SLOW Movement

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore

Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story.Using a variety of techniques (miniatures, computer animation, 2D animation) award winning author/ illustrator William Joyce and Co-director Brandon Oldenburg present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM Technicolor musicals. Morris Lessmore is old fashioned and cutting edge at the same time.

Especially for those who love books, enjoy!

NY Times: Philanthropy by the Rest of Us

December 22, 2011

Philanthropy by the Rest of Us

By OLIVIER ZUNZ

Charlottesville, Va.

CHRISTMAS SEALS, first sold 104 years ago in a Delaware post office, transformed the treatment and control of tuberculosis, one of the most feared killers of the age.

Just as important, they produced a revolution in philanthropy. At that time, the 1 percent of the late Gilded Age, men with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller, were creating major new philanthropic institutions. Christmas Seals, in a way, was the response from the other 99 percent: by marketing something as inexpensive as a stamp and using the proceeds to attack a major disease, the founders of the Christmas Seals program demonstrated the collective power of the American public.

The idea reached the United States by chance. The Danish-born immigrant Jacob Riis, well known as a pioneer photographer of tenement life, had already seen six of his brothers die of tuberculosis by 1904 when he received a Christmas letter from Copenhagen.

In addition to the traditional postage stamp, it bore a peculiar seal, the brainchild of a Danish postal clerk, Einar Holboll. Rather than rely on a few deep pockets to pay for a new hospital for children with tuberculosis, he sold the seals for two ore (there are 100 ore in a Danish krone) each. Patrons placed the seals alongside regular stamps to raise awareness of the campaign.

Three years later, Riis reported the story of this highly successful “penny subscription” in the magazine The Outlook, urging its duplication in the United States. Riis pointed to the fact that “no millionaire” had yet come forth “to endow” the fight against tuberculosis in America, and went on to say that “no millionaire” was “wanted,” that the job would be “far better done by the people themselves.”

Emily Bissell, a member of The Outlook’s editorial board and an active fund-raiser for the Red Cross, took him up on the suggestion as a way to support a tuberculosis sanitarium near Wilmington, Del. She borrowed money from friends to print the seals, persuaded the Wilmington postmaster to sell them in the post office lobby, and sold the first Christmas Seals in December 1907. Aided by an adroit publicity campaign, she raised $3,000 that first year, 10 times her original goal.

It was such a success that the next year the Red Cross made the seals available in post offices around the country, packaged with the message, “These stamps do not carry any kind of mail but any kind of mail will carry them.” That year, Christmas Seals raised $135,000; by 1916, they raised $1 million, all through purchases of less than $1.

The Christmas Seals campaign demonstrated the philanthropic power of the grass roots. It not only raised money, but called attention to tuberculosis. In a few years, the number of volunteers for the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis soared to 500,000 from 5,000. In 1919, three million child “crusaders” served in the Modern Health Crusade to raise awareness of the disease.

Equally important, this people’s philanthropy mobilized public health officials, attracted the attention of politicians — President Theodore Roosevelt publicly endorsed Christmas Seals — and even mobilized the 1 percent. The Rockefeller International Health Commission joined the fight against tuberculosis during World War I.

Mass philanthropy took off in a wide variety of fields. Community chests sprang up in every major city, and the Red Cross took volunteerism and grass-roots philanthropy to new levels to support the troops abroad. By the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the March of Dimes, volunteers knew how to canvass entire populations in large and small cities alike. Today, it is possible for practically every citizen willing to spend a little money to respond directly and almost instantly to world emergencies simply by sitting down at a computer or picking up a cellphone.

At the same time, mass philanthropy has become increasingly news-driven, as givers respond to earthquakes and tsunamis with an outpouring of resources but then lose interest as these disasters move off the front page. During the holiday season, our phones ring incessantly with appeals from scores of nonprofits. That we give to some of them is critical for our society. But the new ease with which we can transfer money does little to deepen the philanthropic spirit or generate long-term commitments.

What’s missing is both the commonality and intensity of purpose displayed by the original Christmas Seals campaign. Interestingly, these are two qualities exhibited by Occupy Wall Street, a movement that seems unable to harness its members’ sense of outrage to purposeful action.

It might be worthwhile for all those who sympathize with the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other plazas and squares around the country to learn from the example of the Christmas Seals campaign. We have no shortage of urgent causes that will benefit from the energy of the grass roots. The seals campaign showed that the 99 percent, even when feeling disenfranchised, are hardly powerless to repair the safety net — and even influence the actions of the 1 percent.

Olivier Zunz, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of “Philanthropy in America: A History.”

WSJ: How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything

OCTOBER 24, 2011

How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything

What harm can a handful of nasty or incompetent employees do? A lot more than you may think.

By ROBERT SUTTON

Superstars get a lot of attention from bosses. But bad apples deserve even more.

A growing body of research suggests that having just a few nasty, lazy or incompetent characters around can ruin the performance of a team or an entire organization—no matter how stellar the other employees.

Bad apples distract and drag down everyone, and their destructive behaviors, such as anger, laziness and incompetence, are remarkably contagious. Leaders who let a few bad apples in the door—perhaps in exchange for political favors—or look the other way when employees are rude or incompetent are setting the stage for even their most skilled people to fail.

It's crucial for leaders to screen out bad apples before they're hired—and if they do slip through the cracks, bosses must make every effort to reform or (if necessary) oust them.

Spreading the Vibes

It's easy to understand why bosses would rather focus on attracting and developing superstars. A mountain of research shows that stars and geniuses can deliver astounding results. And, obviously, it's more fun and inspiring to focus on top-performing, energetic employees.

Serge Bloch

But studies of everything from romantic relationships to workplace encounters show that negative interactions can pack a much bigger wallop than positive ones. The reason is simple: "Bad is stronger than good," as psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues put it. The negative thoughts, feelings and performance they trigger in others are far larger and longer lasting than the positive responses generated by more constructive colleagues.

Consider research on bad apples and team effectiveness by Will Felps, Terence R. Mitchell and Eliza Byington. They examined the impact of team members who were deadbeats ("withholders of effort"), downers (who "express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation") and jerks (who violate "interpersonal norms of respect"). An experiment by Mr. Felps found that having just one slacker or jerk in a group can bring down performance by 30% to 40%.

How can organizations squash those negative influences? The easiest way, obviously, is to avoid hiring bad apples in the first place—and that means taking a different approach to assessing candidates for jobs.

The usual means of screening are often weak when it comes to determining if a job candidate is a bad apple. Candidates may have gone to the best schools or may come across as charming and brilliant in interviews—thus disguising their laziness, incompetence or nastiness.

That's why one of the best ways to screen employees is to see how they actually do the job under realistic conditions. Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta favor that approach. When they're hiring new people for their Palo Alto, Calif., company, Pulse, which makes a news-reading app for mobile devices, they consider evaluations from peers and superiors and do multiple rounds of interviews. But they say the most effective thing is to bring candidates in for a day or two and give them a short job to accomplish. (The candidates are paid for their time.)

Not only do they learn a lot about the candidates' technical skills, Messrs. Kothari and Gupta say, but they also learn about their personality. How do they deal with setbacks? Do they know when to ask for help and to give others help? Is the candidate the kind of person they want to work with? The partners say there have been several candidates who looked great on paper and came highly recommended but weren't offered jobs—because technical and interpersonal weaknesses surfaced during the selection process.

Play Nice or Else

Beyond smarter screening, it's important to develop a culture that doesn't tolerate jerks. The best organizations make explicit their intolerance for bad apples; they spell out which behaviors are unacceptable in the workplace and act decisively to prevent and halt them.

Consider Robert W. Baird & Co., a financial-services firm that has won praise as a great place to work. The company is serious about creating a culture where disrespect and selfishness are unacceptable. They call this the "no jerk rule" (though they use a more colorful word than "jerk").

The company starts sending the message during the hiring process, says CEO Paul Purcell. "During the interview, I look them in the eye and tell them, 'If I discover that you are a jerk, I am going to fire you,' " he says. "Most candidates aren't fazed by this, but every now and then, one turns pale, and we never see them again—they find some reason to back out of the search."

When the company makes a hiring error and brings aboard an employee who persistently demeans colleagues or puts personal needs ahead of others, Baird acts quickly to deal with or expel the bad apple.

Mr. Purcell's crusty approach won't work in every company culture. For an idea of how to handle the task with a more subtle hand, look at renowned chef Alice Waters, who has headed the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., for 40 years now.

Biographer Thomas McNamee describes how Ms. Waters's love of people and food has spread to those around her. Along the way, though, many bad apples have been shown the door—but Ms. Waters doesn't hold it open. The process usually starts when one of her colleagues conveys the message that Ms. Waters isn't "entirely pleased." If the hints don't work, then that colleague—or someone else close to Ms. Waters—does the firing.

A spokesman for Chez Panisse says Ms. Waters does personally fire employees on occasion and "she manages to have that person feel as though they are making the decision to leave and it is better for themselves to move on and explore new opportunities." He also notes that a large percentage of employees have been with the restaurant for decades.

Keeping Them Close

There are times, of course, when an organization can't—or won't—remove a destructive personality. Maybe the person is a star as well as a bad apple, for instance, or is otherwise crucial to the operation. In such cases, leaders might try to use coaching, warnings and incentives to curb the toxic employee's behavior. Another tactic is to physically isolate the bad apple.

In one organization, there was a deeply skilled and incredibly nasty engineer whom leaders could not bring themselves to fire. So, they rented a beautiful private office for him several blocks from the building where his colleagues worked. His co-workers were a lot happier—and so was he, since he preferred working alone.

But beware: Leaders who believe that destructive superstars are "too important" to fire often underestimate the damage they can do. Stanford researchers Charles O'Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer report a revealing episode at a clothing retailer. The company fired a top-producing salesman who was a bad apple. After he was gone, none of his former colleagues sold as much as he had. But the store's total sales shot up by nearly 30%. The lesson, according to the researchers: "That one individual brought the others down, and when he was gone, they could do their best."

Mr. Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, is the author of "Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst." He can be reached at [email protected].

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: The Children's Authors Who Broke the Rules

 

September 16, 2011

The Children’s Authors Who Broke the Rules

By PAMELA PAUL

The stylistic eccentricities of Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein and Theodor Geisel, a k a Dr. Seuss, are so much a part of the childhood vernacular today that it’s hard to imagine their books were once considered by some to be wholly inappropriate for children.

Yet these three authors — who each have a new book coming out this month in what can only be described as a Seussian coincidence (“But, see! We are as good as you. Look! Now we have new books, too!”) — challenged the conception of what a children’s book should be. And children’s literature, happily, has never been the same.

Once upon a more staid time, the purpose of children’s books was to model good behavior. They were meant to edify and to encourage young readers to be what parents wanted them to be, and the children in their pages were well behaved, properly attired and devoid of tears. Children’s literature was not supposed to shine a light on the way children actually were, or delight in the slovenly, self-interested and disobedient side of their natures.

Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, a woman who once declared it her mission to publish “good books for bad children.”

Theirs were books that taught the wrong lessons and encouraged narcissistic misbehavior. In “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963), Sendak’s masterpiece, a child chases his dog with a fork and yells at his mother — only to be crowned king and served a hot dinner. “I developed characters who were like me as a child, like the children I knew growing up in Brooklyn — we were wild creatures,” Sendak said recently in a phone interview. “So to me, Max is a normal child, a little beast, just as we are all little beasts. But he upset a lot of people at the time.”

These were books that glorified absurdity and made children laugh at the wrong things. “There’s too many kids in this tub,” begins one Silverstein rhyme, “I just washed a behind / That I’m sure wasn’t mine / There’s too many kids in this tub.” Even the grammar is wrong.

Nor were these books especially childish. The Little Nemo-esque dream world Sendak concocted in “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) was inspired by the Holocaust of all ghoulish things. Its cheery bakers wear Hitler-esque mustaches and try to stuff a young boy named Mickey into an oven. Mickey, moreover, is brazenly naked, his genitalia accurately depicted alongside what some deemed “phallic” milk bottles and creamy baking ingredients. Was it a masturbatory fantasy sequence or an innocent dream about baked goods? The book predictably landed on the American Library Association’s list of the “most challenged books” of the 1990s.

But in 1970, Sendak became the first American to win the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for excellence in children’s book illustration. Still, his books didn’t sit easily in everyone’s idea of the nursery. His next big book, “Outside Over There” (1981), a not-so-cloaked parable of sibling rivalry, tells the story of a gang of goblins kidnapping a baby girl from under her sister’s watch. The book contains mysterious sexual overtones, with the older sister made rapturous by the proceedings.

“Can ‘Outside Over There’ really be a children’s book?” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt asked in The New York Times. “Is it appropriate for a children’s book to be raising such questions?” The book, he wrote in a largely laudatory review, had the “quality of nightmare,” and intimidated his “somewhat withered” inner child.

Shel Silverstein was similarly suspected of being child-unfriendly. In 1964, Silverstein had trouble finding someone to publish “The Giving Tree.” He had already sold one children’s book, “Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back,” but editors thought “The Giving Tree” fell into a nebulous and unpromising noncategory between children’s book and adult literature. “Look, Shel,” William Cole, an editor at Simon & Schuster, later recalled telling Silverstein, “the trouble with this ‘Giving Tree’ of yours is that . . . it’s not a kid’s book — too sad, and it isn’t for adults — too simple.” Another editor was even more dismissive: “That tree is sick! Neurotic!”

“Whimsical” was one word used to describe Silverstein. But it came with a B-side adjective: “weird.” This was a man who had drawn cartoons for Playboy, and who wrote the lyrics to Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue.”

Yet “The Giving Tree” went on to sell 8.5 million copies. It was embraced by Christians as a parable of selflessness and has been denounced by feminists as a patriarchal fantasy in morality-tale clothing. Ellen Handler Spitz, the author of the classic study “Inside Picture Books,” wrote that the story “perpetuates the myth of the selfless, all-giving mother who exists only to be used and the image of a male child who can offer no reciprocity, express no gratitude, feel no empathy — an insatiable creature who encounters no limits for his demands.”

With “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1974) and “A Light in the Attic” (1981), Silverstein turned another commercial noncategory — verse for children — into a bonanza. Like “The Muppet Show,” both books were a hit among grown-ups and children alike; “A Light in the Attic” spent 182 weeks on the New York Times general nonfiction best-seller list, including 14 weeks at No. 1.

Sendak and Silverstein had roots in the counterculture, but a deeper forerunner is another contrarian children’s book author, Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss. The son of prosperous German immigrants, Geisel studied at Dartmouth and Oxford and had a successful career in advertising promoting insecticide and Standard Oil (don’t tell the Lorax!) before turning to cartooning and then children’s literature. His first effort, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937), a story that describes the wild fabrications a boy plans to tell his father before he ultimately tells the truth, was rejected 27 times before finding a publisher. He went on to Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton and the Grinch.

But the full flowering of his subversive genius came with “The Cat in the Hat” (1957), inspired by lists of words children could be expected to read. “How they compile these lists is still a mystery to me,” Seuss complained in an essay in The New York Times Book Review. The books recommended for young children, he complained, were far beneath their intellectual capacity.

And so “The Cat in the Hat” used only 223 different words of near monastic simplicity, showing that one could achieve the sublime under absurd constraints. The Book Review, in a typically glowing response, called it “one of the most original and funniest of books for young readers,” adding, “Beginning readers and the parents who have been helping them through the dreary activities of Dick and Jane . . . are due for a happy surprise.”

Today, Sendak’s, Silverstein’s and Seuss’ books define what we’ve come to think of as children’s literature. Their new books are no exception. “Bumble-Ardy,” the first picture book Sendak has written and illustrated in 30 years (it is based on an animated segment that appeared on “Sesame Street” in 1971), tells the story of a rambunctious pig who has never had a birthday party. Naturally, the one he gives himself — absent caregiver! dirty stunts! guzzled brine! — devolves into a mess. “Every Thing on It,” the fourth volume of collected verse from Silverstein, who died in 1999, contains poems about snotty pasta (“Betty, Betty, / Sneezed in the spaghetti, / Made it icky and gooey and wetty”). And “The ­Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories,” a collection of Dr. Seuss stories that appeared previously only in magazines, features the kinds of nonsense that blend right in with the Stinky Cheese Man and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Books by Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein are now the classics we reach to when building our children’s libraries. They exemplify the traditions we defend. As Sendak put it at the end of our conversation, “Thank God we have grown up.”

Pamela Paul is the children’s books editor of the Book Review.

FT: The pasta equation

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7134bd64-c874-11e0-833c-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXfcSHlu

August 19, 2011 10:07 pm

The pasta equation

By George L. Legendre. Photographs by Stefano Graziani

In a new book, an architect uses mathematics to give a surreal vision of the varied world of pasta

Left: Galletti, use in tomato sauces. Right: Fusilli Lunghi Bucati, eat with meat ragu

The architect Marco Guarnieri and I share a professional address in a quiet lane off Bermondsey Street in south London. On most evenings we mill about the office’s communal table and exchange our impressions of the day’s crop of problems: delayed professional fees, contractual instructions and interim certificates. But first we sit ­­down and eat pasta.

Being Italian, Marco knows all about pasta. It takes him around eight minutes to prepare the simplest of pastasciuttas – a dish of spaghetti all’aglio, olio e peperoncino. Sadly, it takes us no more than a few minutes to finish our portions.

During one of these evenings, the concept for a book about pasta emerged. Its premise is simple: to work out the mathematical formulas of pasta and use the results to produce a culinary resource that is both beautiful and useful. My firm uses mathematics to model anything from pedestrian bridges to playground slides, so why not food too?

There is a huge canon of pasta, and often names or forms overlap, or become confused. Many regions in Italy produce lesser-known varieties of pasta, or spawn minor variations of established ones, then give them local names. This all makes classification a difficult task. Inspired by the science of phylogeny (the study of relatedness among groups of natural forms), we pared down the startling variety of pasta to 92 unique types, divided according to their morphological features, with each pasta illustrated by its parametric equations, a 3D diagram and a specially commissioned photograph by Stefano Graziani.

Left: Funghini, good in minestrone. Right: Fagottini, fill with ricotta or fruit

In the examples above, you can see the complexity of galletti, combining a bent longitudinal profile, a hollow cross section, striated surface and smooth edges; fusilli lunghi bucati, a distinctive member of the fusilli clan with a spring-like profile; funghini, with their dainty crenellated edges; and fagottini, pinched into shape from a circle of durum-wheat dough.

Combined, these representations capture the essence of each pasta, and give a concise, elegant and unique expression of a familiar thing. It is a surreal presentation of a wildly popular food, perhaps sometimes overlooked for its aesthetic depth and variety.

And does this scientific approach result in tastier pasta? Absolutely. The topological properties of each shape impacts how it absorbs heat and water, cooks, soaks in liquids, and retains a sauce – a shape may even be designed for a given sauce.

Our next project, to make a pasta derived from periodic equations, pasta ioli, is still a work in progress. But the pasta family, in all its shapes and sizes, is bound to keep growing.

‘Pasta by Design’ by George L. Legendre is published this month by Thames & Hudson, £16.95

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

NY Times: Love, the Many-Splendored Emotion

 

 

August 12, 2011

Love, the Many-Splendored Emotion

By JUDITH SHULEVITZ

ALL ABOUT LOVE

Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

By Lisa Appignanesi

401 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.

 

The news about love — if anything can be said to be new when it comes to love — is that it affects us on more levels than we realized. Poets and artists have long viewed love as a prime mover, but by the beginning of the last century, scientists and philosophers were dismissing it as socially and scientifically irrelevant. Love was confined to private life, where only women and novelists and psychoanalysts were supposed to pay much attention to it. Then, a little more than half a century ago, biologists and economists and psychologists decided that love mattered after all, and began conducting experiments to determine how much.

The early science of love looks a little shocking in retrospect. Experiments meant to demonstrate that mammals attach themselves to mothers because they need love, not just food, all too often required outright torture. Researchers snatched baby creatures away from mother creatures and put them in cages to prove that life without love was a sad, diminished thing. The science of sexual attraction made use of more benign methods, but until more women entered the field and started asking different questions, the experiments tended to produce stunning affirmations of Western patriarchal stereotypes. Whatever the results, however, this work did make scientists appreciate the central importance of love for life. Love or the lack of it turned out to affect not just psyches but also bodies; not just brains and genitals but also hormones and the expression of genes; not just the well-­being of individuals but also the flourishing of societies.

Today, biology is said to be powered by love. A rat will grow up fat and sassy if well-­licked by its mother, nervous and underdeveloped if licked poorly or not at all. Culture is sometimes seen as an artifact of love, too, or at least of what Darwin called sexual selection. Sporting matches or music competitions, among other costly and apparently useless displays, have been reinterpreted as the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail, ways of signaling genetic excellence.

In “All About Love,” Lisa Appignanesi, who has written extensively on the history of psychoanalysis, turns her back on the ever-­growing scientific literature on love, largely out of disgust with the way sociobiological theories get used to defend a conservative social order: “I’ll believe in evolutionary psychology more, perhaps, when it’s used less as an explanation for male philandering and female nesting,” she writes. What she wants to know is how we humans experience love individually, psychically — love being neither purely bodily nor purely mental but irreducibly both. In the words of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, it’s the “imaginative elaboration of physical functions.”

A latter-­day Romantic, Appignanesi also celebrates the Byronic power of this “unruly emotion” to wreak havoc on our lives. “Rapture at bottom contains something of the asocial, the criminal, and desire may indeed be fueled by the breaking of bonds, whether of clans, families, or godly and social rules,” she writes. Love is a story we tell ourselves, if sometimes a dangerous one. The “purported facts” about love “garnered from the labs of biologists, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists” are, to her, mainly ways of bolstering dominant social narratives. To really understand love, she argues, you have to demythologize those narratives, whether they’re fictional or factual or in that somewhere-­in-­between place where memoirs dwell.

You might say that Appignanesi aims to play psychoanalyst herself, listening between the lines of our culture’s semi-self-aware monologues about longing and desire. And a conscientious therapist she is, diligently assembling the “life history of love,” its arc through our lives. First comes first love: our crazed, adolescent forays into passion, when “carnal desire transports the lovers into a heightened world and everything in that world takes on powerful new meanings.” Next comes marriage, and its corollary, adultery, when the private ecstasies of love and the ungovernable nature of desire run up against the social expectation of unflagging monogamous romance. On she moves to child rearing, surely the most contested and political form of love today. Appignanesi wraps up her survey with friendship, which “catapults us out of the sphere of kin and binds us into the world of others,” she writes. Friendship is wise and calm and companionable and therefore best appreciated in old age.

To illustrate the different stages of love, Appignanesi recounts the plots of novels, poems and operas. She analyzes the popularity of cultural touchstones like the 1995 dating manual “The Rules” (its appeal betrays “a deep anxiety about appropriate modern codes”). She dissects marital narratives — “Pride and Prejudice,” "Bridget Jones's Diary" — and traces the evolution of the Cinderella narrative into high-end romantic fiction (“Jane Eyre”) and middlebrow chick lit (the “wittily exuberant” "Eat, Pray, Love"). She quotes a lot of psychoanalysts, Freud and Lacan and Donald Winnicott and Adam Phillips (an accomplished aphorist who hovers over the pages like an interrupting angel). “Why is it,” she asks, “that passionate love and loss seem to be so bound up with one another?” All later loves, she answers, stand in for that first, all-­absorbing love for mother, who is inevitably left behind. To become an individuated, language-­wielding “I” is to betray the “symbiotic plenitude” of infancy. Or as Appignanesi puts it, echoing Lacan: “To say ‘I am’ is already to say ‘I have lost.’ ”

Appignanesi offers up a brief history of marriage, from the Greeks through Victorianism and the sexual revolution and into the present. She outlines the literary history of love, by way of Dante and the troubadours of Provence. In her chapter on love in families, she gives the briefest of nods to the new science of epigenetics, which has shown how a mother’s experiences — the food she eats, the stress she feels — can regulate her child’s hormones and even affect his genes. But Appignanesi quickly shuts down this fascinating line of inquiry, warning that “the exponential growth in theories about early childhood is oddly coincident with the rise of feminism,” as if the science existed exclusively to perform the task of social control. She sidesteps the question of homosexuality, not just because the subject is too big but because, she explains, she aims to undermine the categories of gender and permissible versus impermissible sexuality that the very notion of homosexuality rests upon.

Appignanesi’s approach to love is aphoristic and whimsical. She loves to overturn some bit of conventional wisdom, rather than risk boring us with arguments. There is no unifying theory here, just a bewildering topography. We wander in a forest of other people’s fictions and ideas, often guided by little more than some faintly comical historical generalities. (“In the annals of love, adultery has ever played a raucous part.” )

For those of us who adore love stories — and who doesn’t? — a tour d’amour ought to be enough. That it isn’t tells you something about what it takes to write about love. Love stories, like love itself, turn less on things that are easy to summarize — situations, plots — than on the little details that give a tale or encounter its unexpected power: a gripping tone, a flash of wit, the eerily sadistic undertones of an erotic obsession. Such grace notes rarely make it into potted synopses.

No literature has fewer grace notes than scientific articles about love, of course. And yet at their best these documents have a freshness that Appignanesi’s book lacks. There’s something jolting, in the best possible sense, about science’s incessant quest to measure the unmeasurable, to give precise coordinates to knowledge that may have been common but was still vague. By now, everyone knows that you’re supposed to cuddle your infant, but who would have predicted that if you don’t, the mental health consequences may be passed down for three generations? Who would have guessed that, in the chemical sense, at least, people really may be made for each other — that the success or failure of a kiss may be due not just to feelings or technique but also to an unconscious olfactory response to your lover’s pheromones? Love cuts deep, much deeper, in some ways, than even our greatest poets have been able to describe. We are only beginning to learn how far down it goes.

Judith Shulevitz is the author of “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.”

WSJ: Dear Book Lover: Books that Get Better With Maturity

Excerpt:

Paradoxically, reading experts say the best way to read a difficult book for the first time, at whatever age, is to race through it. "Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on the way," wrote Mortimer Adler, an educator and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. "Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost."

===

DEAR BOOK LOVER
MAY 9, 2011

Dear Book Lover: Books that Get Better With Maturity

• By CYNTHIA CROSSEN

Many years ago when I was in college, I took a course on the modern European novel. We read Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," which many of us liked so much that we asked our instructor if we should read some other books by Mann such as "Buddenbrooks" or "The Magic Mountain." He told us that neither of those books should be read by anyone under the age of 40. Can you think of books that will not reveal themselves fully to the reader until one has reached, say, the age of 60? Or books that one may have read at an early age that ought to be reread once one has the experience of having spent six decades or so on the planet?

—Tom Ulen, Champaign, Ill.

"Age-appropriate" is a useful adjective in the world of children's books, but there are no such handy ratings for adult books. Yet unquestionably, some books are more adult than others. What would a 20-year-old make of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" or G.B. Edwards's "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page," whose 80-year-old narrator disliked using even a telephone? Conversely, don't "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Little Women" have greater charms for young adults than for their grandparents?

Everett Collection

Approach classics like "Moby Dick" with an open mind.

The danger in reading far ahead of your stage in life is that you might conclude the book is bad (stuffy, rambling pretentious) and dismiss it forever. This happened to me with Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady," forced on me in a college literature class. For many years after, it was a novel I loved to hate. When a book club I belonged to chose it, I kicked and screamed, until I fell under its spell. I was too young for James when I was 21.

Paradoxically, reading experts say the best way to read a difficult book for the first time, at whatever age, is to race through it. "Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on the way," wrote Mortimer Adler, an educator and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. "Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost."

Speaking for teenagers through the ages, Mr. Adler continued, "Shakespeare was spoiled for generations of high-school students who were forced to go through 'Julius Caesar,' 'Hamlet' or 'Macbeth' scene by scene, to look up all the words that were new to them, and to study all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never actually read the play. Instead they were dragged through it, bit by bit, over a period of many weeks…. They should have been encouraged to read the play in one sitting. Only then would they have understood enough of it to make it possible for them to understand more."

It's said that you never step into the same river twice, and that's also true of reading. You are a different person from the impatient adolescent or the college procrastinator who had to grind out a term paper in a weekend. So pick up that classic you hated in your youth, and take advantage of your maturity: You now know that it doesn't matter if you understand every word.

Five years ago, O (Oprah's magazine) published some essays about reading hard books. One of them, by Geoffrey Sanborn, who teaches literature at Bard College, was about "Moby-Dick," a book that has always terrified me. "These days most people think of 'Moby-Dick' not as a strange, wild, sad story," Mr. Sanborn wrote, "but as a Hard Book, full of boring whaling talk and hypersubtle symbolism…. As a result, most readers begin the book with their guard up.

"But 'Moby-Dick' wasn't meant to be a rigorous, depleting experience…. It was meant to be a stimulant to thought and feeling; it was meant to make your mind a more interesting and enjoyable place. So if the prospect of reading 'Moby-Dick' makes you feel even a little bit daunted…get an unannotated edition with no introduction and no essays in the back. Clear your mind of expectations and open it to chapter one. Listen with nothing more than ordinary human curiosity to the voice that begins speaking to you."

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at [email protected].

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Boing Boing: Found Sign- Why the Internet is No Substitute for a Library

Chance upon this on Boing Boing. Interesting.

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Found Sign: Why the Internet is No Substitute for a Library

Xeni Jardin at 11:59 AM Thursday, Apr 14, 2011 

 

Joe Sabia says, "This is a sign that hangs from the wall of my local public library in Milford, Connecticut. It's a large but quaint building occupied by maybe 6 or so people, and 3 elderly kind women at the check out desk." Click for larger size.

Update: Boing Boing pal Seth Godin writes,

Apparently, it comes from this book which is in itself quite an amusing read, as far as the reviews indicate...

Culture

FT: On the other hand

On the other hand

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 21 2011 22:06 | Last updated: January 21 2011 22:06

I want to speak out on behalf of an oppressed minority. This is not one of those minorities one could call fashionable; its oppression might seem negligible, and perhaps most of it, in the west at least, occurred in the past. But left-handed people, who constitute about one-tenth of the population pretty much across the board, have suffered in the course of history.

The negative connotations attached to left-sidedness and left-handedness are remarkably consistent across cultures and across history. Perhaps the most striking is the Latin adjective sinister, which starts off meaning “left” or “on the left hand”, but quickly (in Latin that is) acquires the secondary meanings “wrong”, “perverse” and then (closer to the meaning of sinister in modern English) “unfavourable”, “adverse”, “ill-omened”.

Sinister has passed into many European languages, keeping the link between left-sidedness and inauspiciousness. The French word gauche means both left and physically awkward. In English, we talk about having two left feet to designate clumsiness. The left side fares no better in Slavic or Finno-Ugrian tongues. But this is not just a European phenomenon: the Chinese word for left, zuo, can also mean “improper”. Conversely, the association of right and the right hand with notions of correctness and justice runs deep and broad through European and non-European cultures.

Tarred with this brush, left-handers have either been treated with suspicion or more violently, and with unknowable consequences, “changed” – that is, forced to use their right hand to write.

Why should this matter? I am not left-handed myself, all too right-handed I fear, but my mother is or was left-handed, until she was “changed”. She suspects that such changing might lead to quite profound cognitive and emotional disturbance. A friend tells me her father was beaten repeatedly until he switched from left to right hand, and developed a lifelong stutter.

The more we learn about handedness and the workings of the brain, the more perverse the attempt to denigrate or change natural left-handers appears to be. Left-handers, or at least people who are not strongly right-handed seem, some studies have shown, to be at a cognitive and creative and even sporting advantage. Anyone watching Rafael Nadal, Gary Sobers or Alastair Cook might have worked that out already.

According to the critic and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in his fascinating book The Master and his Emissary, citing research by Marian Annett: “There are unexpectedly large numbers of left-handers among artists, athletes and ‘skilled performers of many kinds’.” Annett herself goes on to say that it is “not that there is a predominance of left-handers in talented groups, but rather that there is a shortfall in such groups of people who are strongly right-handed”.

And for McGilchrist, the implications of this apparently random quirk could hardly be more momentous. The Master and his Emissary tells a story of the human condition, and human history, based on the “power struggle” between the two hemispheres of our brains – the increasing, and, he argues, disastrous dominance of the left brain, the main seat of language and representation, over the more immediately perceiving right brain, on which it is in fact dependent.

McGilchrist’s thesis is bold and to some extent, given our limited knowledge of the immense complexities of the brain, speculative. But he is a subtle and clever thinker, and unusually qualified to range with such authority over so many different domains of knowledge.

In case you are scratching your head, or racking your brain, about what all this has to do with left-handedness, it is worth recalling one of things which has been known with certainty about the brain since the early days of neuroscience: that motor and other functions on the left side of the body are controlled by the right side of the brain and vice versa. This means that some, not all, left-handers, together with people who suffer from dyslexia and schizophrenia, might be less “likely to show ‘left-hemisphere encapsulation’”. Just possibly, left-handed people, or some of them, might be less locked in to the increasingly artificial world-view delivered by the left brain and more in touch with the more intuitive right brain and its way of perceiving the world.

If that is so, we should be rejoicing at the recent resurgence of left-handers in politics; you might expect Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein to have been southpaws but not Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and David Cameron. But perhaps the real skill or genius in politics lies not so much in being left-handed as in being to see things from both sides, or as many sides as possible, that is being able to bridge the hemispheric and also the ideological divide.

[email protected]

Boing Boing: The creation of breatheable chocolate, an excerpt from The Lab - Creativitiy and Culture, by David Edwards

 

The creation of breathable chocolate, an excerpt from The Lab: Creativity and Culture, by David Edwards

Mark Frauenfelder at 10:18 AM Monday, Jan 3, 2011 

 

David Edwards teaches at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In this excerpt from his book, The Lab: Creativity and Culture he writes about creating a "food inhaler" that dispenses breathable chocolate.

Thierry Marx was helping transform how we enjoy the purely aesthetic realm of eating. Each year, in the town of Pauillac, north of Bordeaux, within the chateau of Cordeillan-Bages, he created hundreds of new ways to prepare, visualize, and consume familiar foods. By 2007 the reputation of his restaurant drew comparisons with the two top experimental restaurants in the world, Ferran Adrià's El Bulli outside Barcelona and Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck north of London.

That same year we had a chance to involve Thierry in an experiment at Le Laboratoire with the colloid physicist Jérôme Bibette. To explore how a chef became an exhibiting artist, we traveled down to his restaurant in July. The conversation swirled that day around wrapping flavor in particularly thin membranes. Having looked into the idea of inhaled aerosols for delivering drugs and vaccines, I brought up the idea of breathing these colloids into your mouth. Later in the fall I shared that notion with students at Harvard University. They would need to make the food particles small enough to get into the air, and large enough to avoid entry into the lungs under all conditions of breathing. We knew this much. But what did inhaling food mean? Would there be pleasure in it? After a semester of reflection, brainstorming, and quite a bit of coughing (even after designing the particles with a size to avoid the lungs, we discovered that, no matter how we breathed through straw-like inhalers, the particles flew to the back of the throat) I put a piece of tape over the paper cylinder my students had prepared to inhale things like carrot powder. The coughing stopped. And here we had the first prototype of the food inhaler we called Le Whif.

The LaboGroup was just then being formed, and José Sanchez decided we could manufacture Le Whif in the Chinese factory where we planned to make the plant filter. Six months after the idea had come up in Thierry's restaurant, we manufactured the first Whifs in China. They arrived in Paris a few days before Thierry and Jérôme's culinary art exhibition at Le Laboratoire, in March 2008. We exhibited our fledgling product over a Whif Bar imagined by Caroline Naphegyi and cosponsored by the Nestlé division Nespresso. Nespresso offered each visitor a free coffee, and we included a little brown object that looked like a tube of lipstick, by which you whiffed chocolate into your mouth.

To be perfectly frank, Le Whif didn't work well. Chocolate powder fell out if you inclined one end above the other, and you almost invariably coughed when you inhaled for the first time. But this was a lab, and we were testing a new idea--a new way of experiencing food! Two Harvard students, Trevor Martin and Larissa Zhou, had flown to Paris for the event. Jonathan Kamler, who had graduated the year before, having led the previous semester's student whiffing project, was also in Paris to work full-time for the LaboGroup. These three kept the chocolate inhalers full of chocolate powder as several hundred opening night guests tried it out.

It turned out to be fortuitous that, just weeks before the exhibition, the French government had outlawed cigarettes in cafés. This had outraged many French café-goers. Le Whif seemed a kind of inventive response. The traditional sip of coffee, bit of chocolate, and smoke that properly ended a French meal became, in this new anti-cigarette era, sipped coffee and smoked chocolate. Our guests had a ball with it. They invariably held Le Whif between their fingers as if it were a cigarette, and kept it long after the tube was empty, chatting, appreciating a novel social experience (which became, in the hands of my three little boys, something of a slightly illicit thrill).

No, this wasn't a commercial product, and nobody pretended it was. Nobody, that is, but the LaboGroup team. Why? Because the team was having fun. The hoped-for outcome of this first experiment had been observed in the public reaction to the exhibition, and now there were more experiments to be done. And, besides, if Le Whif did manage to become a product one day, magical revenues would appear. The team needed to hope for this income stream. The risk of running out of money was too palpable.

True, whiffing was even more far-fetched than filtering the air with plants. However, being far-fetched made the idea plausible as the preoccupation of an art lab, and commended the idea as a valid creative process even as it cast doubt on the eventual outcome of a valuable commercial product.

Clearly there were things to improve. The design needed to prevent all the chocolate from spilling out as you moved Le Whif around after filling it and before inhaling. But the product needed to remain simple; especially, it needed to avoid the unattractive trappings of pharmaceutical products. Le Whif needed to reliably deliver enough chocolate to satisfy taste but not so much as to fill your mouth with dry powder or provoke a spasm of coughing. The LaboGroup launched a second version of Le Whif in the fall of 2008 with the opening of the new LaboShop. The public could come inside and enjoy a whiff of chocolate with a cup of espresso. Whiffed chocolate came in mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate, and pure chocolate flavors. We invited the public to opine on the result and help us design a fully commercial chocolate inhaler that we would launch within the year.

We said that whiffing was a new way of eating, and proposed Le Whif as a kind of inhaled fork or spoon--and we believed it. Until now, nobody had reliably put food in the mouth through breathing. First there were the hands, then chopsticks, then forks and spoons, and now Le Whif. Yes, we were starting with chocolate, but you could inhale many other things, too, as we did during private evenings of experimentation in the FoodLab--with cheese, mushroom, exotic teas.

From the fall of 2008 into the winter of 2009, our local LaboShop clientele included young professionals, kids, and an occasional celebrity, like the French actress Isabelle Adjani, who would sneak in and out, sunglasses donned, enjoying a private pleasure. This eclectic group, probably fewer than a hundred people, returned regularly to the LaboShop, defining for us the commercial potential of Le Whif and rarely leaving before posing the same impatient question: When could they actually buy Le Whif and take it home? The LaboShop team would, when asked this question, point to the upcoming product launch, whose date we kept moving out further into the future as we tried to improve the design of Le Whif, now a third time, and work out a business model in the absence of a huge demand.

The team geared up for the commercial launch over regular late-evening drinks at the neighborhood café. Production costs needed to be lowered, simplicity improved, and more chocolate added, among other things.

With so much happening then at Le Laboratoire--the global financial crisis having fully settled down on us--our product development was spotty and informal. We did the best we could with limited time and resources. After many delays, the date of the launch was set for April 29, 2009. There would be a world tour to bring Le Whif to major cities and accustom people to the notion of breathing chocolate. We put together communication materials and planned a launch that resembled the opening of an art exhibition, which was the only kind of opening we knew. Our message was philosophical. Breathe chocolate and experience food as an artistic act. If chocolate failed, we had other ideas--inhaled spices, inhaled steak, inhaled coffee. Thierry Marx began to think about it all.

Four weeks before the scheduled launch in Paris, something very surprising happened. In his first months working for us, when he was still living in Cambridge, Tom Hadfield helped us put the business plan of LaboGroup in shape. In the midst of this he sent a note in early April saying that he was about to start a buzz campaign by Internet. Distracted by the challenges of the launch, we didn't take special notice. Tom's note probably arrived on a Thursday. The campaign was to begin the next day, he wrote.

On Saturday morning Tom reported that some blogging had started and the traffic on the Internet site had doubled. We received another note from Tom on Sunday. Internet traffic had doubled again. Similar messages came on Monday and Tuesday. By then Internet orders for Le Whif were flooding in. Several major blog sites picked up the story midweek, and on Wednesday the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe wanted to do interviews. "The world has been waiting for breathable chocolate!" Tom wrote ecstatically in one of the many emails now zipping across the ocean. By the end of the week the Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS Morning News had asked for the product to test. We had waves of orders and media requests from England, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, India, Thailand, Japan, Poland, and other countries.

The world had awakened to the idea that we had a new, surprising commercial product. But we actually didn't. We were unprepared. The day before the April 29 launch I was in Washington, D.C., to give a talk at the National Institutes of Health on work I was doing related to infectious diseases. On my way from the airport I received an email from Jonathan Kamler explaining that Le Whif had arrived, filled with chocolate and properly packaged. But, when he took it out of its packaging to test it, Jonathan discovered it didn't function properly. He couldn't even open it. Out of a hundred Whifs, perhaps thirty worked. In a lightning decision, we decided to hand pick the new product, throw out the defective ones, and launch the next day. Thankfully, the surprise of the product, the suddenness of international public reaction, and the bizarre atmosphere of the FoodLab, with Thierry Marx presiding over lunch, helped everyone ignore that day how unreliable this first product actually was.

The team was invited a few weeks later to the Cannes Film Festival to help animate the beachfront terrace café of the Majestic Hotel. For two weeks young women walked between café tables from noon through mid-afternoon. Shoulder straps held serving trays from which they offered free Whifs, like vendors selling hotdogs at a baseball game. Later that month the team traveled to Chicago for the All Candy Show. This went relatively smoothly, and by the end of the month we ran out of the first faulty stock--15,000 Whifs.

A new shipment arrived in July, and until October 2009 it performed mostly as we wished it to, particularly in the hands of those educated to use it or patient enough to learn how to use it even when it dusted your knees with chocolate, or when the chocolate flew into your mouth in one quick burst, or when the inhaler arrived empty, because of some glitch in the filling, packaging, and transporting process. While we received many disappointed notes from customers who received Le Whif and either did not understand it or experienced a malfunction in one of these ways, we also received notes from at least as many customers delighted by the product, who understood Le Whif even with all its youthful blemishes, and who remained hopeful about ordering more, particularly once we'd figured out the issues of manufacture and supply.

The experiment continued. In October we produced an even more reliable chocolate inhaler that began to sell in Lafayette Gourmet within the flagship Galeries Lafayette store. Helped by a brilliant chocolate expert, we completely changed the packaging and marketing of the product to better signal our commercial intentions while preparing the launch of a fully commercial Whif at the end of January 2010. This final product was launched at Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, and later that spring in Dylan's Candy Bar in New York City and other locations around the United States, such as the gourmet shop Cardullo's in Harvard Square. That same spring the product launched in England within the House of Fraser in London and in many other cities and towns around the United Kingdom.

Le Whif's commercial appearance mobilized the entire network of artscience labs. LaboGroup ran the business, Le Laboratoire curated the idea through exhibitions, The Laboratory at Harvard introduced the product during its opening in 2009, and the Idea Translation Lab at Cloud Place organized a few high school whiffing parties. Through sales, Le Whif would benefit all the artscience labs eventually; but this was not the reason why Le Whif went on exhibit in Paris or animated parties in the United States. The labs participated in this experiment mostly because Le Whif was a surprising idea, conceived with students at the intersection of aerosol science and culinary art, and, while fun, it also expressed something essential about what each lab did, or wished to do, with students, creators, and the public.

More than a commercial product, Le Whif carried the creative process outside lab borders. We wished the product to be understood in its original art-as-process context. This was signaled by the launch parties in Paris and, later, at the Cannes Film Festival, in Chicago, in Cambridge, and elsewhere. It was signaled by the early silver balloon packaging we used, and by the "airline tickets" we handed out to explain what we had in mind with the "world tour" promotion. Our sales approach reflected a lab sensibility; it did not reflect a reasoned analysis of the market.

Le Whif traversed the entire idea funnel. It started as a catalyst of education, soon became a catalyst of cultural exploration, and went on to be a catalyst of commercial sales revenue that helped keep our labs running. It also inspired new culinary art and science experiments, from whiffed coffee, which launched in the spring of 2010, to whiffed vitamins, scheduled to launch later within the year. And on the horizon was yet another design, Le Whaf, which I conceived with the French designer Marc Bretillot as a new way to "drink by breathing." This was a new form of food--a standing cloud of flavor that falls between a liquid and a gas, just as whiffed food fell somewhere between a solid and a gas.

From The Lab: Creativity and Culture by David Edwards. Copyright © 2010 by David Edwards. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

FT: A poetic disappearance

Excerpt: As always, hearing literary translators talk about their work reminded me of the immense difficulty, creativity and importance of the task. A literary text is woven in a particular language as intimately as a garment is woven in a particular fabric. Once the fabric is changed, all sorts of minute yet invisible adjustments of tailoring need to be made. The original suit cannot be reproduced in every detail.

===

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8cf344c8-0d51-11e0-82ff-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz19DVFqk19

A poetic disappearance

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2010 22:04 | Last updated: December 23 2010 22:04

Illustration by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from the new Collector’s Library edition of ‘The Little Prince’

Part of the attraction of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is surely its air of mystery. The tale itself is mysterious – part realistic, the plane and its pilot marooned in the desert; part fanciful, the Prince and his planet and flower – and it ends on the biggest of question marks.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Christmas cards: the angel is in the detail - Dec-17

Naples: a city in need of mercy - Dec-03

In praise of cultivation - Nov-26

Barred from freedom - Nov-19

How far back can we go? - Nov-13

The essence of humanity - Nov-05

But that mystery has been enhanced by the mystery of the author’s death, in a plane crash in 1944 off the French Riviera; fragments of what was probably the plane and a bracelet belonging to Saint-Exupéry were recovered more than 50 years later.

This was not just any old plane crash, but one full of romance: a professional pilot, but too old and injured for active service, the anti-Fascist but also anti-de Gaulle airman had to cajole the Free French authorities to allow him to resume reconnaissance flights. Explanations for the crash have ranged from suicide – Saint-Exupéry was acutely depressed in the months before he died – to downing by a German fighter. Reading his own accounts of flying early passenger planes, you would not discount engine failure.

I have to admit straightaway that I have always – until now – resisted The Little Prince. I would not go so far as Andre Gregory in the film My Dinner with Andre, who found something repulsive, even fascistic, in the tale, but my nose detected a whiff of tweeness. Could the bestselling book ever written in the French language be little more than a flimsy whimsy?

Two new versions – Joann Sfar’s graphic adaptation, translated by Sarah Ardizzone, and a translation by Ros Schwartz – both of which were the subject of a discussion at the French Institute recently, have forced me to reconsider. Even quite radical reimaginings such as Sfar’s seem particularly pertinent because The Little Prince combines its high poetic polish with such an obvious air of incompleteness. My sense is that the work comes out of an agonising tension between a desire for a perpetual childhood, and a recognition of adult ties or commitments, which Saint-Exupéry never resolved – unless he resolved it by pushing the joystick down towards the blue waters of the Med.

But for translators, the questions and problems are not so speculative but eminently practical. How, for example, do you translate that famous opening request by the Little Prince, which in French consists of the words: “S’il vous plaît ... dessine-moi un mouton.”

It sounds simple but mouton in French can mean either sheep or lamb. Sarah Ardizzone and Ros Schwartz, in her beautifully judged Collector’s Library version, come to different conclusions for excellent reasons. Schwartz opts for lamb because “‘Please ... draw me a sheep’ ... was not something I could imagine a child saying spontaneously.” Ardizzone takes the opposite view: “I actually like the plosive, slightly cartoony sound of ‘sheep’. I didn’t want any echoes of ‘lamb of God’ in what is already a spiritually charged text.” Ardizzone’s sheep had another advantage: it enabled her to translate the Pilot’s exasperated “Il me broute avec son mouton celui-là” (literally, “He gets on my nerves with that sheep/lamb of his”) as the brilliant “I wish he’d stop bleating on about his sheep.”

How do you translate another of the Little Prince’s deceptively simple and childlike sayings: “Quand on a terminé sa toilette du matin il faut faire soigneusement la toilette du planète”? Not easy at all. As Schwartz says, “I could think of no single expression in English that worked for both a person and a planet.” Her solution – “Once you’ve brushed your hair and cleaned your teeth, then you clean your planet” – for once doesn’t sound quite right to me, a little too brisk and prosaic, lacking in Saint-Exupéry’s cosmic and ecological resonance.

As always, hearing literary translators talk about their work reminded me of the immense difficulty, creativity and importance of the task. A literary text is woven in a particular language as intimately as a garment is woven in a particular fabric. Once the fabric is changed, all sorts of minute yet invisible adjustments of tailoring need to be made. The original suit cannot be reproduced in every detail.

On the other hand, literary translation is just part of the unending process by which, as Auden put it in his great elegy for Yeats, “the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living”. The literary tailor-translator cannot copy the original suit, but she or he must come up with a suit for contemporary taste. Who knows, a translator may sometimes improve on the original.

Sfar’s bold graphic reworking, and Ardizzone’s fresh, unsentimental text remove the troublesome whimsy from The Little Prince. Do they also remove some of the mystery? Whereas Saint-Exupéry’s flower hovers on the border between floweriness and capricious femininity, Sfar’s flower is more openly and nakedly seductive. The Pilot-narrator becomes a much more tangible presence than in the original – an improvement, I feel. In one respect, though, Sfar in his concluding drawings deepens the mystery, poetically connecting the Little Prince’s disappearance with the author’s own last flight.

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: Stories from a real-life comic book hero

Stories from a real-life comic book hero

By Peter Marsh

Published: October 31 2010 22:14 | Last updated: October 31 2010 22:14

Schoolchildren in the Japanese city of Kyoto have been grappling recently with an unorthodox addition to their reading: a manga-style comic book that tells the story of Shigenobu Nagamori, an extrovert Japanese electronics entrepreneur whose company has grown from humble beginnings to become one of the world’s biggest makers of electric motors.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Nidec eyes GE and Bosch motor units - Oct-31

Nidec to buy Emerson motor unit - Aug-18

Kyoto cluster: Tea ceremonies to transistors - Mar-17

Nice work if you do not mind cleaning toilets - Jun-06

The chief executive of Nidec – who started his company in 1973 and remains chief executive – is depicted on the cover of the book (pictured below) as something akin to a Japanese version of Superman, described in garish kanji characters as “the man who is hotter than the sun”.

A 90-minute conversation with Mr Nagamori in his office on the 20th floor of Nidec’s Kyoto headquarters is a frenetic affair. Speaking in his characteristic high-speed staccato, at such a pace that the translator struggles to keep up, the former engineer explains why it is important to convey stories such as his to young people as a way of stimulating the formation of new companies.

“I believe if you want to be an engineer, money’s not the only thing. Engineers are often pursuing a dream about inventing new products that will benefit other people. I think you’ve got to put this dream to people, and that’s the way to motivate them.”

In Mr Nagamori’s case, his dream was using what was in the 1970s a novel concept – an electronically controlled, or brushless, design – to change the operation of conventional motors.

Brushless motors can reduce the energy consumption of electric motors by up to a third and promise to make a big impact on cutting the world’s total power needs.

“Fifty years ago, what we call the ‘rice’ of industry – the most mainstream product that drives everything else – was steel and 25 years ago it was semiconductors. But today it’s the electric motor,” proclaims Mr Nagamori, a lean and fit-looking 66-year-old.

“Look inside a car, and it’s got about 80 motors. In a few years’ time – especially with the emergence of electric vehicles – you will probably see 160 motors in each car. In 1973, when I started my company, the average American household contained 60 motors, [while today] it’s close to 150.”

Mr Nagamori is well known in Japan for making outspoken comments and indulging in slightly eccentric practices: he insists on being the “number one” in everything he does, for instance, when travelling by jet or in the bullet train. When Nidec built its new headquarters in 2003, Mr Nagamori demanded it was the tallest building by far in his home city.

One of his favoured management tenets is to make all new graduates who start at Nidec spend a good part of their first year cleaning out the company toilets. “It’s to convey the idea that life in companies isn’t always easy,” Mr Nagamori explains. With a stake of 14 per cent in Nidec, he is ranked by Forbes magazine as Japan’s 13th wealthiest person.

Mr Nagamori’s background was far from propitious. Growing up in a tiny three-room house on the edge of Kyoto with six brothers and sisters, he says he learnt important lessons from his parents.

He used to help his father – a farmer who eked out a living growing vegetables – to sell the produce in markets in the centre of the city. The youthful Mr Nagamori could never understand why the older man refused to sell his remaining stock at a discount at the end of the day, preferring to throw it in the river as the two of them walked home.

“But my father told me that if you’ve developed something with your whole heart and brain, it’s something special ... He told me that if you wanted to make a success of your life, you should value what you do, recognise the worth of your products, and do your utmost to keep the prices as high as you can achieve.”

After gaining a scholarship to study electronics engineering at university, Mr Nagamori worked for two Japanese engineering companies before deciding to start Nidec in 1973. The oil shock of that year, he says, gave him the chance to make a success out of his new “brushless” designs.

“Energy costs went up a lot. I reasoned that energy was becoming a commodity that people would value.”

But his mother initially tried to talk him out of this idea, arguing that by taking a gamble he might lose everything. “[Then] she asked me: ‘Are you ready to work twice as hard as everyone else? If other people work eight hours a day, are you going to work 16 hours?’”

The CV

Born: 1944 in Kyoto
Education: 1963-67 Studied electronics engineering at Tokyo Polytechnic University.
Career: 1967-70 Worked as an engineer at TEAC, the audio equipment-maker, in Tokyo.
1970-73 Joined Yamashina Seiki, a precision engineering company in Kyoto that was setting up an electric motor division.
1973 Set up Nidec, where he is chairman and chief executive, with funds of Y20m that he had saved up through selling shares in TEAC.
Hobbies: Calligraphy

After Mr Nagamori assured her on this point, his mother quietened down, and gave the venture her blessing, he recalls. With a hint of melodrama, he goes on: “At the end of the day, if I’m tempted to slacken off, I can look out [of his 20th floor office] and see my mother’s grave. I say to her on these occasions: ‘I made you that promise, [and] I am still working.’”

The stories of Mr Nagamori’s childhood are laid out – in a series of graphic pictures and with a fast-paced dialogue – in the Nidec-published manga book. It seems the 5,000 children aged 10 to 15 who have received the publications have been impressed.

“We’ve had a very enthusiastic response [to the books],” says Mr Nagamori. “Children read [them], and take them home to their families. And they then have a discussion, which I think is a good idea, because you have to get the mothers and fathers involved as well.”

He hopes his life story might trigger the impulse in a young person to do something similar.

“It’s necessary to say that this [setting up a company] is a worthwhile goal for a young person, as distinct from them going to work for a company that is already established.”

This year, Nidec is expected to have sales of nearly $8bn, two-thirds of which is likely to come from electric motors, the rest from other devices the company makes, such as electronic components. It has almost 100,000 employees, most of them in Asian countries outside Japan, including China, Thailand and Vietnam, where the company has most of its factories.

Nearly all the 1.2bn motors Nidec is likely to make this year are small units that fit into devices such as hard disk drives; most of the world’s desktop computers plus mobile gadgets such as the Apple iPod have inside them at least one Nidec motor.

But, helped by a series of acquisitions, including the purchase in the summer of the motor division of Emerson, the big US engineering group, the company is also branching out into bigger motors of the type found in domestic appliances, cars and factory machinery.

Mr Nagamori has given no hint of any ideas about retirement: he has set out plans to keep expanding the company partly on the basis of more acquisitions, with his goal being to reach sales of Y10,000bn (about $110bn at today’s exchange rates) by 2030, when he would be in his mid-80s.

In keeping with Mr Nagamori’s long-term way of planning, he is willing to be patient. He says he started talking to David Farr, the chief executive of Emerson, about buying the company’s motor division some 10 years ago. “He [Mr Farr] said he doubted Nidec had the capability to make this purchase in the near future. He suspected that it might be a bit too much of a risk for Nidec,” Mr Nagamori recalls.

After being initially “a little bit angry” at this response, Mr Nagamori says he resolved to wait for Mr Farr to change his mind – which he eventually did, with a deal to sell the division for an undisclosed sum being finally agreed in a meeting between the two men four months ago. Emerson declined to comment on the circumstances behind the deal.

Asked about his extrovert style, which is in marked contrast to the conservative approach of most Japanese business leaders, he says that much of this has come about from Nidec’s exposure to foreign businesses, many of them based in the US. “I’ve always loved the US; I like the approach to communications.”

Ike Takeda, chief executive of Nichicon, another Kyoto-based electronics manufacturer, and a friend of Mr Nagamori, says that in a few years’ time the Nidec man’s approach may not seem so unusual.

“More Japanese business people have had the experience of operating on a global basis and are becoming more outgoing – which is, I think, good thing for Japan as a whole,” Mr Takeda says.

Mr Nagamori says he spends little time worrying whether his approach fits in with the prevailing trends in Japanese business circles.

“I tend to say what I mean. And people, of course, know me. When they hear me say something, they say: ‘He’s just being Nagamori’ ... Perhaps I am treated as an exception.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: A timely guide to being a better manager

A timely guide to being a better manager

By Peter Whitehead

Published: September 29 2010 19:21 | Last updated: September 29 2010 19:21

Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be the best... and learn from the worst
By Robert Sutton
Business Plus $23.99/Little Brown £10.99

It can be a mighty relief when a disliked boss decides to leave, creating a dangerous moment during which emotions must be kept in check.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Business books: Guide to greasy-pole climbing - Sep-29

Business books: How the web will save the world - Sep-08

Book review: Rich history of Lehman’s demise - Sep-01

Band shows us how to knock ’em dead - Aug-26

Business books: Stay tuned for Bronfman’s story - Aug-18

Business books: Inventor of modern marketing - Aug-11

It can certainly be a mistake to follow the example of one employee I knew who pinned a departing manager against a wall and told him, in robust language, to go away and not come back. Unfortunately, the manager returned a year later to an even more senior position.

Anecdotes such as this abound in Robert Sutton’s book Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be the best...and learn from the worst. Without them, it would be a brief and colourless exhortation to use common sense and treat people with respect when in a position of authority.

With them, it paints a terrifying picture of workplaces randomly blessed with paragons of virtue or damned with dysfunctional misfits at the helm.

Sutton is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University and in 2007, he declared war on bullies and incompetents, who make life for those around them a misery, in his book The No Asshole Rule.

He reports that this prompted thousands of readers to send him messages, convincing him that the modern workplace is plagued with “assholes” – commonly those in charge.

This follow-up takes a closer look at bosses: the things they should and should not do; the central role they play in the lives of their teams; and the damage they can do to those around them and to their business.

It pulls no punches into laying into the bad bosses. There are allegations of employees being physically tortured – one incident of “waterboarding” during a company picnic resulted in a lawsuit – and tales of people being fired by e-mail.

Mistreated employees become resentful, demotivated, obstructive and energised only by the thought of revenge.

Bad bosses are labelled “clueless and coldhearted” and accused of causing far-reaching damage to their teams and their companies. They “make people sick”, says Sutton.

To back this up, we hear of a 10-year Swedish study of 3,000 workers that found “those with lousy bosses suffered far more heart attacks”. Sutton comments: “I would call those lousy Swedish bosses incompetent assholes.”

Then there are the good examples, such as the Oakland police sergeant who was so widely respected that several veteran officers chose the unpopular all-night graveyard shift so they could work alongside him.

Alternating between the heartwarmingly enlightened and the blood-curdlingly awful is good knockabout stuff, but will bad bosses learn from it? Will they even pick up this book?

Sutton offers various strategies for improvement, such as imagining your 14-year-old son is following you around all day: how proud of you would he feel?

Sutton himself acknowledges that one of the offenders’ worst traits is self-delusion: bad bosses could read the book from cover to cover without recognising themselves.

Having made the case repeatedly that managers need to consider others in everything they do, Sutton’s perhaps counter-intuitive conclusion is that they have to accept the role is all about themselves: their own behaviour is infectious and will be copied; everything they do will be watched and noted.

Is this good advice? The world’s worst boss, David Brent of The Office TV comedy series (renamed Michael Scott in the US series) believes exactly that, with his constant “look at me” antics. But he is utterly lacking in common sense and compassion. So perhaps the best advice would be that anyone without these traits should please do everyone a favour and steer clear of management.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: A guide to climbing the greasy pole

A guide to climbing the greasy pole

Review by Morgen Witzel

Published: September 29 2010 23:17 | Last updated: September 29 2010 23:17

Power
Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t
By Jeffrey Pfeffer
HarperBusiness $27.99/£18.99

“Almost anything is possible in attaining positions of power,” begins Jeffrey Pfeffer’s new book. “You can get yourself into a high-power position even under the most unlikely circumstances if you have the requisite skill.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Business books: How the web will save the world - Sep-08

Book review: Rich history of Lehman’s demise - Sep-01

Band shows us how to knock ’em dead - Aug-26

Business books: Stay tuned for Bronfman’s story - Aug-18

Business books: Inventor of modern marketing - Aug-11

UK management guru deserves a revival - Aug-04

As the text makes clear, “skill” does not necessarily have anything to do with being exceptionally knowledgeable or good at one’s job. Instead, skill lies in knowing about the levers of power: where they are, how to pull them and what to do next.

Pfeffer, a professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University, is a long-time observer of the corporate world, and knows whereof he speaks. He writes fluently of his subject, using anonymous case studies of people he has known over the years.

After discussing how people should prepare themselves to achieve power, Pfeffer then looks at such essential skills as how to get noticed by the right people, how to build networks with the right people, how to build a reputation and how to overcome opposition.

These skills are described in detail with plenty of practical suggestions. If any readers fancy a career in greasy pole-climbing, then this is the book for you. Like all of Pfeffer’s books, this one is highly readable, interesting and at times entertaining. On one level, it is also deeply honest.

“Power” is not a very fashionable word these days. Most powerful people, especially in business, try quite hard not to appear too powerful. Democracy, inclusiveness, sharing, being mutually supportive; these are supposed to be the most valued qualities in an executive.

So it is actually quite refreshing to read a book that talks openly about power and acknowledges its uses in frank terms. Powerful people, says Pfeffer, tend to be the ones who get things done. They are also wealthier, live longer and have a better quality of life. So, power is good.

And yet, there is also a strong streak of intellectual dishonesty running right through the book. Power has consequences and, apart from one chapter – a very good and thoughtful chapter, it should be said – on the consequences of power for those who have it, Pfeffer never comes to terms with the uses and abuses of power. Nor does he describe what the wielding of power by one person does to others around them.

Partly this is because he never really explains what power is. I looked through the book in vain for a definition. But in most standard definitions, power means control over other things, and particularly other people. It means getting other people to do what you want them to do, and it can mean getting them to do things they themselves do not want to do.

Any observer of Pfeffer’s experience and knowledge must know this. So why the omission?

None of the people in the case studies acts dishonestly or unethically, nor are they even particularly ruthless. This means the book contrasts unfavourably with older works such as Machiavelli’s The Prince or Eustache de Refuge’s Treatise on the Court, or the more recent studies of power by Manfred Kets de Vries which go deep into the psychology of power.

These works discuss power as a moral issue, and talk about the consequences of having power and its morally corrosive effects on those who have it. As Lord Acton said, power corrupts.

But there is no acknowledgement of that here. This book is about getting power and keeping it, nothing more. It assumes that power is benign and benevolent, and we know that this is not always the case.

That said, this is never less than an interesting read, and some chapters are particularly good.

The section on the reasons why people lose power, for example, ought to be required reading for would-be leaders. Many of them are so intent on reaching the top that they have no real idea of what they will do when they finally get there. They either become prey to inertia, so paralysed by the responsibilities of power that they fail to act decisively, or they fall prey to factions among their followers and are destroyed. (Would-be prime ministers in particular, take note.)

The chapter on networking also makes some useful points about building networks with the right people and the consequences of choosing the wrong ones.

This sounds like common sense, but choosing the wrong allies in an organisation can be a sure way to failure; networking partners have to be chosen with care. It reminded me of a recent novel, Dork, by Sidin Vadukut. It is the tale of a trainee management consultant with an unerring ability to network with the wrong people.

Pfeffer’s book includes an excellent summary that makes an important point: if you do not take power over your own life, then someone else will. It is up to you to protect your own life, your career, your future; no one else will do it for you.

Perhaps for that reason alone, this book is worth reading.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: End of road for National Stadium

Prime News

Home > Prime News > Story

Sep 30, 2010

End of road for National Stadium

Demolition finally begins on 37-year-old arena after three-year delay

By Terrence Voon

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SPORTS HUB IN 2014

Demolition machines (above) starting to tear down the iconic 37-year-old stadium yesterday. The demolition works will be completed by March next year. The stadium, which hosted three SEA Games and 18 National Day Parades, will make way for the $1.33 billion Sports Hub, slated to open in April 2014. -- ST PHOTO: RAJ NADARAJAN

 

THE first slabs of concrete fell at the National Stadium yesterday, as construction of the long-awaited Singapore Sports Hub finally got under way.

Three years after the works were originally slated to begin and nine years after the idea was first mooted, four demolition machines set about tearing down the iconic 37-year-old stadium.

Delivering the cue for the demolition at the official ground-breaking ceremony yesterday was Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Vivian Balakrishnan.

He was joined by about 100 invited guests, many of whom were former local sports stars who enjoyed their heyday at the Kallang arena. Some, like former sprint queen Glory Barnabas, held back tears as the famous grey grandstand was reduced to rubble and dust.

'It was here that I beat the Burmese girl (Than Than) in a photo finish,' she recalled, referring to her women's 200m victory at the 1973 South-east Asian Peninsular Games. 'I feel a tinge of sadness, even though I know it's for the better.'

The stadium, which hosted three SEA Games and 18 National Day Parades, will make way for the $1.33 billion Sports Hub, slated to open in April 2014.

The centrepiece of the integrated facility is a 55,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof. Other key features include a 6,000-capacity indoor Aquatic Centre, a water sports centre, and 41,000 sq m of commercial space.

The project had been hit by repeated delays due to rising construction costs and financing constraints caused by the 2008 economic crisis.

Its completion date was pushed back four times - from this year to next year, 2012 and then 2013, before the current projected date of April 2014. The postponements meant that Singapore had to give up its hosting rights for the 2013 SEA Games.

But Singapore Sports Council chairman Alex Chan said the delays, while regrettable, gave the planners more time to improve on the Sports Hub's original design.

'The team sorted out a lot of the technical concepts and that's a big plus,' he said.

'It is my belief that we are in a much stronger shape, both from a design and concept standpoint and also (in terms of) the people who are backing the project (financially).'

The improvements include providing better access between buildings, enhancing the road network around the Sports Hub, and refining the design of the stadium's roof and retractable seats.

The Singapore Sports Hub Consortium (SSHC), which won the bid in 2007 to design, build and manage the facility, said yesterday that demolition works will be completed by March next year.

When the stadium opens its doors in 2014, a sports and entertainment festival lasting several weeks will be held to mark the occasion.

Thereafter, there will be a year-round series of events to keep the Sports Hub humming, and these may include an Asean Football League and Twenty20 cricket matches.

Said Mr Ludwig Reichhold, managing director of Dragages Singapore, which heads the SSHC: 'The old National Stadium was an icon in its own right - where many of Singapore's best memories were made.

'We can only aim to better this with the completion of what will be another national - and hopefully international - landmark, a place Singaporeans can look on with pride.'

[email protected]

===

Prime News

Home > Prime News > Story

Sep 30, 2010

New book chronicles history of 'Grand Old Dame'

 

IN ITS 37 years of service to Singapore, it was known affectionately as the Grand Old Dame. But those fretting at the prospect of losing a piece of history as the National Stadium makes way for the future need not worry.

Even as the first blocks of concrete fell from its grey walls yesterday, its memories have been immortalised in the book The Dream Lives On.

It was launched during yesterday's ground-breaking ceremony for the much-anticipated Singapore Sports Hub.

Built in 1973 to the tune of $50 million, the national icon, which has hosted 18 National Day Parades and countless events in the past, has been captured in vivid detail by the book's author, Mr Godfrey Robert.

Said Mr Robert, 63, a former sports editor of The Straits Times who is currently The New Paper's consulting editor (sports): 'When I was approached to write the book, I gladly accepted it because I wanted to tell the stories from my heart... it was written with a sporting passion, not just from a spectator's point of view but also as participant in some of its activities.'

The coffee table book also chronicles the lives of sporting stars who have graced its hallowed premises, including 1960 Olympic silver medallist Tan Howe Liang and Singapore's favourite footballing son, Fandi Ahmad. Priced at $20, the book will be on sale at selected Singapore Sports Council sports and recreation centres.

LEE MIN KOK

ST: Thinker Mover Shaker - Dr Goh Keng Swee

Insight

Home > Insight > Story

Sep 25, 2010

Thinker Mover Shaker

Dr Goh's brilliance and practical mindset could be detected in a rally speech he gave two months before the 1959 elections. That contained his basic ideas about Singapore's economic situation, and in it, he gave a listing of the island's disadvantages. -- ST FILE PHOTOS

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Dr Goh Keng Swee's life spanned 92 years, four ministries and countless policies that undergird the Singapore of today. The late deputy prime minister, who died on May 14 this year, was the quintessential thinker among the country's founding leaders. From his entry in a limerick competition at age 13, to his thoughts on the emergence of China at age 76, his writings are gathered and analysed in a book by Dr Ooi Kee Beng, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. In Lieu Of Ideology: An Intellectual Biography Of Goh Keng Swee will be launched on Oct 4. Here are edited excerpts from the book.

'My Ambitions'

GOH demonstrated early in life a talent, if not a need, for writing.

At the age of 13, he won a consolation prize of five Straits dollars in a newspaper competition. The paper had published a limerick without its punch line, requesting that competitors provide it.

It read:

'A planter cried out in affliction,

If only they'd give me restriction,

It might end all my woes.

But as everyone knows,

...........'

Restriction here referred to curbs on the planting of new rubber trees. Goh's concluding submission was: 'It's only a planter's conviction.'

Goh later published a couple of noteworthy short pieces in the school magazine, the first of which was written before he had turned 13 years of age.

'My Ambitions (1931)

Anybody who wants to prosper in this world must have an ambition. Ambition comes from a thought or when we get enthusiastic, we determine to carry out our thought. He who has an ambition will do his best to satisfy himself. He will stick to his work and see that he is the best man that ever has done that work. Our ambition must be to make ourselves useful to our country, our people and ourselves.'

This early document is fascinating for a variety of reasons.

First, we see a boy who is certainly more philosophical than his age would coax us to expect. Not only does he show conviction that ambition is critical to success, but he wishes to persuade others of that as well.

Second, this ambition goes beyond itself and has ethical goals, namely serve 'our country, our people and ourselves'.

Singapore's disadvantages

TWO months before the 1959 elections, Goh spoke at a rally at Dhoby Ghaut. That speech contained his basic ideas about Singapore's economic situation.

It was in his symmetric listing that day of the island's disadvantages that we detect his brilliance and his practical mindset.

Despite Singapore's fortunate location, he said, the free entry of foreign goods made it extremely risky for local capital to go into manufacturing. Second, as long as import duties had to be paid on goods going into the Federation, investors would prefer to establish factories in Johor than in Singapore. He also realised that not only was the general technological skill level among Singaporeans not up to standard, but training facilities too were 'grossly inadequate'. All these had to change.

To achieve that, Goh contended, a common market comprising the Federation of Malaya and Singapore was necessary. Goh would remain strongly convinced of the correctness of this analysis, and the subsequent failure to reach agreement on a common market with his counterpart in Kuala Lumpur, his second cousin Tan Siew Sin, was a pivotal reason for the separation of Singapore from Malaysia in August 1965.

Fear of PAP leaders being 'butchered'

WHEN relations between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore began sliding from dreadful to dangerous, Goh took it upon himself to work for a separation, and kept it secret from the British as well as certain members of the Singapore Cabinet who were deeply involved in PAP ventures on the peninsular mainland. 'Rajaratnam's histrionics' was also upsetting Goh.

Apparently playing his role as Minister of Finance to the hilt, Goh mentioned to Australia's representative in Singapore William Beale Pritchard just five days before the separation that 'Singapore might just as well be out of Malaysia if KL was not going to cooperate economically'.

He feared that the PAP leaders would all be 'butchered', and after Lee Kuan Yew's 'moment of anguish' in signing the document for separation on Monday, Aug 9, 1965, Goh confided in Pritchard about 'the long haul ahead and the need for hard work' with 'none of the nonsense of the last six months'.

As a further sign of how frenzied and insecure the political situation had become by July of that year, Goh, being perhaps the Singaporean leader least emotional about Malaysia, remarked further to Pritchard that 'Lee would be kept under control'.

On the day of separation, the Finance portfolio was handed over to Lim Kim San while he took over the Ministry of Interior and Defence, apparently feeling that priority had to be given to Singapore's physical safety.

The PAP leadership managed nevertheless to stay sufficiently united during these critical times. Over the next two years, Goh rushed through the establishment of the Singapore Armed Forces, national service and the Singapore Air Force. By August 1967, he was back at his Finance post.

The policy that doesn't work

ON JAN 13, 1971, Goh was asked to officiate at the opening of the Seminar on Modernisation in South-east Asia organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

In the post-colonial world, import substitution became the common path towards development. It appeased national demands for genuine independence and made economic sense to the national economists. And yet, in almost all cases, it failed to work.

Goh advocated that the logic was flawed in the first place. While the rationale aspired to cut foreign interests down to size, it actually could not.

First, import substitution required heavy investments in machinery and equipment that had to be imported from overseas. Second, local demand for import-substituting goods was usually low. In order to right this weakness, governments began either protecting certain firms through high tariffs and encouraging monopolies or providing subsidies. Success in business in such a milieu would depend on 'obtaining official permits and licences more than on efficient production and management', paving the way for corruption.

What was more harmful, Goh claimed, were the non-economic effects. The original goal was after all to spread new technologies and 'new social attitudes appropriate to modern societies' - 'respect for hard work, innovation, a meritocratic system of personnel selection and advancement, continuous striving for greater efficiency, in short, achievement-orientation'.

Need for elite to serve NS

GOH moved for the second reading in Parliament of the National Service (Amendments) Bill on March 13, 1967.

He presented the reasons for the special kind of defence that Singapore needed, the foremost of which was that the absence of a viable defence would mean that the island 'must revert to a colony or satellite of whoever wishes to afford it protection'. Furthermore, small states that failed to look after themselves invited civil war and disorder, tempting larger states to intervene.

Another important reason was the contribution it would make to the nation-building process.

One of Goh's strongest arguments was that 'many of our monied and intellectual elite' had failed to realise that 'their status and position (could) be justified and maintained only if they (undertook) a responsibility in the defence of the nation consistent with their position'.

Another line of thought entertained by Goh where defence was concerned involved Singapore being a 'rootless, migrant parvenu society'.

'(In a society without deep roots), minor success brings about overconfidence and the belief the good times last forever; minor setbacks send people into a state of nervousness. In this situation, the Singaporean lends his ears to rumours of all kinds. Nothing is too absurd for him to listen to and pass on to others.'

The rumours he referred to were about him leading a Cabinet faction against Lee Kuan Yew in order to seek the latter's resignation and a re-merger with Malaysia. The 'gullibility' of Singaporeans on this point which he considered 'bizarre' and a 'patent absurdity' was what worried him.

Singapore's 'brainless young'

THROUGHOUT his life, he held strong views that he voiced publicly about what can only be called 'The Human Element', and how this impinged on the best-laid plans of mice and men, including Goh.

Where defence was concerned, human weaknesses such as self-deception, complacency, laziness and cowardice, or the propensity of commanders to put show before substance, could easily lead to disaster. Partly for this reason, he sought to raise the technological know-how of the army and the country, just as his handling of Singapore's economy had led to enormous and effective institutions being generated to lead growth and avoid disaster.

Economic development for non-advanced countries required a social revolution of a certain type. First, an educated citizenry was needed. With literacy came an awareness of the 'benefits of economic development' as well as a social discipline that would guide citizens away from 'frivolous pursuits' towards 'a fuller and more cultured life'.

The second important factor for growth was 'the opportunity which a society afforded to those with talent, ability and skills to rise to the position for which they were best fitted'. For this to happen, an able leadership free from corruption was needed.

Later in 1967, he gave a reply in Parliament on the possible opening of a casino in Singapore to boost tourism. He was opposed to it unless two conditions were fulfilled: it would bring 'substantial benefits to Singapore' and 'firm safeguards against Singaporeans using it' were put in place. The human element, especially in fellow Singaporeans, was evidently a source of worry to him.

On Dec 10, 1972, Goh famously warned that the practice among young Singaporeans of copying Western fashions would turn the country into a nation of 'Wogs'.

'Wogs' - short for Westernised Oriental Gentlemen - was a term of contempt originally used by British civil servants for English-educated Indians. 'The brainless young, who follow Western fashions and wear long hair are part of the Wog culture of Singapore. Wog women wear mini-skirts and nylon stockings and think they look smashing.'

However, what he seemed to think was the problem was what he saw to be evidence of a lack of 'a set of sound basic values'. 'An understanding of one's own cultural heritage and a knowledge of the history of one's own people would help to give a man some cultural ballast.'

Goh's concern grew about the negative moral and psychological problems that Singapore's speed of advancement and its need to adapt to global dynamics had generated. Causing worry were two things: 'the wholesale adoption of a foreign language and the chase after money'.

PAP Govt welcomes controversy

IN AUGUST 1978, Goh was tasked by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to 'look into the problems of the Ministry of Education with a team of your own choice'.

But in 1967, he had already publicly presented views on the subject.

To start with, there had been 'far too much emphasis on academic performance'. Good performance in exams... did not say much else about the person's integrity and character, which were 'just as important as intelligence and more important than the mastering of examination technique'.

Apart from participation in physical activities, Goh identified three other aspects of education which had been neglected in Singapore: creative imagination, character and moral values.

Later that year, he attacked 'a curious view' held by some and that had been communicated to foreign diplomats and journalists that the Singapore Government disapproved of dissenting opinions, 'even to the extent of dispatching Special Branch agents to search for the heretics and persecute them in one way or another'.

The PAP Government, he said, actually welcomed controversy. The absence of open debate - apart from 'Barisan mid-summer madness' - in Singapore, except on trivial matters, was serious and had to stop. The unfounded fear of the Government, he ventured, was one reason. If that were the only reason, then the intelligentsia in Singapore would count as 'the most cowardly and spineless intelligentsia in the world'. If they really believed that they were ruled by tyranny, then it should be their duty to rebel, 'even to the point of taking up arms against the Government'.

He did, however think that there was a second and more acceptable reason for this 'deplorable absence of articulation', which was that the 'English-educated intelligentsia were uncertain of their position in society and in fact did not understand in all its complexities, the society in which they lived'.

Not pulling any punches, Goh assumed snobbishness to be a reason why the intelligentsia distanced themselves not only from the common man but also from the reality of society itself and from the ability to understand its workings.

His apparent aversion to the intelligentsia may seem odd, given that he was one of the most, if not the most, educated minister in the PAP. But the basis for this sentiment seemed to be the intelligentsia's tendency to find refuge behind a wall of privileges and abstractions. This timidity was what irritated him.

'There is a regrettable habit here to equate political views and action and even nation-building activities with passionate declamation of lofty ideals... or the striking of heroic postures and attitudes. Frankly, I find all this repellent. I am more interested in what people do, not what they say. The important thing is to tackle concrete problems as they exist, not to lay down woolly abstract principles. There are no crusades to mount, only a lot of work and a myriad of problems at all levels of society.'

When Education Ministry is more authoritarian than the army

IN PARLIAMENT on March 27, 1979, Goh claimed that his committee had identified 'real causes of trouble' in Singapore's education system. These were:

The languages of instruction in our bilingual system are not spoken at home for the great majority of schoolchildren.

The rapid switch from the Chinese stream to the English stream made necessary the mass production of teachers for the English stream schools, to the detriment of the quality of teaching.

One system of education, lasting 12 years, has been tailored to suit the brightest 12 per cent.

Basically, the motion was meant to revise the educational structure to 'allow each pupil to study at a pace suited to learning capacity', and which would make him as bilingual as possible. The ultimate goal concerned Singapore's economic future, as well as the relative importance of English vis-a-vis Chinese and other languages used in the country.

But after that came the stage of implementation.

On taking over the ministry, Goh found that although the staff had integrity and were devoted, 'the management was dreadful'. He boiled down the problem to two factors: the cult of obedience and the cult of secrecy. Strangely, the army was less authoritarian than the Education Ministry was. The army had an evidently healthier work culture than in schools where he found 'the bowing and scraping' and the 'desire to impress' too much to bear. He had actually stopped visiting them.

---

'(In a society without deep roots), minor success brings about overconfidence and the belief the good times last forever; minor setbacks send people into a state of nervousness. In this situation, the Singaporean lends his ears to rumours of all kinds. Nothing is too absurd for him to listen to and pass on to others.'

Dr Goh Keng Swee

'There is a regrettable habit here to equate political views and action and even nation-building activities with passionate declamation of lofty ideals... or the striking of heroic postures and attitudes.

Frankly, I find all this repellent... The important thing is to tackle concrete problems as they exist, not to lay down woolly abstract principles. There are no crusades to mount, only a lot of work and a myriad of problems at all levels of society.'

Dr Goh Keng Swee

Boing Boing: Enormous library desk made of books

Enormous library desk made of books

Cory Doctorow at 4:54 AM Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010

A reader writes, "Books are reused to create this enormous piece of library furniture at TU Delft architecture bibliotheek. Because the books are stacked rather than dismantled, this desk is true to its origins as well as its function."

Kaishi

Boing Boing: How to Open a New Book

How to open a new book

Mark Frauenfelder at 9:40 AM Monday, Sep 6, 2010

WSJ: Author to Bypass Publishers for Fans

MEDIA & MARKETING
AUGUST 24, 2010

Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

In a significant defection for the book industry, best-selling marketing author Seth Godin is ditching his traditional publisher, Portfolio, after a string of books and plans to sell his future works directly to his fans.

The author of about a dozen books including "Purple Cow" said he now has so many direct customer relationships, largely via his blog, that he no longer needs a traditional publisher. Mr. Godin plans to release subsequent titles himself in electronic books, via print-on-demand or in such formats as audiobooks, apps, small digital files called PDFs and podcasts.

"Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don't know who reads their books," said Mr. Godin in an interview. "What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers."

It's unclear how many, if any, best-selling authors will follow Mr. Godin's lead. However, his departure from Portfolio, an imprint owned by Pearson PLC's Penguin Group (USA), comes at a critical juncture for the industry. With many new titles spending less time on best-seller lists and in bookstores, publishers are increasingly dependent on brand-name authors such as Mr. Godin to deliver significant book sales.

Mr. Godin, a public speaker and proponent of nimbleness and the need for speed in marketing goods, has long delighted in shaking up traditional thinking.

One of his many concerns about the current publishing market is that the process often takes 12 months or more to get a new title into the hands of his readers.

Mr. Godin's most recent book, "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?," has sold 50,000 copies to date since its release in January, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 75% of the retail book marketplace.

Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Portfolio, said that "Linchpin" is Mr. Godin's fastest-selling book but declined to comment further.

"It's going to make a lot of other big authors sit up and take notice," said Mark Coker, chief executive of Smashwords Inc., an e-book publishing and distribution platform based in Los Gatos, Calif. "There are a lot of authors with fan followings."

Mr. Godin, who disclosed his intentions on Monday on his blog, said his blog attracts an estimated 438,000 followers. He also noted that in the past he has created, executed and maintained a variety of e-book promotions for earlier titles.

For future titles, Mr. Godin said he would hire a top-quality editor and someone to format the work for electronic distribution. "After those fixed costs, your idea is packaged as you want, and it can then be put on sale next to other potential best-sellers on Amazon and elsewhere," he said. "The business race is on to have the relationship with the reader."

Mr. Godin said he doesn't have any new books in the works right now. Prices have to match the expectation of the purchaser, he added. "It depends on who you are selling to and the situation."

Mr. Coker said that as e-books account for an ever-larger percentage of total units sold, the distribution advantage of having new titles in bricks-and-mortar bookstores will have to be weighed against the potential financial advantage of retaining ownership of a new book and distributing it as an e-book or on a print-on-demand basis.

He said that "midlist" authors—those who are successful but not best sellers—who receive minimal marketing support from their publishers may be tempted to follow Mr. Godin's lead.

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at [email protected]

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