Workaday

During the trip to Italy last week, we were given the unique opportunity to visit one of the country's most prominent publishing houses. Guinti Editorial, whose dominance includes both books and retail chains, hold their operations in a beautiful mountaintop villa down the road from our own accommodation. So, after plenty of chatting and conferencing, we trod up the road to have a look.

As we toured around the beautiful, historic villa I tried to keep a running commentary in my head of what it would be like to actually work there.

"Here I am, coming into work, making my way past the carved marble statues and through the 17th-century frescos painted in the same style as the Palazzo Vecchio. Around the corner from the fireplace with the family crest of the Medicis, where nobles plotted the family's overthrow in the 18th century.

"Oh! Look what's hanging from the ceiling above my desk!

"Time for a meeting. Look at the view from my conference room!

Not your correspondent, but she could be my boss

"Time for lunch. What shall I read in my break time. Oh, I know! The collected works of Leonardo Da Vinci bound in priceless leather volumes handmade to replicate the original documents as closely as possible!"

Then I tried to think of the perks of my former Boston office. We used to brag because we had really nice cubicles and free coffee.

....... Yeahhhhh.

Here's the Kicker . . .

'To punt' has a couple of different meanings, depending on which side of the ocean you're on. In America, it's something you do in (need I say it, American) football, where you toss the ball back to the kicker and he launches it across the field to the other end, buying you extra yards before you send out your defense.

As a result it's taken on a second meaning, when you decide not to address something right away and sort of waffle on it until you really can't help but get to work.

In the UK, it's a sport native of only Oxford or Cambridge, where you take a long flat boat out and steer it around using only a worthless little paddle and a long pole. The breed of punting can be distinguished by where you stand on the boat: Cambridge punters stand on the flat end, Oxford on the scooped end. Both of them tend to smack into the riverbank more often than float downstream.

Well, your correspondent has been doing a little bit of both.

It's been so long since I last posted because, as I've hinted at before, it's awfully difficult to take a break from intensive report writing to . . . do more writing. The good news is, one draft is (just about) done and I should be back to my regular schedule shortly.

. . . ANY other name?

In case you were curious what we did in that week in Florence:

http://publishinglexicon.wikispaces.com/

A group of students from five countries got together to discuss what words we use when we talk about publishing. The results were fascinating.

Did you know Italians have hundreds of different words for different types of children's books? And that there is a unique word just for pop-up books? For textured books? For cardboard books?

Did you know that the French googliser and twitter, but insisted on creating a new word for "digital books"?

Did you know that the german word for Search Engine Optimisation, which we abbreviate as SEO, is Suchmaschinenoptimierung? (They abbreviate it as SEO sometimes, too. I wonder why.)


Did you know any words in Slovenian?


You do now!

A Rose by Any Other Name . . .

The weirdest thing about summer school in Italy? I spent half of my time speaking French.

The course I participated in was run in conjunction with three other universities besides my own. The University of Paris, Leipzig University, and the University of Ljubljana sent their own publishing students, to talk about digital publishing in each of our respective countries. Though the common language was meant to be English, French lecturers began by admitting they were best prepared to speak in their native language and employ a translator. My notes are scribbled in a hodgepodge of languages, which was all the more confusing when it was time to go to town and I continued to merci the locals.

They, of course, said, scuzi?


Things became clearer by the end of the week, as altogether we agreed about the loveliness of the villa and drank more cappucino than could possibly be good for us. They literally served us three meals within five hours, each more opulent than the rest. That was before we went into town and saw the gelato.

Second breakfast

Fourth dessert

I made great friends with the other students, and the night before leaving for Casablanca found myself in a local bar enjoying another Italian specialty . . . A certain kind of drink which involved oranges, sugar, coffee grounds, bananas dipped in poppyseeds. How did you drink it? Following the commands of the mustachioed Italian bartender.

Chin chin!

Pisa Cake

Here's the weird thing. The Leaning Tower of Pisa doesn't just lean. It leans visibly.

It leans so that you kind of suspect one of these days - in fact, any minute now - it will accidentally topple over. They only allow 40 people to climb at one time; one suspects that's because too many people gaping down from the top levels would send the whole thing to the ground.

It was leaning before they even finished building. That's why it also seems to curve, just ever so slightly, to compensate for the tilt at the base. No one tells you about that. No one tells you about the intricate design work on its many pillars, either, and the way it gently complements the beautiful cathedral sitting directly behind.

These were the surprising bits. Otherwise, it was something I'd seen a million times in photographs. I sat in the grass with a university friend I'd bumped into on the plane, both on our way to Florence for a seminar on digital publishing. We looked at the Leaning Tower together, and I couldn't help thinking that it was too familiar to be real.

My friend, a Chinese student with a talent for photography and a travel bug almost as large as mine, flipped through the pictures on his camera until he came to the one he wanted. He showed me the screen. "This all reminds me of a palace I saw in Beijing."

I looked. A temple, very Chinese in style, with the same sort of dome as the church whose shadow we were sitting underneath. Kind of. It looked completely foreign to me. But to my friend, this courtyard was foreign, and he was trying to compare it to home.

Just when you think you've got it pegged. . . . !
-----------------------

I'm aware that I haven't posted in a while, and there is a lot of news to share from the trip to Florence, Madrid, and Morocco. Bear with me for a while, since most of my time right now is taken up by my dissertation. I'm writing as much as I can these days - it doesn't leave much creative energy for blog posts. Once the paper is done, hopefully in a few weeks or so, posting should go back to normal..

Neverending

I looked at the man in the bazaar. He looked at me.

"Two hundred," he said.

In the back of my head, a little forgotten gear gone almost rusty started to turn again. "Two hundred ... No. One ... hundred? ... I mean: one hundred!"

Just like that. I was haggling again.

I've been back from Morocco only about a week, long enough to dive into dissertation research and phone up a few publishers from Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Now I'm typing up the last of it before packing my laptop back into its case and catching a bus to the airport, destination Florence.

There, I'll be participating in a seminar on digital publishing with Slovenian, French, and Italian students, aaaaaaand of course sampling the local cuisine by night. (It's only natural.) On the way home, I stop for 12 hours in Madrid to see what I can see, then it's back to Morocco for my final visit to the sister, and then finally - finally - I land back in Britain.

No volcanic ash has caught up with me yet, but my goodness if this hasn't been a whirlwind month.

I'll write more about how it goes trying to speak 'e-book' with Slovenians. Meanwhile: ciao.

More Natural Disasters

Here's the sequel to last week's blog post about the ridiculous travel arrangements for my favorite travel companion and I. We managed to get reunited after an additional 24 hours of him sleeping in airports, but unfortunately between his feet touching ground in Scotland and his feet completing a 26.2-mile marathon, there was only enough room for dinner and a quick nap.

This is what we get for choosing a marathon in Scotland, though: gale force winds, hail, and yet enough sun to give us both sunburns.

We both finished, though, and in good time. Maybe limping a little. (Or a lot.) We couldn't quite relax, however, until we were safely in Morocco with my sister, drinking mint tea with our feet up.

This is where the volcanic ash cloud comes in.

Those gale force winds kept on even after the run, which complicated things at the airport. One waitress casually mentioned that the roof had blown off part of the building and onto the runway, giving us nice little heart attacks over dinner. Our plane was severely delayed, sitting just a few miles away in Glasgow waiting for a break in the weather to come pick us up and shuttle us back to London in time to make our connection the next morning to Casablanca.

If we missed our flight, there might still be time to get to London before our 10 am to Casa. Except, of course, if the ash cloud cancelled all flights from Edinburgh entirely.

Ash clouds! Honestly, after all of this, you'd think we wouldn't have to worry about ash clouds!

We were still at the bar chatting with a Scottish ice hockey player when our flight board blinked from DELAYED to FINAL CALL and started flashing red. They weren't kidding. We chugged our drinks and hobbled towards the plane just as they were closing the doors, which must have looked both hilarious and pathetic to our flight attendants. I'm writing now from the safety of Morocco and still hobbling, but at least there's a hammam in my near future instead of an airport floor to sleep on.

Now let's hope the ash cloud settles in enough time for us to get back up to London by the end of the week. I never thought I'd find my travel plans at the mercy of a volcano, but . . . then again, I shouldn't be surprised at anything anymore.