Link Gallivanting

I came across this website entirely by accident and wonder how I didn’t know of it earlier: Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate. It’s a manually compiled and updated catalogue of “the most intelligent, provocative, and illuminating news stories, critical reviews, political essays, and commentaries published online” and is a service of the The Chronicle of Higher Education (US).

The site is updated six times a week and to someone who loves eclectic information, it’s a mine of still unexplored links, unread articles, new ideas, book reviews, loud opinions, and interesting insights. The sidebar of links to online mags and newspapers is very useful, though I wouldn’t recommend visiting this site if you do not have time to wastespend gambolling through the WWW.

Another addictive site, recommended by a friend a couple of days after I heard of it on the radio, is Ted.com, a collection of free lectures you can download and view at your leisure. Some lectures are 4 minutes while others are 30 minutes long, and the topics run from “life lessons” to physics to astronomy to the environment to music and design. I guarantee you’d find something interesting to watch on this site. If you have iTunes, the iTunes University has a ready link to Ted lectures, as well as a buffett spread of video and audio teachings direct from universities such as LSE, Yale, MIT. It’s a great site for part-time scholars and information-hoarders. Makes a great research tool if you manage to find the correct topics.

Filed under: Collectibles, Playing Favourites, Tech , arts and letters, ted.com, websites

At the Mags Rack

The magazine racks at bookshops are always enticing – the text and images on the covers of a lot of publications compete for attention and it’s not surprising that customers station themselves for quite awhile at the racks.

As a former magazine hound, I can tell you that it’s the cosmetics as much as the content that enthralls. There’s pleasure not just in making new discoveries about your surroundings, which can be as immediate as your living room and as expansive as the universe, but also in absorbing the colours, photos and layout of an article. Subjects are liberally spiced by magazine’s big injections of graphics and photos; science, economics, business, politics, all perk up when the writing is complemented by pretty pie charts and prepossessing tables.

I’ve dropped magazine reading for a number of years now, namely due to the steep prices of the magazines I would like to read, and the sheer volume of reading that I need to plow through already which makes magazines a guilty distraction.

Still, I haven’t gone cold turkey. Stores such as Reissued on the second floor of Amcorp Mall that offer older issues of international mags for RM9.90 each, make magazine reading lighter on the wallet. Slick, online versions of magazines are also an avenue to satisfy zine-lust (my vote goes to The National Geographic website for both content and visual stimulus). If you ask me though, online mags are not as satisfying as the real thing in your hands.

In terms of the real thing, the socio-literary Off The Edge, home-decor mags Haven (English) and Anjung Seri (Bahasa), as well as MPH’s lovely book mag, Quill, are my regulars. With our recent home move, a slew of other interior decor titles have found their way onto my bookshelf in the past year, supplemented on and off by Madam Chair, a big (in terms of size) refreshing publication for career women that unfortunately eludes a lot of bookstores’ mag racks.

I have recently added a new title to the list of regulars: Discovery Channel’s Magazine, a beautifully-produced magazine on science and nature, containing excellent articles on a diverse enough range of topics to appeal to eclectics like me. I’ve bought two issues and have been delightfully apprised of: termites, space travel, high-rise farming, the Baja Desert Race, Chinese navigation, the Sydney Opera House construction and – in the latest issue 5 – the not-quite-so-humble-after-all pencil.

The quality of writing in Discovery is excellent and the layout, graphics and photos make reading a visually immersive experience. Given the content repository of the Discovery Channel, of course, the depth and breadth of coverage should not be such a surprise. It also taps into the decades of magazine-publishing experience of that old reading favourite of many of us, Reader’s Digest. I hope the magazine retains its eclecticism and piquant design for the issues ahead.

It’s great that a magazine is launched when the industry as a whole is fighting a losing battle  to remain relevant in the age of freely available dots and bytes. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, and particularly so with ebook readers such as the lustworthy Amazon Kindle presently gaining ground, magazines will all migrate to the electronic form.

But until that time, the glossy, sometimes audacious covers, funky layouts, catchy titles, sharp writing and arresting photos of magazines still work their magic best through the print medium.

Filed under: At the Stores, Personal Note, Playing Favourites, Reads , discovery, magazines, reading

Young Writers

They say you live your unlived potential through your children.

If that is true, then it could be that my writing life is finding its way out through my sons. Both now have started fiction-writing, the older brother penning chapters of a robot epic (with chronicles and sagas in mind), and the younger one composing short, frisky animal tales.

It’s hard to describe my emotions whenever I catch them scribbling in their notebooks or pecking out letters on the laptop – it’s a mixture of parental pride, a wannabe writer’s hurrah, and creative envy; with no restrictions on grammar, logic and plot, imagination has a merry romp in both their minds and streaks through their narratives. Ah – there’s a lesson there for wanting the editor in your head dead.

The pride overrides all the other emotions, of course (there could be a kiasu Mom in me, after all). It’s not that the writing’s particularly good – it’s the fact that they are writing, weaving tales from figments of imagination and snatches of real life. It’s the fact that they are putting pen to paper and downloading the world and scenarios that they see in their heads to black and white type. It’s the fact that the boys are incorporating new words and expressions into their writing and are reading more avidly than before. It’s the fact that they can get just as excited buying notebooks as they are Playstation games.

And it’s the fact that the older one says he enjoys the writing process (oh, heaven!).

And so I tell both, but in particular my eldest, that no matter what happens, no matter what goes on in life, no matter who is around and who dies, no matter what people around say, that they must keep writing. And reading. And writing more.

They will, I hope, appreciate the message once they are older. For now, my job is to encourage and enable, and then to get out of the way (down, you Editor, down!).

And while my own writing ambitions are far from dead, if I do die without a finished manuscript, at least I would die knowing someone in the family can take up the craft, pick up the pen, form lyric and sense from scraps of scribblings, and produce, well, who knows – textual magic.

Filed under: Personal Note, Playing Favourites, Writing

Office Humour

When there’s nothing much to smile about, at work, I turn to:

Dilbert.

 

A creation of Scott Adams, the history of Dilbert could serve as a sort of inspiration to cubicle inhabitants everywhere. Essentially, Dilbert was created by Scott when he himself was a cubicle-ite, and was an amalgamation of his co-workers. He used Dilbert for his work presentations then was encouraged by the response to try Dilbert for syndication. United Media signed him up and in 1989, Dilbert was launched. Scott still held his day job until 1995, and his work experience (he worked from 1979 to 1995), I believe, is what makes Dilbert and his experiences immediately recognisable to office workers all around the world. So who says all that nastiness you endure at work can’t translate to money, huh?

Dilbert now appears in 2,000 newspapers in 70 countries, and the Dilbert web site, which is fantastic by the way, was the first syndicated comic strip to go online in 1995.

Our Star carries Dilbert in its tech section on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but in black and white. A pity.

At any rate, while you laugh at Dilbert and co (and many times thank the Lord that you do not have a Boss like his), some of his characters and stories will eerily remind you of real life. There is truth in art. And actually, this Dilbert comic strip below is based on a true story:

This guy got fired for posting a Dilbert strip that described managers as “drunken lemurs”; Scott Adams knew about it and created a series of strips around the incident (as above). Not only that, Scott also posted the guy’s resume on his blog, and voila – the guy has now found a new position with one of Adams’s fans. The article quotes Adams as giving this advice though:

“Stick with ‘Garfield.’ No one ever got fired for loving lasagna.”

Heh. I shall continue loving my Daily Dilbert.

Filed under: Collectibles, Playing Favourites, Reads, Work & Productivity , humour, office humour, work

Harry Potter

I’d never realised so many literary snobs existed until recently.

I’m a fan of the Harry Potter series – not enough of a fan to pre-order months in advance or to queue up for hours to get an early copy – but keen enough to be willing to splash out RM82 for a hardcover edition of the book (thank goodness for MPH’s membership card). Anyway, the mere mention of this kids’ book elicited snobby sniffs from certain parties as well as aghast reactions from some that an otherwise very serious thirty-something – ie: me – could find enjoyment in reading about the adventures of a bunch of teens with magic wands.

Yes, of course, the narrative is “simple” and “easy” - it’s meant for children, for goodness’ sakes – but the fact that it’s transcended its target readers worldwide speaks volumes about the storytelling ability of its author. Plus, as someone who has attempted creative writing, “simple” and “easy” narrative is not so easily executed, whether it be a children’s tale or not. JK Rowling has also created a whole new world of witches and wizards - not one that rivals Tolkien’s in terms of detail – but a credible, believable alternate universe with its own set of rules. 

Ah, and some people tell me I’m too serious!  

At any rate, I find all the Harry Potter tales absorbing and this one the most engaging of all, as Harry faces down Voldemort, his nemesis since the day he was born. Just like with its six predecessors, this Harry Potter edition saw me lugging the thick tome almost everywhere – it was on the passenger seat of my car (in case of fortuitous traffic jams, you understand), it was tucked away in my briefcase at work and brought out for lunchtime reading at the desk, it followed me on visits to my aunts’ (where ashamedly, I curled up in a sofa in a corner with it, instead of joining in my aunts’ chatter), and it was faithfully by my bedside on all the six days it took for me to finish the book (and I would have finished it sooner, if not for work, classes and exams).

My ten-year old is now just starting on the series, and I’m toying with the idea of buying a paperback boxed set of Numbers 1 to 6 for him to enjoy (mine’s scattered all over our bookshelves). The values in Harry Potter are good values for kids to absorb (adults, too, incidentally) – courage, valour, friendship, faith, honesty and kindness – along with the magic and mystical creatures that inhabit Harry Potter’s world. The ending of HP7 is, of course, a “happily ever after” ending, appropriate for a children’s book, and perhaps something that reminds adults, too, that hope and idealism need not burn out and die out with advancing age. And yes, that good can triumph over evil, however impossible it may be initially.

I recommend this NYTimes review of Harry Potter - I echo its commendation of how JK Rowling fits in all the pieces of the puzzle together at the end – and if you haven’t tried a Potter tome, go and borrow one, relax for God’s sake, and allow yourself to be transported.

It’ll be worth it, I promise.

Filed under: Books, Playing Favourites, Reads

Mind Mapping

I get very excited when I come across a new software tool. At a class I recently attended, the tutor was advocating this software: MIND MANAGER by MINDJET as a nifty tool for computerised mind mapping. I have downloaded the 21-day trial version and am playing around with the software. Just to let you know, I have played around with NovaMind’s mind-mapping software and still have the free Freemind installed. Novamind’s was very colourful – it really is like creating Tony Buzan’s mind map on the computer, with wavy lines, lots of hues, and graphics you can include for yourself. Freemind was a lot more structured – more like an engineering diagram than a mind map, but still operates on the same principles of mind-mapping, that of root subjects and their sub-roots. What I did not like about it is its presentation – there was very little flexibility in terms of adding colour and graphics, and exporting could only be to HTML or JPEG format. Still, I have a Freemind-based chart of our Library’s operations on the bulletin board behind my desk. And – oh yes – Freemind is free.

I’m still tinkering with Mind Manager, but the features that stood out for me with this software are: the ability to add lots of colour, flags, notes, and graphics, and the ability to export to Powerpoint, MS Project, and MS Word. This latter feature alone made me download the tool – I mean, I’ve created mind maps before on computer only to find that I have to translate it to linear, conventional form manually. The tutor showed how a mind map gets translated to a presentation or text document, and it’s almost magical to see the sub-roots transplanted to bullet form.

The price is off-putting though – it’s US$349 for the full version (with export features) though non profits and educational establishments qualify for a discount of almost 50%. Exchanged into Ringgit, that’s still a hefty price to pay for a piece of software, though if you use it often enough (daily), I gather it’s more of an investment than an expenditure.

I’ll keep tinkering with this tool – I understand a novelist used it to flesh out his novel :

For the past decade, Richard Powers has turned to a program rather ominously called Mindjet MindManager, which creates vast, sprawling outlines resembling family trees….For “The Echo Maker,” which won the National Book Award last year and is about a man who emerges from a coma without an emotional connection to his intimates, Powers created a visual outline for each character. It included material on his or her “life history, personality traits, physical characteristics, verbal tics, professional and educational background, choices and actions, attitudes and relations to the other characters,” he said. “As the material grew, I created topical sub-branches and sub-sub-branches. … After many months, at the very tips of these increasingly articulated branches, I sometimes ended up with sketches that plugged right into the draft.”

Wow. Of course, he supplemented MindManager with Microsoft’s OneNote, where he “mapped out possible changing interactions between characters, and claims “The combination of software programs (each of which links seamlessly into the other) allowed for simultaneous top-down and bottom-up composition.””

I personally feel software cannot replace desire and inspiration, but as a planning and personal productivity tool, mind mapping can be useful, whether done on computer or done the old-fashioned way: using your hand, colour pens, and paper.

Filed under: Playing Favourites, Tech, Work & Productivity, Writing

One Less Read

So it’s happened.

Dina, a good friend and blogger whose writing can make me smile on the worst of weekdays, has decided to end her blog.

It’s her decision, and I respect it.

But – oh dear – I shall miss my daily fix of her very funny, very Malaysian, very human stories.

Goodbye, Dina. I know we’ll be reading your Star column but still……

You shall be missed.

Filed under: Personal Note, Playing Favourites, Reads