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.