Great blog post from what looks like an exciting new UK startup, on how the internet is connecting those with the ideas to those with the skill for execution. Being one of the latter – I wouldn’t mind someone creative throwing me an idea now and then, and apparently, since ‘execution is expensive’ I am in possession of quite a skill…

“Crowdsourcing is a way of solving problems and producing things by connecting online with people that you otherwise wouldn’t know”. That’s according to a video by crowdsourcing.org (we posted earlier this month on facebook) and it’s central to what we’re doing. If you’ve read any of our previous content, you already know that we want to help create new businesses by connecting users with the people or the ideas they need to start up; that means finding and collaborating with business professionals to help develop your concept, or finding great startup opportunities to pitch in time and resources.

Sharing ideas online is the starting point of any real or meaningful experience with our community and stats show that the majority of us are comfortable doing it. Most of us live and work in the grey area between total privacy and openness. Life is about engaging with your surroundings –…

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The Octogenarian Who Jumped Out of An Old Life and Into a New One

Italian book cover for The Centenarian Who Jumped Out The Window and Disappeared

So, my grandmother isn’t a centenarian, and nor is she quite blessed with a grandchild with bestseller writing potential and a name like Jonas Jonasson to PR the hell out of it, but – she does have me, and yesterday, as she stepped off her aliyah flight at 80 years old with signature grace and equanimity, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the title of the bestselling book, and of films like Up.

In a globalised, highly-connected and hyper-communicative ‘facebook’ age, it is, I suppose, hardly surprising that more and more of those belonging to an older generation are taking the opportunity to re-discover their vitality and capacity for change.

Don’t let the grace and equanimity fool you, however, my grandmother is not one of those…..

For the full post on The Times of Israel, click here.

Link

This just had to be posted and shared, and, eventually, responded to in a suitably clever blog post.

But for now, for all you book lovers out there, enjoy the vindication. For all ye scoffing sceptics who insist that a TV program or video game will suffice and eventually supplant – HA.

This is a question I think about often…anyone any answers?

Review: Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife and the power of fable

Israeli Cover of The Tiger's Wife - quite impressive

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the beautiful Tea Obreht and her stunning debut The Tiger’s Wife. Obreht was the youngest ever writer to win the Orange Prize and she was named one of The New Yorker‘s 20 under 40. More significantly, The Tiger’s Wifehas appeared on almost every list of the best books of 2011, both commercial and reader-based, and high-brow intellectual and literary.

This last seems to highlight the way that though the book appeals to a wide range of people (it has spent many weeks in the New York Times bestseller list, and has been number 1 on the ABA Indie Bestseller list for almost 20 weeks), it is also receiving praise from critics and prestigious reviewers. This combination of commercial potential and literary value seems hard to find – so what is the secret of The Tiger’s Wife?

The answer is difficult to describe. The book doesn’t exactly have a simple and clear plot, and Obreht’s subject matter stretches from the universality of death to the specificity of the war-torn Balkan experience. Her characters are sometimes mythical and sometimes real, and sometimes both at the same time.

On a simple level, you might say that this is a book about a woman coming to terms with the death of a beloved grandfather, and a country coming to terms with a bloody past, but that would be to ignore the most wonderful thing about the book – Obreht’s talent in using fable to “deliver a truth histories can’t touch“.

Understanding the magic of The Tiger’s Wife goes to the very heart of understanding why we read fairy tales – what emotional and human realities they can reveal to us in ways that normal writing cannot.

Albert Einstein claimed “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” G. K. Chesterton wrote that “Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

By refusing to limit herself to realistic writing, Obreht transforms the tragedies of Balkan history and the struggle of one woman to commemorate her grandfather’s life into an emotional truth we can all share in and identify with. Not only this, she delivers a truth that is at once ‘real’ and believable, and also hopeful.

But Obreht’s achievement is even more complex than that, since she never lets her story fall into fable completely. Instead, by resolutely standing on the thin line between realism and fable, Obreht highlights the way that the two are necessary to each other. The conflict between science and superstition that the book deals with – both stylistically and through it’s content – is never resolved precisely because we need both in life. The breathtaking end of the book works exactly like this, leaving the reader stranded between these two poles of life and forcing them to keep thinking about the book for hours afterwards.

Perhaps the real secret to enjoying The Tiger’s Wife is by following W. H. Auden’s advice: “The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.” Throw yourself into The Tiger’s Wife, and it will reward you with a stunning reading experience and a moving emotional truth.

I like the mix of image and words, but I like the phrase even better…

Edilio Ciclostile

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Female ‘Sovereyntee’ and The Wife of Bath

Today being International Women’s Day, I’ve been thinking about female role models, as have several other blogs and tweets around. There have been plenty of lists on which literary heroines or fictional characters would come up as our top ten, and with a solid smattering of Bronte and Austen heroines standing next to Katniss Everdeen of Hunger Games fame, there is enough variety to appeal to one and all.

Whilst I’d have to admit that Margaret Atwood’s Joan in Lady Oracle more closely resembles who I am, if we’re talking about heroines or role models for who we’d like to be, Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath comes up trumps.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to go around marrying multiply and playing cougar, as Julie Walters so wonderfully portrayed the Wife of Bath in the BBC adaptation in 2003.

But the Wife of Bath does represent some serious girl power – both in her medieval time and in ours. She refuses to conform to contemporary conventions of womanhood, and with irrepressible enthusiasm and joie de vivre she happily indulges in all that life has to offer with no thought for authority.

But the reason I love the Wife of Bath is for her linguistic playfulness and her role as a woman attempting to rewrite women in the canon. She fills her tale with mini-episodes of transformation, highlighting the way women are adept at adapting to different situations and are able to slide, chameleon-like, into forms that can get them what they want. Rather than seeing this as a terrible necessity of living in a patriarchal world (*yawn*), I would celebrate this ability woman have to get what they want. Their clever flexibility that uses the rules of a particular game to their advantage, rather than loudly demanding that the rules be changed or the game aborted.

The Wife of Bath reminds me of that saying, the one that gets recycled and farmed out by mothers and aunts and grandmothers and older sisters and mother’s best friends at every opportunity. It’s most famous appearance might have been in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, when Tula’s mother turns to her and says,

“the man may be the head of the family, but the woman is the neck, and the neck can turn the head any way she wants.’

This, to me symbolizes the ‘sovereyntee’ women can lay claim to. It’s controversial, I know, to claim that women shouldn’t be the head if they want to, but perhaps there is strength and power to be gained in laying claim to a particularly feminine way of being, one that is just as effective as a male one but perhaps not as clearly dominant – rather than attempting to assert that we’re all the same.

Even the Wife of Bath had to use the language of male scholarship and patriarchal religion to clothe her feminist project, but the fact that she could do that at all is, I think, cause for celebration rather than sadness.

In Search of Transparency, or not…

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man