read this e-journal

Part of day job is putting together a monthly journal for Julie Meyer's company, Ariadne Capital. If you're interested in early-stage companies in the broad media, tech and telecom space then it's not a bad read and occasionally a very good one. Through the Maze comes out the third week of every month and is free to subscribe to. I'm always looking for interesting stories and writers too, so if you fall into that category, contact me.

Is Google making us stupid?

This was the title of Nicholas Carr’s article published in Atlantic Monthly that sparked what has become a firey debate between the guardians of old culture and the nouveau tech. It’s a debate that interests me profoundly, not just because I don’t just sit but live on the fence between the two, but also because of the more scientific research that has begun to show neurological changes in a whole generation intellectually engaged with Playstation, Facebook and MSN.

John Walsh in this Sunday’s Independent, iterated the case that there are increasing numbers of people now unable to tackle what might be called ‘difficult’ literature: Joyce, Beckett, Homer, Milton. Actually that should read difficult and long. Because the argument goes that given the way we engage with information on the web, ‘power browsing’, we are increasingly unable to apply the necessary intellectual concentration needed to sustain meaning over the long distances of big novels or other works. This inability is mirrored in structural changes to the fore-brain, or the parts of the brain that are involved with language and abstract logic.

I’ve just finished reading Susan Greenfield’s ‘The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century’ (no, not that long). Professor Greenfield is the eminent Oxford neuroscientist whose work has been popularised in various forms over the past decade. She writes, “At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells that make up the constituent parts of the brain actually change in response to certain experiences and stimuli.” So the brain is plastic and malleable, like a muscle. Use it or lose it. She quotes a fascinating research study undertaken by the Harvard Medical School. Three groups of adult volunteers with no prior ability to play the piano are given a week in an identical room with an identical piano. Group 1 is given intensive piano practice for five days; group 2 has nothing to do with the piano and Group 3 is told to imagine that they were spending five days intensively practising the piano. Comparative brain scans showed Group 2 had no change; Group 1 had significant structural changes to the parts of the brain associated with fine motor control and – big surprise – Group 3 showed almost as much change to the same parts of the brain as Group1. In other words, the impact of the imagination, or higher thought process, is not just real but physical.

My late father studied Classics at Cambridge and then went on to carve out a very classical career as a mandarin civil servant. He always maintained his education had taught him how to think, had trained his mind. I, of course, poo poo-ed such Byzantine thinking until, in the immortal words of the Fonz, I realised he was right just at the point when I have a son who thinks I’m wrong. (And aged four, wants nothing more than to master Playstation).

I don’t really think the Sony Reader with its galactic memory (160 books-worth) and leviathan battery life or Google Book Search (with its millions of scanned books out there free on the web) are a threat to the world’s creative imagination. To me physical access to ideas is always good if it’s expanding: I think people will always choose to lose themselves in a good book, with paper and ink and easy pages to turn at some time. What does concern me, though, is if somehow the democracy and vastness of the internet, with its multiplicity of views and sources, turns us away from the deeply-researched, long argument posited by a single, deeply-thinking person, and worse, makes us unable to follow him or her on a deep intellectual journey.

Beanz meanz Heinz...or Branstons?

OK now we know the credit crunch is real. Sales of baked beans are up 12% on last year and Branstons beans are up 22%. I'm a Heinz girl myself - and the full sugar version too. They can't do them in France where the name says it all - haricots blancs à la sauce tomate - so I wonder what hard-pressed French families are eating more of? Let them eat cake.

In a world where...

Don laFontaine has died aged 68. Until his death no-one outside his niche knew his face – even his name. But his voice sold over 5,000 of Hollywood's most blockbusting flicks from Dr Strangelove to The Terminator. He'd started as a radio engineer and then progessed to a few radio ads before finding his real talent. Overweight and unglamorous, he is probably one of Hollywood's most hired actors. In his 33 year career he single-handedly created an industry of voicing movie trailers with his signature sound of an insomniac's throaty base rolling like thick black coffee over gravel. He had a pregnant voice; a voice that held your attention and promised and suggested. How can one man's voice be so iconic? So unrepeatable? So resonant for so many people across all the world. Earlier today I was doing some early work putting together Ariadne Capital's next journal to Maria Callas belting out arias at high decibels across the Somerset countryside. It got me thinking about other voices I love: the unfashionable 50s tenor, Beniamino Gigli and the rasping bark of Sid Vicious (strangely also admired by the great interpreter of German lieder, Ian Bostridge) and Tom Waits and Dylan and Louis Armstrong. They've all got highly individual voices that are drenched in experience: unmistakable. So now we can look forward to many laFontaine immitators and how dull they'll be.

The soundtrack to your life

If, like me, you have a large, unalphabetised and long-unvisited collection of vinyl, the Ion USB is like an instant time machine that will transport the soundtrack to your teenage life onto your iPod within minutes. Turn the past into the future, goes the marketing spiel. And it does. The turntable comes bundled with Audacity software (good for PCs or Macs) and Bias Soundsoap 2 which irons out some of the worst cracks and splutters of those much-abused discs. My own time journey is so far incomplete but an unexpected rediscovery were several of John Cooper Clarke's idiosyncratic works or oeuvres as I feel they should be called. Like Morrissey but funnier and darker, the sardonic Cooper Clarke still pounds the circuit in his black drainpipes, big hair and outsized sunglasses. The bard of Salford delivers his bleak vision through devastating puns in a flat Northern monotone against what are often trite tunes.  His first LP – Où est la maison de fromage? – was released in 1978 just as the Sex Pistols were shaming glam rockers into retirement. More recently The Arctic Monkeys cite Cooper Clarke as a major influence. It is difficult to convey the full effect through quoted lyrics but here are a few lines from Beasley Street:

The boys are on the wagon

The girls are on the shelf

Their common problem is

...That they're not someone else

If you want to, you can trace his verse back through a very British tradition - to Betjeman and Noel Coward - of small quotidian life and something nasty in the woodshed. Here he is in rare, romantic mode with I wanna be yours:

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner

Breathing in your dust

I wanna be your Ford Cortina

I will never rust

If you like your coffee hot

Let me be your coffee pot

You call the shots

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat

for those frequent rainy days

I wanna be your dreamboat

when you want to sail away

Let me be your teddy bear

take me with you everywhere

I don't care

I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter

I will not run out

I wanna be the electric heater

You'll get cold without

I wanna be your setting lotion

Hold your hair in deep devotion

Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean

That's how deep is my devotion

Books I wish I had written

I am not about to launch into a solipsistic journey into my literary passions, don't worry. But just occasionally you read a book that is close enough to your own interests or frame of mind to stand out as one you wished had been yours. Haunts of the Black Masseur by Charles Sprawson is exactly that kind of book. Subtitled Swimmer as Hero it presents an erudite but also seductive history of the culture of swimming and also vividly communicates the physical elation of moving through water from someone who has swum the Hellespont. There's Byron leaping into the surf at Shelley's beach funeral, Virginia Woolf weighting her coat pockets with pebbles before quietly walking into her Sussex river suicide, Hart Crane swallow-diving to his death in the Bay of Mexico. He reminds us that in England everyone swam naked until about 1840; that the Germans from Goethe and Thomas Mann to Leni Riefenstahl associated swimming with a Faustian quest for spiritual perfection through godlike athleticism while in the States swimming has been inextricably linked with refuge and withdrawal. There's Esther Williams and David Hockney; Edgar Allen Poe and Yukio Mishima and of course Johnny Weissmuller and Mark Spitz. The book is a great modern example of the work of a true amateur in its original meaning. I wish I had written it.

Women entrepreneurs

Tomorrow I'm meeting Jenny Fielding, who has recently arrived in London from the US. She works for a really interesting organisation called Astia whose mission it is to bring promising women entrepreneurs into supported contact with venture funds. As someone who has been meeting and writing about entrepreneurs for a good part of my career, I was curious to drill some numbers here. According to VentureOne (a Dow Jones subsidiary) in 2007, companies run by women CEOs attracted just 2.9% of available funding in the US, down from 4.52% in 2006. The UK tally is undoubtedly even worse, although perhaps tellingly, I haven't found a reliable data source. The reason is almost certainly one of closed male networks. Venture funds tend to back people they know. Ninety-four per cent of venture fund management in the US is male. In Britain, who knows? More, probably. Ergo male entrepreneurs are 20 times as likely to get funded as their female counterparts.

Astia has an astonishing track-record of getting bright women entrepreneurs early stage funding in Silicon Valley. Running a pilot last year in New York, 70 per cent of companies who had been accepted into the Astia programme, got funded. Jenny Fielding is here to replicate the model in London and it will be fascinating to see how it works. There are, of course, some great examples of young women entrepreneurs – Christina Domecq (SpinVox), Sarah McVittie (Textperts), Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Susie Willis (Plum-Baby), Cary Marsh (Mydeo) – but they (or rather we) are not winning this game en masse. Spectacularly failing at it, actually.