Atomic Razor

I'll Be Right Back After This Message from Our Sponsor

The estimable Mitzi Szereto is running an Erotic Fiction Workshop (and Party!) as part of the Bournemouth Literary Festival on Saturday, 27 October.  By an  odd coincidence, the location is close to where I used to live in Talbot Woods - it's actually just over the border in Poole. I went to Mitzi's workshop at The Grange on the Isle of Wight last year and she certainly gives a good workshop. There's a competition and since getting published is primarily about networking so entering can't hurt and I understand that 4Talent might be involved. When I lived in Bournemouth in 1995-6, it was a sleepy backwater with a great beach, hardly any pubs and lots of purple-haired retirees with unpalatably strong right-wing views. Of course, nowadays it's the UK's Number One Party Town and the beach is still great. So why not make a long weekend of it?  You could drive down on the Friday, stop off lunch in one of the many fine pubs in the New Forest, stay overnight in a B&B, attend the workshop on the Saturday, party all night and then spend Sunday walking off your hangover along the beach. You know it makes sense.

Erotic Fiction Workshop & Party with Mitzi Szereto
Bournemouth Literary Festival

Have you ever considered writing erotic fiction? If not, why not? It is not porn but a stylised and sophisticated form of literature that is fun to write and easy to sell. The workshop’s aim is to break down barriers in people’s writing. There's no need to be fearful or suppress your writing because of some inner censor. Workshop will consist of a lecture, group discussions, writing exercises and an overview of the marketplace for those considering publication. Please do not bring in copies of your short stories for critiques. Designed for those interested in writing erotica for professional or personal exploration. Open to all levels of writers. An attendance certificate will be awarded.

Date: Saturday 27 October 2007
Venue: The Student Hall Centre, Talbot Campus, Fern Barrow, Bournemouth University, BH12 5BB

Erotic Fiction Workshop: 10 am to 1 pm (Ticket £25 includes cold beverages)
Lunch Break & Homework: 1 pm to 3 pm (lunch not provided)
Evaluation & Attendance Certificate: 3 pm to 4 pm
Party, Recital & Competition Prize Giving: 7.30 to 9.30 pm (Ticket £10 includes a glass of wine and nibbles)

ALSO ENTER THE EROTIC FICTION SHORT STORY COMPETITION. VISIT THE COMPETITIONS PAGE FOR DETAILS.

To book please call Lillian Avon on 01202 417535 and send a cheque made payable to ‘Bournemouth Literary Festival’ to 20A Parkwood Road, Bournemouth BH5 2BH.
info@bournemouthliteraryfestival.co.uk
www.bournemouthliteraryfestival.co.uk

{Author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto has more than a dozen books to her credit, including the critically acclaimed Erotic Fairy Tales: A Romp Through the Classics; Getting Even: Revenge Stories; The World’s Best Sex Writing 2005 (non-fiction/criticism); the multi-genre Dying For It: Tales of Sex & Death; Wicked: Sexy Tales of Legendary Lovers; the popular Erotic Travel Tales anthology series, and the upcoming The New Black Lace Book of Women’s Sexual Fantasies. She’s also penned several best-selling erotic novels under the name M. S. Valentine. Mitzi is the pioneer of the erotic writing workshop in the UK and Europe, teaching them from the prestigious Cheltenham Festival of Literature to the Greek islands. She’s been featured in publications ranging from the Sunday Telegraph (London), Independent (London), Times (London, including the Sunday Times Travel Section and the Times Higher Education Supplement), Observer (London), Company Magazine, First Magazine, Family Circle, Writing Magazine, Toronto Star, Scarlet Magazine, Penthouse, Erotic Review, and Forum to Bravo UK Television, Telecinco TV 5 (Madrid), and BBC Radio (including the Asian Network). Her work as an anthology editor has earned her the American Society of Authors and Writers’ Meritorious Achievement Award. Her anthology Erotic Travel Tales 2 is the first anthology of erotica to feature a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Originally from the USA, she now lives in England.}

Wrong in almost every particular...

The bailout of Northern Rock

Samizdata.net

I was going to write a long response but realised that life was too short.  It's this sort of thing and the article further down which do so much harm to Libertarians.

Being able to make statements like "Of course one feels very sorry for the people who have savings with NR and I suppose many of them are mightily relieved at the turn of events. I am sure I would be relieved if I were in their position.But hard cases make bad law, and bad policy."

Then comes, "The ultimate culprits, as I said the other day, are the central banks and their historically low interest rates. With so much cheap liquidity, the sort of returns investors made on safe investments were peanuts and so they took greater risks for often only a slightly higher reward."

The history of SIVs and similar bond units is pretty old and started WAYYYY before there was this much cheap money and liquidity - in fact it goes back into the dark days of the early 90s (if not earlier) with, IIRC, Morgan Stanley et al.

To then compare this situation with Barings is just ridiculous.

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Softening Up

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | France warning of war with Iran

Interesting. It is traditional to see an Anglo-Saxon/Continental divide in so many areas, but it is and always has been much more complicated than that. There are plenty of French conservatives and quite a number of those are pro-American or, if you prefer, neoliberal. For instance, consider the Cercle d'Oratoire and their journal Le Meilleur des Mondes. It is probably significant that the French translation of Brave New World is called Le Meilleur des Mondes. World War One and World War Two show that when push comes to shove French and Anglo-American econo-political interests are aligned (after a fashion). Note that it is believed that Kouchner attended the recent Bilderberg 2007 meeting in Istanbul (along with Ed Balls). I know the link is to a tinfoil hat site, but I suspect the list of attendees is accurate enough. (I can't find any evidence that Sarkozy himself has attended a Bilberberg meeting.) Curiously, they believed a few months ago that the Bilderbergers would decide against war with Iran at the meeting. Obviously, the debate/events have gone the other way. The question is not now if, but when. It looks like we are going to have something else other than the Northern Rock share price to worry about in the coming months.

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Funny Ha Ha

Consider the following sentetence from Marie Phillips's recent novel Gods Behaving  Badly (p.40)

He'd wiped the semen that could spawn an entire nation of heroes onto a paper napkin with drawings of snowmen on it, left over from Christmas, and hid it in the rubbish bin underneath a copy of the Evening Standard.

The "He" is the Greek god Apollo. The Evening Standard is a famously bad and famously disposable newspaper famously owned by the the Daily Mail and General Trust. But this is the year 2007 and nobody reads the Evening Standard in 2007: people read free newspapers. Now, is it just me or wouldn't London Lite be funnier than the Evening Standard in that sentence? London Lite is even more disposable than the Evening Standard, so the character point that Apollo is a careless, thoughtless kind of god would be made even more forcefully and the dig against the DM&GT would still get made. Phillips might respond that she wrote that line a couple of years ago before London Lite was launched and that anyway readers from outside London or outside the UK or indeed readers ten or fifteen years from now (given that the Evening Standard has been going since 1827, it might be considered that the paper is more likely to still exist in decade's time than the current crop of freesheets) are more likely to recognise the Evening Standard. But as James Joyce said "The particular contains the universal". Phillips doesn't have a problem with her characters using the pretty much already obsolete Palm PDA. To those characters in a novel set in the 2000s, London Lite or Metro (still DM&GT) or thelondonpaper (Murdoch) or even City A.M. (the ultimate in disposable newspapers) would all be funnier than the Evening Standard because they are all truer to (not quite Aristotelian) eternal verities of time, place and character.

Also the phrase "a paper napkin with drawings of snowmen on it" would be better rewritten something along the lines of  "a paper napkin with pictures of snowmen printed on it" to make it clear that the drawings weren't idly doodled on the napkin by some bored Green Room occupant. OK, OK, I know, I know, It's clear from the context, but we should always aim for precision in our writing when we can. I'll stop now.

Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

Spectrum London's featured exhibition - Sebastian Horsley

To the Spectrum Gallery in Great Titchfield Street in the heart of Noho/Fitzrovia last night for the launch of Sebastian Hosley's autobiography Dandy in the Underworld. Unfortunately my free copy from the Book Depository hadn't arrived yet (I had an email from them yesterday saying the book was about to be dispatched). so I was able to be get it signed by the great man himself, but a free copy is still a free copy whenever it arrives.

The absinthe was flowing, but I decided against chasing the green fairy on the grounds that it was a school night. Tout le monde was at the event, which was full of  people who looked vaguely familiar as though they might be minor tv personalities or bit part actors. In some cases, this was probably because they were minor tv personalities or bit part actors, but in most, I suspect it was just that they looked like minor tv personalities or bit part actors.

Thanks to be Zara jacket, I was mistaken for a publisher (as opposed to a flood prediction software engineer) by a couple of Americans from Harper Perennial in New York. I learnt that InDesign has squeezed out  Quark as the industry standard DTP package among American publishers at least. I'll stick with TeX for typesetting needs, of course, but I need something for design covers (I want to reproduce the classic cover design of the early 1950s Penguins, which I have long admired, for the forthcoming Atomic Razor Press books) and I am not sure that Scribus is quite the thing.

Afterwards to the Colony in Soho, one of - perhaps the very last - of the legendary Soho drinking dens. Kept expecting to bump in Kenny Gabriel from my writing chum Greg Keen's forthcoming (we all hope) novel, Hardcore. The Colony is a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there, although it is fairly clear that quite a few people pretty do. Oddly many of them looked and sounded like the kinds of eccentric fans you used just to see hanging around Cambridge Unicons in the mid-1980s (geekdom is a capacious place; there were  also quite a few examples of the lean, gaunt, weathered, W.H. Auden-faced-type among the denizens of the Soho demimonde present in the club). Not so sure about the band. Attitude does not necessarily make up for lack of talent. Perhaps they improved as they got int o the set, we didn't stay to find out, but I can say that the spirit of Vivian Stanshall was being channelled last night, although it is possible you could have powered the Parish by attaching magnets to his spinning corpse.

 

 

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More iPhone Blood Letting...

Segan: Steve Jobs Must Hate the Cell-Phone Industry

FOXNews.com - Segan: Steve Jobs Must Hate the Cell-Phone Industry - Technology News | News On Technology 

Interesting article following on from the item yesterday.  I'll have to admit a degree of schadenfreude about this as it was one of the more likely outcomes of the way they entered the phone market.

I'm also pretty sure I said somewhere that this would almost certainly make a hell of a PDA and people would queue up to buy it. 

I suspect that Steve Jobs and his merry band are frustrated at the cellphone industry and, in particuarly the European Operators knowing their business better than he does and they're probably demanding that he improve the things that make them money (SMS, MMS, Java, Ringtones) before they let him anywhere near their networks.  The lack of a firm European launch Operator when we're only 45 days or so from the date given for the launch is also telling.

Part of the problem will be that no European OpCo exists in the realm where they can officiall lock a phone to them for 2 years, so they won't have as much interest in the revenue share deal that Apple is rumoured to have done with AT&T in the US.

Saw This One Coming

Apple's Jobs Cuts IPhone Price by $200

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

I was having a conversation with somebody else who works in the "phone biz" the other day and this topic came up.  We were interested in seeing the overall first quarter sales figures for the iPhone, especially the August numbers.  We were harbouring a suspicion, based on the lack of crowing coming from the Apple camp that they'd seen a pretty dramatic slip off once past early July.

I have seen some contradictory reports but they were unverified and this move to effectively slash prices just 2 months after launch is pretty blatent, it also sets the stage for the next thing we're interested in which is the public bust up between AT&T and Apple when Apple finally gets around to announcing the terms they've reached with any of the European Operators.

The problem with the iPhone launch was its spectacular success.  This isn't always a good thing as sales at that level and price would always be hard to maintain, especially when you're also locking people into an expensive phone contract.  If this had been a $50 or $100 reduction, I and I suspect the markets, would have thought it a sound move to keep momentum.  $200 sounds a little bit too much like an effort to force growth in market share at the expense of margin.  They should ask Motorola about how that one works out in the phone business.

What is still unclear is just what impact this move has on profitability.  I've not seen a real BOM analysis, and no phone BOM is complete without amortising your software and other development costs - but if they can still make money on $400 a device I'll be impressed.  High end phones typically run at a BOM of $200 and up before you start factoring in your development costs.  That's for a normal device, the iPhone is anything but normal.

Watch these spaces...

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