Falling Foul of Twitterati

The award-winning novelist Jonathan Franzen has kicked up a Twitter storm, after complaining on BBC Radio 4's Today program about the impact of social networking on writers' lives.

In an interview with Today presenter James Naughtie, Franzen said the literary world is now so obsessed with Twitter that agents refuse even to look at manuscripts by writers who don't tweet.

"What I find particularly alarming from the point of view of American fiction is that [social media] is a coercive development, agents will now tell young writers: 'I won't even look at your manuscript if you don't have 250 followers on Twitter'," said Franzen. "I see people who ought to be spending their time developing their craft, and people who used to be able to make a living as freelance writers, I see them making nothing and coerced into this constant self-promotion."

It's not the first time the author has hit out at modern techno-fuelled culture's effect on literature. In a Guardian article last month, Franzen asked:

What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?

Franzen's latest attempt to put the case for struggling writers was met with disbelief and derision on Twitter.

Francesca Main, editorial director at Picador – publisher of the Booker prize shortlisted novels Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent, and Harvest, by Jim Crace – tweeted: "Franzen says it's alarming that agents turn away writers for having too few Twitter followers. It's alarming J-Franz believes this nonsense."

She added later: "Most of the authors on Twitter have a book out far more frequently than those who spend loads of time grouching about it."

The Sunday Times columnist and novelist India Knight tweeted: "Lighten up, Franzo."

Franzen's latest book, The Kraus Project, is a study of the works of Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, a relentless critic of dehumanising technology and the popular media's twisting of reality.

Franzen said: "It [technology-driven culture] gnaws away particularly at my soul because I'm a fiction writer. For something like literature it's maybe not such a great model. You see this in any number of ways – very directly you see the demolition of the independent book business and the brick and mortar book business by Amazon. But also this crowd-sourcing model, everything shared, communal, it doesn't really work, not to pay freelance writers; and most important, the whole definition of literature is that people go off by themselves, develop a distinctive voice. It's not a communal enterprise."

by Liz Bury

pic: Jonathan Franzen speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme

@Guardian

The Nature of Fun

It's not easy to read these kinds of posthumous essays considering the certain destination the author has met. But anyhow I found the following essay pretty moving, meticulously dissected the a paradox in a writer's career. I think "The Nature of Fun" can be extended to other fields, as long as one is sincerely dedicated to his/her career.
pedram   
The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo'sMao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (ie, dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete attention.
The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it – a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception – yes, understand: grotesque because imperfect. And yet it's yours, the infant is, it's you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it – hate it – because it's deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels… and so you want it dead, even as you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.

The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool – it's a genuine relationship, of a sort – and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.

So you're in a bit of a dicey position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you hope others won't see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.

Or else you don't want to fool these people; what you want is you want them to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong: you want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you were crazy: you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact (others persuade you) aren't there at all. Meaning you're at least a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: it'd also mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing you made (and love), in your spawn, in certain ways you. And this last, best hope – this'd represent something way worse than just very bad parenting; it'd be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that's still what you most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong.

But it's still all a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labour-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple of days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed wild horses on to his farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says: "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between 10 and 60 for cannon-fodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4-F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?
This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the issue of fun, as a writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavour's about fun. You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don't like. And it works – and it's terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don't even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or at least you hope so. You're no longer writing just to get yourself off, which – since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow – is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure personal fun starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don't know like you and admire you and think you're a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive.
Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe "vanity" is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you're good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, now, writing – your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing: a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it at all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. At this point 90+% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will make you disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double bind, and it can keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have gone.

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation: fun. And, if you can find your way back to the fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that "disciplined fun" is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralysing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likeable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.

David Foster Wallace
@Guardian

Jacques Audiard: 'My work is like rolling thunder'

For a man who is a bundle of intense, nervous energy, Jacques Audiard is a surprisingly slow worker. Since he started directing, in 1994, he has completed just six features, with lengthy gaps between them. Indeed, the three-year run up to his new film, Rust and Bone, represents something of an acceleration. "I am free," Audiard shrugs, "because I work for a producer [Pascal Caucheteux] who says, 'We'll go when it's ready.' He doesn't give me a deadline. The films take a long time to write – too long, perhaps. That is where the time is spent."

But what films they are. His last, A Prophet, the coruscating study of a French-Arab convict who becomes a player in the Corsican mafia, was four years in the making, and won a runner-up prize at Cannes in 2009; it also made a star of its lead, Tahar Rahim. Before that, in 2005, there was The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a nerve-shredding remake of James Toback's seminal New Hollywood film, Fingers; again, it made a huge star of its lead, Romain Duris, in a role originally played by Harvey Keitel. Rewind another four years and there was Read My Lips, in 2001, in which deaf office worker Emmanuelle Devos falls for hoodlum Vincent Cassel and takes part in a brutal robbery. Read My Lips emerged a full five years after the film that put Audiard on the map: A Self-Made Hero, his fantastically watchable account of a fake Resistance fighter, with a liquidly brilliant central performance by Mathieu Kassovitz.

Rust and Bone is a reworking of a book of short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, and of two in particular: the title story and another called Rocket Ride. It's a substantial rewrite: the killer-whale trainer played by Marion Cotillard was originally male; an accident that is a backstory in the book becomes the climax of the film; the film's two central characters live in entirely separate worlds in Davidson's original, and never meet (Audiard's film has them conducting a complex, passionate relationship). Moreover, the film is set in France, in an anti-glamour Riviera of ramshackle workshops, grubby flats and battered wastelands. (This is not, as Audiard is at pains to point out, an assault on the plushness of the Côte d'Azur; it is simply because the only killer-whale aquarium in France is located in Antibes.)

Key to this part of the process is Audiard's scriptwriter, Thomas Bidegain, who worked on A Prophet and also acts as the director's unofficial translator. Sitting in on our interview, he chips in, amplifying his director's words. "The way we work is to talk about what the film should be, the kind of film we want to do. We were coming out of A Prophet – a jail movie – no women, no space, no light, no love. So the idea we had was to do a love story."

But Audiard, twitching with auteurist pride, cannot be talked over. "I really believe the form of the film must be in the scenario; cinema is not just added value to the scripting. I believe in it as a totality. There was a specific problem with this film, which we saw often during the writing: the clash between realism and stylisation. You had constantly to be looking for an equilibrium. If it's too realistic, it's boring. If it's too stylised, you don't believe it." Bidegain adds: "What attracted us to the short stories was the universe they described, a universe of catastrophe – a world where people just have their body left to sell. The characters were normal people, but their destiny is magnified by accidents."

But this is the director's show, and Audiard wants to talk about a key scene in which Cotillard's character, Stéphanie, loses her legs. In Davidson's story, the incident is described with gruesome precision: the trainer stands on the killer whale's lip, slips, and is horribly mutilated as the animal attempts to eject him from its throat. The film's treatment of this central moment is, in sharp contrast, cryptic and impressionistic; a chaotic, dream-like sequence, slowed down to the point of abstraction. "We start out very realistic," Audiard says. "We shot the marine show just as it is, very natural. But if you do the accident like that, it would be over so fast. So we go outside the point of view of the character: what we make is more like a fantasy. It could be an image a child dreamed, after the story was told to him."

That seems as good a rationalisation of Audiard's extraordinarily fluid image-making as you're likely to get from the director. His is an ability that is as confident as cinema has seen for decades. It is not for nothing that Audiard has been repeatedly compared to Martin Scorsese in his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull period; he has the same restless imagination, the same unerring confidence in handling the camera. Audiard is reluctant to explain details – "It is immodest, like I am God!" – but rather poetically likens his scene-building to "rolling thunder", a tension crackling away in the background before the climactic moment.

He used CGI for Cotillard's post-amputation scenes, digitally removing her legs. "It's just a cheap computer manipulation, you know. When we shoot, she's just wearing green socks. You get used to the green socks, then one day we saw the first finished CGI, and you think: Wow! It's really erotic." He expands on this: "We know this from the original story – that's what the film is about – she is someone who doesn't like sex before the accident: she's too controlled. She finds in love the possibility to be abandoned, to let go – she finds out what love is."

Audiard has been here before. In Read My Lips, the disability is deafness, but the film has a near-identical dramatic drive: a woman whose impairment is an analogue to a repressed emotional life; an insensitive, inarticulate man; a relationship that unlocks them both. Audiard says he never noticed the similarities; it was his editor who pointed them out. But it is this inquisitiveness about his characters' inner lives that really marks Audiard out as a director. For a long time regarded as essentially a crime guy, a modern Jean-Pierre Melville (perhaps due to his predilection for spiffy trilby hats and a pipe), Audiard looks very much like a director with a yen for intense, emotional romances. "Maybe it's a problem of vocabulary – 'crime' is perhaps too specific a term for what I do."

Be that as it may, you would have thought Audiard would be a natural candidate for a Hollywood – or at least an English-language – transfer, like so many of his French colleagues, with varying degrees of success: everyone from Renoir and Truffaut to Besson and Audiard's former star Mathieu Kassovitz have tried it. The Beat That My Heart Skipped cleverly aligned him with the cultier end of 70s American cinema; and Rust and Bone, after all, could easily have been a boutique Hollywood production, with an Oscar-winning lead. But Audiard remains wary; partly, his sketchy English makes it a tad tricky; and partly he genuinely seems to prefer the unploughed pastures of his homeland. "If you open the door of a boxing gym in Brooklyn, you know what is behind it. You've seen it 200 times, in 200 films. If you open it in Antibes, it's all new. There is curiosity. Had we set set it in America, it would be a kind of cliche, somehow. You need something to say about the place where you make films. I know Europe. The US I don't know so well. I need a film that sees something, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did for Milos Forman. It makes it worth the trip."

@Guardian

by: Andrew Pulver

c'est l'amour

Michael Haneke, right, with (from left) Jean-Louis Trintignant, Adrien Brody and Emmanuelle Riva after Amour won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

The 65th Cannes film festival drew to a close with the director Michael Haneke being awarded the Palme d'Or for Amour.

His victory was greeted with acclaim but an understandable lack of surprise: Amour had been hotly tipped ever since it unspooled on the fifth day of the festival.

The jury, presided over by former Palme d'Or winner Nanni Moretti, gave the chief award to Haneke, saying the jury was not unanimous on any of the awards, but that many of the contending films were "more in love with their style than their characters"; this, presumably, was where Haneke differed.

Amour, which stars French veterans Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as well as Isabelle Huppert, describes the relationship between an elderly married couple when one of them is incapacitated by a stroke.

The Palme d'Or is Haneke's second; his last was only three years ago for The White Ribbon. In this he joins a select company, including Emir Kusturica and the Dardenne brothers.

The Austrian director accepted the award in his characteristically low-key way, saying: "It's a harsh thing to have to contend with. It's something I had to contend with in my own family, and that's why I started to make this film."

Haneke also mentioned his own wife: "This film is an illustration of the promise we made to each other, if either one of us finds ourselves in the situation that is described in the film."

The Grand Jury prize, Cannes' second most prestigious award, was given to Matteo Garrone, the Italian director whose film Reality explored the effect of reality TV. Garrone's award was genuinely unexpected, perhaps reflecting the common cultural ground between him and the jury president.

British cinema scored a pleasant surprise as the bronze-medal Jury Prize went to Ken Loach's The Angels' Share, a whisky heist comedy set in Scotland. Loach, who is held in high esteem on the European festival circuit, took the opportunity to affirm his opposition to Europe-wide austerity economic policies when accepting his award; he elaborated on the issue afterwards in the winners' press conference.

"The characters in the film have no work, and the world tells them they have no worth," Loach said. "We are reminded of the situation in Europe where people are told they have to stay out of work, and stay of no value. So we are in solidarity with those against austerity – another world is possible."

A rare moment of levity was provided by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose best director award was probably the biggest surprise of the night, after a string of negative reviews for his film Post Tenebras Lux. Reygadas bounced into the winners' press conference, punching the air, and stood balancing his award certificate on his head. British jury member Andrea Arnold had earlier defended his film to the hilt, saying it had "dared to fail".

Probably the most disappointed director on the night was Leos Carax, whose Holy Motors looked likely to scoop at least one award. Moretti said: "Opinions were divided within the jury over several films; some won awards, some did not."

But one popular winner was the young American, Benh Zeitlin, whose surreal coming of age film Beasts of the Southern Wild won the Camera d'Or for best first film. Zeitlin, the only American to win a major prize, explained that nearly all his cast and crew were first-timers too: "We were a lot of inexperienced people running fast into the unknown."

Former Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen also drew loud cheers when his best actor award was announced for the child-abuse-accusation drama The Hunt. Jury member Ewan McGregor said: "The wonder was in the subtlety."

@Guardian

France Peresidential Elections 2012: TV Debate

The Socialist François Hollande has emerged with the upper hand from a bruising TV duel with the rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy, as the two held their last rallies in the final 24 hours of campaigning before Sunday's presidential vote.

The first opinion poll for LH2 Yahoo showed French viewers of the live TV debate found Hollande to be the more serious candidate and also the nicest, most sincere and closest to their daily concerns. Sarkozy was seen to have been more dynamic and competent. Hollande was most convincing on the issues that worry voters the most: jobs, making ends meet as well as education, while Sarkozy was seen to be better on Europe, immigration and reducing France's debt.

Over 17 million French people watched the almost three-hour live TV presidential debate, more than watch an X Factor final in the UK, but fewer than tuned in to watch Sarkozy take on the Socialist Ségolène Royal in 2007.

Sarkozy is trailing Hollande by five to eight points in the polls and a classic televised battle of the personalities had been seen as his last chance to turn the election around and win over the large majority of France's 6.4m far-right voters he needs to have a chance at re-election.

Pollsters were sceptical that Sarkozy, who at times had seemed riled and on the defensive, would have done so. French presidential debates do not usually yield an outright winner, and some called this a draw.

But most commentators felt Hollande had won on points, delivering the most memorable lines, including repeating: "I, as president of the republic …" 16 times in a bid to gain in leadership stature. Newspaper columnists felt the debate would not produce an "earthquake" for the struggling Sarkozy, the most unpopular president to seek re-election in France. Hollande was seen to have cemented his advance.

He was given a further boost when the centrist François Bayrou, who took 9% of the vote in the first round, broke with his party's tradition and said he would vote for him. This was a blow to Sarkozy, who needs to secure as many Bayrou voters as possible.

If the TV slanging match was full of bile – Sarkozy called Hollande "a little slanderer" and Hollande told him "you'd be hard pressed to pass yourself off as a victim" – the political reaction afterwards was just as laden with invective.

Nadine Morano, a rightwing minister and Sarkozy ally, said the exchange with Hollande had been like "extracting pus". Sarkozy's special adviser called Hollande "grotesque". Jean-Marc Ayrault, tipped as a possible Socialist prime minister, said Sarkozy had been aggressive. Hollande said the nature of the debate had reflected the fracture, aggressiveness and tensions in society "after five years of Sarkozy".

But Sarkozy insisted that the election was on a knife-edge and all was to play for. "The opinion polls are lying. An election has never been this open … It's even more open after the debate," he told French radio.

He then gave a highly personal interview seemingly to show himself as more human and close to the people, saying he was so "rubbish" at technology that he didn't know how to work the three TV remote controls at home, and suggesting if his wife, Carla Bruni, wasn't with him he could barely operate the television.

At his final major rally in Toulon, he said the "left and its laxity" had "ruined" France.

Hollande, before giving his final open-air rally in Toulouse, was deliberately cautious about Sunday's vote, warning that nothing was won. Some observers have predicted the result could be closer than polls suggest.

Meanwhile, media fact-checkers were poring over the highly technical parts of the TV debate, when the candidates hurled statistics at each other. One French site calculated that Sarkozy mentioned a figure every 47 seconds and Hollande mentioned one every 1 minute, 36 seconds, although not all were accurate.

The final runoff vote takes place on Sunday.

@Guardian

by Angelique Chrisafis

My Author of The Month (November 2011)

I finished "The Buddenbrooks" in november and i dedicate this post to its great creator Thomas Mann. The drama is a twisted epic about the decline of a family. It conveys many dimensions which can be analyzed and studied. I attached an article from Ian Sansom, explaining the term "the Buddenbrooks effect", an extension of Mann's novel to fields like economics, history, etc. He intends to formulate a great dynasty through this. pedram 

Historians and economists sometimes refer to the Buddenbrooks effect. The term derives from Thomas Mann's 1901 novel, Buddenbrooks, in which he depicted the decline of a bourgeois family (which rather resembled Mann's own). The Buddenbrooks effect refers to the tendency among family businesses to decline over a period of about three generations. All good things, in other words, must come to an end. And all good columns also.

In our discussion of family dynasties we have covered princes and politicians, kings, queens and emperors, movie stars, musicians, writers, artists and wrestlers. We never quite got round to the Capetians, the Merovingians or the Carolingians. Many families of dictators got away, including the Gaddafis and the Kabilas. As for banking and business families, there were just too many: the Barings never got a look in, or the Fords, or the Gettys.
We barely mentioned the French – the Mitterrands, the Le Pens, the De Gaulles – let alone the Swiss Bernoulli family of mathematicians, or the English Knott family of lighthouse keepers. Among the fictional families, the Simpsons got a mention, but Tolkein's Tooks and JD Salinger's Glass family failed to make the cut.
For some of the families we surveyed, as well as many whose stories are untold, the Buddenbrooks effect certainly seems to apply. The classic Buddenbrooks downcurve looks like this. There is a founder of the dynasty. They achieve great success: they build a better mousetrap. Their son or daughter then struggles to achieve similar or greater success: there are only so many amazing things one family can do with a mousetrap. Then along come the grandchildren, who turn out to be nogoodniks who squander the inheritance, sully the family name, and sell the mousetrap business. And so back to square one.
This pattern applies particularly to family business dynasties: capitalism triumphs over hearth and home. But for others, the Buddenbrooks effect is only the beginning of a much longer and more complicated story, or simply does not apply at all. The Mughals, for example, ruled for generations, demonstrating, if anything, a kind of double Buddenbrooks effect. And there were dozens of Bachs who excelled as musicians from the 16th to the 19th century. The great Khan squash dynasty were more like a sprawling clan than a family. And the Holy Family abide by rules entirely of their own.
In his book Dynasties: Fortunes and Misfortunes of the World's Great Family Businesses (2006), economist David S Landes quotes from a set of rules drawn up by Robert Peugeot, scion of the French car manufacturing dynasty. Peugeot sought to secure the family future and fortune by insisting that "Shares in the enterprise would be passed only to sons, never to daughters or sons-in-law" and that "Black sheep had to be put aside, where they could make no trouble". It is one way of avoiding the Buddenbrooks effect. There are others.
Stephen R Covey, in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (1998), suggests that families write their own mission statement, which may be worth considering, though try explaining your Latin motto – Virtus Repulsae Nescia, say, or Nec pluribus impar – to your Xbox-addicted teen. Versions of the Covey approach can be found in Matthew Kelly's Building Better Families: A Practical Guide to Raising Amazing Children (2008) and Steve Stephens' 20 Surprisingly Simple Rules and Tools for a Great Family (2006), where the first rule is simply, "Plan ahead".
Other ways to ward off the Buddenbrooks effect include: not having children; not allowing your children to have children; or simply ensuring that any children you do have inherit only your good humour, tolerance and a capacity to muddle through.

 by: Ian Sansom

Wow

Marine researchers in South Africa had a narrow escape after a three-metre-long great white shark breached the surface of the sea and leapt into their boat, becoming trapped on deck for more than an hour.
The incident occurred while the research team was conducting a shark population study off Seal Island, near Mossel Bay, on South Africa's Cape coast.
Using sardines as bait to attract the predators, the seven-strong crew was able to observe four great whites. The animals are renowned locally for bursting through the surface as they prey on seals.
Dorien Schröder, team leader at Oceans Research, based at Mossel Bay, said that last Monday morning, after more than an hour of shark activity around the vessel, the Cheetah, the waters at the stern had been quiet for five minutes. "Next thing I know I hear a splash, and see a white shark breach out of the water from [the] side of the boat hovering, literally, over the crew member who was chumming [throwing food bait] on the port side," she said.
Schröder recounted how she pulled her colleague to safety before the shark, weighing about 500kg (half a ton) landed on top of the bait and fuel containers. At first half of its body was outside the boat but in a panic the shark thrashed its way further on to the vessel, cutting the fuel lines and damaging equipment before becoming trapped between the containers and the stern. The crew found safety at the bow of the boat.
As Schröder poured water over the shark's gills to keep it alive, another boat was sent out to the Cheetah. A rope from the second vessel was secured around the shark's tail, but repeated efforts to tow the fish into the water failed.
The rescue ship then towed Cheetah to the port with the shark still on deck. A hosepipe was placed in the fish's mouth to ventilate its gills, before it was lifted off the boat with a crane, then lowered back into the water.
Though the shark swam away it was unable to navigate its way out of the harbour and soon beached. With Oceans Research's co-director, Enrico Gennari, an expert on great white sharks, the team tried unsuccessfully to "walk" the shark back to sea. Finally they tied ropes to the shark's tail fin and behind its pectoral fin, and attached these ties to the rescue vessel, which towed the shark out through the harbour estuary. The ropes were then removed and the animal swam away.
Gennari said it was the first time he had heard of a great white shark jumping onto a research vessel. He estimated the predator would have had to have leapt about three metres out of the water to be able to land on the boat. A smaller vessel would have capsized, he said.
As for the cause of the shark's behaviour, Gennari said it was almost certainly an accident rather than an attack on the boat. In the low-visibility water the fish could have mistaken the vessel's shadow for prey, or been disturbed by another shark close by, he said.
"It's all speculation," he said. "But sometimes a shark breaches the surface when it feels another shark underneath it. They [move] like a flying fish and end up several metres away."
@Guardian
pic :A great white shark off Seal Island, South Africa. The animal on the Cheetah would have leapt three metres out of the water, scientists said. Photograph: Chris Brunskill Ltd/Rex Features

Assault on Democracy

Hugo Chávez has long considered Noam Chomsky one of his best friends in the west. He has basked in the renowned scholar's praise for Venezuela's socialist revolution and echoed his denunciations of US imperialism.

Venezuela's president, who hasrevealed that he has had surgery in Cuba to remove a cancerous tumour, turned one of Chomsky's books into an overnight bestseller after brandishing it during a UN speech. He hosted Chomsky in Caracas with smiles and pomp. Earlier this year Chávez even suggested Washington make Chomsky the US ambassador to Venezuela.
The president may be about to have second thoughts about that, because his favourite intellectual has now turned his guns on Chávez.
Speaking to the Observer last week, Chomsky has accused the socialist leader of amassing too much power and of making an "assault" on Venezuela's democracy.
"Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, such as fighting world war two, is an assault on democracy. You can debate whether [Venezuela's] circumstances require it: internal circumstances and the external threat of attack, that's a legitimate debate. But my own judgment in that debate is that it does not."
Chomsky, a linguistics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke on the eve of publishing an open letter  that accuses Venezuela's authorities of "cruelty" in the case of a jailed judge.
The self-described libertarian socialist says the plight of María Lourdes Afiuni is a "glaring exception" in a time of worldwide cries for freedom. He urges Chávez to release her in "a gesture of clemency" for the sake of justice and human rights.
Chomsky reveals he has lobbied Venezuela's government behind the scenes since late last year after being approached by the Carr centre for human rights policy at Harvard University. Afiuni earned Chávez's ire in December 2009 by freeing Eligio Cedeño, a prominent banker facing corruption charges. Cedeño promptly fled the country.
In a televised broadcast the president, who had taken a close interest in the case, called the judge a criminal and demanded she be jailed for 30 years. "That judge has to pay for what she has done."
Afiuni, 47, a single mother with cancer, spent just over a year in jail, where she was assaulted by other prisoners. In January, authorities softened her confinement to house arrest pending trial for corruption, which she denies.
"Judge Afiuni has suffered enough," states Chomsky's letter. "She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free."
Amnesty International and the European parliament, among others, have condemned the judge's treatment but the intervention of a scholar considered a friend of the Bolivarian revolution, which is named after the hero of Venezuelan independence, Simón Bolívar, is likely to sting even more.
Speaking from his home in Boston, Chomsky said Chávez, who has been in power for 12 years, appeared to have intimidated the judicial system. "I'm sceptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It's striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her … that suggests an atmosphere of intimidation."
He also faulted Chávez for adopting enabling powers to circumvent the national assembly. "Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo [authoritarianism] and it has to be guarded against. Whether it's over too far in that direction in Venezuela I'm not sure, but I think perhaps it is. A trend has developed towards the centralisation of power in the executive which I don't think is a healthy development."
Chomsky expressed concern over Chávez's cancer and wished the president a full and prompt recovery.
Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance became a publishing sensation after Chávez waved a copy during a UN address in 2006 famous for his denunciation of President George W Bush as a devil.
Its author remains fiercely critical of the US, which he said had tortured Bradley Manning, alleged source of the diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks, and continued to wage a "vicious, unremitting" campaign against Venezuela.
The Chávez government deserved credit for sharply reducing poverty and for its policies of promoting self-governing communities and Latin American unity, Chomsky said. "It's hard to judge how successful they are, but if they are successful they would be seeds of a better world."
Leonardo Vivas, co-ordinator of Latin American initiatives at the Carr Centre, said that Afiuni's case was the most prominent example of the erosion of justice in several Latin American countries. The centre hoped that Caracas would now heed Chomsky.
"He is one of the most important public intellectuals in the US and is respected by the Venezuelan government."
The decision to lobby publicly was taken because quiet diplomacy had limits, said Vivas.
Chávez, who is convalescing in Cuba, has a reputation for lashing back at criticism, raising the risk that the Afiuni initative could backfire.
"That could happen," said Vivas. "But that would mean recognition of the problem."








Chomsky's letter


Judge María Lourdes Afiuni has suffered enough
With this public letter I want to express my open support of the liberty of judge María Lourdes Afiuni, detained in Venezuela since December 2009. In November of last year I was informed of her situation by the Latin American initiative of the Carr Centre for human rights policy at Harvard University. Ever since, I have been directly involved in mediation efforts with the Venezuelan government, with the purpose of releasing her from prison through a gesture of clemency by President Chávez.
Judge Afiuni had my sympathy and solidarity from the very beginning. The way she was detained, the inadequate conditions of her imprisonment, the degrading treatment she suffered in the Instituto Nacional de Orientación Femenina, the dramatic erosion of her health and the cruelty displayed against her, all duly documented, left me greatly worried about her physical and psychological wellbeing, as well as about her personal safety.
Those reasons motivated me in December 2010 to address, jointly with the Carr Centre, a petition for an official pardon from the president in the context of the yearly presidential amnesties.
In January I received with relief the news that Venezuela's attorney general had suggested house arrest for judge Afiuni given her fragile health condition, which ended up with emergency surgery. Being in her house with her family and with adequate medical attention has been without doubt a significant improvement of her situation.
However, judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free, not only due to her physical and psychological health conditions, but in conformance with the human dignity the Bolivarian revolution presents as a goal. In times of worldwide cries for freedom, the detention of María Lourdes Afiuni stands out as a glaring exception that should be remedied quickly, for the sake of justice and human rights generally and for affirming an honourable role for Venezuela in these struggles.
For the above reasons I want Venezuelans to be aware of my total solidarity with judge Afiuni, while I affirm my unwavering commitment with the efforts advanced by the Carr Centre in Harvard University to release her from imprisonment. At the same time, I shall keep high hopes that President Chávez will consider a humanitarian act that will end the judge's detention.
@Guardian
Pic : Maria Lourdes Afiuni

Syria Updates

The Syrian president President Bashar al-Assad has made a speech on the country's state TV denouncing "satellite television stations" as being part of a conspiracy against Syria which began weeks ago. Residents in Deraa told the Guardian that the speech was met with fury: "The speech was nonsense and has given security forces the green light to continue its oppression on our people," said one man speaking by telephone from the city.

Interview:Heartbeat of Barcelona and Spain

Many have described Barcelona's 5-0 win over Real Madrid last November as the greatest performance ever. Even Wayne Rooney admits that he stood up in his living room and started applauding.

[Xavi's face lights up]. Yeah? Really? Rooney? That makes me proud. Rooney, wow! Rooney is extraordinary, he could play for Barcelona. And before people imagine headlines like "Xavi says Rooney to join Barcelona" – although, I'd love him to! – what I mean is that he's our kind of player. That game was wonderful, the best I've played. The feeling of superiority was incredible – and against Real Madrid! They didn't touch the ball. Madre mía, what a match! In the dressing room, we gave ourselves a standing ovation.
You mention Barcelona's dominance of possession. It's tempting to conclude that we've never seen a team with an identity – for better or worse – as clear as the current Barcelona and Spain teams. It's all about possession. And that's your identity – one that seems to have become dominant.
It's good that the reference point for world football right now is Barcelona, that it's Spain. Not because it's ours but because of what it is. Because it's an attacking football, it's not speculative, we don't wait. You pressure, you want possession, you want to attack. Some teams can't or don't pass the ball. What are you playing for? What's the point? That's not football. Combine, pass, play. That's football – for me, at least. For coaches, like, I don't know, [Javier] Clemente or [Fabio] Capello, there's another type of football. But it's good that Barcelona's style is now a model, not that.
But some claimed Spain were boring at the World Cup. You kept winning 1-0.
That's upside down. It's not that we were boring, it is the other team that was. What did Holland look for? Penalties. Or [Arjen] Robben on the break. Bam, bam, bam. Of course we were boring – the opposition made it that way. Paraguay? What did they do? Built a spectacularly good defensive system and waited for chances – from dead balls. Up it goes, rebound, loose ball. It's harder than people realise when you've got a guy behind you who's two metres tall and right on top of you.
So, what's the solution?
Think quickly, look for spaces. That's what I do: look for spaces. All day. I'm always looking. All day, all day. [Xavi starts gesturing as if he is looking around, swinging his head]. Here? No. There? No. People who haven't played don't always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It's like being on the PlayStation. I think shit, the defender's here, play it there. I see the space and pass. That's what I do.
That's at the heart of the Barcelona model and runs all the way through the club, doesn't it? When you beat Madrid, eight of the starting XI were youth-team products and all three finalists in this year's Ballon d'Or were too – Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and you.
Some youth academies worry about winning, we worry about education. You see a kid who lifts his head up, who plays the pass first time, pum, and you think, 'Yep, he'll do.' Bring him in, coach him. Our model was imposed by [Johan] Cruyff; it's an Ajax model. It's all about rondos [piggy in the middle]. Rondo, rondo, rondo. Every. Single. Day. It's the best exercise there is. You learn responsibility and not to lose the ball. If you lose the ball, you go in the middle. Pum-pum-pum-pum, always one touch. If you go in the middle, it's humiliating, the rest applaud and laugh at you.
Your Barcelona team-mate Dani Alves said that you don't play to the run, you make the run by obliging team-mates to move into certain areas. "Xavi," he said, "plays in the future."
They make it easy. My football is passing but, wow, if I have Dani, Iniesta, Pedro, [David] Villa … there are so many options. Sometimes, I even think to myself: man, so-and-so is going to get annoyed because I've played three passes and haven't given him the ball yet. I'd better give the next one to Dani because he's gone up the wing three times. When Leo [Messi] doesn't get involved, it's like he gets annoyed … and the next pass is for him.
You're talking about style over success but not only can they go together, they have to go together, don't they? Arsenal play great football, Arsène Wenger is a hugely respected coach, but they've not won anything for years. Could that happen at Barcelona?
Almost impossible. If you go two years without winning, everything has to change. But you change names, not identity. The philosophy can't be lost. Our fans wouldn't understand a team that sat back and played on the break. Sadly, people only look at teams through success. Now, success has validated our approach. I'm happy because, from a selfish point of view, six years ago I was extinct; footballers like me were in danger of dying out. It was all: two metres tall, powerful, in the middle, knockdowns, second balls, rebounds … but now I see Arsenal and Villarreal and they play like us.
Do you see yourself as a defender of the faith? An ideologue?
It was that or die. I'm a romantic. I like the fact that talent, technical ability, is valued above physical condition now. I'm glad that's the priority; if it wasn't, there wouldn't be the same spectacle. Football is played to win but our satisfaction is double. Other teams win and they're happy, but it's not the same. The identity is lacking. The result is an impostor in football. You can do things really, really well – last year we were better than Inter Milan – but did not win. There's something greater than the result, more lasting. A legacy. Inter won the Champions League but no one talks about them. People discovered me since Euro 2008, but I've been playing the same way for years. It is true, though, that I have grown in confidence and tranquillity. And that comes with success.
Has English football suffered because it embraces a different footballing culture?
It has changed; the style's a bit more technical. But before it was direct, it was about the second ball, the typical No9 was a Crouch or a Heskey and there was no football. Carragher, boom, up top; Terry, boom, up top. I think it's changing: Barry, Lampard, Gerrard, Carrick … they are players who treat the ball well. You see them now and think, Christ, they are trying to play.
Is Paul Scholes the English Xavi?
[Xavi interrupts, almost bursting with enthusiasm] Paul Scholes! A role model. For me – and I really mean this – he's the best central midfielder I've seen in the last 15, 20 years. I've spoken to Xabi Alonso about him. He's spectacular, he has it all: the last pass, goals, he's strong, he doesn't lose the ball, vision. If he'd been Spanish he might have been rated more highly. Players love him.
England seems to mistrust technical players.
It's a pity. Talent has to be the priority. Technical ability. Always, always. Sure, you can win without it but it's talent that makes the difference. Look at the teams: Juventus, who makes the difference? Krasic. Del Piero. Liverpool? Gerrard, or Torres before. Talento. Talento. When you look at players and ask yourself who's the best: talento. Cesc, Nasri, Ryan Giggs – that guy is a joy, incredible. Looking back, I loved John Barnes and Chris Waddle was buenísimo. [Open-mouthed, eyes gleaming] Le Tissier! Although their style was different I liked Roy Keane and Paul Ince together, too. That United team was great – my English team. If I'd gone anywhere, it would have been there.
In England do we overrate physical players? You mention Carragher, Terry …
Whoa! Wait! Be careful. They're fundamental. We've got Puyol. Technically he might not be the best but it's incredible the way he defends. Carragher and Terry are necessary, brilliant, but they have to adapt to technical football [not the other way round]. For me, that comes naturally – or for Messi, Iniesta or Rooney. Others have to work at it. For them it's harder to lift their head up and play a pass – but they have to.
But when a player is offered to a club, the first question is: "how tall is he?"
Have you seen [the Villarreal winger] Santi Cazorla? You think I'm small, he's up to here on me [Xavi signals his chest]. And yet he's brilliant. Messi is the same and he's the best player in the world. Maybe it's the culture, I don't know, but in England you're warriors. You watch Liverpool and Carragher wins the ball and boots it into the stands and the fans applaud. There's a roar! They'd never applaud that here.
Next week you play Arsenal again in the Champions League last 16. Are they different? A kind of Barcelona-lite?
Arsenal are a great team. When I watch Arsenal, I see Barça. I see Cesc carry the game, Nasri, Arshavin. The difference between them and us is we have more players who think before they play, quicker. Education is the key. Players have had 10 or 12 years here. When you arrive at Barça the first thing they teach you is: think. Think, think, think. Quickly. [Xavi starts doing the actions, looking around himself.] Lift your head up, move, see, think. Look before you get the ball. If you're getting this pass, look to see if that guy is free. Pum. First time. Look at [Sergio] Busquets – the best midfielder there is playing one-touch. He doesn't need more. He controls, looks and passes in one touch. Some need two or three and, given how fast the game is, that's too slow. Alves, one touch. Iniesta, one touch. Messi, one touch. Piqué, one touch. Busi [Busquets], me … seven or eight players with one touch. Fast. In fact, [the youth coach] Charly [Rexach] always used to say: a mig toc. Half a touch.
Arsenal-Barcelona always provokes questions about Cesc Fábregas's future.
If I'd ever gone to another club, I'd have been thinking about Barcelona – the link is strong. The same is happening to him. But now there's a problem: now he's expensive. But I think that a footballer ends up playing where he wants. He has to end up here.
That's not what Arsenal fans want to hear and some have accused Barcelona players, you included, of stirring trouble. Last summer there were so many remarks supposedly coming out of Barcelona …
Really? I hardly spoke then. I imagine they wouldn't have liked that. [Xavi pauses, adding quietly, almost shamefacedly] You know, often footballers don't think. We're selfish, we don't realise. I also say it because I'm thinking of Cesc. He wants to come here. Barcelona has always been his dream. But of course he's Arsenal's captain, the standard bearer, a leader. This situation is a putada [bummer] for him. He's at a club that plays his style with Wenger who has treated him well, taught him, raised him. Cesc respects him. If he'd been at, say, Blackburn it might have been easier to leave. Look, the truth is: I want him to come here. Of course. Barcelona have a very clear style and not many footballers fit. It's not easy. But Cesc fits it perfectly.
Would he replace you, though?
I don't see new players as a threat; I don't say "this is my patch". I'm more: "bring them here, let them play". The more talent in the middle, the better. Four or five years ago [people said] me and Iniesta couldn't play together. We can't play together? Look how that one turned out.
Last year, you beat Arsenal comfortably …
Yes, but this year they're much better. I think it's a disadvantage for us that we played last year. They had [too] much respect for us. It was as if they let us have the ball; we always had it, home and away. The game in London could have been a 4-0 we dominated so much – but it finished 2-2. This year will be different.
What was your reaction to the draw?
I was happy. I like the fact that we'll see a great game. Arsenal aren't the kind of team that come to try to putear you [piss you off, break up the game, destroy the match]. If it was Chelsea, you might think Madre mía, they're going to leave the initiative to you, wait deep, close up, play on the break with Drogba and Malouda. But, no, I think Arsenal will want the ball. There will be more of a game. As a fan I'd definitely pay for a ticket to see this game. Manchester United or Chelsea would play in a more speculative way. They would leave us the ball. Arsenal won't.
Does English football attract you? Spanish players always return from there raving about it.
It's incredible. Una pasada. Now that is football. England really is the birthplace, the heart and soul of football. If Barcelona had Liverpool's fans, or Arsenal's, or United's, we'd have won 20 Champions Leagues, hahaha! OK, so that's an exaggeration but I've never seen anything like it. We won 3-1 at Liverpool once and we were both applauded off the pitch. In England, footballers are respected more, the game is more noble, there's less cheating. Every Spaniard who goes loves it – and comes back a better player. If I had ever left it would have been to England.
The final is at Wembley, which makes it even more special for Barcelona, doesn't it? Last year it was special because it was at the Bernabéu but Wembley is the scene of the Dream Team's one European Cup. And this feels like a year in which you are being constantly compared to them …
In 1992, I was 12 and my brothers went but my parents wouldn't let me. I was in tears but it made no difference. I'd love to play at Wembley. It's special for Barça – and for everyone in football. Last year was more morbosa [about the rivalry with Real Madrid, almost a little dirty, titillating]. This year is more nostalgic, more classic. And I'm more of a nostalgic. Me? I'm a romantic.
@Guardian
Photo : Solarpix.com