Reporting From The Front Line

Sorry for not blogging earlier, I was at a place called Frideswide on the Western Front attending to the casualties and dodging fire in the trenches. And I'm only half joking.

Two of my great loves, poetry and Second Life come together with Oxford University's new virtual simulation which places the work of the war poets (including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain and Siegfried Sassoon) in a three dimensional, immersive environment that you can wander through and participate in. You can watch video, listen to readings of the poetry, read facimilies of documents, and watch video as you visit a training camp, communication trench, a casualty clearing station, and a front-line trench. You can wear (if you care to) the uniform of a soldier or nurse, and of course you can pose for and take pictures. I spent a couple of hours there and still have more to see and listen to.

It's a very relevant journey for me, as both my grandfathers fought in the First World War. One talked about the terrible things he'd seen all the time: the other couldn't bring himself to mention it at all.

One thing that made the experience special for me, last night, was having the opportunity to chat to one of the researchers behind the project who was able to explain how everything had come together. (Thanks Skanda!)

You can read all about the project here on Oxford University's website, and find out how you too can visit the battlefield and check out the possibilities of this new and exciting medium. Why Second Life? As the website explains :

Virtual worlds create opportunities to do things that are impossible in real museums. By simulating parts of the Western Front, the archive can embed an entire exhibition's worth of content within in the space. This can be further enhanced by placing digital versions of real archival materials and narratives along the paths that visitors take. The result is an immersive and personal experience. It's not 'real' but it does offer possibilities for understanding a part of history that is now beyond human memory.

Weaving the Wovel

We know the nature of reading is changing due to the technology. Well, are you ready for ... the wovel?

Web+novel: you must have guessed the semantic origins, even as the naffness of the term made you groan. (It's as bad, if not worse than blook!)

Where the wovel differs from its more traditional linear counterpart is with its interactivity.

Programmer Jesse Pollack who works for Underland Press declares it has :

...the technical functionality of Web 2.0, the creativity of fiction and the pace of print journalism ...

The wovel is serialised fiction, and works like those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books you may remember from your childhood. It allows the readers to choose the direction the plot will take ... which, of course, demands great flexibility on the part of the author. (Go and read some of the fiction on Underland Press' website to see this genre in action.)

Of course Dickens was the master of the serialised novel, and more Alexander McCall-Smith has embraced it more recently. Closer to home, isn't this exactly what Nizam Zakaria has been doing with his Malay novels on his blogs? (Though his site seems to have disappeared now.)

Nizam the wovelist has a nice ring, come to think of it!

Blog Reflections

In a piece called Of Blogs and Reflections in the Malay Mail today - Gabby Goh asks three litbloggers, myself, horror king Tunku Halim and Eli James of Novelr about our favourite web discoveries this year and our hopes for next. Here's what I said (with a couple of bits bolded so you will take note of them). Sorry if I've gone all nerdy on you - I'm surprised myself! :

For me, 2008, has really been the year of Facebook - the application has put me in touch with old friends and made me new ones, been a useful place to pick up news and share ideas, but most of all it has been the best avenue to reach a large potential audience for the events I organise. I have set up a group for readings@seksan and look forward to another exciting year of live literature!

This has also been the year I really started to find my feet in the vast virtual world Second Life (which I initially heard about from librarian friends who have established a strong base there). Now that I can fly and teleport and have a good wardrobe of pixelated clothes, I'm busy looking around for ways the metaverse can be used to promote reading and writing activities and making connections with others from around the world interested in the same. (For a taste of what's possible take a look at http://www.writtenword.org.uk.). I've been attending poetry readings and writing workshops and see so much potential for bringing practitioners of all the arts into this very creative space. The complete beginner can avoid the traps I fell into by reading Second Life for Dummies. But the best book to help you understand the history and evolving culture of this community is The Making of Second Life by Wagner James Au. Au reckons, by the way that virtual worlds like Second Life will, in time, become our interface with the internet.

I'd like to send my thanks to all my readers for sticking with me for yet another year, and for helping to make bibliobibuli such an interactive blog by commenting on posts and emailing me links and feedback. The bookshops, local publishers and distributors have also been a tremendous support, passing me copies of free books and sending me hot items of news. I am inviting anyone who feels they would like to contribute a post on any aspect of books or writing to guestblog for me. (Get in touch with me at sharonbakar@yahoo.com). September 2009 will mark my 5th blogiversary, so I am thinking of ways to celebrate this in style!

A very Happy New Year to all of you!!!

Short Attention Spans?

A transatlantic debate is currently raging about whether a decade of staring at computer screens, sending emails and text messages, and having our research needs serviced instantly by Google and Wikipedia, has taken a terrible toll on our attention, until our brains have been reconfigurated and can no longer adjust the tempo of our mental word-processing to let us read a book all the way through. ... The average-length novel is too much of a stretch for the time-challenged, multi-tasking, BlackBerry-prodding "entertainment consumer" to ontemplate reading, let alone the 700-page biography of VS Naipaul or Edith Wharton. Not because of the size of books, but because of the thought processes they contain.

This piece by John Walsh in the Independent (pictured below) has been preying on my mind over the last week or so. Is it true that our internet us is shortening our attention spans alarmingly to the extent that we cannot read as effectively as we could before? (That reading skills are changing in the internet age is something we have, of course, discussed before.)

My page-hopping- hyperlink clicking-YouTube-downloading self wonders if it might be true ... and doesn't necessarily want to hear the answer.

These days I have to make it a point to get right away from the screen (which actually means leaving the house least my itchy fingers draw me back to the keyboard!) for extended stretches of time so that I can get some serious (book) reading done. I don't know why, but I feel that I am finding focusing on the written word off-screen harder ... hitherto I'd put it down to senility creeeping in! And I thought it was just me!

But in excellent piece (which honestly, you must read) called Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr writes :

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon.

So friends, how are your heads these days?

Hands Off Our Writing!

Ellyn Whyte, who writes the delightful columns Katz Tales and A Dog's Life for Star Weekender has a feature on a topic very close to my heart - the theft of online content, where one's newspaper articles or blog/ website posts are swiped wholesale.

As the article points out, many journalists may want to sell their articles on elsewhere, or, as in Ellen's case, may be planning to use them for a book and the reproduction of their work in this way immediately lessens its value.

Freelancers get paid very badly for that appears under their names in the papers (it certainly isn't recompense for the wear and tear on the brain and the amount of ink expended) so they are usually writing for the love of it and with a personal project in view. (For me the journalism is an extension of what I do on this blog, feeding into it and out of it, but of course I have my book projects too.)

My little burst of indignation at the guy who was helping himself to every single one of my blog posts to generate income on his own is recorded in the article, as is my solution :

“I sort of had the last laugh because I stalked him (the thief) back, know where he lives and learned an awful lot about his life!” Sharon says, adding meditatively, “I might put him in a piece of fiction, sad little man.”

But yes what can you do? Legally, you don't have much recourse, although the paper today lists some very sensible measures you can take to protect yourself. The ultimate protection is not allowing your work to be put up online, but that would be really very sad. We write because we want people to read us. We want everyone in the whole goddamn world to read us. We just don't want to be ripped off.

Shaming the perps into taking down the material is one recourse, and often the thieves are naive little bloggers too lazy to put up their own content and nourished in an academic environment where plagiarism too often goes undetected and unpunished, and where pirated videos are available on every street corner. These guys at least are easily shamed into taking the post down.

But funnily enough it appears that government departments are among the worst content thieves! Does no-one teach these civil servants about the morality of the cyber-world? Among the baddies that emerge in this piece are Pejabat Majlis Daerah Lenggong* who have lifted material from Jan Stuivenberg's waterfallsofmalaysia and the Perak Veterinary Department who are nicking Ellen's content. You may remember also that Caving Liz was having a long and frustrating battle some time back with an Indian travel agent who stole her stuff to sell package tours to Malaysia on her website.

There is though I think a real need to clarify and tighten laws regarding the use of content, as well as generally raise awareness about the issue, and I hope Ellen's article opens up the discussion about what is and what isn't legitimate use of material.

Meanwhile, if you think that you would like to use something that is on a website or on a blog - ask first! I usually do give permission for others to use my material, but I want to be consulted , and I want to hold on to the right to say no.

(*I wonder if this protest has worked already because the site has suddenly been taken down?)

Barker's Brick, Dripping Emulsion, and Why Computer Games Make You Smart

Haven't asked you for a while what you're reading, and I'd love to know!

My reading has been totally disrupted this week as the house is upside down with builders and decorators doing their thing. Mind you, a bit of colour splashed on the walls does make one extremely happy ...

Am still on Nicola Barker's Darkmans, but it's such a brick of a book that I can't carry it around in my bag and at home, can only read it at the dining table! I am very much enjoying it though and don't mind the length. I'm resigned to it taking me a while, and slipping a different book into my bag for when I go out.

I've also finally read Everything Bad is Good for You Which I found a cheap copy of, thanks to the generosity of Big Bookshop. TV programmes are getting more complex, computer games make you brighter, blogging increases your IQ. There's a lot of good news here for the geek and couch potato!

I inserted a jokey extract from the book some time back about the dangers of reading, but it turns out that Johnson is a staunch defender of the value of print books, even while he explains that in our participation of life online, we are reading perhaps more than ever before ...

I have been moving books around and decided to make a list of all the unread books I have which I really want to read. I gave up when I counted 50 titles. Really I must not buy any more. (But I have already broken that resolution several times this week ...)

So what's happening with you, reading-wise?

Of Machine-Guns, Doorbells and Cancer: The 2007 Blooker Prize

The 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize, awarded for a book blook based on a blog, has been won by a former American machine gunner with My War: Killing Time in Iraq. Colby Buzzell based his memoir on the blog he began while in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2004, about eight months into his deployment.

According to the Guardian:

... he portrayed the texture of daily life ... from listening to Metallica on his iPod to watching his fellow "grunts" surf the web for pornography.

Within weeks his blog was receiving thousands of hits a day, and he was contacted by literary agents wanting to sign him up.

There is an irony about the timing of the prize as the US military high command is clamping down on blogs written by its personnel - ostensibly for security reasons.

The winner in the Fiction category is The Doorbells of Florence by British blogger Andrew Losowsky based in Madrid. His book of short stories was based on photographs he had posted on Flickr (which makes the genre he's writing in "fliction", it seems).

The Comics section was won by Brian Flies with a true-life account of his mother's struggle with lung cancer. The blook is called simply Mom's Cancer and is based on an Eisner Award-winning webcomic. The original blog has had to be removed from the internet now that the book has been published, but you can see some of the graphics here.

There were more blooks shortlisted, and I do hope that you will take a look and come away inspired. Blooks are certainly a very interesting route to publication. But first find the right concept for your blog.

Now before I end this post, I'd like to make mention of an excellent litblog:

... about fiction - both online and offline. It deals with the way the Internet is changing the way we read - whether it is books we’re dealing with or not. What is the future of the book? Can blooks make a lasting impact in the publishing industry?

I'd landed up at Novelr a few times after googling stuff about blooks and having been much informed by the posts. Then one day I checked to see who the blogger is. American? British? Someone in the publishing industry?

Nope. Eli James is a student in Kucing, Sarawak. And I don't even dare ask how young he is ...

(Picture of Colby Buzzell from the Guardian)

Vietnamese Dissident Arrested

I found this story in yesterday's Malay Mail and then dug around some.

Novelist and journalist Tran Khai Thanh Thuy (pen names Nguyen Thai Hoang and Nguyen Thi Hien) was arrested last weekend, according to the VietnamNews:

... for alleged activities in violation of Article 88 of the Penal Code, which makes it criminal to spread propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

Thuy was among eight Vietnamese writers who received the prestigious Hellman/Hammett award in February from Human Rights Watch, which recognizes courage in the face of political persecution. (Read the writers' joint statement on the censored books blog.)

Sophie Richardson, deputy director of the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, which administers the annual award said at the time that:

This is an especially important year to recognize dissident writers in Vietnam. ... Vietnam’s emerging democracy movement has become bolder, more outspoken and public, making activists more vulnerable to government reprisals. The Hellman/Hammett awards give these writers international attention and some protection. ... These writers’ works and lives embody the Vietnam that the government wants to hide, the one in which there is free speech, independent media, and open access to and use of the internet. Those who think that Vietnam’s booming economy means it is loosening up politically should look below the surface, at the plight of writers such as these.

According to PEN Canada:

Tran Khai Thanh Thuy was apparently briefly detained on 2 September 2006 for her Internet writings, followed by three weeks of daily interrogation sessions. She was again briefly detained on 11 October 2006 and interrogated about the essays 'The Grotto', 'Self-Narration' and 'Dialogue' written after her detention in September. She was also reportedly brought to an open ‘People’s Court’, in which members of the public are forced to participate in the abuse and humiliation of those accused. She is now believed to have been placed under effective house arrest and has been banned from published her writings on-line. Her case appears to be part of a pattern of organized and widespread police harassment of dissident writers and human rights activists in Vietnam ...

Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups say Vietnam's Communist authorities are involved in the most severe crackdown in decades apparently for fear of losing their power base at a time when people, emboldened by economic reforms, are searching for alternatives to the Communist ideology.

This blogger adds her voice to all those asking for Tran Khai Thanh Thuy's immediate release from detention and a cessation of harassment against other writers in Vietnam.

Because freedom of expression is a basic human right!

Air on a Gmail

Just a non-bookish aside.

Doesn't it come to something when your internet service provider writes to you to invite you to sign up for a Gmail account? WTF?

No More Mrs. Nice Guy

Oh goodness, I do go into stroppy English teacher mode when I answer my e-mail.

I squashed an urban legend about a Budweiser frog screensaver and told the sender to send it back down the line. Added my usual lecture about how hoaxes waste time and cause needless anxiety. (And probably lost a friend!)

I forwarded to a spammer (a local guy who has obviously bought a list from someone) all the spam I have carefully collected over the past few months. I have sent his spam on to all the spammers on my list.

And I replied to a semi-literate e-mailer ("interested to be ur fren") that I do not speak SMS.

Life's too short to be nice.

The Urge to Glurge and Other Online Misdeamenours

Received a story from a friend in my e-mail. It's called The Birdies. Go take a peep.

The passed-on-passed-on e-mail ended with the words:

THIS IS A SPECIAL GUARDIAN ANGEL... PASS THIS ON TO AT LEAST 5 PEOPLE WHOSE RELATIONSHIP YOU VALUE. PASS THIS ON, JUST TO REMIND OURSELVES AS WELL AS OTHERS THAT YOU ARE BEING WATCHED OVER FOREVER...... Now don't delete this message.

Now I don't know about you, but these sentimental e-mails, rather than filling me with love, and peace and benovolence to my fellow man ... just make me see red! Most of the time they aren't true and I hate to be lied to. And it's emotional manipulation of the cheapest sort. The "pass-it-on-to-at-least" instruction is the final straw. I feel like rounding on the person who sent it and shouting "You gullible idiot! What do you take me for!"

The folks at snopes.com came up with a great word for these stories. Glurge.

What is glurge? Think of it as chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in: It's supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits.

In ordinary language, glurge is the sending of inspirational (often supposedly "true") tales that conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer, and that undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a "true story."

Does it matter if these stories are not true? Some friends are taken by surprise by my reaction and say; "It's a nice story anyway." Yeah, stick-your-fingers-down-your- throat-and-hack-up-a-hairball sort of nice. (And doesn't the word "glurge" sound so pleasantly like vomiting?) Am I alone in feeling like this?

Urban legends are much worse though and I've had plenty of those sliming their way into my inbox.

There was one about Bill Gates sharing his fortune. The subject line screamed:

PLEEEEEEEEEASE READ IT WAS ON THE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!"

And it went on:

For a two weeks time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks,Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.

Gates himself stepped forward to squash the rumour and lambast the senders-on-senders-on for wasting everyone's valuable time.

We've also had out localised variations of urban legends which have done their rounds in America and other parts of the world before reaching these shores. (We always seem to be that bit behind!)

Remember the story about snakes in the kiddies ball pit in IKEA or man in Midvalley Megamall's carpark who pretended that he wanted to borrow a carjack but was really out to kidnap a poor defenceless woman at knifepoint?

Surely, there are enough things to be afraid of this world without someone adding to them?

And the irony is that all these stories seem to be passed on to me by friends in academia! The very same people who come down like a ton of bricks on their students if they haven't taken the trouble to check their sources.