vendredi 30 janvier 2004

'The Joy of Letting Women Down': too good for mere words Many pages would serve well as a scan from Natalie d'Arbeloff's handbook, but I chose this pair because you can see both telling illustrations and the instructive text in blood bold and even sometimes CAPS to make some of her points. Natalie's notions of how the 'Worshipped Male' might set about juggling the "Primary", "Regulars" and "Temps" among the lays in his life were also the part of her work that provoked the most interesting real-life horror stories and criticism when I let a friend or two loose on her book in the Canteen: Since Ms d'Arbeloff might be curious to know what the likes of François, Tony and Jacques made of some of her observations, let it be said that if I've learned anything from 'The Joy of Letting Women Down: Secrets of the Worshipped Male' (Robson Books, 2000) it is, just for starters, to tell her that their informed opinions are Absolutely None of Her Business. In a pocketful of liberally illustrated pages, Natalie has herself already revealed more than enough. Just take some of the wretched whistle-blower's chapter headings: 3 The Management of Female Lust and Jealousy 8 Sleeping Together 9 Time-Management and Excuses 12 Guilt, Contrition and Loveability. In all, there are 15 such revelations, including accurate and splendidly politically incorrect sketches of the various "types" of women and men to be encountered in the "sex war". The trouble with Natalie, quite apart from this bare-faced lack of discretion on matters worthy of the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, is that she claims to have "been an expert on the subject of this book for most of her adult life and doesn't regret a minute of it". She further lays claim to a "serious side", as if the above wasn't seriously bad already. If you want to know how a 'Worshipped Male' (WM) functions and can manage to exist at all, you will have to read this handbook which takes the following contradiction as its starting point: "Most women want a man they can worship. Most women want a man they can rely on. It's a fact of life that these two things are incompatible (...)". In further sweeping statements, practical examples of outrageous successes and bloody disasters, and reckless disclosures, Ms d'Arbeloff (her place) does what you could pay many psychoanalysts to do but would usually be wiser to trust your few real friends in providing for free. With elegance, wit and irony, she holds you up a mirror in which, male or female, you're almost bound to recognise part of yourself if you're honest -- and irrespective of whether you agree with the woman. If my friend in London is telling the truth about having lived much of what she writes, then she's a braver and bolder person than I am, because if I were a woman and had endured even the half of this lot, I think I might be a quivering wreck by now. My own experiences with women, however, especially in the last decade or so, have unremittingly taught me that I possess virtually none of the requisites to be a 'WM' and have instead almost incessantly erred down the paths of alarmingly predictable reliability, blind loyalty and phenomenal naïvety. It's no wonder that virtually my every bid to get lovely creatures who drive me half insane with lust to take their clothes off and allow me either to screw them or be laid by them has ended in variations on that balls-breaking theme I will stomach no more: "Yes, I'll 'go out' with you as long as you just want to be good friends." Yet any number of the most selfish, ugliest, mentally impoverished and total bastards I know among my own sex seem capable of arousing intense female desire virtually at the drop of a hat. Sometimes they achieve this and sate their own lust without even the polite prelude of, say, buying dinner first and pretending to be seriously interested in any more than the bits tucked away under their bras, knickers and, occasionally, veils. Regrettably, I also have a feminine side -- a pronounced one according to all those tests you can have fun with on the Internet -- and realise that Ms d'Arbeloff's immensely readable account of many things I unconsciously knew perfectly well but am happy to see written down is also of as much interest to women as it is to we men, the weaker sex. She puts it better herself than I might: "(The manual) is not suggesting that being a WM is a good thing. It is a very bad thing which, like many bad things, is also a lot of fun. This book reveals why this bad thing is fun and precisely why this fun is bad." With consummate insight, Natalie sent me this slender but invaluable tome not for review but out of mercy as a New Year's gift in the immediate wake of my last documented disaster, which left considerable dents in my ego and my intended holiday budget for 2004. To pretend that I regret any of my extremely unpleasant lessons to date would be as much of a mean-minded insult to the women I have desired -- and sometimes still like -- as it would be fruitless indulgence in self-pity over wasted years. I should also note that sometimes I've given quite as bad as I've got, proving a uncharitable mirror to some women myself, given sufficient provocation. I haven't resolved with the turn of the year to be "bad", nor will I reveal some conclusions I have drawn with Natalie's helping hand. However, I remain unsure only whether it's still naïf of me or simply fair warning to inform the next gorgeous creature to tell me just what a "wonderfully kind, adorable man" I am that there is a price to be paid for the already tear-drenched shoulder I shall offer them, such being my nature, to weep on. Ms d'Arbeloff's funny contribution to one of life's most eternal and intriguing mysteries will probably be among the most wisely spent investments in hard-won wisdom (Amazon UK) many who stumble across this review could make. 8:25:54 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 29 janvier 2004

Body blows revisited: just how bad has sunk in! Rewrite: Jan 30 - still sick at heart! Eric Olsen blundered in where angels and devils alike fear to tread in yesterday's 'Blogcritics' editorial, 'BBC Spanked Soundly'. Eric's links are good ones, but -- ridiculously swift to use his reading of the Hutton report to grind an old axe -- our American friend calls the Beeb "anti-war, anti-Blair, leaning way to the left"! This is absurd, superficial and smug. I can only imagine Eric doesn't very often listen to the BBC and certainly knows far fewer of the people who work or have worked for that vast institution than I have. And I'm rewriting this entry, because though I woke up once again with a sledgehammer headache, it's eased off a little today, leaving me more clear-headed to say that I find Eric's trans-Atlantic punditry irritatingly complacent. The BC editor has of late included in a 'New Year's Resolution' poll the options to: Pick fights with other Blogcritics. Post, comment, link more, More, MORE DAMMIT!!! I wouldn't vote for either of those, but since the list reads suspiciously like an editorial rant or a party whip at work, I'd like to suggest that if Eric is going to write more provocative editorials, he'd do better to start by knowing what he's talking about. Before returning to Hutton, the two other blows I mentioned yesterday were waking up with a really unwanted dose of whatever's going round. So did many people in Paris, going by the state of the Canteen's clients at lunchtime, Sam's plea for paracetemol as he served us all, misery in the Métro and the throbbing skull of one of the doctors I kept an appointment with today. The second blow, this one below the belt, sent Natalie's 'Secrets of the Worshipped Male' to the top of my reading list. Certain recent events were elucidated when the concierge knocked on my door with a very big packet. I have no desire to be a "WM", but my first experience of being the man who is sent back gifts he gave a woman, without so much as a note, isn't one I would wish to repeat. I'm still not quite sure that Nat's book should soon be reviewed rather than burned, as I've already noted, as a manual far too revealing -- and extremely funny -- to be bestowed on the public at large. Getting back to my relief that blows usually come only in threes, I really have now read through the Hutton report (BBC). And rather more than just skimmed it, though I didn't re-read all the evidence in its hundreds of pages. It is frightening! If this outrageously one-sided document is British justice at its best, then may all the gods help that country of my birth, because it's in a very bad way. My friend Tony told me he hasn't "seen so much TV since 9/11, but then journalism's my trade". He thought, in a note, that the only people really likely to wade through all that stuff are we journalists. Fortunately, he's wrong. Even if they're not all ploughing through the report itself, it's pretty clear what a lot of Brits think if this 'Have Your Say' page is anything to go by. If I risk seeing Tony for lunch as planned -- since I really don't think he needs the foul bug I've got on top of his other reasons to trek to this part of town for a medical appointment this afternoon -- I shall be strongly contesting his conclusion that the departure of BBC director general Greg Dyke (BBC story on what I listened to this morning) is a "good thing". It's true, as Tony contended, that under Dyke the Beeb has been guilty of "dumbing down" on occasion.< However, in the wake of the Hutton bombshell, the former chief executive at the corporation and a lot of its staff have behaved with an honour and integrity conspicuously lacking on the part of the country's "Teflon prime minister" and many of his mates. One of the very few bloggers I managed to find in the newsreader last night who have already managed to stop either crowing or vomiting their disgust over Hutton and what it means for the media at large, not just the Beeb, is Hetty Litjens. 'Heli', who goes on this morning to put up a quick interesting link asking 'Who is Hutton?' ('Heaven and Hell'), had already managed yesterday to begin writing some intelligent analysis of what it all means. I was just too damned disheartened. Yesterday was one of those days when I really couldn't think how I still often succeed, after three decades often at the hot end of journalism, in believing any politicians any of the time. This whole appalling and "extremely shabby" episode, as Tony just summed it up on the 'phone, saying he is prepared to risk my bug to discuss it all further at the Canteen. Tony, who as regular visitors will know is now retired after a working lifetime in the press, needs cheering up as much as I was this morning by happier developments in life. I have very rarely known him confess to depression, since he's a very gutsy man, but he tells me that this Hutton business and its implications for "the old country" put him in the blackest of moods he's known in a very long time. It's not a "spanking" the BBC has had, Eric! The whole institution has been rocked to the core by a shameful collision with squeaky clean politicians that should be scaring the shit out of any of us who lay claim to being professional journalists and, above all, editors. Throughout the months of the inquiry, I retained some faith that Lord Hutton might use his admittedly restricted brief to come up with something other than what does, indeed, read very dangerously like the "whitewash" some are calling it. I was wrong. 10:18:37 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 28 janvier 2004

How Hutton sent me in search of the muse "Six bulletins. Six! Tu te rends compte?" So clucked an old hand on the "French side" at the Factory this evening once all the fuss was over: a fuss my veteran friend, soon due for a well-merited retirement, considered to be over-excited coverage of the Hutton report, Blair's gloat over its findings and the resignation of BBC chairman Gavyn Davies. I had other things to do myself than count how many bulletins and urgents shot out into cyberspace from AFP on the English "wire" as the drama unfolded, let alone in French and other languages. But as I told my colleague, if he thought putting out six red-print bell-buzzing bulletins in French about this latest twist in the tragi-comedy of British governance was excessive (and if indeed that's how many there were), "just imagine how many Reuters may have sent! That's today's media world." As far as I can tell, it's that other big news agency which has for a decade or more now taught journalists to hit the "news flash" priority range of buttons the most often and hardest in the game, lending it all the sense of competitive urgency I'm increasingly convinced is bad for business and in nobody's interest. Now that I know a good fellow named Laurent in Abidjan to be among the Faithful Five ¾ -- "I check out your blog almost every morning," he astounded me by disclosing -- I should apologise for so much boring focus here on the return of the Condition in the past few days and weeks. Nevertheless, today's well-handled furore gave me the textbook example of the Condition at work! As the noise levels from TV sets pouring out live coverage of events rose around the editorial floor, along with the electric tension and effort most people were engrossed in to turn round the Factory's own raw news from London as fast and as well as they could, my brain began to reel and it became so hard to concentrate on Africa that I stuffed the iPod earphones into my head and switched out all the racket inspired by the story of the day with a remark to Karin, my partner: "If anybody needs me, just knock! I'll catch up on this lot tonight or in the morning." Perfectly inappropriate though my gut reaction to all the organised frenzy was in a news agency journalist, this mind of mine was extremely busy exchanging irritating signals with my bowels which had me rushing twice to the toilet in quick succession... Intestinal order and a focus on the African news on my own screen were soon restored by Patricia Kaas in her 'Piano Bar' -- an uneven album where the remarkable French singer (PK official site) makes an excellent and original job of several "golden oldies" and an unmemorable mess of one or two, like 'La Mer'. When it came to going-home time, though, my system needed the kind of purge kindly provided (now that some of the Kid's tastes have begun to give as much pleasure to her dad) by a very loud dose of 'Absolution'. I've become deeply attached to Matthew Bellamy's often pretentious, over-the-top lyrics, Dominic Howard's manic brilliance with a drumkit, the cheerful plagiarism of Rachmaninov and other romantics, some wild basslines and the sheer energy of Muse (note: the clever Flash version and the generous freebies on the official site are probably too much for people with slow connections, but there's an HTML version and a range of download options). That cleared my head of the Factory. While downloading a QuickTime video or two, I found further agreeable distraction in this sort of thinking: "Unless you are a British football fan with a summer house in Rwanda and a harem of lingerie models and more groupies than the Rolling Stones, there is no way you should have seen enough sex and violence that it should be boring. "These are two of the most basic triggers hardwired into our DNA." Or so Patrick LeClerc thinks in an editorial about writing at 'Quantum Muse,' which has just joined my ever-growing list of sci-fi and "alternate literature" sites to keep an eye on. Frankly, I find such matters, weighty or otherwise, more interesting by the day -- infinitely more so than the making or undoing of Tony Blair and the likes in the "headline" news. There's plenty of violence, and most of it saddening, in the affairs that have kept Lord Hutton so busy since August, but precious little sex, which remains of far more abiding interest and sells infinitely more paper and creative work than any "sexed-up" event. I do have a professional interest in reading what Britain's Guardian newspaper chooses to make of it all after it late in September so bluntly spoke of "10 ways to sex up a dossier". Whenever I hear anybody at AFP or any other news factory (since it happens pretty much everywhere) ordering some poor wretch to "sex up" a story, however "senior" they may think themselves in the hierarchy of such institutions, that particularly loathsome trend of our times grates on my ears and triggers the most unpleasant of responses in my guts. There are, of course, good and bad ways of writing a story, but if it needs "sexing up", then it's definitely not news. 11:47:46 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 26 janvier 2004

The Condition (ii): self, science & fictions. Progress?! Well, it was snow. Of that dirty-city sleet kind driven by a biting wind which turns every corner straight into your face... The Inuit (Eskimos) must have a singularly horrible word for this sort of slush, which left me drenched and bone-chilled in the 15 minutes it took to walk to the Mind Juggler's place. Now I know why some Brits mentioned on the Beeb at the weekend that they planned to call on the Canadians for some expertise about "Arctic conditions imminent"! Far from further rest and relaxation, Dr F. again proved radical in her latest recommendations regarding getting shot of the Condition. We're in for another bout of intensive mind-body sessions, since she reckons I've more than assimilated Round One, for all my misgivings (this morning's entry). She even thinks I should go to the Factory rather less for a while and work intensively on the recovery plan we're formulating! That, I can see, is going to go down as well at AFP as a couple of tonnes of bricks... But I suppose it does make some kind of sense, since it's now clear that "social integration" is far from the issue. Facets. Did I mention facets before? Sort of, certainly in 'Where There's Will, there's a way' back in May ... those were the days, when I could parody Shakespeare about the Condition, geez! I didn't know then just what I was launched into and how darned long it would take. The Mind Juggler and I have begun to argue. Constructively, but it's an argument nevertheless, in which one of the few things we agree on is that the harder I can work with her now, the better it'll be and the quicker the whole process will be over! What this really boils down to is that your correspondent is going to have to push harder at the breakthrough point(s) I confusedly suspected we were approaching by this morning. I've already learned the "learning paradox" for myself ("paradox" being one of her key words today): the fact that learning anything is not a steady uphill path for any of us, but rather something we accomplish in a series of "jumps". That's to say, it's often precisely at those moments when you often feel that you are more confused about whatever it is you're learning than ever, when you feel you've been treading water for a while, that your brain's doing the really hard graft for the next level "up". This is a phenomenon I've observed particularly when it comes to learning languages or related skills, and also in the creative process. I'm going to have to devise a "work schedule" for putting all the fragmented facets together; those facets of self that appear to have splintered at around the same time as the guts fell apart. We've discussed elements: creative writing (more of it, not less, reckons the MJ) musical expression (and expression about music) "educational" wordcraft family matters sexuality (she is a shrink, and there's been a lot about that of late, quite self-revelatory too) senses of guilt and duty (ditto) "religious" outlook (if that's the appropriate term for my renewed waxing interest in "Oriental thinking", Zen, the Tao and all that) sciences and science fiction, writ large(*) the Factory (which is supposed to go down my list of "priorities" at the very time I'm beginning to settle back into the place. That's one of the matters where we can't see quite eye to eye). Yes. Well, I think that'll do for starters. Fuck me! I really thought this lot was going to be sorted out within two or three more weeks at most... Even if I know well enough that the accomplishment of self-realisation is a lifelong task. And probably, usually, an unfinished one. _______ (*) From a collection of definitions by the intriguing Neyir Cenk Gökçe (Gökçe's 'Science Fiction Page'). These are but a handful of many Neyir has gathered on the wide-ranging site of a Turkish mechanical engineering student. I post them first because I find them interesting, and secondly because they're an excellent example of the danger of trying to label and pigeon-hole things, Western-style: "By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism." Alvin Toffler "In fact, one good working definition of science fiction may be the literature which, growing with science and technology, evaluates it and relates it meaningfully to the rest of human existence." Bruce H. Franklin "A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method. To make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of 'almost all'), it is necessary only to strike out the word 'future'." Science Fiction: its nature, faults and virtues, in 'The Science Fiction Novel', Advent, Chicago:1969 Robert A. Heinlein "A revealing way of describing science fiction is to say that it is part of a literary mode which one may call 'fabril'. 'Fabril' is the opposite of 'Pastoral'. But while "the pastoral" is an established and much-discussed literary mode, recognized as such since early antiquity, its dark opposite has not yet been accepted, or even named, by the law-givers of literature. Yet the opposition is a clear one. Pastoral literature is rural, nostalgic, conservative. It idealizes the past and tends to convert complexities into simplicity; its central image is the shepherd. Fabril literature (of which science fiction is now by far the most prominent genre) is overwhelmingly urban, distruptive, future-oriented, eager for novelty; its central images is the 'faber', the smith or blacksmith in older usage, but now extended in science fiction to mean the creator of artefacts in general--metallic, crystalline, genetic, or even social." Introduction, 'The Oxford Book of Science Fiction,' (Oxford, 1992) Tom Shippey "Science Fiction is that class of fiction which contains the currents of change in science and society. It concerns itself with the critique, extension, revision, and conspiracy of revolution, all directed against static scientific paradigms. Its goal is to prompt a paradigm shift to a new view that will be more responsive and true to nature." 'The Cosmic Dancers' (New York, 1983) Amit Goswami If you've got more Neyir hasn't listed with these and his others, he'd be glad of a heads-up, he writes (spotted via a recent 'Science Fiction and Religion' post at Kuro5hin). 10:52:20 PM  link   your views? [] 'Avalon': deadly reality, now on a 'fave list' The outstandingly gifted Japanese musician whose photo I've pinched here is Kenji Kawai, whose compositions played a key role in that Manga turned cult movie, 'Ghost in the Shell,' which I briefly mentioned here last August 24. Along with 'Avalon'! Kenji -- who works with Macs, bless him (profile at 'kenjikawai') -- pursued his musical partnership with the fabulous writer & director team, Mamoru Ishii and Kazunori Itô, on 'Avalon' (2001), such a strange Japanese-Polish co-production of a film that when the Kid and I first saw it on the big screen it really needs we both emerged quite stunned. I wasn't sure whether I'd just seen the most virtuoso piece of sluggish nonsense or a chef d'oeuvre. All I knew was that I needed to watch this movie again, so utterly was I drawn into its bleak, mainly sepia-tonal world. It was gone in a couple of days, my chance lost, but it's one of the very few films to have haunted me at a deep level since; and not least Kenji's astounding musical score, which you can just about still find on a Virgin France CD, ranging from electronica to oratorio. 'Ghost' (Amazon UK) is easier to track down. Like Kenji's soundtrack, which takes on such crucial importance in the closing scenes of 'Avalon' that to say more would be a spoiler, "ghosts" play a key role in this film too. Summed up in a line or two, 'Avalon' is the story of Ash, chilled out "warrior" who makes a living playing an illegal virtual reality war game set, with the help of the Polish military, in some near future reminiscent of a hungry, hopeless Cold War bloc '1984'. Ash has become one of the game's few solo players since her team, the Wizards, cracked up in a clash which left one of her partners brain-dead and hospitalised. In a world that offers precious little else, for her and a few others the game -- and the explicit parallels it draws with recurrent aspects of the Arthurian legends -- has become more than life itself. On its release, this extraordinary fable of realities was swept into the shadows by the massive box office hit of 'The Matrix,' with which 'Avalon' was initially compared by several misguided critics. Well, last night I saw it again. Once and a half times... My own Mac has been so badly behaved under Panther (Apple's new operating system) when it comes to the built-in CD drive that I cracked and finally acquired -- yes, DVD: a darned good external CD and DVD read-and-write drive. The same me who has long cursed both the horrors of television and the whole home movie thing. No doubt about it this time: 'Avalon' (Amazon Fr.) is a masterpiece, one that I've even decided to buy second-hand as a very strong candidate for my own list of all-time Top Ten Films -- that good! I see that in the past year or so, this film too has won serious cult status at the IMDb, where those who considered it one of the most turgid and tedious bores of the year on release are now massively outnumbered. Malgorzata Foremniak is terrific as Ash: ice-cold, except where her dog is concerned, and the rest of a largely unknown (in the West) cast are all good. It is a slow movie, but one that merits several viewings. First time round, I was so taken with the music and the stunning photography (a subtle interplay of reality and virtual reality in itself) that I missed half the subtleties of a deceptively simple plot, wherein Ash decides to aim for gameplay level Special-A, the mysterious innards of Avalon. At the risk of life itself. Press reviews last year could scarcely have been more varied: "If Hungarian miserablist Bela Tarr ever remade The Matrix, it might look like this, but I don't think Tarr would have made it quite so boring. It's a futuristic fantasy whose undoubtedly impressive computer-generated effects are occluded by being mostly presented in a kind of sepia monochrome, as if the film has been developed in cold tea. For all its many bizarre moments, it can be an extraordinarily grim and frankly tedious trudge," wrote Peter Bradshaw (Guardian). "...the live-action debut of the Japanese animator Mamoru Oshii is a hypnotic science-fiction picture made in Poland and set in a dystopian near future (...) The picture concentrates on one contestant, the cool, good-looking Ash, and her progress of mysterious self-discovery, and it's beautifully designed and lit, most of it in a golden sepia. At times the use of music is reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski (jyjung71), but the pictures it most closely resembles in mood and appearance are Chris Marker's 'La Jetée' and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker'," Philip French wrote (same website! for the 'Observer'). Being a "gauche" and right-brained person, I didn't know quite what to make of somebody's comment at the IMDb where they described 'Avalon' as "a very right-side-of-the-brain experience", unless they meant that a lot of the way the film "works" is subliminal, non-rational. But there is a story to it, a very intriguing one which I grasped on second viewing, taking advantage of the new computer toy to run one or two scenes through again for closer inspection. What some have taken for "repetitive" isn't, in fact: such scenes are like keys, used and understood differently each time round. And since I admire both Tarkovsky and Marker, of course I'm going to agree not only with Philip French but with all those who contend that to compare this film with 'The Matrix' trilogy is absurd, superficial and idiotic. I still reckon, as I wrote back in August, that 'Avalon' is a "love it or hate it" movie, but now I know which camp I'm in! The only real parallels one might draw with 'The Matrix' are the questioning of the nature of reality itself -- especially in a world where the "real" really hurts (there's some clever use of colour in the sepia shots of food which take on some importance here) -- and the way Ishii and Itô draw on myth and legend that are pretty important to the points they succeed in making. It deserves "cult status". It was a movie far ahead of its time and very different mind-fodder from most of the unmemorable gloss and dross that came out of Hollywood that year. But I think it also deserves a second chance on the big screen circuit! DVD is OK. But it really isn't the same thing, not if you've got the devil's luck like I have to live in an adventurous art-movie paradise like Paris, where some of the best cinemas still have the committed support and audience to go on taking risks. zzz Also revisited in the past few days, thanks to the rental shop, and another sure candidate for my "eventually buy as part of the Top Ten list": a very different, and exceptionally moving, kind of musical film, Giuseppe Tornatore's 'La Leggenda del pianista sull'oceano' ('The Legend of 1900'; IMDb, 1998). But that -- and despite the title it's a movie in English with outstanding performances notably from Tim Roth, Pruitt Taylor Vince and an indispensably gorgeous Mélanie Thierry -- is a very different story. Some other time. ____ 'Avalon' photo credits: Cinévia Films; Kenji: no credit given at source, apart from OPhoto. 7:29:49 PM  link   your views? [] The Condition (i): groundshift? Mindshift...? On the 12 strokes of noon, I've the latest appointment with the Mind Juggler, but I'm deeply confused as to where we go from here. We've not had a session together for 10 days now, which was exactly the way it should have been. It gave me almost enough of the time needed to let my mind, both conscious and quite clearly unconsciously, assimilate and make some sense of all that "work" we did during the last intensive set of meetings. But maybe not enough... This December, January and early February period has always been an appalling time of year where nearly every day is one big battle for clarity, lucidity and indeed, some kind of sanity, against the really black dog blues! With the exception of a couple of days, last week at the Factory was mostly mercifully quiet on the African news front and there weren't the other events happening which last year -- as an accumulative effect of constant battering on several fronts -- finally tipped me over into the Condition by the time the spring arrived. But something's going on. I hesitate, as ever, about blogging it, but fight off the inhibitions because I now accept the fact that this struggle of mine to stay ... well-tempered, in Bach's sense of the term perhaps, against the rage of clinical cyclothymic "disorder" is of genuine interest -- and possibly even of help! -- to some who read it. So they tell me. Whatever, this is the first winter I can remember when I seem to have kept a really serious depression at bay, managing to stay generally cheerful, while my brain is functioning like a G5 multi-processor Mac. Just so much to take in: information overload even when I make every effort to avoid it from the outside world. It's what's happening inside that's driving me half-crazy, so much long-forgotten data surging up into consciousness from decades back; whole new ways of seeing and being and feeling I'm trying to make some sense of in what Dr F. and I have now firmly agreed is not the once posited problem of social integration, but an ongoing reconstruction of self! My bowels have been seriously out of order again since Friday, to such a degree that it was a near disaster when Sam saw me heading for the toilet in the Canteen a couple of days ago and broke the dire news that it was broken and he couldn't repair it before the morrow. But that's not really the point. A year ago, as those who have followed this online experiment for the past 11 months will know, living with the Condition, however awful, seemed at least straightforward as the long search for purely physical causes of the gut collapse began. Today, with the ever deepening understanding -- I hope! -- of psycho-somatic medicine that has been foisted on me, it's become really hard going to sort mind from body, in so far as they can be "separated". Which they can't. To accept and absorb the tough facts the specialists have been chucking at me since the autumn. "Are we going too fast for you?" the Mind Juggler asked last time I saw her. "No," I said. "I agree that we need to press the pause button for a good week or so, but what they need of me at the Factory and everywhere else is someone together. Whole. Stable!" And still I'm asked for a big comeback on the humour front, that zany sense of the absurd and the outrageous people seem to enjoy so much... Well, frankly, folks, I can't promise that right now. But it will come. It's already coming, but you can't force that kind of outlook. Today, it is pissing down out there. Rain out front, and what looks far more like would-be snow out back. This frequent ability of the weather to do one thing on the street side of the flat and another on the garden side is something I've never understood. But Sunday did bring a small miracle. Sunshine. Lots of it, for hours on end. So I had people to see and other things to do than write. I've got an odd but deep feeling about this coming session with the Mind Juggler, along with the realisation that we're not going to be through with each other quite as quickly and expeditiously as I'd at first envisaged. We're getting to the heart of the matter! Today's going to be important. But why? Your guesses are as good as mine... Did this make any sense at all? 11:27:34 AM  link   your views? []

samedi 24 janvier 2004

Inequality. Time. Networks FAQ... "So here’s what I do believe: inequality is inevitable, and that being for or against it makes no more sense than being for or against the weather. "Now there are many ways to treat inequality as inevitable — you can adopt such a posture because you are or have become cynical, worldly wise, passive, or an adherent of realpolitik — but I have a very particular way in which I believe inequality is inevitable. I believe that wanting large networks without inequality is like wanting mortar without sand. Inequality," argues Clay Shirky at 'Many2Many', "is not some removable side-effect of networks; inequality is what holds networks together, inequality is core to how networks work." Via David Brake -- who's also one of only too few people to give decent blogspace to sometimes "depressing" African studies at 'Blog.org', I've been following Clay's thoughtful piece about inequality in the blogosphere and the very considerable feedback it has generated. Shirky focusses mainly on weblogs as part of a look at the workings of "power laws" in general -- one of the kind of things, I'd think, to interest Natalie and her fellow Bloggers Parliamentarians. A cracking debate has been under way among some of the "first among equals" of the blogosphere -- a term I choose since participants include several "founder bloggers" -- since Joi Ito asked 'Are Blogs Just?' on January 6... Part of the recipe behind such rich food for pondering minds is an essay on RSS (Boston Globe) by Hiawatha Bray. On this blog(*), like so many others, the Faithful 5 ¾ see an 'RSS feed' each time you drop by -- quite likely, for some of you, without having a clue as to what it is. My own 'RSS' feed is the orange oblong marked "XML" under the "Connect" heading to the right. It's the direct link to the "URL" -- http://radio.weblogs.com/0120356/rss.xml -- that you can simply stick into one of those internet newsreaders I often mention to fetch headlines, and usually the text, without using an Internet browser. While Bray's article doesn't go into the technicalities of explaining how RSS works, he tells you why it's so useful more succinctly and better than I could. "This time," he wrote of the technology, "the idea doesn't carry a simple, catchy name like push. Instead, we get an acronym -- RSS, or really simple syndication. With RSS, any Internet user can automatically receive the latest updates from thousands of websites. (...) Quietly, without any fuss, CNN, The New York Times, the BBC, and many other leading news organizations have set up RSS feeds that provide constant updates to subscribers. Syndic8.com [for example] lists over 20,000 RSS feeds, ranging from top newspapers to obscure weblogs run by Internet hobbyists or political activists. Indeed, RSS is a far more democratic technology than the old push approach, because anybody can create an RSS feed by adding some special code to his or her website." Never mind what a "push approach" was and still is. What matters to me in all this hoo-ha are two things. First, it's all part of a massive, unfinished, permanent debate on the Net. Is the Internet, yes or no, the wonderful tool for equality among peoples, races and nations the idealists hoped it would be when it burst out of the academic and military spheres into the general public's awareness and lives? Secondly, RSS is not only a relatively new feature of the ever-changing (and increasingly commercialised, "hijacked for business") Net of our day. It's also a considerable time-saver. Commenting on one of my recent posts about Time, a vast subject ever more frequently in my thoughts, Natalie says: "The problem is time itself, there isn't enough of it. If you have any tips, tricks or treats to suggest to deal with this problem, speak now." RSS, Natalie, luv. There's one for starters! The real treat would be to tell you and everybody else who spends a lot of their time online how to use it, but the ubiquitous Dave Winer (blogrolled by me and a zillion others in the blogosphere) made a very good job of that in his RSS 2.0 Specification page and links for Harvard Law School. It all looks rather intimidating at first glance. Well, here's a bit of encouragement: maybe six years ago, I knew almost nothing about computers. One year ago, I scarcely knew what HTML meant, let alone how to be relatively at ease in it on a daily basis. Today, with no help from anybody but people and tools I've found on the Net, I use RSS as often as I use a browser. If you've got the motivation, it isn't so difficult; and the motivation stems from what you really want to do with your time. As for that first issue -- the Net, democracy and equality -- it's one I despair about on a bad day. But in a more cheerful mood, I'd say that "Yes, I've seen the Internet helping to make life better for people in Africa, offering new opportunies, new connections." It really depends not only where, but how you look. Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield with his 'Ecosystem of Networks', Liz Lawley -- in her recent 'defining blogs' (entry at 'mamamusings' ; b'rolled) -- are among interwoven clusters of people bringing their own wheres, hows and whies to the matter of the Net and equality. But one of the most powerful and effective time-savers I know is something we all have to learn sooner or later. In my own profession as a journalist, you can no longer hope even to survive if it's not a skill you've mastered with experience, but the same goes for any creative activity I can think of -- except, perhaps, sex. The single best way of learning to save time, I think, is to learn how to ask the right questions. Once you can do that, then your brain's headed for the second half of the job faster than you can say "encyclopaedia" or "search engine". Once you know what your right questions are, you're already well on the way to knowing where to find the answers. _____ (*This is the post where I drop, once and for all, the artifice of putting an apostrophe in front of "blog". Though, like 'phone, it's short for something, I really should stop being such a pedant!) 10:46:36 PM  link   your views? [] Apple: a day for a big bite of healthy creativity! "Get your hands dirty with the Webkit API" -- the what? It's something built into modern Apple computers, but don't switch off quite yet -- and even "build your own browser" is the MacDev Center's recommendation of the day. With several browsers already open, I'm not going to start making my own internet navigator, thanks all the same. When it comes to creativity, though, it's generous of the O'Reilly people to offer Mac users a 56-page 'Mini Manual' for iLife (direct .pdf 1.5 MB download) as a promotion for a book about Apple's hugely raved over music-making, photo-editing, movie-making iLife (Apple UK) suite. At $49 (£39 -- and 49 euros, since bad greedy Apple still pretends to be oblivious to the fact that a dollar hasn't been worth a euro for months), I understand why everybody who has played with GarageBand is writing that this toy alone is worth that much in its own right. When I was around 16 or 17, I'd already invented GarageBand in my head, never imagining that anybody would ever put a computer programme like that well within the budget range of your average teenager in the rich countries. That career, however, was for the parallel life where I became the composer, conductor and musicologist I'd dreamed of being in the early '70s. Thirty years later, the best I can do is tell anybody who lives for that kind of ambition: "Scrimp, save, get a Mac and go for it!" At this foul time of year when I'm getting so much reading done, I find myself mentioning O'Reilly so frequently -- especially what I'm learning online at a most reasonable monthly cost in that Bookshelf of theirs -- that the works of Tim and his colleagues are getting direct front-page publicity henceforth, along with my admirable MacMusic friends. Their logos duly stolen, the MacDev Center and the Safari Bookshelf are now part of the clickable furniture here, above the Amazon links. I've also tweaked the HTML there and elsewhere on this home page, so that such pages should automatically open in a new window. Something else the more technically minded in the Mac-using blogosphere can't escape right now is the Big Apple anniversary: "Apple introduced Macintosh 20 years ago today," trumpets MacDailyNews. Even at the 'Daily Mirror', columnist Shiraz finds it a day for a "Pat on the Mac"! And so, of course, it is. Yesterday, for the really interested, I discovered that a fellow named Uriah Carpenter has done something exceptionally big-hearted. Most Mac lovers have heard of the legendary '1984' commercial and some of the more recent incentives to Think Different. Uriah's gone a step further. If you're lucky enough to have a fast Net connection, you can watch that advertisement and even download it, along with the rest of the best, at Carpenter's 'Apple Quicktime page'. My own generosity will extend to saying nothing unkind about Steve Jobs today. 7:24:09 PM  link   your views? [] Isandlwana and winter: winning and losing Sizwe was unusually quiet the morning after Isandlwana. And it was hot, God it was hot, though we both preferred open windows to the air-conditioning the car offered. The three of us -- the Kid, me and our driver from Soweto -- had spent a sweltering afternoon trekking round two of the most famous fighting grounds in South Africa. Today, a couple of armies will be re-enacting the battle in which King Cetshwayo's warriors dealt Queen Victoria's soldiers the most resounding defeat sustained by colonial British troops in Africa, 125 years ago ('Zulu War' by Peter Schwartz). The battleground is set around a hill which looks like a broken tooth. A couple of cigarettes calmer, Sizwe stopped fuming and told me what had made him so bad-tempered. Sure, since Nelson Mandela became the first president of a democratic South Africa, the striking memorial (pictured above) to the warriors of Siwze's Zulu people who also died at Isandlwana has been built. But that's all there is, he protested, while the whole battlefield is studded with white marker stones set at the sites where different units of the British army fought and fell. Lists of names, accounts of heroism. "My people still get a raw deal," Sizwe said. "It'll be a long time before there's real reconciliation! Not before the other side of the story is told." "Oh come on," I said. "You've got to admit that the historian couldn't have done a fairer job of it. He told the Zulu side of the war and he told us how much better their military strategy was than the Brits', didn't he?" "Yes," Sizwe agreed. "He did, that's true. But I do not think that there are many people like this man." Regrettably, I can't remember "this man's" name. This is what the elderly fellow looked like, though, making his way with the Kid from the chapel at Rorke's Drift to the very building Stanley Baker, Michael Caine and their co-stars defended against overwhelming odds in 'Zulu' (1964; IMDb), which I first saw when I was 10 ... a film which was, of course, among the reasons I asked Sizwe to take us to the battlefields. Marianne was far less interested, her main priority before we got there to find something really cool to drink or, even better, swim in, until the historian grabbed even her flagging attention. What fascinated the Kid most wasn't the excellent museum at Rorke's Drift (there's nothing nearly so informative at Isandlwana), but the old man's tales of his own childhood, peppered with stories his grandparents told of the battles. He'd grown up with Zulu children, almost oblivious to apartheid before the evils of it were codified into increasingly brutal legislation during the decades after World War II. This meant that I'd spent part of the day rendering translations of what he and Sizwe told me of their conversations in Zulu from English into French for Marianne (most of the English she could follow herself, but with French her first language, she found the several tongues we heard during our trek round northern South Africa pretty tough going). zzz Aaah, to be there right now, enjoying an African summer again! A friend in Jo'burg has got the idea: he's due to finish his long posting there just at the most perfect time of year to swap hemispheres and begin his retirement in southern France. Winter? What winter? I've 'blogged nothing for a while because as Lauren, the Factory's latest newcomer to the Abidjan bureau, succinctly summed things up on the 'phone after a long haul the other night: "It's really been a fuckshit day!" A succession of them, indeed. Since that most apposite vulgarity was new to even my vocabulary of "filthy" expressions, I looked it up, to find it rarer than most -- and it took me to a site which I'll certainly bookmark along with other online reference works. The UrbanDictionary ("not appropriate for all audiences") is a most interesting place which seems to be put together by users. "Define your world," is its goal. While mild, grey and rheumatically damp weather persists, I've been in deep hibernation mode, quietly visiting my Safari Bookshelf a lot. My latest borrowings from that library include books on how to write for the web! 1:25:22 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 20 janvier 2004

Too little time to kill? Think different Until the white goddess or one of her kin decided it would be otherwise, I intended last night to 'blog about Time (making the best use of). One Dave Pollard has been writing about it. So has Rainer, over in Brazil. In the Factory today, I found a brochure in my pigeon-hole. "If the locals only knew what they offer you here" at AFP HQ, said colleague Gerry, back from Chicago and other adventures, shaking his head. Yeah. Well. What "they", managerial types up in their stratosphere, offer we more permanent fixtures is annual training, paid for by the company and on working time. But some of the courses! I can tell our bright "local hires" and short-term contract employees that you're probably not missing much. Every recent year, they've included such gems as these (rough hewn to make more sense): learn to master the workplace console (one half-day) learn essential editorial skills (one half-day) learn to speak in public (two days; I always thought that one was slipped in there by some union guy as petrified as I used to be of the microphone at big meetings) learn to organise your Time (two days) analyse your current use of time learn to plan your priorities etc. If memory serves me right, there used to be one called "Learn to Organise Meetings" -- three days! Or was it just two? That was back in the days of a managing director who adored holding weekend meetings, flying people in from far and wide. Before he got the boot. Time has become one of my most valued "commodities", always at a premium even on the days I'd rather hibernate. Unlike Dave 'How to Save the World' Pollard, I don't find 'blogging "an ordeal, especially when I am plagued by deadlines or a heavy workload." The answer then is "Don't 'blog. It's not an obligation!" But Dave deserves many "trackbacks" for the "time-savers" he posted last month, 14 of them. I only spotted these recommendations a couple of days ago (via Rainer, now he's released Zingg! for Panther) because I already observe Dave's idea n° 2, "Read what you do read less often." With two or three exceptions, I check out the favourite people in my 'blogroll about three times a month at length, like catching up on friends. That's why the occasional deceased link can go unspotted for a little while. And if these writers have RSS.XML feeds, they certainly go into my newsreader so that I can keep more frequently up to date on their headlines. I've also learned not always to have NetNewsWire update automatically at selected intervals, since this can prove, with experience, to be a false time-saver. Do that, and you're at risk of jumping on to a blogosphere bandwagon every bit as insane as the other rat-races of life, determined to keep up with the pack, even be competitive and get ahead of it. I'd rather be "late" and have something possibly interesting, even analytical, to say, than turn 'blogging into an echo of the deadline pressures we agency journalists and many other people face every day at work. Being ridiculous, absurd, irreverent and funny is fine, as long as people really find you more entertaining than boring. Experimenting is fine, as long as you don't mind when it doesn't work out. But being shallow or superficial is what I'd call the CNN style of 'blogging. Flashy, but without depth, understanding and, ultimately, any significance. It took me many years to learn the paramount importance of what Dave makes his last idea, which I'll quote in full: "Give yourself time to think, to experience offline, and to think creatively. This is the most important time-saver of all. Don't just react to what you read and see in the news. Get away from reading and your computer and other media, take a walk, do things that stimulate your creativity and give you unique material to write about, talk to people to get different viewpoints and ideas, clear your mind, think about what's really important to you, what you really believe, what you think needs to be done and said, and then write about that. The time you spend in unencumbered thought will be saved many times over in the process of reading and writing: you'll know exactly what you want to say, your enthusiasm and creative energy will make your writing easier, faster and more entertaining and valuable to readers, and you'll find it much easier to say 'no' to wasting time reading and writing about things that are suddenly much less important." To that I would add this: If being "confined to quarters" for six months with the Condition last year taught me anything, it was that I valued my solitude. Even when my guts were getting me down or giving me physical hell, I relished my freedom of mind, the time to sort out my priorities and say "hallo" to the many important aspects of life I'd buried in the name of the Job and career. Paradoxically, the more time I had, the more quickly it seemed to pass. But Dave's also right on the ball with this: "do things that stimulate your creativity and give you unique material to write about, talk to people to get different viewpoints and ideas." Though I couldn't stray far from this immediate part of town, when I was not alone I found myself talking to people and listening to them as almost never before, really getting to know a mixed and lively neighbourhood I had resided in for almost 10 years, previously just skating over its surface. Without that kind of feedback and the sense of community, this log would be very different from what it's become and would reflect far fewer interests. Never one for small talk, I still learned that even this and gossip, both apparent time-wasters, can stimulate creativity in the most unexpected ways. Time invested in a bit of polite chit-chat with strangers can lead on to extraordinary discoveries and much reward, if you find that they turn out to have interesting interests. In conclusion, but for fellow Mac-lovers only, I'd add that Zingg! and other contextual menus now available in Mac OS X 10.3 amount to substantial time-savers when you add up all the little short-cuts they allow. There are lots of clever people like Rainer out there who have thought of things Apple hasn't. And of late, I've become a big fan of the "Services" menu. The one in the screenshot. It takes a little while to learn -- and to remember -- to make the most of what you can now do with it, in an ever-increasing number of applications. But that too is time well spent. 10:40:34 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 19 janvier 2004

Metropolitan mishap "Merde!" the Kid said, glancing at a clock. "I've never cut it so fine before. Kisses, kisses!" The embrace done, backpack on, she was leaping down the stairs last night, heading for her other home. And back in 10 minutes. "Forgotten something? Now you have missed your train." "Métro's all closed," she gasped. "Somebody jumped in front of a train. I can't get to the station." "I'll walk you there." "I called Mum, she wants to bring the car and fetch me." "That's kind of her." "Why did they have to jump in front of my Métro?" "It is a bit unseasonal," I said. "Normally, the suicides don't start again until February. After a batch in November." "It's a horrible way to do it," said the Kid. "Yes, it is." "They were bringing something out on a stretcher. There were firemen, everybody." "On this line, often they choose Gaîté" (one station further up), I told her. "Gaiety! Oh ha-ha, Dad!" "No, but it's true, love. I must have told you about the one I saw." "No. Never. Do tell!" Ah, her current teenage taste for gore. So I did, and she asked for details of carbonisation by electrocution, blackening and how the skin pulls back from the teeth in a death smile. "Yuk! And you saw it?" "Oh, yes." "Wasn't it horrible?" "The body really doesn't look much like a person any more." "What did you do?" "Helped people calm down the ones that were screaming, waited for the emergency services, and then walked to work." "It's so selfish to do it in the Métro. Why don't they cut their wrists in the bath or something?" "The ones I feel most sorry for are the train drivers who hit them. You see it coming and you can't stop. That must be really horrible." "What kind of noise does it make?" "That's enough." The Kid's tale reminded me of another. And also that half of my favourite poetry books are still piled on the floor, where they've been for three years while everybody argues about who's going to fix the hole in the roof that leaks rain on to my shelves, who's going to pay for it and when it should be done. Last I heard, it was early this month. Lunacy. Sending anybody up there on to wet sloping slates in January! So many poems have been written about the Métro since Fulgence Bienvenüe's Line One opened on July 18, 1900, that many have been collected into an excellent anthology, 'Les Transports Poétiques,' by Bernard Lorraine (le cherche midi éditeur, 1994). Extracted from something more substantial, here's one in English, though, about what the Métro public announcements speakers still rather coyly call an: 'Incident de voyageur' Two hours in those tunnels for nothing. I’m disheartened. What use ? Good for nothing ! I so much wanted to talk with her of verse and ... But gone, gone she was, the wrong hour tolled, heart fell apart & that was called la floraison du mal. I tried to set the clock back. Clic-clac, speaker overhead. « This is your driver speaking. Please be patient for a few more moments, the service is perturbed : un incident de voyageur. » Yes, you can say that again and it’s hot ! This sweat, the getting there... will she show tolerance ? What use am I here ? Clic-clac, speaker overhead. « This is your driver speaking. » Already a quarter of an hour and old people, standing, begin to ask for seats from the young, heads between walkmans. « You make me shit, old cow ! » one adolescent mutters as he cedes his place & my thoughts run free. Paris, city of light, you’ve just seen it, my heart. « ... line is blocked between Saint Lazare & Brochant. » C’est brûlant ! Jesus, this ! Clear, a clochard, Place de Clichy, undoubtedly. Will she wait ? Will she wait for me, so late ! Best foot, stop tapping, listen instead to the astonished words of the fat-assed American tourist and his wife, who is crushing my arm. Do we inform him where he might get off, dear heart, squeezed in bleak anticipation ? Or absurd, do we let them stew, you and I ? We shall be set forward ! When ? Clic-clac, speaker overhead. Is this our pilot speaking ? Third time. Who does he think he is ? We’re stuck! Where are the hostesses, the plastic trays of horrible food ? It’s bloody hot. Where are the wings as they collect the remains of the anonymous victim ? Somebody’s dead. She wasn’t even home. Back underground again at Etienne Marcel to ride on to market - les Halles, much changed, the cattle human now in the glass & steel shopping forum where drug-pushers ask « You want some ? » I’m on a trip of my own, the mind already blown. She’s vanished. How smoothly we glide on to Châtelet - long live small castles ! Task those who didn’t want a Channel tunnel with just one sceptic question about their sceptered isle : « Why ? » Cité ; but no City of London. By what irony does England demand that the French train stops at Waterloo ? Napoleon wanted a Chunnel. England expects a lot today, but not from me, Lord Admiral, except in the estuary. Duty ? Cité. My weeping heart, are you still there ? The thought-police are based round here, above our heads la préfecture. Saint Michel. Cry pity ! Odéon. This is odious ; not even half an hour, & gone she was. Odéon... Odéon. No explanation, this driver kicks his heels in silence, while his train is stalled on rubber wheels. She let you down. At Saint Germain, one revives with blazing intent, after that broiling where the theatre lies. Germain is certainly germane. Next stop is literature, Saint Sulpice. If you please, no more wars ! Saint Placide. O my heart, is that how you are ? Montparnasse-Bienvenüe. Welcome, Montparnasse ! We all get off, toreadors ready for the corrida. For me comes change : Gaîté, Pernety, Plaisance. Imagine being gayous ! The names are evocative despite lack of pertinence & the corridors at Montparnasse are very long. But I live across line 13, the rumbling starts before dawn ; & she, she is close to line 4. That bygone muse whom still I adore. Her line is a panoply of saints. I pray to all of them, to others also, my gods, am startled : « Heavens, what is that noise ? » It’s the doors opening - whoosh ! Change trains. Directions. Bang ! « - Gaia, I thought her thighs parted... - She departed. Cette nuit te laisse voyageur? » 11:32:57 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 18 janvier 2004

Books, 'blogs and Benson's bright idea The New Year couldn't be allowed to steal in damp and chill without a little tweaking. The "on the shelf" column at the end of the b'roll to the left comes to you courtesy of 'All Consuming', a fine initiative launched and maintained by Erik Benson. If what you're reading is at somewhere like Amazon, Erik's "library" site offers the means to 'blog it, with the kind of community spirit that can sometimes mark Anglophone undertakings from Internet forums to waging war. Should you be both an avid reader and a 'blogger, All Consuming rewards close inspection. Erik's site checks recently updated weblogs hourly to see who's reading what and pursuing the book links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sites. I was gratified to see that the mechanics of it don't track US bookstores only and the whole place makes far more sense to me than BlogShares, where I appear to have made fictive thousands since discovering my name there. If I started playing at the latter, I'd waste time, so it just does its own thing. By contrast, if you join, Benson's book listing tells you who's into the same kind of writing and reading as you are. Since I've already met new and likeable people in flesh and blood as a direct outcome of this 'blog, Eric's site is a welcome addition to the front page. The man, like almost everybody I know, self included, occasionally finds a need to reorganise all his composite bits and pieces. Hence, on his own weblog, one entry about the 'Month of Mecember'... 8:46:14 PM  link   your views? [] Fast food for thoughtful digestion "Dear Mr. A, First off all I don’t like you and you don’t like me. But I am sorry that you had a heart attack. I hope you get well soon. And I like your sandals. I am sorry your wife left you in this time of sorrow. And I don’t like you and I don’t like you and I heard you don’t like me. You remind me of Mr. V. Anyway get well soon but I know this letter means nothing to you. I also don’t know what to write and good luck with the yoga" This is but one of a batch of letters penned, apparently, at the behest of a substitute teacher by a US 8th grade school class. The others at '::America is a state of mind...' are no less kind. zzz "McDonalds is very proud that other employers like to employ people who have had successful periods of employment with McDonalds. This is actually true. Employers know that if someone comes from McDonalds with a good reference then they have been through the boot camp. It is like a badge that simply says ‘I will put up with shit’, it’s a certificate that indicates your spirit has been repressed, that you have shown obedience. These are the sort of workers capitalism requires in the greatest number and these are the sort of workers the McDonalds experience is designed to produce. Fortunately, it very often fails." But then: "McDonalds is able to keep screwing us over because they do everything in their power to stop us organising. For decades they've used myriad tactics, both legal and illegal, to try and stop their massive workforce from organising itself and putting an end to the exploitation that keeps the dollars rolling into McDonalds profit bank. They know that if we were organised they wouldn't get away with paying us such crap wages to work in such crap conditions. Now the tide has turned. McDonalds Workers Resistance is their worst nightmare." How to raid the tills. How to have sex with co-workers on the job. How to survive the shift. This rebellion seems to have spread from Glasgow and a like-minded association even has an online forum (WRAM). Yes. I've been reading the Cruel site listings again. zzz At DeadBrain, one of my favourite articles so far this year explained why 'Bush orders military occupation of the moon'. This included some fine quotes: "'The Yanide States o' Merica,' he said, 'will not and cannot let the terrists set up operations on the moon, which we consider is US territory anyway, since we're the only ones that ever went there. So applying the Bush Doctrine I have today ordered that the moon be taken into protectional US custody, and a permanently manned and womanned base be set up there as a matter of extreme national urgency.' 'And I don't want to hear any complaints from the U of N, especially the French and Germaniums,' he said. 'This is a logical step and Americans, including I, are not prepared to wait for resiglution after resiglution.'" On January 4, still way off home ground, Malcolm Drury offered us 'US probe lands on Mars, begins search for WMD.' 4:58:58 PM  link   your views? [] Trash and the Kid (second refrain) "Bombsite Marianne!" "Blitzkrieg Kid!" She knows I mutter such things. She knows that what she can do in seconds to a small apartment is appalling! But when she'd watched eight episodes of 'Friends' and performed a minor explosion because the video rental store had shut nine minutes before she could rush down for the rest and relief from a cliff-hanger, she eventually clambered up into her bunk. Soon afterwards last night, I saw that a packet of Comté cheese still sat on the table. The butter was on top of the electric rings. As for the bread, it was safely wrapped. But on the floor. By the time I slid into bed with Natalie -- one of her books anyway -- the Kid was already lost to the waking world. As usual, I got up at least an hour before her and beheld the rest of the debris. Perilously close to her computer, empty yogurt pots were carefully posed one on top of another like the beginnings of some contemporary sculpture. Another yogurt pot was behind a cushion on the sofa, fortunately the right way up and leaving no stains. A green bottle of what had been apple fizz lay so close to the waste bin that there might even have been a half-hearted attempt to put it inside. In the bathroom, biscuit wrappers. Another big empty bottle, iced tea this time, stood on the Kid's bedside shelf. Behind a plate of unfinished ham-studded bread from Paris's second best bakery and chunks of semi-gnawed cheese. Clothes were ... everywhere. Yesterday I found two smelly socks underneath her pillow. "What are you doing here?" she reproaches me as I pass by the place where she is simultaneously watching the 'Friends' DVD again and chatting with her real friends via the Net. "Looking!" I grimace, picking up a damp towel hurled into a corner. Getting angry almost never works. Neither does any other kind of talking, pleading, arguing, explaining ... nor punishment. Amenable to stern parental authority in every other domain, here the Kid has a huge Blind Spot. Where some teenagers are conventionally sloppy and grouchy, Marianne has made an art form of the Making of Mess. Perhaps. It's amazing that she almost invariably leaves for her other home taking everything she brought with her, given some of the virtually inaccessible places I've occasionally found discarded underwear and other vestiges, as if they were deliberately hidden. Her mother thinks this is pure laziness and lack of consideration, and says so loudly and sharply. I'm beginning to wonder. It would be art of a kind if the Kid showed any signs of being aware that she's doing this! She was quick to inform me that last night I snored and had to be thumped with a pillow, but ignored the remnants of mess I'd purposely left lying around to see whether she might complete the clearing up. Einstein reportedly said that an untidy desk is a sign of an untidy mind, but the Kid's brain is perfectly well organised. She's got the eyes to see the needle in the haystack, notices details of people's appearance which pass me by, draws far better than I ever could, stores away images for ready subsequent recall of the kind I can only manage in dreams. And when she gets bored with the grunts that go with her age, she can be extremely articulate. But remember the big bright red waste bin I bought? It might as well be invisible and possibly is to her, 95 percent of the time. I'm now at a loss to explain to the mess and how she can stand it, unless she is quite genuinely oblivious to it. Is there a cure? It's not a feller she'll eventually be needing: it's a walking vacuum cleaner of a valet. Meanwhile, she has won me over to aspects of her taste. Korn and most other hurlers are still mainly banned within my earshot, but I've now acquired albums by Muse ('Showbiz' is grand) and Type O Negative. The latter's 'Life is Killing Me', torn between sex and morbid matter, features much noise but plenty of melody and black humour too. If this is "Gothic metal", I like it. Radical additions to my own already eclectic musical world are also in part the doing of 'Les Inrockuptibles,' a contemporary culture weekly so good that I finally realised it would be cheaper to subscribe to that along with my other regulars. Their website (Fr., evidently) has free mp3 downloads I'll tell the Kid about. Once she's learned that trash is not only something you listen to and watch. 1:11:29 PM  link   your views? [] Lenses for the new year's focus on genocide There was more on Zavos, the fervent would-be clone scientist, and indeed on the Rwandan genocide on 'Sunday,' my main weekly feed for what's happening in the world's organised religions. Both topics remain troubling and I began this morning determined to banish bleak thoughts and do my best to ignore the foul weather that I couldn't persuade the Kid to brave even once yesterday. Just two more links, however, for it's in the first week of April that the world will be commemorating the start of 100 days of madness in the densely populated central African country when at least 800,000 people were massacred a decade earlier (the government puts the figure at one million). Paul Merlino, a journalism and international affairs student at the University of California in Berkeley, won a fellowship last July to look closely at the "Gacaca" community courts. These tribunals, consisting of locally elected "people of integrity", bring some traditions of pre-colonial African justice to efforts to speed up the trials of scores of thousands of suspected killers jailed in a nation no bigger than Wales. Very touchy Rwandan authorities, we know only too well at the Factory and as Paul initially found, don't make "objective reporting" from their country easy. Journalists can come under considerable pressure. That's one reason why I've recently been reading Merlino's despatches and found them every bit as good as the work of more experienced reporters and sometimes more lively too. 'After the Genocide' at 'FRONTLINE/World' was published in December. An award-winning US public service television and Internet venture, FRONTLINE/World (home page) brings rarely covered cultures and societies into American and other homes. Paul is among several students to have been granted reporting fellowships in a joint FRONTLINE/World-UCB scheme. Gacaca justice is also being filmed by the Aegis Trust, a genocide research centre established in Britain "to help understand this terrifying phenomenon and to provide some guidance for lay people and professionals alike". Worth exploring like FRONTLINE/World, the Aegis Trust has a good website (apart from a dead link or two), and sets out via television and the net to study the prevention of genocide as well as documenting instances and accounts of it by survivors. 10:48:54 AM  link   your views? []

samedi 17 janvier 2004

Gender gaps, stats and sociable browsers "Italy and Spain have the largest gap between men and women who are online (...) Twenty-one percent of urban Internet users in China say the Internet helps them increase contact with people who share their political interests. The next highest was also a totalitarian state, Singapore, at 8.6 percent of all users. Italy and the United States were both at about 8 percent. Across the board, Internet users in the surveyed countries watch less television." So says a survey by UCLA, according to AP (Yahoo news). That comes after a week in which we learned what a friendly, outgoing bunch we net freaks are: "The typical Internet user -- far from being a geek -- shuns television and actively socializes with friends, a study on surfing habits said Wednesday. The findings of the first World Internet Project report present an image of the average Netizen that contrasts with the stereotype of the loner 'geek' who spends hours of his free time on the Internet and rarely engages with the real world. Instead, the typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says" (Reuter, also Yahoo). This whole World Internet Project thingie is a brainchild of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy and academic partners in Italy and Singapore. "Potentially the Internet represents change on the order of the industrial revolution or the printing press. Believing this, our Internet Project is designed to get in on the ground floor of that change and to watch and document what happens as households and nations acquire and use the Internet." Reassuring. Isn't it? 11:08:35 PM  link