being awarded commissions and exhibitions that you have gone for but have not been successful in attaining. There are only so many commissions and jobs out there (especially now) so it’s something you have to come to terms with. And sometimes these competitors are close friend’s. The other thing (in my personal experience of athletics) is that there’s a deep psychology involved in running against a field of athletes who have personal best times whose differences are a second or less. In other words there are great photographers out there all producing wonderful images – all having prepared themselves. So, I think all you can do is prepare as well as you can by being ready and equipped to shoot and mentally having thought through what you want to do.

The demands of being a professional photographer can be stressful especially if there are no other forms of income like teaching, a part-time job or a private income. It can also be lonely and calls for constant vigilance in pushing yourself – just like any other business. However, I also believe that photography is so myriad in it’s processes, forms, applications, content and reception that there is enough space for everyone to enjoy the act of making photographs. This is of course very different from the ‘business of photography’. It is also differs to the fears of producing exhibitions. You are probably only as good as your last show and fear of some sort pervades the everyday working life of the photographer/artist. It may be just a personal fear in not achieving what you believe you can or a desire to have positive criticism of your work. I’m sure there are some who have few qualms such as these working in photography but I haven’t met them yet.

4. What’s left for you to do?

I don’t feel I’ve really started yet! I don’t expect to fulfil my picture making desires until I reach my mid 50’s! When I look through the grand photographic bibles and see the same names coming up again and again I realize I’ve done very little and have a lot more to accomplish. I’d like to travel more and take on issues that are important to me world-wide making images in any form that I think best suits the subject. Lately this has included working in video from an ethnographic perspective.

I wanted to be a fashion photographer when I started photography and have always looked up to corporate photographers because they deliver high quality products for a client on time. I would like to pursue these areas and see if I can use these techniques to comment on issues I care about. For me it’s all about learning more and more in order to express myself.

5. Do you have any regrets in your life as a photographer?

Yes. I would like to have taken more pictures growing up in 70’s Britain. It wasn’t pretty (and I was fairly young) but it was an important time in terms of recording growing black consciousness in black British youth. Definitely less arguing (in obviously no-win situations) about the essence of photography, how it should be shown, where it should be shown etc. Although sometimes it’s necessary and fun! I regret not going for the ‘edge’ enough but I suppose there’s always time to do that now.

Dave Lewis

September 2009

I haven’t been blogging lately…and I’m pretty sure I made it clear in a past post that I wouldn’t blog as much since I’m looking for part-time work (still?! Yes, still. The economy has a long way to go before it can fully recover, but it’s not as bad as it was last year, so there’s a chance I might find something — even if it’s retail [but not fast food. I'm overqualified due to my high school and college education]. Besides, I can do volunteer work in the meantime to build up my résumé and get some good references) and I’m working on a mystery novel I’m hoping to have published sometime next year.

So, what have I been wasting my time on when I could have been blogging?

Well, Pokémon Stadium 2, for one. I finally got through the Prime Cup, and am now trying to beat the Elite Four and Lance the Champ. There have been a lot of near-wins, but nothing definite…yet.

EDIT: As of 9/4/09, I just defeated everyone in Pokémon Stadium 2 (the Elite Four, Lance the Champion, and the Rival that appears after you defeat everyone in the Prime Cup matches), and am now on Round 2, where I have to battle the same people I did in Round 1, but now, everything is harder.

Then there’s my Facebook. Yeah, I know. My sister (the assistant Low-Rent Librarian) will tell you that I’m the last person in the world who would go near a social networking website, which is true if you’re talking about MySpace or even Twitter (which I only use to tell people about my blog updates). Facebook was a little hard to manage for me at first, but I got into it when I found that most of my high school, college, and Catholic elementary school acquaintences were lined up around the door to try and reconnect with me. Having the detailed memory that I do, I weeded out the people who made fun of me and chose the people who liked me (whether or not I remembered them in any capacity). I even made friends with people whom I don’t know at all, but did confirm me as their Facebook friend nonetheless. And, because of that, I became the Facebook friend to Holly Pamela Cooper, sister of Bradley Cooper, on whom I have had a huge crush ever since he hosted that episode of Saturday Night Live from season 34. Yeah, I know, it’s sounds so “high school,” but can you really look into those baby blue eyes of his and not agree (Maybe if Bradley had his hair long like he did on The Hangover, but the hair length isn’t really an issue with him. He could be bald and I’d still drool over him)? Well, maybe if you were a lesbian or if guys like him aren’t your type, but still…

I’d bet it would be so very hard to be angry at him, because those eyes of his are just like that memory eraser device from the Men in Black movies: if the light’s just right and you make direct eye contact, your mind goes blank.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that: I’d hit that so hard, ten year age difference be damned. And should it be a one-night stand? I’d be disappointed, but I’d respect that decision. Just drive me home (or give me cab/car/busfare), un bisou adieu, and photo evidence that we were together (I promise I won’t let the tabloids have it), and I’ll be on my way, Mr. Cooper (and no, not Mark Curry’s character from that 1990s sitcom).

There. I admitted something I thought I’d never admit ever, even under threat of torture. And, much like the root canal on my dead left molar, it didn’t hurt (but it was kinda tedious because I’ve been bottling it up for so long).

What else has been keeping me away from here?

Oh, this: after 26 years on the air, the PBS show Reading Rainbow has been canceled (even though many people thought it was canceled years ago, particularly after LeVar Burton left), so I have been visiting two libraries in my town to check out books to read for kicks and jollies, something that I’ve been doing for years (especially when I was in school, where I was considered the sweetheart of the library, but at the same time, became notorious for borrowing books and never giving them back — at least not without a fight, usually it was the threat of paying the necessary fines) and something that’s lost on most people in this age of technology, instant gratification, and leaving nothing to the imagination. And, on a similar note, I’ve been watching clips from The Electric Company (the 1971 version, not the remake that came out this year), particularly this one, which proves that even a channel like PBS can get risqué and a tad weird (even if that wasn’t their intention, and, hey, as long as the kids are learning something…):

And to my sister, I’d just like to say, “I’m sorry for lying and saying that that sketch was from The Mighty Boosh. It actually looks weird enough to be on the ’70s-era Saturday Night Live or at least on the very short-lived sketch show, Turn On, which was so bad that it got canceled in the middle of its first episode.”

Lastly, I did a full YA book review for The Low-Rent Library. If you haven’t seen it yet, please do. And I will go back to PhotoShopping book covers with sarcastic titles. I promise.

“About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa — still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate — a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.”

Continue reading here.

HT: Marginal Revolution

take II:

and here it is on a shirt:

Spelling mistakes on Graphjam

Graph by: loversknot via Graph Jam Builder

In an earlier post I was reflecting on the concept of a curriculum shared by Tim Brown of IDEO on his Design Thinking Blog.  At that time I shared a list of areas I felt would compose a curriculum.  I have continued to reflect on this and I have come up with the following table:

The rows in the above table are the market segments the columns are the market segment actions.

The Reader is a must see in the big screen.  The movie starts with an affair between an older woman aged 35 and a younger man aged 15. One day she disappears from his life. Few years later, studying to be a lawyer, he sees her on trial being convicted as a Nazi. Only what he knew could save her from a harsh sentence but for several reasons he keeps quiet.

This is the first of its kind where you feel compassion towards the Nazi German woman simply because you connect with her as the person she was with all her flaws. Kate Winslet got a well deserved Oscar for this role.

We the educated lot have never given it a thought what it might be for someone who cannot read or write what they must go through. You go on a streets and you have ad banners screaming at you with accompanying text . The banner will not make sense if you do not read the copy with it. But what appeals at a universal level is an ad that everyone can relate too. The Nike logo, the just do it campaign or the Aamir Khan Gajini look. Recently there is this Saffola Rice campaign that has a young wife carrying her husband. She can do that because she gives him this healthy rice that keeps his weight down. My friends daughter is three she loves this picture. It appeals to her sensibilities. My mom in law who is 70 plus mentions this ad to me. She loves this ad. Will this translate for the product to do well remains to be seen. But it has been noticed and that is a start.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Today a movie goer educated or not will see the poster of the film and if that picture appeals to his eye will decide whether he wants to put in his money and take out three hours of his valuable time.

We make movies for an A center or for the B and C center but the movie that is a blockbuster will always be that which cuts across all these categorized slots.

Whether it was Mumbai or Lahore, an incident of this magnitude cannot happen but for the small contributions from each one of us. Yes, indeed, each one of us is a culprit, just a shade lesser than Kasab and Osama.

How, you may say? Do we really behave the way a responsible citizen need to? Do we really care for another fellow being or the environment? I am not excluding myself from this introspective journey, and for that matter not any ‘educated’ person -

1. How many of us drive in lanes? Usually, if there are three lanes on a road, we will see at least five vehicles squeezing shoulder to shoulder, giving warmth to each other. In a while ‘real heat’ emanates. I can never make out which lane is which.
2. Crisscrossing the lanes with utter disregard to basic traffic rules is our basic etiquette. Honking is my birth right. Don’t look at my face, I am very angry and am about to scowl at the other, as he is not giving me my way. If I am on a two wheeler, then I have every license to find the smallest of the holes to manouvre through. With an engaging cell-phone in hand, it gives me a great thrill to do all these.
3. The slowest moving vehicle will be in the fastest lane, will not budge, and will make sure that faster moving one overtakes from wrong side. The heavy vehicle cannot fathom that a puny vehicle comparatively, can overtake him, so he would always occupy the faster lane to satisfy his ego. 
4. Waiting at the traffic signal or giving way to a pedestrian is ‘shaan ke khilaf’
5. At every round about, I will try to squeeze into, oblivious of the traffic already in the circle, adding to their immobility. I will enter a thorough fare from a by-lane, without bothering to look at the moving traffic, forget about stopping for a moment. Right of way, I am not aware of.
6. Park, we would, at all places that are not meant for parking. Thanks to our innovative ways of parking, a three lane road most times ends up being a single lane, rendering the already chaotic traffic to move at snail’s pace.
7. Often, I discover that the whole traffic is moving slow, only because there are two motorists fighting in the middle of the road after their motor-vehicles have made love to each other. The fight is about which kissed the other first and who is responsible for it! Maintaining a responsible distance from the vehicle in front of me is degrading to me. I am not aware that I should have at least 20 meters of clearing if I am at a speed of 60km/hr.
8. Even more surprising will be, a huge vehicle plonked with a flat tyre or a broken axle, in the middle of the road on a blind curve of an express way that has traffic moving at 100Km/hour!

1. I will open a biscuit packet or a ‘paan ka beeda’ while driving on the road, and in a jiffy the wrapper will be flying out of my window, while I munch the biscuit or paan. I cannot carry a small disposal in my vehicle.
2. I have tea at a dhaba or a kiosk, at the roadside, bus stop or railway platform, but I will definitely throw the PLASTIC cup into the Nala (culvert) or on the railway track. I do not notice the waste bin.
3. While on the sports field, a zoo or a park, I care no hoot to the surroundings, I will drop my emptied plastic water bottle or the plastic glass to see it floating into the arenas! I do not care to look for the ‘monkey bins’ around!
4. I will demand the hawker or the stores to give my purchase in a plastic bag as I never carry a cloth bag from home. I keep doing this every time, despite noticing thousands of these soiled plastic carry bags littered around open spaces, by the side of the roads, railway tracks, clogging water bodies.
5. I will keep the tap flowing while brushing, shaving, bathing, washing etc, not realizing that the overflowing water is a result of vast amount of money that is spent on bringing it into my home. I do hear that future wars will be for water!!
6. I do not even think for a moment about switching off the illuminating bulb in the empty room, as I have never experienced what it is to live in an un-electrified village.
7. I did fell a couple of trees while constructing, but I hardly realize that they were protecting the soil and mother earth for over a hundred years!!

Queues and Security -

1. Standing in a queue is beyond our dignity. We shall find every way to beat the system. Pushing and shoving to get in is my first priority (into the bus, into a train, into a film theatre, into the traffic..)
2. Getting frisked by a security guy is even more demeaning to me. “Mujhe nahin jaante..” (You do not know who I am..).
3. If I am caught violating any rule, at the traffic signal, or with an overweight luggage, or even taking an over-aged child in a train, I will try my level best to ‘payoff.’
4. If I were the security guy at the gate in a railway station or a bus stand, I am least bothered about whether the screening gate is functional, I continue yapping with my fellow colleague. I am not concerned about who has sneaked in, a taxi guy soliciting passengers, a smart kingpin forcing a few kids to beg or even a ‘liberator’ with an AK in his knapsack to carry out the orders of the ‘almighty’

At home -

1. I do not have time to sit and facilitate the child. Neither I have time to read a book to, play a game with, nor take a child to a museum, an art gallery or a performance.
2. The annual visit to zoo for me is a promise that I have to fulfill. It is just a ritual.
3. If some one calls for me, I would ask my child to say “papa ghar par nahin hai, baad mein phone kijiye.”
4. Most of the time, as a father I may even fumble when some one asks which class my child is in.

I continue to turn a blind eye to many ills happening around me, instead of responding, as  ‘chalta hai, hame kya karna’, is the usual refrain!! I can go on and on and on. But I shall stop here.

Most of the above mentioned ‘innocuous’ acts are experienced by silent yet sharp co-travellers, our children. I fail to imagine the gravity of  influence these will have on my children’s thought process and behaviour.

If I am conscientious about my own existence, that of my fellow beings and environment, if I execute my responsibilities in the society – if I play by the rules, facilitate my driver to abide by them, my maid to be more conscious, if I bring up my child with all honesty and involvement – the world certainly would be a better place to be. I am also relatively sure that many of these ‘man-mad-and-made’ disasters can be averted to a great extent. So, till then, I am no less culprit than a Osama or a Kasab.

Looking forward to your feedback here or on my mail id – sreeni@careerlauncher.com

I have always been under the misconception that men don’t read books. Where I come from, men spend their free time plugged into earphones, flicking through songs on their MP3 players, or watching the latest illegally downloaded movies on the miniscule video screens of their nano iPods (and London does have its fair share-don’t get me wrong!). But, when I first started commuting to work alá London style I started to notice a trend completely unfamiliar to me – more and more men reading books.

After a few days of subtle snooping (without coming across as a desperate train stalker) I saw that men, like women, read an array of different books. There are the young investment bankers in oversized designer suits holding their hardback copies of the latest James Patterson or John Grisham novel with their stark masculine covers and bold, block-lettered titles; there are the middle-aged men with receding hairlines clutching the latest how-to-get-rich paperback or weathered versions of Richard Branson’s “Losing my Virginity – The Autobiography”. And there are the students in dirty denims and multi-coloured woollen beanies with tassels, hunched over Ernest Hemingway or Robert Burns. And it’s not just a specific type of man who reads, yesterday while I was waiting for my train I saw a large, burly gentleman with a beard tucking into an 800-page whopper of a fantasy novel – a big book for a big bloke! 

And the question that plagues my mind is: why?

Books are a less invasive medium to iPods or MP3 players and provide a sense of escapism that listening to music on the train can’t provide. And after eight hours of staring at an LCD computer screen and having to listen to the grumblings of disgruntled colleagues and the irrational rantings of power-wielding office managers, the last thing a person needs to hear is pop music blasting into their eardrums.

There is also a certain image that reading portrays. Books have become a symbol of intelligence in today’s society and a man who reads is set apart as well-educated if he opts for a novel instead of an iPod.

On the whole, I am impressed with the notion of men who read for pleasure and hope that this is a sign that, contrary to popular belief, books as a medium are not dying out and that there is a future for yours truly somewhere out there in that big wide world of publishing!

I once took a simple personality test. Before you continue to finish reading the page please try this. Draw four simple shapes: a circle , a triangle, a square and a squiggly line (really it’s that simple) just as described on a plain piece of paper. Step away and then look back at the page of shapes and choose only one shape that you feel most drawn to. Which did you choose? The triangle supposedly means you are obsessed with “power” (one of the only two people I have ever worked with in my life that I didn’t care for picked that shape), the squiggly line means you want to be “free” (my husband picked that one), the square means you want “security” (never mind who picked that , let’s just say it never would have worked out) and the circle means…what? Did you pick the circle? I did. And, yes…it means that you “crave love”. No surprise that most artists pick the circle.

So why is it then that so many of my working artist friends, some successful, some still just starting out, are emotionally destroyed by and just hate the idea that they are creating for what I like to call monetary feedback. Ironically, income is one way that any artist clearly knows that others admire their work – other than applause (but let’s face it, most people clapping usually have a ticket stub in their pocket). Why then do artists have a problem when money is exchanged for their efforts?

Cut to “J”, a Grammy award nominated songwriter, who was struggling when we first met (he had to share a car with his wife or even take the bus while their kids were in a private school because they couldn’t afford to repair the BMW.) His songs soon literally salvaged and made two if not three diva’s (no exaggeration here) careers. One of his hits knocked a very annoying song off of Billboard’s number one spot that had everyone in the industry chanting “please kick that bloody song off as we can’t stand listening to it any longer”. He scored.

So we sat next to each other at a party and craving his inspiration and wisdom I couldn’t wait to speak about songwriting. Instead, the first words out of his mouth to me were, “I’m miserable”. His words were not the inspiration I was expecting and it certainly took the topic I had hoped to cover (me) off the menu. I asked ,“Why?” He responded that as a contract writer with a huge label, even after multiple hits, he felt uninspired. He could do it ,sure, but it wasn’t like when he was younger and he could just sit in a living room with a friend or two and write from his heart. He now felt that he was paid to put out hits the way a car manufacturer churns out parts; Clean, quick and sterile. Part of me wanted to slap him across the face and say, “Snap out of it!”. But, as Joe Walsh said to me when he visited my orchestration class in Santa Barbara, “They call it the music industry for a reason”.

Cut to “L” and “R” – a great artist and established photographer. I had lunch with “L” recently and she mentioned that people were expressing interesting in purchasing her paintings but the offers came with a price. (I’m paraphrasing). ”I want it to look like the one you did with the girl but my bedroom has pastels so the primary colors won’t work….” Similarly, for “R”, the black and white photographer known for his amazing photos featured in many popular magazines he had a problem being asked to “add a little color…” on the one sheet or portrait. He had since found a new use for the term “negative” when referring to his work.

The sad truth is that no artist wants to compromise – ever. But sadly when we are making art for profit we may have to compromise. Perhaps one can simply set a price for that compromise like any other business and never undersell oneself. But more importantly, for me, when someone wants to pay me for my services , I am now able to separate the work I do for money versus the work I do for my art. The analogy may best be approached by looking at the prostitute’s dilemma. Sure….you do tricks. But nothing can match being in love and you will never stop thinking that you are worthy of it. And you will never stop trying to find love and you also know that love will most likely never be found on the street. So then I wonder what shape should an artist pick? Circle, Square, Squiggly or Triangle? Can one train his or her brain to choose more than one?

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Watch this unique trailer for CORALINE, featuring author Neil Gaiman, and learn what the word “koumpounophobia” means:

Ripped out from telegraph.co.uk, it has an entry of a list made by TIME which lists the top 10 discoveries made by humans in 2008.

1 – Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, was finally launched in September this year on the French-Swiss border after taking nearly 20 years and £4.4 billion to build. It aims to resolve some of the greatest questions surrounding fundamental matter, such as how particles acquire mass and how they were forged some 13.7 billion years ago

2. The North Pole – of Mars

In May NASA’s Phoenix lander touched down in Mars’s far north, which had never before been visited. This is where the greatest concentrations of ice and water are to be found. Phoenix discovered nothing that changes the picture of Mars as a “dead world”, but it reinforced the planet’s image as a once-wet place that could have teemed with organisms.

3. Creating Life

Geneticist J. Craig Venter – one of the two men credited with mapping the human genome – managed to invent a new bacterium. Venter stitched together the 582,000 base pairs necessary to invent the genetic information for a whole new bacterium. Step two is to boot up that DNA programming in a living bacterium to see if it takes charge of the organism.

4. China Soars into Space

The Chinese launched their first manned mission in 2003, their second in 2005 and their third this year. They began with a one-person ship, then a two-seater, then a three-man version, and during that last mission they completed a successful spacewalk. By all spacefaring measures, that’s impressive – going from a standing start to a sprint in five years.

5. More Gorillas in the Mist

New surveys this summer by the Wildlife Conservation Society put the numbers of western lowland gorilla’s in the wild far higher than scientists had thought. The forests and swamps of the northern Republic of Congo are now thought to be home to 125,000 gorillas, or up to twice the previous estimates.

6. Brave New Worlds

In June, Swiss astronomer Michel Mayor found 45 exoplanets which orbit stars other than the Sun. All of them were far too hot to harbour life, but Mayor’s instruments – which detect planets by the gravitational wobbles they cause their suns – should be sensitive enough to find ones with larger orbits that place them out in cooler, arguably habitable regions.

7. The Power of Invisibility

Scientists from the University of California announced they’d invented an invisibility cloak this year. Using nanowires grown inside a porous aluminium tube to create a sheeting 10 times thinner than a piece of paper, they proved that they could wrap an object in the material and bend light waves around it, making it effectively invisible.

8. Cenozoic Park?

In November Penn State biochemistry professor Stevan Schuster announced that he had reconstructed 80 per cent of the genome of the long extinct woolly mammoth, using clumps of hair from the remains of several of the creatures.

9. Can You Spell Science?

Between 1979 and 2006, the percentage of scientifically literate adults in the US doubled – to 17 per cent. This year, a survey by a professor of political science at the University of Michigan found that that dismal showing may have improved, but only a little. In practical terms says the investigator, that means that only one in four adults can read and understand the stories in the weekly science section of The New York Times.

10. First Family

Researchers in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, found the oldest nuclear family ever uncovered when they excavated 4,600-year-old graves of a group of Stone-Age people who appeared to have been killed together in a raid. Among the remains was a foursome interred together – an adult male and female and two boys, one of them eight to nine years old, the other four to five. Analysing molecular DNA evidence, the investigators confirmed what the tableau suggested: This was a family. Certainly this is not the oldest one that ever existed, but merely the oldest ever unearthed.