Agree or disagree? "Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to
close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way
people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels."
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all
publications become digital,” according to an observer overseas: "However, the jury is
still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to
wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us
whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of
brain chemistry, to reading off screens."
Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite
reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens,
according to a U.S. book industry study group.
"The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes
and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,”
said a study group spokeswoman, who added: "But yes,
if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper
superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly
wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how ''the reading brain'' is adapting to screen-reading, or
in the words of Cory Doctorow, ''screeniness'', according to a survey.
“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a
person's interest in reading overall,” said another analyst
in Britain. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain
adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
"When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn
on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” he said,
adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the
mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in
terms of
brain chemistry."
He also believes it will be at least a century or more before print is
obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly
inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.
"Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need
to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended.
"It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us
about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"
Friday, December 30, 2011
TABLETS CLOSE BOOK ON PAPER
Tablets, e-readers close book on era of paper, but questions remain about 'the reading brain'
Tablets, e-readers close book on era of paper,
but questions remain about 'the reading brain'
December 31, 2012
By Ben Lappaine, AFP
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels.
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies President and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP, adding: "However, the jury is still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of brain chemistry, to reading off screens."
Online retail giant Amazon has made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices, and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books.
In 2011, digital books earned about US$3 billion in revenue, an amount that the combined momentum of e-readers and tablets is expected to triple to US$9 billion by the year 2016, according to a Juniper Research report.
Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens, according to the U.S. Book Industry Study Group.
Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favorite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed.
“The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,” said BISG deputy executive director Angela Bole, who added: "But yes, if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how the reading brain is adapting to screen-reading, or in the words of Cory Doctorow, screeniness, according to the survey.
Owning e-readers tended to ramp up the amount of money people spent on titles in what BISG described as a promising sign for publishers.
Major U.S. book seller Barnes & Noble responded to the trend by launching an e-reader, the Nook, and other chains are picking up on the strategy, according to Juniper.
“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a person's interest in reading overall,” said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
“When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” Weiner said, adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in terms of
brain chemistry..
Bajarin believes it will be at least a century or more before print is obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.
“For one thing, there is a generation of people above 45 who grew up with this reading format and for many this will remain the most comfortable way for them to consume content for quite a while,” he said.
“However, younger generations are already moving rapidly to digital representations of publications and, over time, they will be using e-books and tablets to consume all of their publications, even if the reading brain finds screen-reading to be inferior to paper surface reading.”
Weiner expected hardback or paperback books to be preferred in some situations, such as home reading, even as digital dominates publishing.
“I think it is a myth that it is going to kill the print book business,” Weiner said.
“Will it force publishers to think differently?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, but it doesn't spell the demise of print (book) publishing.”
Newspapers and magazines, however, should read the digital writing on the wall, according to analysts.
“Newspapers and magazines have different issues,” Weiner said.
“Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended. "It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"
Newspapers spend a lot of money printing and distributing daily editions that can't be kept as fresh as stories on the Internet.
In related news, Dr Ellen Marker, who studies reading and the reading brain in Boston, has her own ideas. The pioneering neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic
reading state, hoping to understand the differences between reading
off screens and reading on paper surfaces.
Dr Marker feels that her studies will show reading on paper
is superior to reading off screens in terms of
retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking.
Among the things that Market has discovered so far is that reading on
paper might be
something we as a civilization should not ever give up.
“Even though reading on screens is useful and convenient, and I do it
all the time, I feel that
reading on paper is somethine we should never cede to the digital
revolution,” Marker, 43, says. “We need both.”
With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the
ability to look at brain activity. Marker says that by understanding a
function as gigantic as reading, how the reading brain does its magic
dance, a response that hijacks all of
one’s attention, she might also learn how reading on screens could be
inferior to reading on paper.
Research and teaching take up most of Marker’s time, but when she has a
spare moment, she thinks about what all this might mean for the future
of humankind.
She discusses what her research could do for the future of
humankind. “We need to know
if reading on screens is going to be good if it replaces all our
reading on paper.”
“There’s no premium on studying paper reading modes versus
screen-reading modes in this society,” she tells me
as Smith murmurs, “What do you expect? The gadgetheads want to take over.”
One of the biggest conundrums turns out to be a nagging
question for all mankind: What if reading on screens is not good
for retention of data, emotional connections and critical thinking skills.
Marker begins slipping more and more
into her thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create
awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?
What is reading, really?”
but questions remain about 'the reading brain'
December 31, 2012
By Ben Lappaine, AFP
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tablet computers and electronic readers promise to close the book on the ink-and-paper era as they transform the way people browse magazines, check news or lose themselves in novels.
“It is only a matter of time before we stop killing trees and all publications become digital,” Creative Strategies President and principal analyst Tim Bajarin told AFP, adding: "However, the jury is still out on how the reading brain is adapting to screens. We need to wait for the current reserach with MRI and PET scans to tell us whether reading on paper really was superior, brain-wise, in terms of brain chemistry, to reading off screens."
Online retail giant Amazon has made electronic readers mainstream with Kindle devices, and Apple ignited insatiable demand for tablets ideal for devouring online content ranging from films to magazines and books.
In 2011, digital books earned about US$3 billion in revenue, an amount that the combined momentum of e-readers and tablets is expected to triple to US$9 billion by the year 2016, according to a Juniper Research report.
Readers are showing increased loyalty to digital books, despite reservations about how the reading brain "reads" off screens, according to the U.S. Book Industry Study Group.
Nearly half of print book buyers who also got digital works said they would skip getting an ink-and-paper release by a favorite author if an electronic version could be had within three months, a BISG survey showed.
“The e-book market is developing very fast, with consumer attitudes and behaviors changing over the course of months, rather than years,” said BISG deputy executive director Angela Bole, who added: "But yes, if it can be shown that the reading brain finds reading on paper superior
to reading off screens, then we are going to be in big trouble."
Concerns about e-book reading are diminishing, with people mainly wishing for lower device prices, and not concerned
at all about how the reading brain is adapting to screen-reading, or in the words of Cory Doctorow, screeniness, according to the survey.
Owning e-readers tended to ramp up the amount of money people spent on titles in what BISG described as a promising sign for publishers.
Major U.S. book seller Barnes & Noble responded to the trend by launching an e-reader, the Nook, and other chains are picking up on the strategy, according to Juniper.
“I'm among those who believe that the new e-book craze expands a person's interest in reading overall,” said Gartner analyst Allen Weiner. "However, I must agree with experts that how the reading brain adapts to screen reading is of paramount importance. We might be
barking up the wrong tree with these reading devices. Then what?"
“When you can get someone excited about reading in any way, you turn on the reading ignition and it leads to all content,” Weiner said, adding that ink-and-paper works will continue to hold a place in the mix because the reading brain seems to prefer reading on paper, in terms of
brain chemistry..
Bajarin believes it will be at least a century or more before print is obsolete, and if current research shows scrreen reading to be vastly inferior
to paper reading, it might never happen.
“For one thing, there is a generation of people above 45 who grew up with this reading format and for many this will remain the most comfortable way for them to consume content for quite a while,” he said.
“However, younger generations are already moving rapidly to digital representations of publications and, over time, they will be using e-books and tablets to consume all of their publications, even if the reading brain finds screen-reading to be inferior to paper surface reading.”
Weiner expected hardback or paperback books to be preferred in some situations, such as home reading, even as digital dominates publishing.
“I think it is a myth that it is going to kill the print book business,” Weiner said.
“Will it force publishers to think differently?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely, but it doesn't spell the demise of print (book) publishing.”
Newspapers and magazines, however, should read the digital writing on the wall, according to analysts.
“Newspapers and magazines have different issues,” Weiner said.
“Print might wind up extinct for newspapers, while magazines will need to figure out the balance between print and digital,” he contended. "It all depends what the final studies with MRI and PET scans show us about the reading brain in terms of reading on paper compared to
screen reading. What if we are wrong?"
Newspapers spend a lot of money printing and distributing daily editions that can't be kept as fresh as stories on the Internet.
In related news, Dr Ellen Marker, who studies reading and the reading brain in Boston, has her own ideas. The pioneering neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic
reading state, hoping to understand the differences between reading
off screens and reading on paper surfaces.
Dr Marker feels that her studies will show reading on paper
is superior to reading off screens in terms of
retention, processing, analysis and critical thinking.
Among the things that Market has discovered so far is that reading on
paper might be
something we as a civilization should not ever give up.
“Even though reading on screens is useful and convenient, and I do it
all the time, I feel that
reading on paper is somethine we should never cede to the digital
revolution,” Marker, 43, says. “We need both.”
With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the
ability to look at brain activity. Marker says that by understanding a
function as gigantic as reading, how the reading brain does its magic
dance, a response that hijacks all of
one’s attention, she might also learn how reading on screens could be
inferior to reading on paper.
Research and teaching take up most of Marker’s time, but when she has a
spare moment, she thinks about what all this might mean for the future
of humankind.
She discusses what her research could do for the future of
humankind. “We need to know
if reading on screens is going to be good if it replaces all our
reading on paper.”
“There’s no premium on studying paper reading modes versus
screen-reading modes in this society,” she tells me
as Smith murmurs, “What do you expect? The gadgetheads want to take over.”
One of the biggest conundrums turns out to be a nagging
question for all mankind: What if reading on screens is not good
for retention of data, emotional connections and critical thinking skills.
Marker begins slipping more and more
into her thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create
awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?
What is reading, really?”
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Krantzstone (@Krantzstone) on : ''Brand yourself before somebody else does''
in response tomy comment:re an internet guru [Rob Pegoraro] said ”Like it or not; people can be brands.” .......I had said: ........''NO NO NO,,,,people cannot be brands…this is a perversion of culture and civilization….people are people. PERIOD. we are not brands and this whole empowerment ME ME ME self-branding entitled BS is just that, BS!''
Krantz Stone or Stone Krantz, in Canada, replied in the comments section:
Dear Angry Luddite:
I don't think yours is a realistic attitude to hold in the age of the internet and of social media.
The term 'branding' may have corporate connotations which emphasize the commoditization of people's personas and reputations, but the fact remains that when our names and reputations are but a Google search away, no one can really afford to leave their personal reputations in hands of others: we have to take proactive steps to ensure that when employers (for example) Google our names, they don't come up with anything that would make them not want to hire us.
That's just one example of what personal branding means.
It's about controlling our image, our names, our reputations in the on-line, public sphere of the internet.
Even one comment on one blog post can speak volumes about a person: it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce whether someone is callous and thoughtless or kind and considerate by what one says on the internet, or how one says it.
If a post is full of spelling and grammatical errors and is incoherent, like it or not, people who read the post make pat judgements about the kind of person who wrote the post.
Likewise, what one says on Twitter (as Ashton Kutcher discovered to his dismay) can create a huge firestorm of controversy, even if the intent behind it might have been innocent at best and simply not phrased right, and so it's important that people make an effort to comport themselves on the internet as one might do if one were out in real life, speaking publicly, because that is in essence what they are doing every time they post something on Facebook, or tweet, or comment on a blog or website.
No matter how decent a person, or how well-spoken and urbane, if they don't make the effort to control what is associated with their (brand) name on the internet, they run the risk of having their online (and subsequently their real life) reputations tarnished as a result.
Whether that should matter much in journalism is a different story, although I would argue that journalism that is not read by anyone isn't really very useful, no matter how good the integrity of the journalist or how well-written their piece, and especially in the now precarious world of print journalism, journalists are basically being left to fend for themselves in terms of promoting their own work and thus, the need for personal branding.
A decent journalist might be able to garner sufficient Twitter followers, blog readers, Facebook fans, etc. solely through word of mouth of the quality of their work by reputation alone, but it's an uphill battle in a world increasingly stuffed full of self-styled news bloggers marketing themselves so that they might be heard.
There are only so many people whose Twitter feed people are going to want to read on a given day, it's not like there is an infinite amount of tweets that people have time or inclination to read, so they're going to start getting picky about who they follow.
A journalist who wants to earn a living and keep feeding their families needs to be able to generate the kind of following that social media can provide: at the very least, having that sort of following is exactly the kind of cachet needed for a journalist to be able to snag a job at a newspaper (where they care about whether a journalist has or will have the kind of following that will mean more people who might read (and buy) their newspaper and not some other, not to mention it mattering to the advertisers who largely financially support those papers).
At best, having that sort of constant and loyal following means that your journalism work isn't in vain, you're not just some schmuck with a blog writing to a nonexistent audience where you're only getting 10 hits on your page in a month, and 5 of those were you checking your own blog from your phone.
It means having the same kind of following that Pulitzer-prize winning print journalists had in the past, or Emmy award-winning news reporters, of being heard, of getting the kind of recognition for your hard work which is as important to career satisfaction as getting paid.
Otherwise, you might as well go do something else which is less stressful and might pay better. That's all personal branding really is, and I don't really see it as being this terrible or perverse thing that you seem to.
http://twitter.com/Krantzstone
re
http://robpegoraro.com/2011/06/27/journalists-brand-yourself-before-somebody-else-does/
We suggest a new term POT for personal operating tag or P.O.T instead of personal brand.
Any other suggestions? All ideas welcome pro and con.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
AP asks newspapers using wire services now to ''report'' that Walk of Fame stars costs $30K each and are bought and paid for by studios as PR gimmicks
AP asks newspapers using wire services now to ''report''
that Walk of Fame stars costs $30K each and are
bought and paid for by studios as PR gimmicks; before
this AP never reported the hidden truth!
MediaRecoder - New Yark Times
by Peter Jeremy and Nick Cardavid
The stars are paid for. We're talking about the paid promotional
gimmicks on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, where each
star's star costs $30,000 and is bought and paid for by the studios
as part of their marketing costs for upcoming films, concerts, books
and other events that tie in with the "awarding" of each "honorary" star.
Note: Roger Ebert has star there, paid for by some friends in Chicago,
according to a newspaper columnist in the Windy City. CBS TV guy Bill Geist also bought his own star, paid for itself himself.
For years, this crucial background information was kept from readers.
But in 2010, Barbara Munker of the German News Service dpa, reported
a story from Hollywood that laid out the facts: the stars are ordered up by
the studios to coincide with marketing campaigns and cost money, now $30K. the DPA article was on the DPA international wires, but not one USA newspaper printed it or even discussed it. Danny Bloom, lone blogger in Taiwan and a 1971 Tufts grad from Boston, saw the DPA story in the China Post expat
paper in Taipei and could not believe his eyes. All his life, he had
thought the stars on the Walk of Fame were real honors, and
set up by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to honor celebrities.
Turns out the stars have always been a paid PR promotional gimmick,
according to Munker, who has since been quiet on the subject. But her
2010 article is available online.
Bloom, a big fan of movies and Hollywood stars, yes, set out to ask the
AP and Reuters wire services if they could start reporting the truth
behind each star unveiling photo op ceremony, as the DPA had done.
So he wrote emails to editors at AP and Reuters and the New York Times Phil Corbett and got positive responses. Two years later, the AP told its
Hollywood reporters to start adding a last graf to every Walk of Fame
story that states the cost of the star and who paid for it.
So it's a win win situation for Hollywood, the stars, and the reading
public. And thanks to the AP, where editors read their mail and respond
to good ideas, the truth has now come out in print. thanks to danny Bloom's
patience, persistence and powers of persuasion, the truth has been set
free at the Walk of Fame. Reuters? New York Times? So far, AP is the
only news agency to toe the line and tell the truth. BRAVO!
Friday, October 28, 2011
Coco Lee-Bruce Rockowitz tie the knot
HONG KONG — The beautiful and talented 30-something Coco Lee (李玟) tied the knot the other day in Hong Kong with Canadian billionaire boyfriend Bruce Rockowitz [ אֶלִיעַנָה ] in a posh wedding under a
Hebrew wedding canopy in fragrant China.
Well, not really China, but the ex-British colony once called The Fragrant Harbor (“Hong Kong” in Chinese) that is now a sub-autonomous region of Communist China, which means that freedom and democracy there are now at risk.
Still, it was a very capitalist wedding, and what seemed like half the celebrities of Hollywood were there, even though nobody has ever heard of Coco Lee outside of Taiwan or Hong Kong. She can sing though, and dance, too, and it’s a shame she has never been able to break through the Yellow Ceiling that prevents Asian singers from breaking into the American pop music mainstream.
Truth be told, Coco can sing as well as Mariah Carey and she’s even more beautiful. But for some reason, the North American music industry does not admit singers from Taiwan or Japan or Hong Kong (or Communist China) into its ranks. It’s not racism per se, but it’s racism nonetheless.
Asia has some of the best singers in the world performing live to huge audiences there, but crossover to North America? No way, Jose. For some odd reason, Asian faces and Asian accents are not accepted in the North American music business and that’s a shame. You’re missing some great stuff!
Meanwhile, back to the wedding of the century. Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez were there, and so was a Very Wang wedding gown and some jewels “sponsored” by Piaget.
According to May Daily in Beijing, “the two-day celebrations started on Thursday evening when the couple held a Jewish ceremony at the Sky 100 Observation Deck” and ended the next day with Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys and Ne-Yo performing at the sweet 36/52 wedding party.
Rockowitz, yes, a young-looking baby-faced 52 mensch, has been president of the Hong Kong-based Li & Fung Group for the past eight years, and he and Coco look set to enjoy their sunset years jetsetting
around the world in high fashion.
Will she continue singing? You betcha! She’s good a voice that does not quit, and some day a Grammy might come her way. She deserves one!
As for Bruce, he’s in 7th heaven and set for life.
Hebrew wedding canopy in fragrant China.
Well, not really China, but the ex-British colony once called The Fragrant Harbor (“Hong Kong” in Chinese) that is now a sub-autonomous region of Communist China, which means that freedom and democracy there are now at risk.
Still, it was a very capitalist wedding, and what seemed like half the celebrities of Hollywood were there, even though nobody has ever heard of Coco Lee outside of Taiwan or Hong Kong. She can sing though, and dance, too, and it’s a shame she has never been able to break through the Yellow Ceiling that prevents Asian singers from breaking into the American pop music mainstream.
Truth be told, Coco can sing as well as Mariah Carey and she’s even more beautiful. But for some reason, the North American music industry does not admit singers from Taiwan or Japan or Hong Kong (or Communist China) into its ranks. It’s not racism per se, but it’s racism nonetheless.
Asia has some of the best singers in the world performing live to huge audiences there, but crossover to North America? No way, Jose. For some odd reason, Asian faces and Asian accents are not accepted in the North American music business and that’s a shame. You’re missing some great stuff!
Meanwhile, back to the wedding of the century. Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lopez were there, and so was a Very Wang wedding gown and some jewels “sponsored” by Piaget.
According to May Daily in Beijing, “the two-day celebrations started on Thursday evening when the couple held a Jewish ceremony at the Sky 100 Observation Deck” and ended the next day with Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys and Ne-Yo performing at the sweet 36/52 wedding party.
Rockowitz, yes, a young-looking baby-faced 52 mensch, has been president of the Hong Kong-based Li & Fung Group for the past eight years, and he and Coco look set to enjoy their sunset years jetsetting
around the world in high fashion.
Will she continue singing? You betcha! She’s good a voice that does not quit, and some day a Grammy might come her way. She deserves one!
As for Bruce, he’s in 7th heaven and set for life.
Tintin gets pummeled by British lit crit
How could they do this to Tintin?
Hergé's comic-book hero is one of the great creations of the 20th century. Which makes Spielberg's film version little more than murder, says Guardian boy reporter Nicholas Lezard, a lifelong Tintin fan
Mr Lezard opines on Tuesday 18 October 2011 :
Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape. I use this comparison not as a provocation or to cause unnecessary offence: I am using it in honour of a very good joke made by an episode of South Park, in which the cartoon's children watch the final Indiana Jones film and are so traumatised by what they have seen that they go round to the police station and try to get Spielberg and his colleagues charged with the crime. "What they did to poor Indy. They made him squeal like a pig." The tragic irony of this is that it was Hergé himself, Tintin's creator, who, a few weeks before his death in 1983, anointed Spielberg as his preferred director to make a Tintin film; and this after he had seen, and loved, as we all do and did, the first Indiana Jones film.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Production year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 106 minsDirectors: Steven SpielbergCast: Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toby JonesMore on this filmThe sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.
The elements are simple: a boy, or boy/man; his dog Snowy; and, in later books, his gruff sidekick, a quick-tempered alcoholic old seadog called Haddock; and a deaf, absent-minded professor called Calculus. Tintin, with or without the others, rights wrongs, rescues the innocent, uncovers dastardly plots, goes on mind-boggling adventures; even, in one book, to the moon (a scientifically accurate adventure conceived some 15 years before people actually walked there). All executed in cartoon form, but in a style grounded in meticulous attention to detail and respect for veracity.
The books grew in sophistication: Tintin's first appearance in 1929-30 was a black-and-white rudimentary anti-Soviet potboiler, little more than propaganda; there then followed a trip to the Belgian Congo, which is childishly but still blush-makingly racist (yet still hugely popular in the post-colonial country); yet by the final completed work, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), Tintin is sporting a CND symbol, and helping, albeit with reservations and only on condition of non-violence, a group of not-quite-explicitly leftish guerillas gain power in a despotic Latin American country. It's a long learning curve.
My love of Tintin began, as almost everyone's does, in childhood. The books were translated into English not in the order written, so for a while the chronology of the series was somewhat jumbled: in one book the cars and other urban furniture are all 1940s; in the next, technology has advanced enough to build a nuclear-powered rocket capable of reaching the moon; in the next we were back to what looks like the 1930s, except that – in The Cigars of the Pharaoh – a desert sheikh is able to proclaim himself a fan of Tintin, even getting a servant to hold up a copy of Destination Moon as testament to his devotion. No matter: any child with the Alice books (or, say, The Wind in the Willows, with its car-driving Toad) under his or her belt is not going to be too fazed by the dream-logic of what we may loosely call postmodernism – that is, a work of art that draws attention to its own artifice.
For the adventures of Tintin, although they might have messed around with the conventions a little, such as with the fourth-wall-breaking direct address to readers at the end of The Secret of the Unicorn, in which Tintin tells everyone to pursue the book's follow-up adventures in Red Rackham's Treasure, never left the realm of possibility. The adventures might have been implausible – Tintin's escapes from capture or near-certain death might have often been on the unlikely side – but there was nothing in them that was flat-out impossible. (Except, perhaps, for the brief sequence in which he learns the language of elephants in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, but that kind of mistake was never repeated, and besides, the book itself is, appropriately enough given its MacGuffin, an opium dream of a story.) There is certainly none of the CGI garbage of the film – its flying galleons, its impossibly-well trained falcon etc etc etc.
There is a truism which states that the very appearance of a comic strip is virtually the same thing as the storyboard of a film – the sequence of images which is the intermediate stage between the script and the final product. This is certainly why comic books do, according to the film-makers who use them as basis for their next franchise, scream "Take me! Take me!". But this is very misleading; a faux-ami, as we call a word that is not the same in French as it is in English (eg sensible in French means sensitive, not sensible). The experience of reading a cartoon is not the same as that of watching a film. It is slow, quiet and intimate, and in childhood would be most typically undertaken while lying front down on the floor, the book in front of one, one's legs raised perpendicularly at the knee, ankles crossed; the classic childhood pose of absorption in a text. The images may contain stories of chase and speed; but the frames can move as slowly as one wishes. And Hergé, who was as happy to have a frame crammed with words as he was to have one with no words at all, allowed the reader to be complicit with him in the speed at which the story was taken.
I would often linger over the pictures as I admired Hergé's famous ligne claire, the style in which caricature and realism superimpose themselves on each other. No one's face may look like Tintin's, with its rudimentary ellipsis for a head and its dots for eyes, like a teach-yourself-cartooning book's first instructions on how to draw a face ("Tintin", incidentally, means "nothing" in French); but when Tintin is chloroformed on page 35 of The Secret of the Unicorn, his right foot lifts off the ground in just the way yours would, were you too to be chloroformed by a pair of vicious thugs. Incidentally, look at the strips again: see how many of them have a character whose feet are standing directly on the bottom line of the frame. A huge number. They are, so to speak, grounded – another subliminal stratum of plausibility, which helps us give our assent to the adventures depicted.
A scene from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar Being as familiar as I am with the books in English, I thought I'd better have another look at The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure in French: to slow me down, for my French is not perfect, back to childhood reading speed. This allowed me to appreciate better the art, which, after 40-odd years of reading the books, I had been beginning to take for granted. Hence I finally noticed the impeccable triumph of comic timing in which the Thomsons, putting their bowler hats back on with the dignity which slapstick always subverts, are about to be brained by the enormous files of bogus genealogy that Haddock has just thrown down the stairs (Red Rackham's Treasure, page 4); and finally noticed the little joke at the beginning of the first book, in which, in panels four, six and nine of the first page, we see Snowy scratching himself. Why? Because he's at a flea market! A joke whose corniness is obliterated by the fact that we have to work out the punchline, and even the fact that it is a joke, for ourselves.
But there are other, deeper, darker signals embedded within the books themselves, and for noticing these I have to thank the novelist Tom McCarthy, whose book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, using the astonishing findings of Hergé's biographers (and subsequent interpretations by the French writer Serge Tisseron), touches on an almost incredible story: that the whole Tintin series is a consistent, creative, psychological working-out of Hergé's family secret: that he may well be related to the King of Belgium. A visiting VIP – maybe the king, he did visit – would often pass by the chateau where Hergé's grandmother worked as a maid; one such visit resulted in her pregnancy, the results being his uncles (twins who, dressed identically in bowler hats, suits, and carrying canes, are so obviously the Thomson Twins that no doubt as to the link with them is possible). His grandmother was quickly paired off with the gardener; his subsequent grandfather. McCarthy can give a better account of this, and the subsequent coded resurfacings of this story himself than I can in precis; suffice it to say that his book is one of the few critical works that can truly be called "mind-blowing", and that no adult interpretation and indeed appreciation of the books can now be considered complete without having read it.
For example: I pointed out to McCarthy before we saw the film together that there were an awful lot of beds in the Tintin books. A great deal many more than you would expect in a series carrying the words "The Adventures of …" Tintin has a hospital-like bed in his flat at 26 Labrador Road; we see him in it while Snowy brings him the phone. The Bird brothers, the real villains of the story (not the originally innocent Sakharine, who is the film's baddie), may be nasty pieces of work, but they are considerate enough to provide Tintin with a nicely made-up set of sheets and blankets in which he can recover consciousness; Calculus has made himself a bed in a lifeboat in Red Rackham's Treasure (character and story completely jettisoned from film); and in The Seven Crystal Balls, the next book to be ravished and broken by Spielberg and his cronies, there are beds galore, in which the cursed professors writhe with tormented nightmares. And so on and so on: make your own list of the beds in Tintin. It's fun. (On a personal note, I would often, when feigning or even occasionally genuinely suffering from illness, read all my Tintin books in bed, matching drink for drink, in Lucozade, what Haddock in the books was doing with whisky.) So. What's that all about, I asked McCarthy. Easy, he said: it's because of what happened in bed between his grandmother and the unidentified nobleman.
Interestingly, it becomes clear, from a couple of quite clear references, that at least one of the screenwriters, Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, have read McCarthy's book. (McCarthy knows Cornish slightly, I gather.) Alas, they have not understood it. There is a great deal about Captain Haddock's genealogy in the film – he is the character who secretly "carries" the Hergé family story in the books – and there is even a bit when he says to Tintin that "you transmit your own signals", an unambiguous lift of one of McCarthy's own riffs. But there then follows a speech, which Hergé's Haddock would never have made in a million years, full of sub-Alcoholics Anonymous self-empowerment rubbish about breaking through walls and finding your true self, which would have made any self-respecting screenwriter insist on having his or her name taken off the credits.
As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons, and the nicest things one can say about it are that there's a pleasing cameo of Hergé himself in the opening scene, the cars look lovely, indeed it is as a whole visually sumptuous, and (after 20 minutes or so of more or less acceptable fidelity; and the 3D motion-capturing transference of the original drawings is by far the least of the film's problems) it usefully places in plain view all the cretinous arrogance of modern mass-market, script-conference-driven film-making, confirming in passing that, as a director, Spielberg is a burned-out sun. A duel between dockyard cranes? Give me a break. Oh, and the opening credits are nice and witty. But this only confirms a maxim that I have recently formulated: that the closer in spirit the title sequence is to the original from which the subsequent film has been stolen, the more of a travesty of that original it will be.
There may be those who think that to quibble about the traducement of what might be considered a work of one of the lesser arts is to waste everyone's time. But it is not. Something of great subtlety, beauty and artfully deceptive complexity, resonance and depth has been betrayed, and it is time to make a stand.
And Mr Lezard just made his stand! Comments from the Tintin gallery?
Dish!
Hergé's comic-book hero is one of the great creations of the 20th century. Which makes Spielberg's film version little more than murder, says Guardian boy reporter Nicholas Lezard, a lifelong Tintin fan
Mr Lezard opines on Tuesday 18 October 2011 :
Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape. I use this comparison not as a provocation or to cause unnecessary offence: I am using it in honour of a very good joke made by an episode of South Park, in which the cartoon's children watch the final Indiana Jones film and are so traumatised by what they have seen that they go round to the police station and try to get Spielberg and his colleagues charged with the crime. "What they did to poor Indy. They made him squeal like a pig." The tragic irony of this is that it was Hergé himself, Tintin's creator, who, a few weeks before his death in 1983, anointed Spielberg as his preferred director to make a Tintin film; and this after he had seen, and loved, as we all do and did, the first Indiana Jones film.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Production year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 106 minsDirectors: Steven SpielbergCast: Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toby JonesMore on this filmThe sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.
The elements are simple: a boy, or boy/man; his dog Snowy; and, in later books, his gruff sidekick, a quick-tempered alcoholic old seadog called Haddock; and a deaf, absent-minded professor called Calculus. Tintin, with or without the others, rights wrongs, rescues the innocent, uncovers dastardly plots, goes on mind-boggling adventures; even, in one book, to the moon (a scientifically accurate adventure conceived some 15 years before people actually walked there). All executed in cartoon form, but in a style grounded in meticulous attention to detail and respect for veracity.
The books grew in sophistication: Tintin's first appearance in 1929-30 was a black-and-white rudimentary anti-Soviet potboiler, little more than propaganda; there then followed a trip to the Belgian Congo, which is childishly but still blush-makingly racist (yet still hugely popular in the post-colonial country); yet by the final completed work, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), Tintin is sporting a CND symbol, and helping, albeit with reservations and only on condition of non-violence, a group of not-quite-explicitly leftish guerillas gain power in a despotic Latin American country. It's a long learning curve.
My love of Tintin began, as almost everyone's does, in childhood. The books were translated into English not in the order written, so for a while the chronology of the series was somewhat jumbled: in one book the cars and other urban furniture are all 1940s; in the next, technology has advanced enough to build a nuclear-powered rocket capable of reaching the moon; in the next we were back to what looks like the 1930s, except that – in The Cigars of the Pharaoh – a desert sheikh is able to proclaim himself a fan of Tintin, even getting a servant to hold up a copy of Destination Moon as testament to his devotion. No matter: any child with the Alice books (or, say, The Wind in the Willows, with its car-driving Toad) under his or her belt is not going to be too fazed by the dream-logic of what we may loosely call postmodernism – that is, a work of art that draws attention to its own artifice.
For the adventures of Tintin, although they might have messed around with the conventions a little, such as with the fourth-wall-breaking direct address to readers at the end of The Secret of the Unicorn, in which Tintin tells everyone to pursue the book's follow-up adventures in Red Rackham's Treasure, never left the realm of possibility. The adventures might have been implausible – Tintin's escapes from capture or near-certain death might have often been on the unlikely side – but there was nothing in them that was flat-out impossible. (Except, perhaps, for the brief sequence in which he learns the language of elephants in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, but that kind of mistake was never repeated, and besides, the book itself is, appropriately enough given its MacGuffin, an opium dream of a story.) There is certainly none of the CGI garbage of the film – its flying galleons, its impossibly-well trained falcon etc etc etc.
There is a truism which states that the very appearance of a comic strip is virtually the same thing as the storyboard of a film – the sequence of images which is the intermediate stage between the script and the final product. This is certainly why comic books do, according to the film-makers who use them as basis for their next franchise, scream "Take me! Take me!". But this is very misleading; a faux-ami, as we call a word that is not the same in French as it is in English (eg sensible in French means sensitive, not sensible). The experience of reading a cartoon is not the same as that of watching a film. It is slow, quiet and intimate, and in childhood would be most typically undertaken while lying front down on the floor, the book in front of one, one's legs raised perpendicularly at the knee, ankles crossed; the classic childhood pose of absorption in a text. The images may contain stories of chase and speed; but the frames can move as slowly as one wishes. And Hergé, who was as happy to have a frame crammed with words as he was to have one with no words at all, allowed the reader to be complicit with him in the speed at which the story was taken.
I would often linger over the pictures as I admired Hergé's famous ligne claire, the style in which caricature and realism superimpose themselves on each other. No one's face may look like Tintin's, with its rudimentary ellipsis for a head and its dots for eyes, like a teach-yourself-cartooning book's first instructions on how to draw a face ("Tintin", incidentally, means "nothing" in French); but when Tintin is chloroformed on page 35 of The Secret of the Unicorn, his right foot lifts off the ground in just the way yours would, were you too to be chloroformed by a pair of vicious thugs. Incidentally, look at the strips again: see how many of them have a character whose feet are standing directly on the bottom line of the frame. A huge number. They are, so to speak, grounded – another subliminal stratum of plausibility, which helps us give our assent to the adventures depicted.
A scene from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar Being as familiar as I am with the books in English, I thought I'd better have another look at The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure in French: to slow me down, for my French is not perfect, back to childhood reading speed. This allowed me to appreciate better the art, which, after 40-odd years of reading the books, I had been beginning to take for granted. Hence I finally noticed the impeccable triumph of comic timing in which the Thomsons, putting their bowler hats back on with the dignity which slapstick always subverts, are about to be brained by the enormous files of bogus genealogy that Haddock has just thrown down the stairs (Red Rackham's Treasure, page 4); and finally noticed the little joke at the beginning of the first book, in which, in panels four, six and nine of the first page, we see Snowy scratching himself. Why? Because he's at a flea market! A joke whose corniness is obliterated by the fact that we have to work out the punchline, and even the fact that it is a joke, for ourselves.
But there are other, deeper, darker signals embedded within the books themselves, and for noticing these I have to thank the novelist Tom McCarthy, whose book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, using the astonishing findings of Hergé's biographers (and subsequent interpretations by the French writer Serge Tisseron), touches on an almost incredible story: that the whole Tintin series is a consistent, creative, psychological working-out of Hergé's family secret: that he may well be related to the King of Belgium. A visiting VIP – maybe the king, he did visit – would often pass by the chateau where Hergé's grandmother worked as a maid; one such visit resulted in her pregnancy, the results being his uncles (twins who, dressed identically in bowler hats, suits, and carrying canes, are so obviously the Thomson Twins that no doubt as to the link with them is possible). His grandmother was quickly paired off with the gardener; his subsequent grandfather. McCarthy can give a better account of this, and the subsequent coded resurfacings of this story himself than I can in precis; suffice it to say that his book is one of the few critical works that can truly be called "mind-blowing", and that no adult interpretation and indeed appreciation of the books can now be considered complete without having read it.
For example: I pointed out to McCarthy before we saw the film together that there were an awful lot of beds in the Tintin books. A great deal many more than you would expect in a series carrying the words "The Adventures of …" Tintin has a hospital-like bed in his flat at 26 Labrador Road; we see him in it while Snowy brings him the phone. The Bird brothers, the real villains of the story (not the originally innocent Sakharine, who is the film's baddie), may be nasty pieces of work, but they are considerate enough to provide Tintin with a nicely made-up set of sheets and blankets in which he can recover consciousness; Calculus has made himself a bed in a lifeboat in Red Rackham's Treasure (character and story completely jettisoned from film); and in The Seven Crystal Balls, the next book to be ravished and broken by Spielberg and his cronies, there are beds galore, in which the cursed professors writhe with tormented nightmares. And so on and so on: make your own list of the beds in Tintin. It's fun. (On a personal note, I would often, when feigning or even occasionally genuinely suffering from illness, read all my Tintin books in bed, matching drink for drink, in Lucozade, what Haddock in the books was doing with whisky.) So. What's that all about, I asked McCarthy. Easy, he said: it's because of what happened in bed between his grandmother and the unidentified nobleman.
Interestingly, it becomes clear, from a couple of quite clear references, that at least one of the screenwriters, Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, have read McCarthy's book. (McCarthy knows Cornish slightly, I gather.) Alas, they have not understood it. There is a great deal about Captain Haddock's genealogy in the film – he is the character who secretly "carries" the Hergé family story in the books – and there is even a bit when he says to Tintin that "you transmit your own signals", an unambiguous lift of one of McCarthy's own riffs. But there then follows a speech, which Hergé's Haddock would never have made in a million years, full of sub-Alcoholics Anonymous self-empowerment rubbish about breaking through walls and finding your true self, which would have made any self-respecting screenwriter insist on having his or her name taken off the credits.
As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons, and the nicest things one can say about it are that there's a pleasing cameo of Hergé himself in the opening scene, the cars look lovely, indeed it is as a whole visually sumptuous, and (after 20 minutes or so of more or less acceptable fidelity; and the 3D motion-capturing transference of the original drawings is by far the least of the film's problems) it usefully places in plain view all the cretinous arrogance of modern mass-market, script-conference-driven film-making, confirming in passing that, as a director, Spielberg is a burned-out sun. A duel between dockyard cranes? Give me a break. Oh, and the opening credits are nice and witty. But this only confirms a maxim that I have recently formulated: that the closer in spirit the title sequence is to the original from which the subsequent film has been stolen, the more of a travesty of that original it will be.
There may be those who think that to quibble about the traducement of what might be considered a work of one of the lesser arts is to waste everyone's time. But it is not. Something of great subtlety, beauty and artfully deceptive complexity, resonance and depth has been betrayed, and it is time to make a stand.
And Mr Lezard just made his stand! Comments from the Tintin gallery?
Dish!
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