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taliesin's log (voices of women)
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mercredi 27 avril 2005
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I hate the feeling I know other Africa "bosses" in other big outfits share: that since the continent's a low priority in the minds of those who do the budgets for today's media, we can wind up regarding the people we have there as pieces on a board, to be shifted around to "optimise resources".
They aren't.
Such a system only increases a tendency to judge them as "strong" or "weak" links in a network, thus ignoring a chunk of their qualities as people, not just job-doers. Within limits, such judgements are fine and necessary; beyond them, they're insulting, offensive and fuck up lives.
If I get into trouble for digging deeper into this, I don't care. The point I'm making runs deeper than internal Factory politics; it's an attitude and understanding problem applicable both to the media and our "public" worldwide.
I couldn't give a damn when people tell me "Africa's unprofitable" or that its "time has yet to come". So what? So most of the world, especially in Asia, doesn't give a shit? So what? I do. So do a lot of the people who work their guts out reporting on a continent undergoing slow but vast changes. On a daily basis, it may be ephemeral; in the long term, Africans are writing the history books like everyone else. If we don't tell it when it happens, nobody will.
What I'll leave out are details of the plot I've hatched during the weeks Lauren's absence and other "problems" were compounded by the obsession with the Vatican and the need to have people there. By mid-April, I realised "things can't go on like this".
That is internal Factory politics where I'm used to the tightrope of appearing to tell my own bosses what to do when it's just MGs for the sharing.
I hope the outcome will make sense to everybody.
My New Year's 'Diktats' got a "please disregard...", their writer got a reprimand and one of them jusy got enforced by others regarding a so-called "urgent" story about Togo that was mostly crap and propaganda. If my hierarchical superiors chose to make those diktats known more widely than I did myself, that's scarcely my problem.
Even the reprimand was couched in ... well, terms worth framing on the wall if I was that kind of guy.
At such times, that "sixth sense" I've owned up I've got comes into play along with the common sense and stuff I know since I must.
When I enjoy dinner with the Kid's mum tomorrow night, she'll get none of the anticipated odd questions about it; other people who see I'm stuck with it and sometimes have similar gifts have answered them.
One of the most lucid said: "Nick, it's like you've sometimes 'seen' how untold things are for others and already done their thinking for them. You can be like a walking 'I Ching'!"
She made me laugh, but J.'s observation remains a rose with a thorn, since I feel what I 'see' is states and probabilities. I assess them without letting standard moral judgements get in the way, and make suggestions.
At what point does doing that count as interference in people's lives? This is a big dilemma and varies from one person to another, since while I prefer only to dish out suggestions when asked, I think it's wrong to leave people in the dark either when you can see things they can't and it's "for real".
They don't have to listen, after all.
I just leave it there for now.
Catherine will in any case probably be far more interested in finding out about iTunes now she's realised sticking bits of iPod in your ears is quite different from listening to music outside your head and can be wonderful. She compares it to making a journey and she's right, but as I found again today, it's the kind of trip that opens the way -- if that's what you want -- for easy interaction with strangers on a train.
She also says she can't understand half of what I write here.
This came as less good news. While I'm intolerably long-winded, I try to be clear and was thus plunged into an existentialist crisis: one of the kind where I'm seized with an urge to sub everything bunged in the log as cruelly as I do other people's Factory stories.
With such a comment on the back of that mail informing me how brilliantly I write about "nothing", I do begin to need reassurance!
Catherine made it easier, however, when she told me she can't understand a widely read French arts and literature site. Since she's smart and interested in both, another lesson of last year's life-changes for me sunk in: people's brains sometimes work so differently that what she finds incomprehensible is no sillier or more stupid of her than my inability to do mathematics. I've become so hopeless that it takes me ages to get my head round the sums and algebra scientists use in books I read, though I usually manage with a huge effort because if I skip it, I don't know whether they're bullshitting me.
Some of their ideas are so indispensable to the LP, though they won't be in the film since it's about people's stories, not a lesson, that if I've misunderstood the science, what I'm writing about the Quiet Revolution in human relationships will be no more than hot air.
It certainly feels right and has raised enough interest, but now everybody's telling me it's more than reassurance I need at this point: it's a backer. Yes. Somebody willing to risk their money where my mouth is. That's an inescapable reality, since soon I'll need to see people face to face when I can't possibly afford it.
Lord, how people need each other sometimes! It's bad news but that's how it is, even for self-sufficient ones like me, never bored when I'm doing what I enjoy and always at a loss for enough time to do everything. Far from scaring me like it does people who make their careers their lives, the prospect of retirement one day fills me with so much delight I can occasionally scarcely wait or want to go out and buy a lottery ticket.
People like Lauren may be "just friends", but I've missed her so much and do several others when they disappear. She's an air freshener who swears and sweats in Senegal, a swim away from a onetime black heart of a different "slave trade".
Some would call my missing her dependency. They're wrong.
Nothing changes the climate on the English news desk at the Factory as much as much as presences and absences. The interactions and the chemistry, like anywhere else, are extraordinary. The daily mix of people, always varied, is far more important than the workload.
Maybe that's why I'm such a damned nuisance when people are too hard at it for my liking and behave badly or cause a disturbance which gets me told to shut up. I don't know what it's like for them when I'm not around helpfully pointing out that if we take anything too seriously, however horrible, we'll end up dead faster.
I bet this place is less boring when Lauren's around since just knowing she's at the other end of a line in Dakar for an occasional exchange of topsy-turvy views and jokes brightens me up no end. I miss Tony a lot too, but the bastard's gone for good, so I hope he's enjoying it.
Successive desk chiefs have been told they should get software to do the fucking rotas with since all of them hate it and many go half-bonkers or turn sour by the end of their term. I should know, I've seen enough of them. David, for a change, took some home to try out. He hasn't yet because he had better things to do, but I don't doubt he will.
However, while the software steadily gets better at making allowances for the unscheduled absences that are a part of our job, one which depends on what happens where and when, as well as handling personal needs and preferences, nobody in the world can write a programme to factor in the fun.
Thank heavens for that.
Some of the posts here that get the most feedback have been book reviews along with the intimate stuff. Regulars will have noticed that 'River of Gods' has been at the top of the front page's reading list for a long time. That's because it's a superb novel, which I'm chewing on slowly. McDonald knows India very well. Without calling it a thriller, I'm about halfway through and have no idea what's going to happen next.
Much of it's set in what India could certainly be in 2047, which is no longer one country. Some takes place in space, where the Americans have found something. Most of it's about real people, but the future of artificial intelligence is a key part of the plot. Like me, McDonald's into probability theory.
I don't see the future like he does, since I reckon the Quiet Revolution's for real and chances are the world will turn out differently in 2047. But what he does with his science, again without ramming it down anyone's throat but putting India at the forefront of the technological revolution, is as fascinating as the way he starts with 10 quite different people and gradually creates the mix.
McDonald's too good just to read. If he'll have it, like some of the other creative people logged here down the years, he's unfortunately taken me to places where I want to kick ideas around with him.
That's part of the QR.
We can do that these days, like never before; the barriers are now often where we choose to put them, no longer enforced on us by a physical inability to connect. Now I'm mildly annoyed: I can't remember which VoW has a great song about this, but the iTunes "history" of recent listening will remind me who sung that when people dismissively tell you "It's all in your head," they're not only right, but a lot of the time that's exactly how it should be.
Things go wrong when you're simply out of your mind.
There are a lot of fun people around, so I can only suspect what makes Lauren special to me but in no rush to meet her, let alone have any more with her than we've got, is just technology put to the service of human chemistry.
The Factory sometimes strikes me as a place at the mercy of technology, where we can't be "competitive" unless we do what everybody else and make news where there is none. If we don't, it's on telly, and we're not part of it, we're in trouble. But so long as journalists go on kidding themselves they're "objective" in a world where what we write about events can have such an immediate on them we become part of them, then everybody gets screwed.
Some of us have to yell: "Pack it in. Stop. It's not news, it's a circus and we're part of the act." I've so far just skimmed 'We the Media' (Safari Bookshelf)', also front-page reading, but what I've digested warns it's high time to see the game for what it is.
Technology has changed the rules.
Allow it to change us without understand what's happening and we're stuck in '2001'. To see Kubrick's insights of 1968 as anything less than a serious warning about what can happen when you toss a bone into the air and it turns into a spaceship is a big mistake.
He saw where humanity was going, the 20th century point where technology and evolution interact so much that unless we get with it fast, we'll become slaves to machines and no longer the other way round.
Unlike Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke in that fiction, I don't count on benign extraterrestrial seed sowers to change our minds for us. We've got to do it ourselves.
That's heavy shit, isn't it? If you want it to be...
While people who read this log have proved to have increasingly varied interests and reasons the more I've disclosed my own, I'm less and less interested in writing about me. As in life, almost nobody comes here for that, unless they like fertiliser.
What '2001' didn't foresee, except by becoming part of its history, was the QR.
(To be continued... of course. Somehow, some when.)
12:42:48 AM 
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samedi 9 avril 2005
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This side of an old friend was part of the "dialogue practice" originally written for El, who never got it because she likes it short and I didn't want to blind her with science; though Tony came up when the WG had swapped views on comparative religions and the moment came for me to ask:
"You know what we got to start the Third Millennium? 'The Passion according to Mel Gibson', who's got a dad even more bonkers than Guillaume Tell's.
Even Tony went to see that and gave me a blog piece ('Agony, ketchup and artificial additives'). Deeply unimpressed he was."
Turmoil in the Pews
 "I read it. What a relief," said the WG. "Even I was surprised to learn he's a signed-up Papist who wobbles his way to Mass on Sundays and enjoys what he can hear of the music.
When the United Nations took Tony on, he was soon an authority on the navels of the world. I like a man who rises to the occasion.”
“Do you think I should go to Mass too?”
“No. Tony says he’s been excommunicated, but even so I've an inkling what he tells that Father of theirs. Take last week:
'Sorry I said "fuck" 17 times today and still lust after... well, you know who they are. I can't help it.
If I'm good, could you send Nick’s blogging chum Lee down from the top floor for a natter and see your way to planting a stick of Viagra in my flowerpot, not that I'll need it, but just in case?
We'll pretend it's a miracle.
'Quite the rake I was, but the missionary position was really never my cup of tea, if you don't mind. Young Nick didn't believe me until he realised my stories were too good to make up. I was chasing tail at UNESCO, before the US ambassador to the place realized it really stood for UN Endless Sex and Copulation Organisation. She cut off the cash flow, the killjoy.
'Who was it who took my car for a tank and drove it backwards over her parents' flowerbeds when we were trying to keep it all quiet?
‘Now those were the days! Getting all my clothes pinched on a Bulgarian beach and having to find the seedy so-called hotel in my birthday suit. God, that fucking place was the pits!
Turkey and the monumental old erections the lady guides drooled over there were rather more diverting.
 Also, Father, does it matter if I find the Pope a pretty fallible old fool on occasion?
Would you let me keep my marbles for another week and come back for a song and dance next Sunday? It's a bore when they fall out like my hearing aid while I'm on the floor shuffling all my ancient papers around.
'You know my eyes aren't what they were. That's the way it is.
'I’ve always told that idle devil Nick the way it is and what thanks did I get for it?He never listened to me or anyone else till he met one of them: still over-sexed, over-paid and over here.
Frightful buggers, most of 'em. Still, Nick said she's not like the others.
I've met a few nice Yank women myself in my time, you know.
Take Lee. Nick says she just strips down to bare essentials in summer because she’s a cat right under a hot tin roof and cheerfully tells people all about it.
Must say there's nothing like an open mind without any clothes on as she’s writing up what’s in it. Goodness, did I tell you about the one who ... wait a minute.
There we are.
 'I only go to union meetings because I can't hear all the nonsense being spouted but enjoy being a respected venerable nuisance who talks a bit of sense just when nobody wants any.
That's the way it is, Father, that's the way it is...
What was that? Oh, I’m supposed to stand up again. Bloody nuisance, ooh ... aah... there we are.
And now I've lost track.
'When I was in Ind-ya...'"
"WG?"
"Shut up. But why’s he been excommunicated?”
“Told you himself. If he took the food and the drink and confessed, he’d have to mean it, when he knows perfectly well he doesn’t and can’t wait to do it again.”
“You're not thinking of giving this to Eleanor are you?"
"That was your idea, remember? These days, you simply can't tell what might happen."
One of the last times I saw Tony, he was at the top of a ladder. Redecorating.
I was far more alarmed than he was.
9:22:25 PM
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vendredi 1 avril 2005
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"Idiots in the office are just as hazardous to your health as cigarettes, caffeine or greasy food, an eye-opening new study reveals.
In fact, those dopes can kill you! (...)
'You can cut back on smoking or improve your diet,' Dr [Dagmar] Andersson [of Sweden's Lindbergh University Medical Center] says, 'but most people have very poor coping skills when it comes to stupidity -- they feel there's nothing they can do about it, so they just internalize their frustration until they finally explode.'
Stupid co-workers can also double or triple someone's work load, she explains."
These truths were brought to my multiple-compartment attention by Peter the Great, in a photocopy of a newspaper article.
Peter often comes up with stuff worth sharing with my most persistent kind of visitor, but he's no regular blog-reader and may thus learn with me that it's a Nov 21, 2002 story by Kate McClare, picked up ages ago by 'iWork with Fools', where sadly most people feel a need to hide their names.
Since there's one born every minute, the occasional reminder of such scientific investigations into what most of us already know is useful.
'iWorkwithFools' is open to all sufferers. This place remains reserved for the trials and tribulations of my friends and colleagues in need of an outlet for complaints and the rare exclamations of joy and ecstacy that don't fit into the System, as long as they keep the right side of the law and relate to lives as most people have them.
The fact that Sweden's Lindbergh University Medical Center doesn't exist is immaterial, since this is early April 1, when I'll later be busy making sure nobody tries to slip a fast one past my editorial eye. There's always someone ready to have a go, disobeying a diktat which wasn't of my making but AFP rules.
Soon winging her way out of Africa for a while, Lauren won't be among them and I'll cheerfully follow her pre-flight advice to stay the right side of stupid as well, when she learned that the bank tonight sent me a secret code to go with the new functioning card. Indeed, what I've done, now being serious in intent regarding both the LP and the VOW project, is to set myself a monthly budget allowance for these non-profit initiatives: cash others would put aside for vacations or their cars.
Since once this log took the loyal with me on a sometime arduous and serious journey into the understanding and healing of fragmented identity and neuro-chemical disorders, I'll still keep you abreast sometimes of how it can be for others faced with such problems and who find the courage to confront them openly.
Last November, for example, Becky, a brave young Indiana Gemini, found relief in saying "my conclusion of the day is that if you are feeling fat and stupid, maybe it's not just low self-esteem talking."
No. It isn't. Nor will I detail the "synch story" of my day about a bright French journalist explaining how her mother met her at an airport after six months' separation with the greeting: "O Lord! What have you done to yourself?" The answer lay in Beirut mezzes by the forklift truck-load followed by a New York stint and hamburger lunches.
She's dealt with it. So have I. We both got the help needed. And we've tightened our belts. But Becky's 'tidal moods' led her, to a multi-authored research report on 'Depression and Obesity: A Complex Relationship' (Psychiatric Times, Oct 2004) which isn't beyond the grasp of the lay reader.
Her dormant site has a blogroll with a more comprehensive list of good links than you'll find left in my own, while young Becky's moved on to voice the kind of anti-established ideas I've come to expect from any good QR:
"Being gay or engaging in homosexual activity is not disordered. It's simply ordered differently from the mainstream. There's nothing unnatural about gay partnership. For centuries, gays have raised children and formed communities of acceptance.
And for centuries, the church has maligned these people. And despite the 'oh we love everyone' tone of [some Roman Catholic clerical garbage], it's clear that the author actually does have a bias against gays. His sources are unacceptably out-of-date and obviously picked to support a prejudicial point that simply is no longer true.
Ugh.
I just cannot support this. It's wrong. I know it in some part of me that exists before thinking and sentience and all that goo" ('The Valkyrie of Discarded Thought').
"valkryie" is the user name of the part of this Mac of mine set aside for friends to do what they like on. And the back garden of this log is -- as now you now -- for explorations of people's parts that existed "before thinking and sentience and all that goo".
I've almost no patience left for idiots, but lots for some "fools".
So did 15th century-born theologian Erasmus, who chose to be "unhindered by country, academic ties, religious allegiance and anything else that might interfere with his freedom of intellect and literary expression" (Wikipedia).
In 1509, he decided to give Thomas More's neuron a rest and some fun with a few well-aimed blows at received ideas of his day by writing 'Praise of Folly' and then telling Sir Tom ('stupidity.com').
The problem was, if you to take a look, Erasmus began as a pre-telly Rotterdam stand-up comedian who found
"it only takes the mere sight of me to give you all a different look. For great orators must as a rule spend time preparing long speeches and even then find it difficult to succeed in banishing care and trouble from your minds, but I've done this at once and simply by my looks."
By the time he was through -- 'stupidity' uses a translation by Betty Radice -- he'd taken himself to bits and left some of his audience, admiring and bewildered by turns, and even 21st-century QRs with a piece of satire which is pompous, sometimes, but useful.
Times were that an April Fool's Day celebration might have led me to an exploration of the art of stupidity, but that site does a pretty good job of it. Worse still, there's a "psychology of stupidity", which is a potting ground among scientists who reckon they're not and are smart enough -- as in 'Protective Stupidity' by the Rev Dr Michael Ellner -- to tackle a "Big Lie" with worse whoppers of their own, as on HIV-AIDS, which become clear for what they are only if you care to stick a curious nose, like my favourite journalist friends, where it's not wanted: behind the scenes.
Because that's where you find that an edifice of Big Ideas is built on very dodgy foundations.
With a bit of help, truly common sense and a readiness to follow our intuitions -- that gut sense of the right thing to do I find is an innate survival mechanism most people I talk to about such stuff seem to have, but few dare to follow as often they should because of pressure from family, friends or alleged superiors and sets of often self-imposed rules which also become senseless on closer inspection -- you end up, like Erasmus, somewhere far more interesting.
All the science is fine, even great fun if you're into that kind of thing, but my most recommended link of the day is the work of a woman who's decided to compile a journal on 'Scrapping the Difficult Times' and much more.
"There are people who feel that the less said the better and that bad things are best forgotten. While others feel that everything needs to be out in the open to promote healing," Denny observes on a page headed with a wise epigram: "Those who judge, don't matter ... those who matter, don't judge."
Except, maybe themselves. Like me, she's simply made a choice.
Denny (home) is as pragmatically prolific as Mrs Beeton was in her day about much more than good cooking. She's also far politer than me, but often funny and reminds us that "just because something is amusing doesn't mean there isn't some truth to it".
Unless you want to wind up days full of angry stress at stupidity, both your own and other people's, the truth is worse. The people who don't like Heavy Stuff have taught me that just because something is serious doesn't mean there isn't a lot of humour to it.
Erasmus stuck a huge nose in the mirror, saw an ugly old wretch, and put paid to him in 'Praise of Folly'. I'm much better looking than Erasmus, and not stuck with a church which tries to park its rules between me and, for instance, women who share that view.
That's cool. The sap's rising. What's cooler still is that praising folly -- rather than the stupidity that kills -- is an open invitation to my favourite non-martial art.
If you can't beat the system, try to be non-violent and see no point in fighting it because that usually makes it even more stupid and mad, then you're talking (yes, you've got it): subversion.
1:37:43 AM
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© Copyright
2007
taliesin.
Last update:
21/09/07; 22:20:30. |
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