Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Category: Diary (Page 158 of 300)

Things that happen to me, or things I do

Judging a Book by its Cover

1 April 2010 / / 0 Comments

An event report I wrote for the English PEN website.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.

Rick Gekoski, Alex Clark, Joanna Prior and Cory Doctorow.


I’ll admit, I judged this event by its cover.
I assumed that an discussion titled ‘Judging a book by its cover’ would be about book jacket design, rich and fertile ground for ideas on culture and mass marketing.  I expected to hear bookseller Rick Gekoski wax about the beauty of a hardback first edition, and hear Joanna Prior explain how Penguin’s mass market paperbacks have become an iconic design in themselves.  I expected to hear how the large publishers are stifling creativity by homogenising the book design process.
And in fact, I did hear about all those things. However, I expected them to be within a discussion that was essentially about aesthetics. I did not expect to be faced, instead, with a more philosophical question: what is a book? Is it the paper, the cover and the binding? Or is it the words on the page? Continue reading

Speech to the Society of Young Publishers

29 March 2010 / / 3 Comments

A friend and collaborator just e-mailed to say he enjoyed my use of Hanif Kureishi’s formulation on multiculturalism, in my remarks at Goldsmiths College:

‘Multiculturalism’, he says, ‘is the idea that one might be changed by other ideas’. It is a movement based on the dialogic exchange of ideas, even traditions, based on ‘the idea that purity is incestuous’.

I have used it in another speech recently, to the Society of Young Publishers annual conference, in Oxford last December.  In the interests of posting something new to the blog on a Monday morning, here is the speech I wrote.  It is not necessarily the one that I actually gave, but until Jon S uploads a video of the proceedings, I’m safe. The discussion was on ‘The Responsibility to Publish’, and I shared the panel with Chris Brazier, Co-Editor at the New Internationalist, Sarah Totterdell, Head of Oxfam’s publications department, and Alan Samson from Orion Books.

The View from the Panel

The View from the Panel. Photo by yrstrly.


On being asked to speak at this event, I was terrified that I was going to end up speaking in tautologies. If you’re at the Society of Young Publishers, then you’re already speaking to a group of people who are, by definition, of the belief that publishing is a civic good, that they are part of civil society.
So, I want to say more. Let’s go the whole hog.  My first thought is this: That of The Arts, it is literature and publishing, that has by far the greatest impact on politics. Continue reading

Elsewhere, on Offence

27 March 2010 / / 0 Comments

In The Independent, Michael Coveney discusses theatre that offends, and what to do about it. There is a quote from yrstrly too:

Freedom of speech carries with it a freedom to insult; otherwise, as Tom Stoppard says, it’s not a freedom worth having. Bhatti’s first play was not based on any real-life case history, but offered as an extreme allegory of hypocrisy. And as a Sikh herself, who is she to be denied that privilege?
It says much about the state we’re in that her new play comes with explicit support from campaign groups Index on Censorship, English PEN and Free World. Robert Sharp of PEN says that the Sikhs who took exception to Behzti (and many prominent Sikhs didn’t) should remember that when you are satirised or criticised, then you’re relevant, you’ve arrived. But is there any limit to the offence a theatrical play can cause, or should there be?
“None at all,” says Sharp, “except perhaps from a clear incitement to violence. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are sister rights. There is neither in China or Iran. People here should respond to things they don’t like by writing reviews, or writing their own plays.”

Both of the readers of this blog will note the provenance of the sound-bites offered. The bit about satire of minority faiths as a badge of relevance was first mooted in 2005; Putting limits on free speech in cases of incitement was noted last month; and my thoughts on counter-speech and responding through plays and reviews was the subject of a Comment is Free piece last year.  Its a long term project, but you can see how the blog-as-scrapbook model is beginning to pay off.

Petition Bundling

23 March 2010 / / 3 Comments

During the US Election, I remember reading a biographic article about David Plouffe, one of Barack Obama’s earliest and most influential supporters, about how he came to be running the future President’s campaign. It seems he started as a ‘bundler’. These are people who go around donations from dozens of people in their network, delivering a large chunk of cash to the candidate (campaign finance rules set a limit on how much any one individual can donate).
I thought of this word ‘bundling’ over the weekend, when I tried to persuade some friends to sign not one, but four live petitions:

Much of the social media chat at the moment is about making it easier to engage with politicians on a particular issue.  The standard model at the moment, as purveyed by Amnesty UK, the Libel Reform Campaign and 38 Degrees, is a short series of steps that prompts you to:

  1. Sign the petition
  2. Write to your MP
  3. Donate
  4. Tweet and share on Facebook, &ct.

I wonder if there might be an alternative model, which would benefit projects like 38 Degrees, Power 2010 and MySociety which deal with many issues at once.  An earlier step in the process would be a set of check-boxes, where you could pick the petitions you wanted to sign.   Alternatively, other nudge tactics, or techniques used in online shopping, could be employed:

“Other people who signed the Libel Reform Petition also signed….”

Petition

The Manifesto Club petition for visiting artists and academics, presented to Downing Street on 17th March 2010 (photo by yrstrly on the English PEN Flickr stream).

Heathcare Reform Photo

22 March 2010 / / 1 Comment

I just saw this photo on a BBC News report on healthcare reform.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)


It was pulled from the White House’s official Flickr stream, and I think it may soon become emblematic.  It will be used to illustrate a huge victory, substantial but also symbolic, of the Obama Administration.  The President looks chuffed but not ecstatic.  A job well done, but you sense he will be turning to his staff to ask, “what’s next?”
Maybe that’s not what happened in reality.  Maybe the President went mental and stood on a table with a knife, lording over his defeated enemies.  But we don’t see that photo.  Significantly, we only have this one image of the celebrations, so that is what will persist of that moment – its a clever bit of subtle PR.  Politicians have been shaping the narrative with flattering images for centuries, of course.  But its always interesting to watch it happen in real time.

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