Old blog postings

This is my old blog written in 2003-4 when I was working part time, recovering from a pulmonary embolism. In those days, I had time to read books, see films, and post quite regularly to this blog. Then I went back to work full time, and inevitably I stopped posting.  

I took a look at it again recently and it's vaguely artsy but not too shameful - so I've decided to keep a link to it on my Typepad about page. 

Mars: old favourites, and a new society?

I have been enjoying all the recent press stories about missions to Mars, which have contained a curious mixture of harsh reality and pure fantasy. The European Mars expedition was a partial failure because the explorer vehicle, Beagle 2, failed to make contact after landing. However, the NASA probe has just made contact again after an anxious few hours of silence. And the European orbital ship has confirmed NASA's observations last year that there is water at the South pole of Mars. So the (much cheaper) European mission was not a complete failure.

So much for the reality: getting to Mars is expensive and tough. These are unmanned missions: imagine if it had been a ship full of European astronauts that had lost contact with Earth! The recent fantasy stories about Mars have been those of George Bush Jr., who is apparently planning a Mars landing by 2018, along with a permanent presence on the moon. We all laughed when we heard this as it was 'blatant electioneering' (the BBC's phrase I think). But I'm sure that people laughed at Kennedy when he announced the manned missions to the moon.

All these Mars stories have made me start re-reading the Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. I first read Red Mars in about 1996 and have returned to the books every couple of years since then. It is quite rare for me to re-read books - although I did go through all A.S. Byatt's ‘Frederica Potter’ novels again recently. What really made me want to read the Mars books again was a Bush comment: he was talking about travelling to Mars ‘to build an entirely new society’ or some such waffle. The KSR books are about (amongst other things) the difficulty of building a society from scratch, and the near-impossibility of doing this when the new society is completely dependent on the old for resources and cash. The original Mars expedition is hugely expensive and elitist, because only a chosen few scientists and engineers and astronauts (the ‘first hundred’) make the first journey. The balance of power in the Martian population gradually changes as the big corporations begin to send parties of their own to exploit Mars’ natural mineral resources. Many of the first hundred would like to create a new egalitarian society where land is held in common and people receive ‘payment’ for the resources that they contribute to Martian society. They find this difficult because their seemingly ideal society, which allows them to pursue whatever research takes their fancy, is paid for by Earth. And then they discover how to reverse the ageing process and the trouble really starts…..

This is the best sort of science fiction, the sort that asks questions about what sort of a society would be likely to form if we started to populate the blankness of space. Somehow I doubt that anything we build on Mars would be an entirely new heaven and earth, whatever Bush says. The irony of it is that if Bush sends men to Mars, then whatever happens on Mars will follow the American agenda, and will not be new at all.

American Splendour - more real than real life

A comic gem. Probably aimed more at middle-aged American men than at me – but I still laughed.

Funny and thought provoking. For those like me who have never heard of Harvey Pekar, the story is this: Harvey Pekar is an entirely average, rather dull, not very attractive man from Cleveland Ohio who decides to write a comic book about his life, called American Splendour. The comics are a runaway success, and Harvey becomes famous enough to be a regular guest on the Letterman show, that is, until he is thrown out for insulting NBC live on air. His wife Joyce is a fan who first writes to him when she can’t find a copy of the latest comic. Someone writes and produces a play of their life. Harvey gets cancer and writes a comic about that. And then the film is made.

These nesting realities make the artifice of the film completely transparent. At times it has the feel of a documentary, but we shouldn’t be too fooled by this. The real Harvey and Joyce appear in the film – both watching the filming on set, and being interviewed about whether they felt the play or comic accurately represented their lives. Some of their friends also appear, and are even stranger looking than the actors chosen to portray them in the film. We see a scene from the play, and observe ‘Harvey’ and ‘Joyce’ (the film actors) watching it. We see ‘Harvey’ and ‘Joyce’ (the play actors) kissing on the sofa, and Joyce throwing up. We watch Joyce’s reaction to the scene from the play – we can see her thinking that that’s not how it really happened, she didn’t throw herself at him like that. But then we realise that this ‘Joyce’ is no more real than the ‘Joyce’ on stage – she’s just the film ‘Joyce’. And the version of this event that we watched a few minutes ago in the film is no more ‘real’ than the version in the play. Who knows how it really happened? Only the real Harvey and real Joyce.

This transparency continues until the end of the film, when we fade from actor Harvey to real Harvey walking down the street.

And wouldn’t you know, Harvey, Joyce, and their adoptive daughter Danielle all have blogs at the Harvey Pekar website (although it’s not very live, the last post was in October 2003 so I suspect it was a bit of publicity for the film). In these days of reality TV and blogging it can be difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. The lines are becoming very blurred. Even the ‘reality’ of blogs and reality-TV is only an edited reality. But then so are our memories.

Sweeney Todd - Royal Opera House

My New Year’s Day treat for 2004 was a trip to the Royal Opera House to see Sweeney Todd. I love going into London to see a show on either Boxing Day or New Year’s Day. The city is practically empty because everyone is sleeping off a hangover from the night before, and almost all the shops are closed. Covent Garden was full of tourists with nothing better to do than wander around window shopping, but the tube was blissfully quiet.

I was curious to see how the venerable ROH would cope with a ‘low-brow’ production like Sweeney Todd. Previously, I had only Sondheim I had seen was a student production of Into the Woods so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect musically. What I did know was that the singers would be amplified, and I was a bit concerned about how they would cope with this. Opera singers are used to projecting to the back wall of the house: singing into a mike is quite a different business.

The music exceeded my expectation on the whole. There is enough complexity in the orchestra to hold the listener’s interest, certainly the first time each individual number is sung. The piece was written in 1979 and it sounded like true late-twentieth century music. Act One was the most interesting and had some of the best numbers, including Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett’s baking song - 'A little priest' - at the very end of the Act, which is superbly witty. Act Two contains several reprises of numbers that have already been heard in Act One in one form or another, but without much musical development (as far as I could hear, but maybe my ear isn’t attuned to Sondheim yet).

The amplification was a mixed success. Some singers made excellent use of it (Felicity Palmer and Wiliam Dazeley in particular) but Thomas Allen seemed very uncomfortable. I’m not entirely surprised that he didn’t take to it that easily. He must have had to hold back a lot vocally, and given that he was singing a lot during the evening, that must have become rather uncomfortable. I also think that the part was too low for his vocal range. His vocal discomfort leaked into his whole performance, and I wasn’t entirely convinced by his interpretation of Sweeney Todd as a rather muddled man who is strongly led by Mrs Lovett. Of course he is led by her, but an equal partnership would be more convincing – this Sweeney Todd had no undercurrent of evil.

Felicity Palmer was the real star of the show. Mrs Lovett is an absolute gift of a part, with bags of attitude and true wickedness. Palmer grabbed the opportunity with both hands and looked like she was having the time of her life on stage. She made the most of the vocal amplification to put more energy into her acting and movement.

William Dazely was the young sailor Anthony who falls in love with Sweeney Todd’s daughter. He has a sweet baritone voice that came across better than Allen’s in some of their duets. Sadly, Robert Tear was unwell, but Paul Arden-Griffith was a very good replacement as the ineffectual Beadle. There aren’t many tenor characters – Sondheim seems mainly to write for baritones/basses, possibly because these are the most available voices for musicals – but the two in Sweeney Todd, Beadle and Pirelli, are both comic.

So does Sondheim fit into the ROH’s repertoire? I wasn’t completely won over. The set was very basic – a few grimy curtains and Sweeney’s chair were the most memorable items – and I suspect that a glitzy West End or Broadway production would go to town more on the set designs. And the singers were performing outside their usual experience in many cases. I don’t have a problem with the ROH performing Sondheim on quality grounds – the music is just as interesting as many of the Italian confections that are part of its standard repertoire – but the ROH just doesn’t do it as well as a professional theatre production with musical singers.

Trackback from leaderlog

I've had a trackback to my IFRS site and kind words from Leaderlog, another UK accountant who keeps track of audit and financial control issues. Unfortunately I've had to remove the trackback facility from the IFRS site as I use it primarily to keep colleagues updated on IFRS issues and don't necessarily want those colleagues to be able to link directly to my personal site. It's taking me a while to learn the netiquette of blogs. And maybe I need to think about creating an about page (at least on the personal site)......

Christmas films

This has been a good Christmas for films, at least for good quality blockbusters. Watching the latest Lord of the rings film just before Christmas has become a bit of a tradition for the past three years; it's sad that it has to come to an end. As far as I know there are no plans to remake The Hobbit in time for next Christmas!

I have enjoyed all the LOTR films, the first and last ones especially (Two Towers did suffer from the curse of being the middle film in the trilogy). The first shots of Hobbiton and Frodo made me feel as if I was seeing old friends for the first time in several years.

What I particularly liked about the last film was the time taken over the ending. All the loose ends were tied up: we saw Sam and Frodo returning to the Shire, Sam's wedding, and Frodo's last journey to the West with Bilbo and the elves. And yes, I know that the scouring of the Shire was missed out, but it would have been a complete anti-climax to the film, obscuring the destruction of the Ring and Sauron. To be honest it was always a bit of an anti-climax in the book. Dramatically, it made sense to leave it out - although I understand Peter Cushing's frustration at not appearing in the third film of the trilogy. I'm sure we will see him in the Director's cut version some time next year.

I was taken to see Master and Commander the other day. This isn't really my cup of tea, since I'm not a big fan of either films about ships or Russell Crowe, but it was surprisingly enjoyable. From the opening shots of the canons with their names lovingly inscribed in ink - "Jumping Billy", etc - I knew that this film would give plenty of detail about life on a frigate at the begining of the 19th century. It also painted a very clear picture of the qualities needed to be a good captain - and of what happened to those men who did not possess the necessary leadership skills. I was amazed by all the young teenage officers. I knew that young boys were press-ganged and went to sea at the tender age of eleven or twelve, but I had not realised that there were officers of this age. It brings home the rigidity of the class system. If it were not so deeply embedded, there is no way that the old tars would have taken orders from a twelve-year-old boy!

I also want to see The Cold Mountain - if only to see Nicole Kidman looking less than perfect for once!

Amazon "search inside"

I've been playing around with Amazon's new 'Search inside' feature, which allows you to get search results from the text of books, not just the author and title. This feels like the start of a small revolution for academic researchers and journalists. Amazon continues to break new ground: first I read in the Guardian that it had bought the British Library's back catalogue (not the actual books, just the catalogue) to enable dealers in antiquarian books to identify books more easily, then I read about the search inside feature in the most recent edition of Wired Magazine, so I thought I would give it a go. At the moment it only appears to be functioning on the US website, not the UK site.

I had noticed some references to Ezekiel in the A.S. Byatt books I have been reading recently, but couldn't remember exactly where I found them. My other half works on Ezekiel so was interested in the references. To save time, I entered the words 'ezekiel' and 'byatt' into the normal books search function at Amazon and came up with these results. It came up with references in Possession, A Whistling Woman and A Biographer's Tale. Sadly, not all the novels are subject to the agreement that allows Amazon to search inside the books - either the publishers haven't signed up yet, or the books haven't been scanned yet (the Wired article mentioned above has some interesting information on the methods used to scan books). So I know there are references to Ezekiel in A Virgin in the Garden that have not been identified by the search - but it's still pretty good.

A.S. Byatt

I have been re-reading A.S. Byatt's four Frederica Potter books non-stop for the past few days. I needed some pure escapism and I find that the combination of Byatt's prose, which is absorbing because of its sheer physicality and sensuality, and her quirky characters, keeps me deep in the books for hours on end.

The reason I started reading/re-reading was that I finally managed to buy a copy of the Virgin in the Garden, the first in the series. For some reason I had never managed to find this in a bookshop - maybe it was out of print for a while. I think I actually read the books in the order 3-2-4-1 which is not exactly logical. I bought Babel Tower in hardback at a remnants sale in 1996-97, then Still Life in paperback shortly afterwards. I then bought A Whistling Woman in hardback when it was published in 2002 (by this time I had almost everything else of Byatt's except Virgin and wanted to read more) and then finally this year I bought the first book.

It's been interesting to read them one after another - apart from anything else; it answers a few basic questions about the plot (I was never quite sure where the mysterious Ottakar brothers had appeared from). But it also gives each event its correct dramatic weight. Almost didn't notice the death of Stephanie in the second book, because my focus was so much on the dominant personality of Frederica. Virgin, however, made me realise the importance of Stephanie (and lack of Stephanie in books three and four of the quartet) because she is emphatically not a subsidiary character in the first book. She is the foil to Frederica, she goes before her in everything (including, crucially, marriage), she may be a more submissive personality but we can see the roots of so much of Frederica's character in her.

I don't think I had realised quite how much Frederica's life follows Byatt's life. I wouldn't want to say that the novels are entirely auto-biographical, because quite frankly, no-one's life is that interesting, but there are endless similarities: the two sisters born into a literary family; the young woman at Newnham; the struggles of a young writer; teaching at an Art College. I wonder what Margaret Drabble makes of Byatt's decision to kill off the elder sister in the novels?

I haven't quite finished The Whistling Woman yet, so I may have more to write later.

Enron and Wittgenstein

I was browsing the Guardian website the other day and found this article on Wittgenstein and Enron - it's in two parts: part 1 and part 2.

I thought this was superb - at last, a philosophical explanation for why principles-based accounting is superior to rules-based acounting! After a bit of web detective work, I find out that the author, Donald MacKenzie, has invented a new method of studying accountancy, called 'ethnoaccountancy'. Brad Delong has a useful collection of links and comments on some of MacKenzie's other work. Leaderlog also quotes the Enron article. I must take some time to read the two Mackenzie papers - the story of the evolution of the Black-Scholes model is especially interesting given the new IFRS on share option accounting expected next year. This quote by Jonathan King from Brad Delong's site raises some worrying questions about the usefulness of B-S:

4) The discovery of Black-Scholes has led to changes in the world, and especially in our perception of the truth of Black-Scholes. Specifically, people now use Black-Scholes to price options, so to some extent the fact that Black-Scholes describes option prices well is...well, not unexpected.

As an accounting practitioner, I am aware of some of the shortcomings of the B-S model - but mainly its limitations for use in valuing non-transferable share options with peformance conditions attached. It's interesting to see criticism on a more conceptual level. I must read this article - it's stirring thoughts from way back and my degree in history & philospohy of science.

And here's my brother's criique of Mackenzie's Enron article for the LRB - brother is currently writing a PhD on Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty so is good at professional philosopher-speak:

Not bad at all - at least he doesn't appear to have made the usual misinterpretations á la Kripke, but then he doesn't describe his position that much. A little wary of the fact that he seems to be attributing rule-scepticism to Wittgenstein (which does sound a little too much like Kripke). The whole point of the discussion of rule-following in PI is not to undercut the idea that rules can and do guide us; it was far more a phenomenological description of what it is in fact like to follow a rule (as opposed to a more traditional philosophical description of how rule-following is supposed to work - which Wittgenstein does think runs into severe regressive problems). Perhaps the point this author was trying to make though is that the rules in accounting have become divorced from any kind of normative practice, so that there is nothing that can be called 'going against' or 'acting in accordance with' these kinds of rules - the interpretative point is correct, on some interpretation a rule can be made to mean anything you like. But for Wittgenstein this doesn't mean that rules themselves are useless or baseless, just that there is something called 'following a rule' that is precisely not the production of an interpretation of a rule, this is the 'according with' and 'going against' that appears to be absent in the case of accounting.

Of course if the 'principle' based UK standards are to be any better then they must avoid this same pitfall - they must not divorce the interpretative from the active aspects of following a rule. Interpretations function as a way of 'showing how' or 'explaining how' to another person who is not already following the rule, this means that interpretations are normally posterior to the rule itself, which is established through normative practices. Presumable these 'principles' are an attempt to establish this link back to some kind of normativity that is not hermetically sealed off from the non-accounting environment.

The last paragraph is crucial, and is addressed by Mackenzie in the second part of his article. What stops principles from just being meta-rules, subject to the same limitations as rules? Something to do with the body of interpretations I think - but I need to consider this some more. And I am too prejudiced to think clearly on this - being firmly committed to principles - based accounting in the UK.

New gadget - Toshiba e800

I've been distracted by my new toy for the last week or so.... I bought a Toshiba e800 PDA. The main reason for buying this was the 4" VGA screen, of which I had seen some very impressive screen shots on the Brighthand forums and at the Boston PocketPC Club site.
Toshiba shipped the PDA with this fantastic VGA screen, but only able to run four applications in VGA - all document viewers. Just enough to show you how truly impressive the screen is, and to make it really frustrating that nothing else would run in the higher resolution (except the NetFront browser, which has a special e800 VGA version and is excellent).
Thanks to deez at Brighthand, who has provided us all with a hack to run everything in VGA (at the Brighthand link above). And for free! The best things so far are (click on thumbnails for screen shots):

• huge today screen!
• browsing the internet using NetFront and being able to see more than a postage-stamp sized portion of the screen at any one time
• reading Word documents including tables with Textmaker (replacement Word program for PPC). The screenshots form the Softmaker site are in QVGA - it look so much better in VGA!
• Pocket Informant in VGA. I can actually see my whole weeks' appointments at once! The fonts are scalable so it's all readable
• reading ebooks with uBook, the best PDA ebook reader I have found. It allows you to select the font size and colour and read in landscape format
• taking handwritten notes with Phatpad from the people who make Calligrapher
• reading pdfs using the PPC version of Adobe.

Quite apart from the superb screen, this is a real step-up performance-wise for me. I was previously using my iPAQ 5450, which only had 64MB of memory and was running PPC 2002. The e800 has 128MB of RAM plus 32MB of flash RAM, and runs Windows Mobile 2003. I have all my favourite programs installed, even the ones that take up tons of memory, and I still have 60MB of internal memory free!! What's more, I can run memory heavy programs like RunningVoice GSM at the same time as listening to music and browsing the internet - this was never possible on the iPAQ, as the system just didn't have enough memory and would just freeze.

So I haven't been reading so much for the past few days - my spare time has been eaten up by browsing the Brighthand forums, installing programs, finding pictures to use on te today screen, trasnferring music across, etc, etc.

However, I have had time to read Howard's End - on the PDA in ubook - which I loved. The great thing about uBook is that it lets you make annotations (a bit like MS Reader) but then allows you to browse these annotations separately from the book. Great for making odd notes as I read, then reviewing later on. I'm saving my comments on Howard's End for my great piece on Forster (should i ever get around ot writing it) but for now, I'll just say that it's my favourite to date because it deals with the problem of how to reconcile commerce with art and 'sensitivity'.