Alexander McCall Smith goes online

One of my favourite authors is Alexander McCall Smith. Almost all his books are light and delightful reads. He is, of course, most famous for his series of novels which began with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in 1998 and continued with nine more stories. He has written several other novels, many of which are popular across the world.

What is of recent – and greater – news is that Alexander McCall Smith has decided to collaborate with the Telegraph in the UK to publish his next novel, Corduroy Mansions, as a serialised novel on the Telegraph website.

Starting from Monday, 15 September 2008, Corduroy Mansions will be published through the Telegraph website – with simultaneous podcast editions available to download through iTunes.

Furthermore, readers will be invited to get involved in the creative process by writing their comments and suggestions for Alexander McCall Smith on the Telegraph’s website via www.telegraph.co.uk/alexandermccallsmith.

You can find all the information you need on Alexander McCall Smith going online with his new novel right here. You can even get the serialised novel emailed to you by registering on the Telegraph website.

The printed book, Corduroy Mansions, won’t be released in the UK market till July 2009.

Upside down

'The World Stands on its Head'



Foreign Policy’s Passport blog reports that “in the town of Trassenheide on Germany’s Baltic Sea island of Usedom,” a man has built a house upside down. The house is called ‘The World Stands on its Head’ and is open to visitors.

South Africa’s IOL website, in an article titled Man turns house on its roof, identifies the builder of the upside-down house as Polish-born German Klaudiusz Golos. It states that, “Visitors enter the 120-square-metre home through the attic and ascend to the ‘ground’ floor. All the furnishings including chairs, the fitted kitchen and the toilets are also upside down, but the stairs are right-side up because visitors have to use them.”

Some very interesting images of this upside-down house can be found here.

[Citation: Photos: Germany’s upside-down house, Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, 4 September 2008; Man turns house on its roof, in South Africa’s IOL news, 4 September 2008. Image reproduced from Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, Photos: Germany’s upside-down house, 4 September 2008.]

Banana

“Behold, the atheist’s nightmare,” declares Ray Comfort, an Australian evangelist, as he holds up a banana in a hugely popular video on YouTube. The fruit, he says, testifies to God’s creative genius. It comes with a colour-coding system that shows when it is ready to eat (green is too early, black too late); an easily gripped, biodegradable wrapper; and a ‘tab at the top’ which, unlike that on a can of soda, works so well that when you pull it ‘the contents don’t squirt in your face’.

Not everyone is convinced. One video response points out that the banana only achieved its user-friendly qualities through evolution over many centuries of farming.

[Citation: Text reproduced from Viva Vivanno – Innovative things to do with a banana, article in Economist.com, 2 September 2008.]

[Correction: Ray Comfort is not Australian (as the Economist.com article states). He was born in New Zealand and now lives in California, USA.]

On Reading

Most of us have a personal relationship with books. But, if asked, I wonder if we’d be able to define or describe this relationship… or the characteristics of it. Perhaps, if someone were to watch us reading books, he or she may be able to capture the moment from a distance and define the relationship for us.

While surfing the internet, I found that photographer André Kertész has done exactly that. In his book On Reading, which was published in 1971 and released again this year, photographer Kertész has captured various black and white images of people reading books in their quiet moments.

According to a review of the book by Conor Risch, on PDNonline, “Made between 1915 and 1970, the images in On Reading study the complex and varied relationship we have with the printed word, a relationship Kertész no doubt personally developed at a young age as the son of a bookstore owner.”

Without much ado, read Conor Risch’s review of André Kertész’s On Reading here.

[Citation: Conor Risch’s review of André Kertész’s On Reading on PDNonline, 25 August 2008.]

Pop goes 50

King of Pop Michael Jackson turns 50 today. A CD titled KING OF POP is being released – only in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong (strangely, not in the US) – to commemorate Jackson’s 50th birthday. Jackson, of course, along with his concert-promoter friend David Gest, has been busy recording Robert Burns’ poems to music, giving the 18th century Scottish poet’s lyrics a 21st century twist.

Queen of Pop Madonna turned 50 earlier this month on 16 August. She was, reportedly, partying in London and showing no signs of relinquishing her crown.

Media, meaning

A blog I was reading the other day described and commented on the amount of ‘trash’ dished out by the Indian media recently – specifically, the news in print and on TV. For an old-school media/news consumer like me, this observation was not only true, but also heartening to know as the blogger and those who commented on her post were young (I’m guessing, in their twenties) and concerned about the state of the media in India today.

This made me wonder. Doesn’t the news coverage (i.e. the content and its creation) by the media, its bias and its delivery reflect the state and nature of the society (and the culture) it represents and originates from? How, then, can we interpret and criticise the news in India today as trash? As media/news consumers, are we – at least, this small disenchanted group of people – radically different from mainstream consumers in some unique way(s)?

How, and why, are we unable to find meaning in today’s media/news when others around us are thriving in it? What distinguishes us from them? Are we, then, the ‘other’ in our own society and culture?

Acceptance

“Life becomes bearable only when one has come to terms with who one is, both in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the world. We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly. No, the secret is that there’s no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies, our self-regard, or our cupidity. We have to learn that our desires do not find any real echo in the world. We have to accept that the people we love do not love us, or not in the way we hope. We have to accept betrayal and disloyalty, and, hardest of all, that someone is finer than we are in character or intelligence.”

– The General, a character in Sándor Márai’s Embers (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)