Never trust a geek!

What happens when IT geeks get together on discussion sites? Here's a salutary lesson.

Some months ago I bought a very beautiful and sleek ultrabook. I won't mention the brand, for reasons that will shortly become clear. It was a superb piece of engineering, except it wouldn't connect to my server for more than a few minutes at a time. Meanwhile I invested a couple of days setting it up, transferring files, setting passwords, and even switching my cloud storage to a system that the computer liked better. I assumed that the connectivity problem would settle down and that the time and the opportunity cost already sunk would be repaid in higher personal productivity.

No such luck.

After a week of gnashing, I took the thing back to the store, where it was tested and - of course - worked perfectly. I walked out of the store several hundred dollars down, clutching a new wireless modem; my new ultrabook was apparently far too advanced to work with my current modem, which quite easily serves two smartphones, a Mac, a PC, and various Kindles.

The problem was 90% resolved with the server, so I was gnashing at only 10% of the previous rate. Oddly I got used to restarting the ultrabook three or four times a day to reset the wifi adaptor - this narky bit of evil electronica evidently being the problem.

But enough was enough. A few weeks ago I started to haunt the online forums, where I found dozens of complaints about my XYZ Utrabook and the useless PQR chip that jokingly passed for the brains of this benighted piece of junk. There was a huge conspiracy in the tech department of XYZ and PQR: Why couldn't they just fess up and admit that the chip just couldn't hold a wifi connection? Who'd ever be so dumb to buy a XYZ ultrabook?  I pondered over suggested fixes that entailed downloaded dangerous sounding patches from sinister looking sites, but I was always too scared to try them.

I had to admit it. I had bought a lemon.

But then I found that the PQR chip is used in lots of other brands of computer and - lo! - there are forums dedicated to slagging off every brand in the shop ... they are all lemons!

I took a deep breath and went exploring inside the machine's system. I eventually found myself inside (metaphorically speaking) the wifi adaptor, where I discovered a button in the Power Management department; did I want to allow the ultrabook to turn off the wifi adaptor to save power? No, of course I didn't; everyone knows that computers that aren't bolted to desks are always shutting themselves down. "No!" I said (or pressed, actually) and the problem was instantly solved. Pity the guy in the store didn't know about this. And the geeks? Well, why find a solution when you can crowdgeek a problem?

The lesson is, of course, the same one that applies to illness; if you think you're sick, don't read online forums.

Belated farewell to author and teacher Alex Auswaks

The name Alex Auswaks came up over dinner with friends this week. The context was discontented adults, and I mentioned that I always remembered a friend saying that once you get to twenty one, it's time to stop blaming your parents for your troubles.

That friend was Alex Auswaks, my first linguistics teacher. I hadn't seen him for nearly forty years, so later I googled him only to learn in a brief Wikipedia entry that he passed away in Israel last April. I hadn't known that he wrote detective novels and was shortlisted for several awards.

Alex taught on the Modern Languages degree at the Polytechnic of Central London in the early seventies, along with a band of characters straight out of Eccentric Casting Inc. He was rotund and florid, and taught in baggy hand-knitted pullovers, speaking in posh Australian. He had studied at The University of Sydney, but was born into the Russian community in Tientsin in China.

His instructional style was of the 'pontificate with a sardonic smile' variety, and I do recall somebody telling me in later years that he was an awful teacher. Well, he wasn't: He sparked in me a lifetime fascination with linguistics, and he almost certainly played a part in my getting a PhD and becoming a professor.

His secret was to impart a fascination for seminal books: Malinovski's Coral Gardens and their Magic, Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology, Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. He made knowledge look interesting, and I wanted to know what he knew, so I devoured the books that he talked about. We became friends when I joined the circle of students who met him most mornings in a cafe in Red Lion Square to discuss the latest in The Guardian or Le Monde amid clouds of Gauloises smoke. He liked to open a conversation with 'as my uncle Noam Chomsky said the other day ...' but then, perhaps Chomsky was his uncle ...

My other teachers included Edgar Farag, the diminutive wrinkled Copt who wore immaculate suits and smoked cigarettes as if they were scrumptious food. There was a story that this urbane and charming Egyptian had made a good deal of money by translating the Benson and Hedges advertising slogan 'Yes' into Arabic. And there was Gerald Brooke, who had spent four years in a Soviet prison camp until being returned home in a Cold War spy swap. He taught us Russian gulag slang. Professor Peter Newmark, born as he told me in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a lifelong inspiration. He tore me to shreds at a research seminar in the nineties when I presented a silly pretentious paper at Surry University; good on him. There was a summer term teacher who was supposed to teach us advanced Russian conversation, but instead lectured us on the painter Ilya Repin and showed us how to read between the lines of Pravda. The cast of characters who worked at the Poly deserve their own novel, and I might write it one day. Their like could not be found in the standardised, digitized, industrialised higher education systems of today.

So a belated farewell, dear Alex Auswaks. I'd like to think that you are reading one of your uncle Noam's books in some celestial coral garden.

Would you like to be a character in my next novel?

 I've signed up two Beta readers for my novel Forty Apple Trees, and want to recruit at least four more. I plan to complete the book by mid-2014.

What's a Beta reader? It's somebody who's prepared to read chapters of a novel in progress, and to give frank feedback. The author uses the feedback to fine tune the work.

What's special about my Beta readers? They get to appear in a special chapter that I'll slip into the novel. The special chapter describes a lunch which one of my characters attends. The lunch is thrown by a writer who wants to thank his or her Beta readers in person.  Naturally the party will turn out to be a disaster.

To protect the reputations of my Beta readers I'll give you a pseudonym. I'll also ask your permission to quote bits of your comments in my social media posts leading up to publication, using your pseudonym.

Forty Apple Trees will be published initially  as an independent e-book under the editorial eyes of my fellow writers at That Authors Collective. If I'm lucky enough to get a mainstream publisher the Beta character chapter might be cut, but I'll still acknowledge you.

So here's the deal: Let me know by the end of November if you are interested, and I will select four or possibly more Beta readers. I will send you up to three chapters a month in PDF format and ask you to email me comments within two weeks. If you respond to me at least three times during the writing of the book, then you'll get into my special chapter!

This post is distributed via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, so contact me through any of those media if you fancy being larger than life!

Forty Apple Trees is a black comedy about a middle class family who slide into genteel criminality. I've posted a whole chapter that can be downloaded free at http://www.stuartcampbellconsulting.com/downloads/ .

You can also download First Press by That Authors Collective, a free sampler of our work that includes an extract from Forty Apple Trees at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/360625 .

And not to forget of course The Play's the Thing, available for a mere $1.25 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0



 

Mr Abbott, please get off your bike and learn an Asian language

With new Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott freshly back from his visit to Indonesia, I recalled my blog post from February 2013 when I predicted that the ambitious language policies of neither major party would survive the election.  ''We are supposed to be adapting to the Asian century, yet Australians' study of foreign languages, especially Asian languages, is in precipitous decline,'' Mr Abbottt said in May 2013, promising that forty percent of high school students would be studying languages within ten years.

As the election neared, we had the depressing news that the University of Canberra was axing its languages program; would a Liberal victory turn the decline around?

So imagine my thrill recently when I checked the Liberal Party website and saw in the 'our plan' drop-down menu the word 'languages', only to be crestfallen when I found that these simply led to versions of 'our plan' in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Vietnamese. Probing further into the list of 2013 policies I searched in vain for some mention of language learning - Asian or otherwise. Nothing.

A dispiriting feature of Australia's political leadership is its dogged monolingualism. Kevin Rudd was a rare exception, but Alexander Downer's sour comments about Rudd's Mandarin skills in 2007 were perhaps symptomatic of an ingrained fear of stepping outside the cosy sphere of English. What we lack in Australia is role models and champions of bilingualism among our political leaders; multilingual Mathias Cormann provides a possible spark of hope here.

 The distinguished Vice Chancellor Peter Høy warned of the risks of a monolingual Australia in his recent article Can We Afford to be Without Multilingualism? A Scientist’s Lay Perspective. Høy's paper is especially important because he is not a languages cheer leader defending a funds-starved university course, but a scientist articulating a commonsense case based on his personal and professional experience.

 

If Mr Abbott's cycling activity is as extensive as the current travel expenses furore seems to indicate, then our PM might want to devote some pedal time to studying an Asian language. Does the PM want to be seen as a sportsman or a statesman? I thought hard to come up with world leaders who flaunt their athleticism and could only come up with Vladimir Putin, topless horseman and wrestler of monster fish. But as Putin demonstrated at a judo contest in Vienna in 2010, he can make a speech in English and be a sport fanatic at the same time.

 

So will Mr Abbott lope across the world stage as yet another rusted-on Australian adherent of English or bust, or will he adopt a more urbane and diplomatic persona? Could he become a role model for those thousands of school children who may (or may not) study languages within a decade?

 

Here are my language learning tips for the PM:

 

·        Choose Indonesian: You don't have to learn a new script and you can learn some basics quickly.

·        Start with a few hours of study a week, but be modest in your expectations; you're too busy to develop more than elementary skills.

·        Skim the Indonesian press online when you have spare minutes, and paste the headlines into Google Translate. Soon you'll be able to read some simple sentences unaided.

·        Have someone write some simple speeches for you, and learn to read them aloud.

·        When you visit a school where Indonesian is taught, make a speech in Indonesian.

·        When you are next at an official function in Indonesia, make a short speech in Indonesian; you can rehearse it beforehand and simply read it out.

 

Mr Abbott, it's that simple for you to give language learners in Australia the mainstream role model they need and at the same time to hone your image as a statesman. Just get off your bike!


© Stuart Campbell
Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0
Download THAT Authors Collective free sampler First Press at
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/THATAuthorsCollective

 

 

 

 

On not being No.1, and a glimpse of deity

I am still floating in space, having seen Gravity last night. I am content at last to know that God looks like George Clooney, and that I will never refer to Sandra Bullock as Sandra B****cks again after her literally stellar performance. I thought until now that Solaris (the 1972 Soviet original) was the best space movie ever made, but I think I'm drifting weightlessly towards this new film. The only thing that's holding me back is the divine ending to Solaris: What do you think?

Meanwhile back on Earth, I was startled to receive an email from an e-book retailer a few months ago that listed things I might like to read. My book was at No.1! I checked my sales over the next few days and didn't notice any dramatic rise in my trajectory to literary stardom, and forgot about it. Some weeks later I got a similar email, checked again, found no noticeable improvement, and forgot about it again.

Then a writing friend received a similar email. She wrote to me in excitement and I checked my sales - again no effect. And yesterday she got the same email, I checked, and no result. I had no option but to conclude that this must be a wicked artifice of the company's marketing engine. Some Heath Robinsonish gormogon has figured out that I actually wrote my own book and that my friend actually bought it and we have been linked in some diabolical concrete bunker next to a hydro electric dam in Alaska that cools the data centres that churn our writing, our souls and our relationships into trite junk emails.

Or perhaps someone up there is thinking about me?


© Stuart Campbell
Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0
Download THAT Authors Collective free sampler First Press at
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/THATAuthorsCollective

Book club and public reading: A big thank you, and a special present

Last week your faithful blogger exposed all, facing the sophisticated and intelligent members of the Highgate Book Club and reading to the literati and cultural denizens of the Balmain Institute.

For an indie author, nothing substitutes for generous and critical feedback, and the chance to show one's writing to an audience of book lovers.

Thanks so much for your feedback and generosity. You've spurred me on to greater things. And thanks to my mates Sarah, Garry and Helena of THAT Authors Collective, who read with me at Balmain on 3 October.

As a thank you gift, I've copied below my latest, amour scene. I've striven to pare it back to the absolute basics of inference and obfuscation:


Thea sat up, flushed and tousled, and pulled the covers around her.
I laid back and mentally smoked a Gauloise.

© Stuart Campbell
Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0
Download THAT Authors Collective free sampler First Press at
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/THATAuthorsCollective


 

First Press: Download free sample of writing by Stuart Campbell and friends at THAT Authors Collective

THAT Authors Collective has published First Press, a free downloadable ebook of samples of our writing. You can download it here.

Our collective comprises Sydney writers Helena Ameisen, Sarah Bourne, Stuart Campbell and Garry McDougall. We came together in 2013 as a breakaway group from the Write On! writers group founded by Sarah under the umbrella of the NSW Writers Centre in Sydney.

By some alchemy that none of us can explain, we found common cause – a speech pathologist, a tour operator, a professor of linguistics and a counsellor.

What binds us is an addiction to writing and a conviction that four brains are better than one when it comes to literary and technical quality.

First Press features extracts of published and unpublished works, ranging from Helena's poignant memoir of an Egyptian marriage, Sarah's story of love and tragedy set in England and Uganda, Garry's tales of Australian historical mayhem, and Stuart's quirky story of genteel criminality.    

Read. Enjoy. Seek out our members’ works at our websites and associated events.



© Stuart Campbell
Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

 

Sydney author develops mild case of aptronymia

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Surviving the 'how to vote' card line

This little extract from my novel The Play's the Thing might be of help today:

 

One of the rituals of Australian elections is dealing with the how-to-vote card. On polling day the voters must run the gauntlet of half a dozen or so party workers handing out the cheap coloured flyers that contain instructions on how to fill out the ballot paper so that preferences are properly directed according to the wishes of each party. The atmosphere around the polling stations is generally cheerful but purposeful; the party workers often look slightly embarrassed, and they spruik in a half-hearted way that ensures that nobody disturbs anyone else.  A gent dressed for an afternoon stroll will say from the corner of his mouth “Vote Green, keep the Libs out.” as if he is in training to sell copy watches.

For the voter there is a dilemma, solved through three different strategies. For the committed 'I've voted XYZ all my life and I don't care who knows' voter, the routine is to approach the line confidently while spying out their party person, and to walk directly up to them without showing any awareness of the existence of the other party persons. Our voter takes the how-to-vote card and the deed is done. For the 'it's my flaming business who I vote for' person, the trick is to pass along the entire line stony faced, taking a paper from each party,  although even this voter might baulk at the most rabid party and decline their how-to-vote card. The 'haven't made my mind up yet' person is in the third category. This voter passes along the line looking nervously between the face of the party official and their paper, taking some and declining others, until they emerge at the end with a random collection of how-to-vote cards. With one of these strategies implemented, the rest is between the voter and the ballot paper inside the cardboard voting booth.


© Stuart Campbell

Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

That Authors Collective: Public reading, Balmain, Sydney, 3 October 2013

The Balmain Institute has generously offered to hold a public reading by Helena Ameisen, Stuart Campbell, Sarah Bourne and Garry McDougall of That Authors Collective.

Details: doors open 6.30pm for 7pm start, Thursday, October 3, 2013, Balmain Town Hall Meeting Room, behind Balmain Library, Darling St, Balmain.

That Authors Collective was established to pool our expertise in the artistic and technical aspects of writing to ensure that our output is as good as it can possibly be. TAC is a spin-off from the Write On! group of the NSW Writers Centre.

Stuart Campbell is an ex-academic writing about middle class characters falling into criminality. His current novel, The Play’s the Thing, is available as an e-book on Kindle.
Sarah Bourne is a counsellor writing on women’s struggles around social and psychological disadvantage. Her current novel is Never Laugh at Shadows.
Helena Ameisen is a speech pathologist writing on cultural and religious conflict & harmony, in her soon-to-be published memoir, Forbidden Territory.
Garry McDougall is a photographer exploring the uneven battles of race, personal ambitions and historical forces. His recent works include Belonging, Forgetting and Remembering and Pilgrimage (five e-books on Spain and France), available at www.smashwords.com.

Please RSVP  garimac9@icloud.com  02 9810 3695

To read the authors' work before the event, go to
http://www.garrymcdougall.comwww.smashwords.com <http://www.smashwords.com>  (for Pilgrimage, Belonging and Forgetting and Remembering)www.facebook.com/groups/535976469757492 <http://www.facebook.com/groups/535976469757492> /http://stubooks.blogspot.com.au/http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

 

 

 

 

Thought followers find true romance in key deliverables!

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Folk publishing – you heard about it here first!

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Time to fall out of love with the Nazis?

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Extract from a novel in progress: Forty Apple Trees

The author at work*

The manuscript of my second novel Forty Apple Trees is well under way. My fellow writers at That Authors Collective (see side panel story) are giving me feedback; it's tremendous to have the support of a small network of colleagues who aren't afraid to frankly critique your work. 

Forty Apple Trees is a darkly comic story about the descent of a middle class family into criminality. Unlike The Play's the Thing, this novel is set in England and drawn entirely from imagination (well, perhaps). I plan to release an e-book version in 2014. 

Below is an extract from the opening chapter. Let me know if it piques your interest!

You get used to prison after a while. You look forward to the dreary food because there’s nothing else to eat. You forget the smell of the place - urine, cigarette smoke and bleach - because there's nothing else to smell.

Someone like me becomes invisible after a few weeks. There was the initial curiosity from some men who were frightening and pathetic at the same time, but they soon became bored with me; we came from different social universes, we didn't speak the same argot and I wasn’t  young enough to be the plaything of some thug with a big hairy belly. I fell in with a group of other misfits, among whom the common factor was that we were educated to a level that would be measured in the stratospheric in comparison with the rest of our fellows. The four of us ate together, exercised together and always tried to appear as no more than four smudges on the wall. My three friends were all in for financial fraud of one variety or another. Me, well I was in a different league altogether. We had fourteen university degrees among us - I say had, because one day the oldest of us didn't wake up, died of a brain aneurysm during the night, and we were down to eleven degrees and three smudges.

Here I am then, stuck for quite a few years in gaol in a forlorn field in the Midlands, miles from the pretty cathedral town where Thea and I broke the mold cast for us by family, school, university, and the law of the land. Here I am, forty, getting portly on cheap stodge, half way through an online bachelor of something or other that I don't need except as an antidote to brain rot, and becoming even more vastly overqualified for my prison job as mopper of floors and duster of handrails.

Two years earlier ...

It was a summer Saturday, Thea's day, when she would absent herself from the house while I ran William and Zita from one sporting or artistic activity to another, using the wait times to park the car and jog around a convenient park. The family reformed late in the afternoon on the back lawn, me in my running gear making mocktails on the garden bench, and Zita climbing over Thea and sniffing her neck and wrists, guessing the names of the perfumes she'd sampled at the shopping mall in the New Town. The baby sitter was booked for seven, and I had already called Rima at the shop three times to make sure that all was well. All fine, Rima said, not bad for a Saturday. I pushed aside the little niggle of anxiety; I wasn’t looking forward to letting Rima go.

Thea looked lovely, lounging in the deckchair in a white summer dress against her tanned skin, sipping a green drink piled high with orange fruit, a woman of forty at the peak of her dark mature beauty. She didn’t look like any of the university lecturers I’d been taught by.  I’d booked the restaurant and I had a small piece of expensive jewelry secreted in my linen suit.

We fed the children at the big table in the kitchen, the afternoon breeze bringing the scent of roses from the tiny walled garden that Thea had claimed as her territory. A little plaque on the doorway said ‘No children past this point’.  At six the neighbour’s daughter arrived to take over William and Zita, and we retreated to the bedroom.

I never tired of watching Thea getting ready for a night out: The expensive unguents and delicate implements of beautification, dressing and undressing as she approached – by some logic I didn’t understand – the final choice of outfit; trying on heels and swirling her hips in front of the mirror. And finally the laying out of jewelry, matching the pieces with clothes, bag, shoes, make-up, mood, occasion. But tonight was somehow different. She seemed curiously animated, nervous, like a cat before a thunderstorm. I showered, lounged on the bed in a robe and watched her begin the ritual at the dressing table, but she said “Get dressed and come back later. I don’t want you watching me.” I tried a clumsy manouevre, sidling up to her and kneading her shoulders, but she stiffened, raised her hands like semaphore flags and said “Just go”.

Downstairs the children were playing with the babysitter’s body piercings. She taken her nose stud out and William was prodding it with a spoon. Zita was trying to get one of the teenager’s earrings into her unpierced lobe. “Can we all wash our hands after this game please?” I said. I hung around in the garden reading the paper until it was ten minutes before the arrival of the taxi and then went upstairs. I knocked gently on the bedroom door.  "Not long." she said.

After a minute I knocked again and gingerly pushed the door. Thea did a swirl for me and I was transfixed by the dress - the muted sheen of the fabric, the deep harmony of magenta and charcoal grey, the way it hugged her body like a second skin, accentuating the lines of her shoulders and legs. I must have had my mouth open because she said “No need to look like a goldfish. What do you think, gold or silver jewelry with it?” I recovered myself: “Silver of course, something discreet.” Thea said: “Right answer, clever boy”, and kissed me deeply.

While she chose the jewelry I saw the glossy carrier bag. As the owner of a select bookshop in the most upmarket shopping street of a wealthy cathedral town, I know that you don’t buy a Jules Hector in British Home Stores. “I’ll just check whether the taxi’s here.” I said. I went into the vestibule and stabbed my phone to log on to our credit card account – no sign of a thousand pound purchase. Thea caught me up: “Stop fiddling with that phone. This is our anniversary dinner. In fact I want you to leave it at home.” I made a face but she gently took the phone from me with one hand and slid the other inside my jacket, caressing my chest: “Just leave it.”

©Stuart Campbell

* Actually, the photograph was taken in John Knox's House in Edinburgh.

In the meantime you can enjoy The Play's the Thing! It's available as an e-book on Amazon at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

Download The Play's the Thing free on Kindle this weekend

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

On wearing socks with sandals

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

How I learned to love the shockjocks

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

ABC's The Drum publishes one of my blog pieces

See http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4771612.html - especially the very interesting responses.

On becoming a butcher in Paris

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Feedback on my Vietnam piece - heartfelt thanks

I have been really gratified at the thoughtful and universally supportive comments on my post about the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. My faith in human nature has been ever so slightly restored, despite the daily onslaught of muck from the Australian political scene.

My stubooks blog posts go out on Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Please keep reading, whichever medium you see me on, and I'll try to keep writing pieces that (I hope) will stimulate thought, that precious commodity that our leaders seem bent on turning into knee-jerk responses to ever more banal stimuli.

134 reasons why war reporting should not be censored

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

How I learned to love my loathsome literary character!

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Why do Danish movies have so much grunt?

 

My last post ended with a quiz. This time I’m starting with one:

Q: What is stød ?

a)      Reindeer meat jerky

b)      A Norwegian male porn star

c)       A sacred mountain in Norse mythology

d)      A suburb of Copenhagen

e)      None of the above

Watch out for the answer later.

It’s been Danish week at our place. I watched last week’s episode of Borgen on catch-up last Tuesday, the next episode ‘live’ on Wednesday and then Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt at the movies on Thursday.

Borgen has a pretty standard TV political drama plot: Against all expectations, politician Birgitte Nyborg  becomes Denmark’s Prime Minister, forming a centrist coalition by outsmarting the smarmy veterans of the left and right. Each week she steers a nifty course, never succumbing to venality, coming home occasionally to her impossibly patient house husband, who has drawn up a lovemaking schedule (I sense that there is a story arc beginning here). I flinched a tiny bit at her rapid conversion to the Greenland cause and the slightly mawkish day-in-a minute scene where she tours the island learning about the troubles of the inhabitants; we see her talking earnestly to poor Inuit fishermen, windbeaten housewives, and other unfortunates, with no words audible behind the musical score. But I’m hanging out for next week!

The feature film The Hunt is a lot grimmer: Lucas, a teacher, lives in a small conservative village. When the school closes down, he takes a job at the kindergarten, but is accused of sexual misconduct towards a small girl. I won’t spoil it for you, but watch out for performances in a film that had me welded to my seat; I especially loved Alexandra Rapaport as the immigrant girlfriend who can see through the hypocrisy and blockheadedness of the villagers.

So what’s special about The Hunt? And for that matter my top-of-the-list Danish films The Celebration, Open Hearts, Brothers, and Pusher?

The easy answer is Mads Mikkelsen, but of course he’s not in every Danish movie. The next easy answer is directors Susanne Bier and Lars von Trier, but there are other Danish film directors too.

My yardstick for analysing non-English language cinemas is to ask the question ‘How would Hollywood have made this film’. For example try watching Wim Wenders’ divine Wings of Desire and then gag on the US remake City of Angels.

I suspect that the answer here might be patience: Danish film makers seem to have a keen sense of restraint in the way that strong emotional content is delivered. Watch out for the scenes of violence in The Hunt; you’ll be caught unawares. I don’t think a US director would have credited their audience with that much patience. Or watch the subtly handled reaction of the kindergarten teacher when she is told of the sticky details of the alleged offense; I’m sure a US director would not have been able to resist a full-face shot of horror and a bit of vomit.

In Pusher (yes, Mads Mikkelsen again) the bungling drug pushers owe money to gang boss Milo, played by the brilliant Zlatko Buric; violence oozes beneath the surface and you shiver at the sociopathic Milo’s feigned affection for the terrified Frank and Tonny. Somehow I think our sorry lads would have had their asses kicked much earlier in the US remake (Heaven forbid that it will happen!)

Back to Borgen and the quiz. Having said such complementary things about Danish movies, I have to confess that Borgen doesn’t actually come up to the mark. To use the Hollywood test, there are equally good or much better US TV series, such as The West Wing. So why does Borgen get under my skin? I have a suspicion that it is actress Sidse Babett Knudsen’s  enchanting stød. Whoops, I forgot to say that the correct answer to the quiz is (e), none of the above.

If you listen carefully to Danish, you’ll hear frequent little grunts or ‘creaky voice’ as linguists call it, a pronunciation feature known as stød. This is strictly speaking a suprasegmental  feature, that is a little overlay of sound used to distinguish meanings. So while, the Danish words hun (she) and hunt (dog) are pronounced with the same consonants and vowels, the dog word carries a little grunt.  I’m intrigued by this example, and I wonder if it is a source of mother in law jokes in Denmark. The rules for using stød are terrifyingly complex and would deter any foreigner from ever attempting to speak the language authentically (or acquiring a Danish mother in law).

They all do it: Mads and his brother Lars stød like champions. For all I know the Tasmanian-born Mary Crown Princess of Denmark practices it in a gilded mirror nightly, and has nightmares about grunting in the wrong places at balls. But no one gives stød so minxily as Sidse Babett Knudsen playing Birgitte Nyborg .

So let’s get to the heart of it: I’ve fallen in love with Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg ‘s grunt. I can excuse the holes in Borgen’s  plot, the lack of patience, the full-face emotion shots and even the soft focus Inuits: Just give me my weekly dose of Birgitte and her stød!


Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

From Bandicoot Ridge to Nicosia’s Green Line with a detour via Byron Bay

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Can I give you some grated fertiliser with your tagine?

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

e-book covers: Throwing down a challenge!

A post on Indie Author News doing the rounds on Twitter claims that a bad book cover equals bad sales. I can’t vouch for the claim, especially since the indie book world is full of notions about what may or not sell a book. But while I fight for every sale using any dastardly tactic I can think of, I’ll concede that my e-book cover is an important part of my marketing arsenal.

A recent Guardian article pointed me in the direction of the delicious Lousy Book Covers site, where you can enjoy some of the, well, more florid examples of e-book covers. This prompted me to cast a critical eye over a random sample of  hard copy book covers on my bedside locker:  

A 1960 edition of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark: Seems like nobody really bothered – just white block lettering on a black background, and nothing else, somewhat improved I think by the second hand bookseller's red $10 sticker.  Perhaps  Nabokov’s name was enough to sell the book; or is the black background symbolic of the latter part of the book, when the teenage schoolgirl and her grotesque manfriend cavort silently before the blind Albinus?

A 2010 Jonathan Cape paperback edition of Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth: A young woman in a gloomy  tiled corridor, half turning to look at a male silhouette behind her. Well, to interpret this design would entail a spoiler, so you’ll have to work out the symbolism once you’ve read this literary hall of mirrors.

My favourite: A precious 1976 David Winter & Son edition of William McGonagall’s Poetic Gems. The self-published writer of earnest doggerel verse  in 19th century Edinburgh peers out of a half-tone portrait with an expression of guilelessness and hope, unaware that his destiny is to be a figure of affectionate fun throughout the English-speaking world. The words “poet and tragedian” appear below his name.

Now here's a challenge: If you think we did a good job with the cover of The Play’s the Thing, send me a comment. If not, send my cover to Lousy Book Covers! Here’s how my cover came about:

STEP 1: I approached my designer Rachel Ainge, who agreed to do the job. Rachel is a highly professional Sydney-based designer whose work ranges from billboards to thumbnails, and across print, web and video.

STEP 2: I went looking in the big bookshops for ideas. Here’s where I ran into the first hurdle: This isn’t a genre book, so it falls into the messy section of the shop where nothing seems to fit with anything else, rather than the neat ranks of paranormal, crime, etc. where the cover designs are largely formulaic. Oh, to be a rural romance writer -  expensively tousled blonde hair, Akubra hats, tractors! The best single word I use to describe my novel is ‘quirky’, so I went hunting for quirk, and came up with four books that I'd be honoured to sit next to: I’ve included the URLs rather than risk a copyright breach by pasting the cover images:

Michael Frayn – Skios  http://www.amazon.com/Skios-Novel-Michael-Frayn/dp/0805095497/ref=la_B000APIKYS_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367384119&sr=1-1
Joe Dunthorne – Wild Abandon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Abandon-Joe-Dunthorne/dp/0141033959
Jim Keeble – The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles http://www.amazon.co.uk/TheHappy-Numbers-Julius-May-24-2012-Paperback/dp/B0092GDYGK/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356140491&sr=1-2
Randa Abdel-Fattah – No Sex in the City http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/display_title.asp?ISBN=9781742611372&Author=Abdel-Fattah,%20Randa

STEP 3: I reflected on the covers I liked and drew up a set of design principles, which I sent to my designer. Here’s what I emailed her:

• Title and author: The Play’s the Thing by S.J. Campbell
• I want to make the cover ambiguous as to the readership, i.e. equally appealing to male and female readers (which is why I want to use initials instead of my first name).
• I am torn between the zany style (e.g. Joe Dunthorne below) or a cool blocky style like Jim Keeble below.
• I want to avoid any explicit religious imagery.
• Symbolism: I have in mind something like a view of mountains seen through a stage curtain, but with some kind of threatening/mysterious symbolism (a shadow figure maybe, some bloodrops, a gun) somewhere in the image – maybe standing out against a cool pastel background.
• I’ve attached a rough sketch where I’ve put a crescent moon (vaguely but not specifically Islamic imagery) in an evening sky. It is truly horrible and will make a professional designer vomit but it is a possible starting point.

My rough sketch appears at the top of this post.

STEP 4: I discussed the zany vs. blocky options with the designer. Her advice – go blocky!

STEP 5: I received the first draft and was quite stunned at how my sad sketch had been transformed. The colours were deeper and more saturated than I had envisaged. The green foreground was textured so that the eye is drawn to the hills, which are lit by a menacing red dusk. The standout feature was the white and red block lettering, which provides a contrast to the brooding hills,  and also shows up well in a thumbnail. I loved the  addition of the hand holding the curtain aside. The crescent moon was there, but moved to the centre so that it unites the curtain and the title

STEP 6: I asked where’s the drop of blood gone? Well, it’s there nestled in the crook of the N, rather than drooping from the title. In fact I was in two minds about the drop of blood, which was originally there to point to a shooting. The problem was that while the design was being developed, I rewrote the shooting chapter and reduced the gunshot to the mere threat of a gunshot. There is in fact a bit of real bleeding somewhere else in the book, so on balance I was happy to have a discrete drop of blood on the cover.

STEP 7: I negotiated some small adjustments with the designer, for example heightening the row of hills slightly.  I paid for the stock images, reconfirmed the Kindle technical specification, and received the final design.

I'd love your feedback!
 

Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0

Stuart Campbell's Books: Pirates, grandmas and linguistic DNA

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

Pirates, grandmas and linguistic DNA

This post has been edited and included in my new Kindle e-book anthology 'Becoming a Butcher in Paris and other short essays'.

A thousand thanks to my blog readers

Today, my new blog Stuart Campbell's Books made its first thousand page hits. Thanks to all my readers. You've enouraged me to keep writing what I hope are insightful, intelligent and entertaining pieces!

 

 

Buy Stuart's e-book novel 'The Play's the Thing' for US$1.25 with one click at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BMIF0J0