Doppelwirkung - E
57 minutes ago
Wednesday 15 June 2011
Gay Girl in Damascus debacle: lessons from the echo chamber
In 1782, Europeans were shocked to learn of reports emanating from a newspaper in Boston that Native Americans were sending the scalps of women, girls and boys to members of the British royal family and MPs as war trophies.
In fact, no such trophies existed. The newspaper was a fake, printed as a propaganda tool by one of the US' founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin.
Fast forward to 2011 and it seems the apparent ease with which some sections of the public and the media can be duped has changed little in more than two centuries.
To the Guardian, Amina Arraf - author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog - was the "unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country". She was quoted by CNN in an article about gay rights in the Arab world. When Amina was apparently abducted by security agents in Syria, thousands joined a Facebook campaign demanding her release.
But of course, as we now know, Amina Arraf was a fiction. The 35-year-old Syrian-American lesbian was in fact Tom MacMaster - a middle-aged, married man from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's perhaps tempting to see the Amina Arraf affair (Aminagate?) as proof that social media can't be trusted as a reliable source of information. Rumours and myths are repeated so often and so quickly via Twitter and Facebook that they seem to take on a life of their own. If so many people are saying the same thing, it HAS to be true - doesn't it?
It's what Alan Fisher from Al Jazeera called the "echo chamber" at last week's POLIS Media and Power conference at the LSE. The amplifying effect of social media, some believe, can help bring ordinary citizens out onto the streets and topple dictators. Equally, though, it can easily lead to thousands of well-meaning people being misled - especially when countries like Syria, where independent verification is difficult, are involved.
Yes, social media spread the Amina myth around the world at lightning speed, but it also played a central part in debunking the hoax as well.
While some journalists and social community organisers initially believed Amina to be genuine, their efforts, along with those of websites like Electronic Intifada, began to highlight the inconsistencies in Amina's story.
The Guardian has promised to redouble its verification efforts. The BBC's Robin Lustig believes the affair will make journalists more sceptical about anonymous blogs in future.
On Monday's PM programme, Tom MacMaster apologised to bloggers in the Middle East for any harm caused. For some activists, however, an experiment that got out of hand has caused real damage - and may even put lives at risk.
"Shame on you," said Sami Hamwi on the website Gay Middle East (GME).
"You took away my voice, Mr MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know," added Daniel Nassar on GME.
"To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back."
Stuart Hughes @'BBC College of Journalism'
In fact, no such trophies existed. The newspaper was a fake, printed as a propaganda tool by one of the US' founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin.
Fast forward to 2011 and it seems the apparent ease with which some sections of the public and the media can be duped has changed little in more than two centuries.
To the Guardian, Amina Arraf - author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog - was the "unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country". She was quoted by CNN in an article about gay rights in the Arab world. When Amina was apparently abducted by security agents in Syria, thousands joined a Facebook campaign demanding her release.
But of course, as we now know, Amina Arraf was a fiction. The 35-year-old Syrian-American lesbian was in fact Tom MacMaster - a middle-aged, married man from Atlanta, Georgia.
It's perhaps tempting to see the Amina Arraf affair (Aminagate?) as proof that social media can't be trusted as a reliable source of information. Rumours and myths are repeated so often and so quickly via Twitter and Facebook that they seem to take on a life of their own. If so many people are saying the same thing, it HAS to be true - doesn't it?
It's what Alan Fisher from Al Jazeera called the "echo chamber" at last week's POLIS Media and Power conference at the LSE. The amplifying effect of social media, some believe, can help bring ordinary citizens out onto the streets and topple dictators. Equally, though, it can easily lead to thousands of well-meaning people being misled - especially when countries like Syria, where independent verification is difficult, are involved.
Yes, social media spread the Amina myth around the world at lightning speed, but it also played a central part in debunking the hoax as well.
While some journalists and social community organisers initially believed Amina to be genuine, their efforts, along with those of websites like Electronic Intifada, began to highlight the inconsistencies in Amina's story.
The Guardian has promised to redouble its verification efforts. The BBC's Robin Lustig believes the affair will make journalists more sceptical about anonymous blogs in future.
On Monday's PM programme, Tom MacMaster apologised to bloggers in the Middle East for any harm caused. For some activists, however, an experiment that got out of hand has caused real damage - and may even put lives at risk.
"Shame on you," said Sami Hamwi on the website Gay Middle East (GME).
"You took away my voice, Mr MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know," added Daniel Nassar on GME.
"To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back."
Stuart Hughes @'BBC College of Journalism'
#polis11: After Wikileaks
Charlie Beckett chaired this debate about what impact Wikileaks has had on the future of journalism. It was part of the BBC College of Journalism/POLIS conference at the London School of Economics.
The panel: James Ball of the Guardian, George Brock of City University, Angela Phillips of Goldsmiths University, Alison Powell of LSE and John Naughton of Cambridge University/the Observer.
Via
The panel: James Ball of the Guardian, George Brock of City University, Angela Phillips of Goldsmiths University, Alison Powell of LSE and John Naughton of Cambridge University/the Observer.
Via
Tales of the Amur
In fact, we should be grateful to the railway also for the book, since its author was born in Chita, its illustrator in Khabarovsk as descendants of railroad building engineers; their work was combined in Vladivostok, and both were inspired by the archaic culture of the Nanais living in the arch of the railway between these three cities.
Dmitry Nagishkin (Chita 1909 – 1961 Riga) studied electrical engineering, but from 1929 he worked as a journalist and illustrator for local papers, while he was more and more fascinated by the then still living Nanai folk culture. He published the tales collected among them for the first time in 1945 with the title Kid Chokcho, followed in 1946 by the Tales of the Amur and in 1949 by the Courageous Azmun. He himself considered as the peak of his literary work not these, but the historical novel Bonivur’s heart, written between 1944 and 1953 on the Far Eastern heroes of the civil war, the “partisans of the Amur”, also remembered in an extremely popular song. This novel, however, is hardly remembered by anyone, despite the fact that in 1969 they still made a film of it...
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Who, What, Why: Why is 'the hum' such a mystery
There are a range of theories from farm or factory machinery to conspiracy theories such as flying saucers. And yet, 'the hum' remains an unsolved case.
Woodland, a village in county Durham, is the latest place to fall victim to the noise. Some residents have reported hearing a buzzing noise like electricity or a car engine that won't go away.
"It sounds like an overhead power line with this constant humming buzz," says Kevin Fail, a 53 year-old bathroom installer who lives in the village.
He said that he and his wife hear it in bed, downstairs in the house and outside in the garden, but some residents have heard nothing. Fail believes it may have something to do with a disused mine shaft in their garden.
Durham County Council says it is planning to send someone with sound monitoring equipment to the village to investigate. There are "crackpot theories" doing the rounds about UFOs, and Fail says his daughter, whose hobby is ghost hunting, hasn't ruled out the possibility that the mine is haunted. But unlike some residents, Fail says he's not worried. "This has been happening all over the world for decades. Whatever's out there is not going to hurt you."
Another resident of the village said they had received media interest from all over the world.
"The hum" is an international phenomenon. The beach front neighbourhood of Bondi in Sydney was afflicted by it two years ago. One local resident told Australia's Sunday Telegraph at the time: "It sends people around here crazy, all you can do is put music on to block it out. Some people leave fans on.''
One case that was partially solved was in Kokomo, Indiana. The source of "the hum" was located to a fan and a compressor on an industrial site, and yet even after these were turned off some people complained the noise had not stopped.
The Largs Hum in Scotland and Bristol's mystery noise in the 1970s are two of Britain's most famous cases. Often the source of the noise is never found but disappears unexpectedly.
The truth is no-one really knows the cause of "the hum", says Geoff Leventhall, a noise and vibration consultant who has advised the government on the issue.
Despite years working in the field, he has never heard the hum himself and has only rarely been able to pick it up on recording equipment. In one case, his recording equipment picked up a 200 hertz signal at a complainant's house that was detectable in the lab. He managed to trace the buzz to a neighbour's central heating. But this, he says, was an exception.
"Some experts say if you can't measure a noise the presumption is tinnitus," he says. "It all gets rather fraught because people say there's nothing wrong with my hearing.""The hum" is sometimes heard in cities but is more likely to be audible in the countryside and at night, when there is less background noise. Most complainants are people aged 50-60. The most plausible causes are industrial compressors and fans or farm machinery, Leventhall says.
In the 1970s he worked with the News of the World on their campaign to discover the mystery behind "the hum". They received 800 letters from readers complaining of the phenomenon - some of them citing UFOs. But no specific explanations emerged.
In 2009, Dr David Baguley, head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital told the BBC that in about two thirds of cases no external noise could be found. He believed that sufferers' hearing had become over-sensitive. "It becomes a vicious cycle. The more people focus on the noise, the more anxious and fearful they get, the more the body responds by amplifying the sound, and that causes even more upset and distress."
In the end, the solution for sufferers may be to adopt a more accepting mindset, Leventhall argues. He prepared a report for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that suggested cognitive behaviour therapy was effective in treating the symptoms. "It's a question of whether you tense up to the noise or are relaxed about it. The CBT was shown to work, by helping people to take a different attitude to it."
As for the source of "the hum", don't expect a breakthrough anytime soon, he says.
"It's been a mystery for 40 years so it may well remain one for a lot longer."
@'BBC'
For Sale: Childhood Home of William S. Burroughs
So what's the problem? Are potential buyers put off by the $587,900 asking price? Or that it's nearly 100 years old? Are they afraid the place is haunted by the spirit of the boy who would grow up to write Junkie and Naked Lunch, become a guiding spirit of the Beat and hippie generations and have all sorts of exotic adventures, including accidentally killing his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell"?
Actually, it's much more prosaic than that, says Armor. "There's no garage. And the house is landlocked, so there's no way to put a garage in. That's the one thing that's making it hard to sell."
The Burroughs family sold the house and moved to Ladue when William was in high school (John Burroughs, no relation). In later years, when the writer returned to St. Louis, he would be far more nostalgic for the old skid row on Market Street downtown than he was for tree-lined Pershing Place.
Although the house lacks two fancy plaques announcing it as a Historical Site like the ones on T.S. Eliot's childhood home on nearby Westminster Place -- or even one fancy plaque -- it still garners a fair amount of attention. Armor says the current owner, Jackie Millstone, has spotted passerby stopping to stare and point. Recently she arrived home to find a crew from HGTV filming on the sidewalk. But Armor's not sure if the attention is because of the house's famous former inhabitant or if it's just because it's a really nice house. She's inclined to think the latter.
"Jackie's got literature on Burroughs and one of his books out on the coffee table," she says. "She puts it out to show to people who come to look at the house. Some people don't even know who he is. But some raise their eyebrows and say, 'Oh, really?'"
Aimee Levitt @'Riverfront Times'
LulzSec hacks US Senate's web site
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Unofficial Nakba study kit a hit with teachers
When Shira (not her real name ), a history teacher at a junior high school in the center of the country, mentioned "nakba" in a class three years ago, none of her students had any idea what it referred to.
Today, she says, the word just surfaces naturally among the students. They know about it and talk about it. According to her, the reason is clear - Amendment 40 to the Budget Foundations Law, more commonly known as the "Nakba Law."
Shira is one of around 100 teachers and educators who teach the Nakba ("catastrophe" - the Palestinians' term for the loss of their land to Israel in 1948 ) to their students with the help of a unique study kit called "How do you say Nakba in Hebrew?"
The kit was developed by Zochrot, a small Tel Aviv-based organization seeking to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel.
Zochrot is distributing the kit to teachers at a time when the Nakba is recurring in headlines as a subject that is not to be touched - especially not in schools. But over the last two years Zochrot has distributed 300 copies of the study kit.
It covers pre- and post-1948 Palestinian settlements; Israeli and Palestinian recollections of the conquest and destruction of villages; and the refugees' flight and their expulsion. The kit did not receive the ministry's approval and most of the teachers using it conceal their source.
Eitan Bronstein, the founder of Zochrot, stresses that the kit's goal is not to present the Palestinian narrative. "For me, the Nakba is part of our history," he says, "just as it is part of Palestinian history."
'Dafna,' a history and citizenship teacher in northern Israel, uses a section of the kit that presents three competing theories on events in the village of Ein Azael (along the eastern slopes of the Carmel ).
Students are asked to present the different versions of events and discuss them.
In the Palestinian narrative, the emphasis is on "Zionist gangs" that bombed the triangle of villages Aghzam, Jaba and Ein Azael, in violation of the cease-fire. On the other side, there is a passage from the book "The War of Independence," printed by the IDF, whereby the villages were attacked after their residents fired on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road, thereby effectively blocking it.
"This opened up our eyes, because the contradictions between the different versions were really crazy. Nowhere [before] did I hear the Palestinian narrative," says Michal, an 11th-grade student in Dafna's class. She adds: "It was very interesting to see not just the Israel side, and to go beyond the point of view that we learn in Israel - that we are heroes and they are always trying to oppress us."
Both Dafna and Shira were concerned about being interviewed using their full names, for fear of sanctions from the Education Ministry. The ministry said: "Teachers are not permitted to teach content, in any subject, that was not approved by the relevant professionals at the Education Ministry."
Asaf Shtull-Trauring @'Haaretz'
Today, she says, the word just surfaces naturally among the students. They know about it and talk about it. According to her, the reason is clear - Amendment 40 to the Budget Foundations Law, more commonly known as the "Nakba Law."
Shira is one of around 100 teachers and educators who teach the Nakba ("catastrophe" - the Palestinians' term for the loss of their land to Israel in 1948 ) to their students with the help of a unique study kit called "How do you say Nakba in Hebrew?"
The kit was developed by Zochrot, a small Tel Aviv-based organization seeking to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel.
Zochrot is distributing the kit to teachers at a time when the Nakba is recurring in headlines as a subject that is not to be touched - especially not in schools. But over the last two years Zochrot has distributed 300 copies of the study kit.
It covers pre- and post-1948 Palestinian settlements; Israeli and Palestinian recollections of the conquest and destruction of villages; and the refugees' flight and their expulsion. The kit did not receive the ministry's approval and most of the teachers using it conceal their source.
Eitan Bronstein, the founder of Zochrot, stresses that the kit's goal is not to present the Palestinian narrative. "For me, the Nakba is part of our history," he says, "just as it is part of Palestinian history."
'Dafna,' a history and citizenship teacher in northern Israel, uses a section of the kit that presents three competing theories on events in the village of Ein Azael (along the eastern slopes of the Carmel ).
Students are asked to present the different versions of events and discuss them.
In the Palestinian narrative, the emphasis is on "Zionist gangs" that bombed the triangle of villages Aghzam, Jaba and Ein Azael, in violation of the cease-fire. On the other side, there is a passage from the book "The War of Independence," printed by the IDF, whereby the villages were attacked after their residents fired on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road, thereby effectively blocking it.
"This opened up our eyes, because the contradictions between the different versions were really crazy. Nowhere [before] did I hear the Palestinian narrative," says Michal, an 11th-grade student in Dafna's class. She adds: "It was very interesting to see not just the Israel side, and to go beyond the point of view that we learn in Israel - that we are heroes and they are always trying to oppress us."
Both Dafna and Shira were concerned about being interviewed using their full names, for fear of sanctions from the Education Ministry. The ministry said: "Teachers are not permitted to teach content, in any subject, that was not approved by the relevant professionals at the Education Ministry."
Asaf Shtull-Trauring @'Haaretz'
PJCrowley Philip J. Crowley
It's odd that #Obama thinks @RepWeiner should resign, but not #Assad. Sending lewd tweets violates public service, but not killing people?
Mark Fisher in conversation with Michael Schapira
Can you describe in broad strokes where Capitalist Realism came from?
There were a number of threads running through my blog, and one of them had to do with politics. Not politics in some distant sense, but politics particularly in relation to my working life, which through a lot of the early years of the blog was as a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at a further education college. (Ed. note: a further education college is similar to a community college in the U.S., but most students would be 16 to 19 years old.)
One of the stories that came into the blog a bit and sits behind Capitalist Realism is the story of recovery from depression, which was a large trajectory of my life in that last decade. Having done a doctorate in philosophy and literature, I was mentally destroyed in lots of ways and felt pretty useless and unemployable. Very burnt out, I found it very difficult to read any serious work. It was teaching and blogging that actually rehabilitated me. Teaching sort of re-engaged me in the world. When you are doing postgraduate research you can feel very disconnected from the world and your work can feel very pointless. But with teenagers you really have to front up because they won’t let you get away with much nonsense; they will interrupt you every 90 seconds, etc. It was difficult, but it was also an excellent grounding and initiation back into the world.
Alongside that I started blogging. Blogging was a bit like when Zizek says that you can’t sit down and think that you’re going to write a book. You have to think that you’re just going to write a few paragraphs, and then the paragraphs will build up and build up and suddenly a book forms. In the same way, blogging for me started off as not being that serious. The dead heavy weight of scholarly responsibility can interject and cause you think that you can’t possibly write on anything unless you looked at every possible source, which is of course impossible, but nevertheless you still feel the guilt and weight that goes along with that. The blog didn’t really have that. It was just a different space. I didn’t have that weight and responsibility and maybe I could just try out some ideas.
Your rehabilitation from depression seemed to be coextensive with a growing realization of the problems racking higher education and public services in the wake of New Labour. Can you describe the political context of your book a bit for American readers?
What I started to notice very strongly in my working life were the changes that had happened over this period. In lots of ways, Capitalist Realism is really a study of what it was like to work in public services under Blairism and New Labour. We could assume that the neoliberal right would push the interests of business, but we couldn’t necessarily assume that a notionally left-wing party would be doing this as well. There is a certain novelty about that, or rather we take it for granted now, but we ought not to in lots of ways.
What I was experiencing firsthand under New Labour was the imposition of a whole battery of new measures, particularly to do with self-surveillance. For example, [as teachers] we had to fill in 50-60 page long logbooks with “strategies for improvement,” bullet pointed, etc. The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things. Everyone is second-guessing what they think the bureaucratic authorities might want to see. The bureaucratic authorities themselves, when they emerge – these would typically be the Inspectorate, employed by the government to come and check up on colleges – wouldn’t necessarily know either what exactly was required. These people were always interpreting this set of bureaucratic criteria that are slightly Talmudic. It would be one thing to have a set of clear and determinate demands that you could meet. But it is another thing to have this vague legalese, which is capable of multiple interpretations, and which is also guaranteed to maximize the anxiety of everyone who is involved.
It was really the encounter with these kinds of procedures that was one of the main starting points for the work that went into Capitalist Realism. Beginning in a raging exasperation, in writing the book I was able to see these kinds of things as systemic as opposed to just affecting me...
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Michael Schapira @'Full Stop'
Iain Sinclair: Secret Writing
Shortly before her untimely death 1997, novelist Kathy Acker interviewed Iain Sinclair in London. It is, to our knowledge, the last article written by Acker, which reveals her fascination in the magical potential of abstract fiction.
WALKING
The precision. I remember the excitement of reading White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – my first Iain Sinclair experience – though I don’t remember where and when. And yet every word of Sinclair’s, herein lies his style, is always positing when and where. “There is an interesting condition of the stomach,” begins White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, “where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus...” This is Sinclair territory, be it of the body, the emotions, the soul or the environs, the city. Craggy, deeply fissured or painful. Remember: fissures in the earth lead to the underworld, sinister and magic.
Sinclair territory is one in which the word both describes and is what is described. Say “cicatrix” out loud and that sound is the ulcer, the hole in the earth; the sound “musculature,” rolling you from one location to the other and so denying fissure, is the unbroken or “replaced” earth.
In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Nicholas Lane, a contemporary book-dealer in London, not only has an ulcer, but is defined by it. Here is an example of how Sinclair hears rhythm and uses it to create. Listen to this description of Nicholas Lane: “To call him thin would be to underdescribe him. His skin was damp paper over bone. Nothing could get into his intestine so he functioned directly on head energy. An icicle of pure intelligence.” There are four sentences. The second would mirror the perfect balance of the first if its predicate wasn’t a little too long. The third sentence is long and imbalanced; note the dependent clause. Lengthening sound and imbalance grow and explode, in the last sentence, into a spark, a phrase, not even a full sentence, but, like the first sentence, perfectly balanced.
Mind you, I am not speaking about formal structure. I’m speaking about vision. In these four sentences, Sinclair is describing an ulcerated landscape. Balance in the body of the bookseller, of the landscape, occurs when the mind is separated from its body. Sinclair has cut into both the living being of Nicholas Lane and of London and opened them to our sight. We experience sound: we see. A visionary is he or she who makes vision happen.
When I was a child, I read my first ‘adult’ authors, Dickens and Blake. The pages of their books exploded open in my mind a visionary landscape called London. “Under the grass stain, the altar. I dreamed a new dream, meadows of fire.” – White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. This is the usual announcement of the visionary. To dream is to see. To see is to make, to bring into being. I can write only by reading and listening, says the visionary, for one makes only when one is made. Thus the angels Blake saw.
Listen further to the language of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: “Nights all up in that tower room, windows blinded, looking out all across the roofs; not nobody on the streets, was there? Little drink, fag, like, if I wanted, go out on the parapets, I do; go where I like, walk, Flower and Dean, Thrawl, Heneage, Chicksand, walk cross the river if I wanted, nobody else, not never touched the ground.” Walking prose. To walk is to travel; to travel is to see. The eye, the I cannot stay still because in their beings neither the eye nor the I is still. What is movement? It is language itself. Connection. “No man is an island.”
There are two kinds of hedonists. Those who separate body and mind and so turn affairs of the body into matters of dead meat. Then, there are those who equate pleasure and wisdom. Sinclair goes for the latter type of hedonism. In Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair finally does exactly as he likes, gets rid of made-up plot, that old bourgeois contrivance so beloved by the publishing industry. Goes for what is intrinsic, in pleasure, language and movement. Rhythm. Writers are musicians who work in the crossovers between image and sound and meaning. That crossover named language. Let the literary be concerned only with its own grave.
He began in poetry. Lud Heat, 1975; Suicide Bridge, 1979. The novels started in 1987 with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. “When I wrote White Chappell,” Sinclair says, “as I had previously done poems and short stories: writing by hand on big pads of paper. I was scared of not being able to read my own handwriting so on the old typewriter I had back in those days I would type everything up quickly, crudely, not making any changes. Then I would rewrite the whole on a totally different machine, a golfball typewriter. After that I sometimes rewrote the last version by hand. I noted the changes in this text and then typed it all out. Each level of change was based on a different technology.”
We’re sitting in the pub next to the premises of his current publisher, Granta. The pub is upmarket, with posh food and a view of the canal that runs through what is currently one of the trendiest sections in London. Handbags here cost at least 200 pounds a shot. The canal below us is full of trash. “My writing totally changed,” Sinclair continues, “when I began Lights Out For The Territory. For the first time I was writing from the beginning on a word processor.”
Sinclair is talking only about how he writes, not what he writes. Very un-Anglo-Saxon. Imagine book reviews that have no interest in recounting the plots of the novels they’re criticizing. The whole literary industry might collapse. Forget that. Now I’m equating process art and walking. Iain based Lights Out For The Territory on various walks of his through London. “Did you write as you walked?” I ask the tall, slightly sinister-looking ex-used-book dealer.
“I made notes. I scribbled notes. I wrote letters to the machine.” He reconsiders. Things aren’t that simple. “It’s more like possession. You see, all the writing I’ve done is a kind of possession. You prepare yourself for the state of possession by research or by walks or by... whatever... by reading. It may take a long time and it may take no time.”
Sinclair begins talking so fast I can barely keep up with him. This is his music. “I had been planning the material for White Chappell since the early or mid-’70s. I kicked it around in my head for 15 years! Changing it and changing it. Then, when it was time to write it down – whoomf! – I wrote incredibly fast. In the next two novels, Downriver and Radon Daughters, I set out to do something completely different. Six stories that were connected up to sites. To let through the voices of the victims.” One of the characters in White Chappell is Jack the Ripper. “I felt that White Chappell had been too phallocentric. This time I wanted woman and place to come through.”
I’m wondering if women and site are connected and if so, how? But I can’t find the space to break into Sinclair’s language.
“I went to look for the first site, the one where a pleasure boat named The Princess Alice had gone down. Practically everyone on it had drowned. I wanted to write about a woman who had survived, though her children didn’t, and then a few years later she was one of the victims of Jack the Ripper. I went to the wrong site and blundered into another whole series of stories....”
Walking is a listening method. Sinclair walks to listen to the stories that have been and so are in the city. He’s searching for buried treasure. He’s hunting down London’s identity.
“There were these stories waiting to be told. In the long run, actual walking isn’t necessary because it’s all walking.” It refers to writing. Everything does in the world of creation. It and they. “They are all journeys. Journeys aren’t necessarily walks.” Sinclair is fascinated by London’s conduits: trains and the river. By James Joyce: in Dubliners and of course in Finnegan’s Wake Joyce gave him possibilities for mapping, for exposing this city. Every map is a narrative. A story or series of stories are revealing themselves.
To be able to go on this treasure hunt the writer must prepare himself, herself through training. “It’s shamanistic in a way.... For a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something. More important is learning how to move into areas of force, of information and energy in which there are stories that need to be released.”
Later on Sinclair will say to me, “You fall into structures that are magical, potent, and if you get them perfect, it makes things change in the world...”
The precision. I remember the excitement of reading White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – my first Iain Sinclair experience – though I don’t remember where and when. And yet every word of Sinclair’s, herein lies his style, is always positing when and where. “There is an interesting condition of the stomach,” begins White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, “where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus...” This is Sinclair territory, be it of the body, the emotions, the soul or the environs, the city. Craggy, deeply fissured or painful. Remember: fissures in the earth lead to the underworld, sinister and magic.
Sinclair territory is one in which the word both describes and is what is described. Say “cicatrix” out loud and that sound is the ulcer, the hole in the earth; the sound “musculature,” rolling you from one location to the other and so denying fissure, is the unbroken or “replaced” earth.
In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Nicholas Lane, a contemporary book-dealer in London, not only has an ulcer, but is defined by it. Here is an example of how Sinclair hears rhythm and uses it to create. Listen to this description of Nicholas Lane: “To call him thin would be to underdescribe him. His skin was damp paper over bone. Nothing could get into his intestine so he functioned directly on head energy. An icicle of pure intelligence.” There are four sentences. The second would mirror the perfect balance of the first if its predicate wasn’t a little too long. The third sentence is long and imbalanced; note the dependent clause. Lengthening sound and imbalance grow and explode, in the last sentence, into a spark, a phrase, not even a full sentence, but, like the first sentence, perfectly balanced.
Mind you, I am not speaking about formal structure. I’m speaking about vision. In these four sentences, Sinclair is describing an ulcerated landscape. Balance in the body of the bookseller, of the landscape, occurs when the mind is separated from its body. Sinclair has cut into both the living being of Nicholas Lane and of London and opened them to our sight. We experience sound: we see. A visionary is he or she who makes vision happen.
When I was a child, I read my first ‘adult’ authors, Dickens and Blake. The pages of their books exploded open in my mind a visionary landscape called London. “Under the grass stain, the altar. I dreamed a new dream, meadows of fire.” – White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. This is the usual announcement of the visionary. To dream is to see. To see is to make, to bring into being. I can write only by reading and listening, says the visionary, for one makes only when one is made. Thus the angels Blake saw.
Listen further to the language of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: “Nights all up in that tower room, windows blinded, looking out all across the roofs; not nobody on the streets, was there? Little drink, fag, like, if I wanted, go out on the parapets, I do; go where I like, walk, Flower and Dean, Thrawl, Heneage, Chicksand, walk cross the river if I wanted, nobody else, not never touched the ground.” Walking prose. To walk is to travel; to travel is to see. The eye, the I cannot stay still because in their beings neither the eye nor the I is still. What is movement? It is language itself. Connection. “No man is an island.”
There are two kinds of hedonists. Those who separate body and mind and so turn affairs of the body into matters of dead meat. Then, there are those who equate pleasure and wisdom. Sinclair goes for the latter type of hedonism. In Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair finally does exactly as he likes, gets rid of made-up plot, that old bourgeois contrivance so beloved by the publishing industry. Goes for what is intrinsic, in pleasure, language and movement. Rhythm. Writers are musicians who work in the crossovers between image and sound and meaning. That crossover named language. Let the literary be concerned only with its own grave.
He began in poetry. Lud Heat, 1975; Suicide Bridge, 1979. The novels started in 1987 with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. “When I wrote White Chappell,” Sinclair says, “as I had previously done poems and short stories: writing by hand on big pads of paper. I was scared of not being able to read my own handwriting so on the old typewriter I had back in those days I would type everything up quickly, crudely, not making any changes. Then I would rewrite the whole on a totally different machine, a golfball typewriter. After that I sometimes rewrote the last version by hand. I noted the changes in this text and then typed it all out. Each level of change was based on a different technology.”
We’re sitting in the pub next to the premises of his current publisher, Granta. The pub is upmarket, with posh food and a view of the canal that runs through what is currently one of the trendiest sections in London. Handbags here cost at least 200 pounds a shot. The canal below us is full of trash. “My writing totally changed,” Sinclair continues, “when I began Lights Out For The Territory. For the first time I was writing from the beginning on a word processor.”
Sinclair is talking only about how he writes, not what he writes. Very un-Anglo-Saxon. Imagine book reviews that have no interest in recounting the plots of the novels they’re criticizing. The whole literary industry might collapse. Forget that. Now I’m equating process art and walking. Iain based Lights Out For The Territory on various walks of his through London. “Did you write as you walked?” I ask the tall, slightly sinister-looking ex-used-book dealer.
“I made notes. I scribbled notes. I wrote letters to the machine.” He reconsiders. Things aren’t that simple. “It’s more like possession. You see, all the writing I’ve done is a kind of possession. You prepare yourself for the state of possession by research or by walks or by... whatever... by reading. It may take a long time and it may take no time.”
Sinclair begins talking so fast I can barely keep up with him. This is his music. “I had been planning the material for White Chappell since the early or mid-’70s. I kicked it around in my head for 15 years! Changing it and changing it. Then, when it was time to write it down – whoomf! – I wrote incredibly fast. In the next two novels, Downriver and Radon Daughters, I set out to do something completely different. Six stories that were connected up to sites. To let through the voices of the victims.” One of the characters in White Chappell is Jack the Ripper. “I felt that White Chappell had been too phallocentric. This time I wanted woman and place to come through.”
I’m wondering if women and site are connected and if so, how? But I can’t find the space to break into Sinclair’s language.
“I went to look for the first site, the one where a pleasure boat named The Princess Alice had gone down. Practically everyone on it had drowned. I wanted to write about a woman who had survived, though her children didn’t, and then a few years later she was one of the victims of Jack the Ripper. I went to the wrong site and blundered into another whole series of stories....”
Walking is a listening method. Sinclair walks to listen to the stories that have been and so are in the city. He’s searching for buried treasure. He’s hunting down London’s identity.
“There were these stories waiting to be told. In the long run, actual walking isn’t necessary because it’s all walking.” It refers to writing. Everything does in the world of creation. It and they. “They are all journeys. Journeys aren’t necessarily walks.” Sinclair is fascinated by London’s conduits: trains and the river. By James Joyce: in Dubliners and of course in Finnegan’s Wake Joyce gave him possibilities for mapping, for exposing this city. Every map is a narrative. A story or series of stories are revealing themselves.
To be able to go on this treasure hunt the writer must prepare himself, herself through training. “It’s shamanistic in a way.... For a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something. More important is learning how to move into areas of force, of information and energy in which there are stories that need to be released.”
Later on Sinclair will say to me, “You fall into structures that are magical, potent, and if you get them perfect, it makes things change in the world...”
Continue reading
Tuesday 14 June 2011
The geography lesson of Gay Girl in Damascus
The tale of the lesbian blogger in Damascus who turned out this weekend to be a married American chap studying at Edinburgh University will surely be told many times over. Here is a news story lightly wrapped around a bundle of talking points: what spurs someone to create and maintain a false identity ("Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, emblem of street-protesting Syrian womanhood!"); the nature of personal attachment in the era of Web 2.0, and how the internet has democratised that old-fashioned pursuit, the media hoax. How appropriate that Tom MacMaster should claim to be doing a postgraduate degree, because his is the stunt that will launch a thousand research fellowships.
Listening to MacMaster's interviews yesterday, one other issue nagged away at me: what the hoax tells us about the importance of geography.
To the blogger, his distance from the Arab Spring was merely incidental. "The reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely," he airily told Radio Scotland. The fact that he knew the studentville of Edinburgh's Newington far better than the Middle East was beside the point.
And sure enough, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog features very little local detail. True, there's the odd reference to Friday prayers, the Druze, a lover called Zina and all manner of other variables that can swiftly be cut and pasted from Wikipedia. But of the scenery that surrounds Amina, of the journeys that she would have to make to get to her marches and her dates . . . there is next to nothing. The message to western readers is clear: this woman thinks like you, blogs like you and appears to have sex like you. She is foreign only in name.
This is the big lie that underpins all the little fibs dreamed up by MacMaster. It can be summed up thus: in the age of mass technology and almost unprecedented international trade we are becoming more alike – and our local environments are of diminishing significance. Geography mattered in 1914 and 1939 and all the way up to 1989; but now we live in a global village.
This has been the promise of this wave of globalisation, and smarter people than MacMaster have made a lot of cash from it. Thomas L Friedman and Frances Cairncross produced bestsellers titled The World Is Flat and The Death of Distance. In the early 90s, the economist Richard O'Brien pretty much made his career proclaiming "the end of geography".
One way of reading the financial bubble is as a story of people who believed the same thing as MacMaster: that geography was just an inconvenience to be worked around. So you had Northern Rock, a former building society in Newcastle that wanted to be a major bank on high streets and used global financial markets to speed the process up. In Iceland, you had a small clique of businessmen, pumped up on testosterone and cheap credit, who went out and bought up swaths of foreign businesses. Then came the crash and the return of those old local constraints.
It's the British Treasury that had to bail out Northern Rock; it's the government Reykjavik which has to haggle over the cash its banks owe foreign savers. Shoppers who once enjoyed only the benefits of globalisation, in the form of cut-price tellies made in China, can now feel its downside as the property slump in Nevada makes it harder to get a mortgage in Newbury.
Even during the bubble, how interconnected your world was always depended on who you were. Sure, it may have been easier than ever for financiers to fly from London to New York – not so for would-be asylum-seekers hoping to get from Sangatte, say, to Kent.
It's the limits of the globalisation story that have helped drive some academics back to geography and to what is now called "the spatial turn". Anything that comes out of academia labelled "the 'something' turn" generally involves creasing your forehead over some hardback quoting Foucault, but one excellent new history book makes the case for taking local differences more seriously.
In Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram sets out the case for considering the importance of where events happened, rather than only the when and why.
Investigating history's "crime scenes", the Manchester academic upends some of the most cherished popular notions of how big changes come about. He traces the immediate origins of the British Labour party, for instance, to a factory in Bradford making velvet.
In 1890, just before Christmas, the owner of Manningham Mills imposed a 35% pay cut on workers. The largely female workforce wanted to go on strike, but were resisted by the men leading the local trade unions.
So the women organised themselves, and went door-to-door in Bradford and Leeds raising a war chest of £11,000. Barred from the usual meeting houses, they gathered in open-air ice rinks. It was the limitations placed on the women's free speech, and their harassment, that turned a tussle over wages to a much broader movement. The result, three years later, was the creation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford.
Whether it's anti-Mubarak protestors gathering in Tahrir Square, or British university students clustering in commons rooms, the scene and the setting cannot be divorced from each other, and some specifics cannot be wished away. That's the lesson Tom MacMaster is learning the hard way this week.
Aditya Chakrabortty @'The Guardian'
Listening to MacMaster's interviews yesterday, one other issue nagged away at me: what the hoax tells us about the importance of geography.
To the blogger, his distance from the Arab Spring was merely incidental. "The reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely," he airily told Radio Scotland. The fact that he knew the studentville of Edinburgh's Newington far better than the Middle East was beside the point.
And sure enough, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog features very little local detail. True, there's the odd reference to Friday prayers, the Druze, a lover called Zina and all manner of other variables that can swiftly be cut and pasted from Wikipedia. But of the scenery that surrounds Amina, of the journeys that she would have to make to get to her marches and her dates . . . there is next to nothing. The message to western readers is clear: this woman thinks like you, blogs like you and appears to have sex like you. She is foreign only in name.
This is the big lie that underpins all the little fibs dreamed up by MacMaster. It can be summed up thus: in the age of mass technology and almost unprecedented international trade we are becoming more alike – and our local environments are of diminishing significance. Geography mattered in 1914 and 1939 and all the way up to 1989; but now we live in a global village.
This has been the promise of this wave of globalisation, and smarter people than MacMaster have made a lot of cash from it. Thomas L Friedman and Frances Cairncross produced bestsellers titled The World Is Flat and The Death of Distance. In the early 90s, the economist Richard O'Brien pretty much made his career proclaiming "the end of geography".
One way of reading the financial bubble is as a story of people who believed the same thing as MacMaster: that geography was just an inconvenience to be worked around. So you had Northern Rock, a former building society in Newcastle that wanted to be a major bank on high streets and used global financial markets to speed the process up. In Iceland, you had a small clique of businessmen, pumped up on testosterone and cheap credit, who went out and bought up swaths of foreign businesses. Then came the crash and the return of those old local constraints.
It's the British Treasury that had to bail out Northern Rock; it's the government Reykjavik which has to haggle over the cash its banks owe foreign savers. Shoppers who once enjoyed only the benefits of globalisation, in the form of cut-price tellies made in China, can now feel its downside as the property slump in Nevada makes it harder to get a mortgage in Newbury.
Even during the bubble, how interconnected your world was always depended on who you were. Sure, it may have been easier than ever for financiers to fly from London to New York – not so for would-be asylum-seekers hoping to get from Sangatte, say, to Kent.
It's the limits of the globalisation story that have helped drive some academics back to geography and to what is now called "the spatial turn". Anything that comes out of academia labelled "the 'something' turn" generally involves creasing your forehead over some hardback quoting Foucault, but one excellent new history book makes the case for taking local differences more seriously.
In Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram sets out the case for considering the importance of where events happened, rather than only the when and why.
Investigating history's "crime scenes", the Manchester academic upends some of the most cherished popular notions of how big changes come about. He traces the immediate origins of the British Labour party, for instance, to a factory in Bradford making velvet.
In 1890, just before Christmas, the owner of Manningham Mills imposed a 35% pay cut on workers. The largely female workforce wanted to go on strike, but were resisted by the men leading the local trade unions.
So the women organised themselves, and went door-to-door in Bradford and Leeds raising a war chest of £11,000. Barred from the usual meeting houses, they gathered in open-air ice rinks. It was the limitations placed on the women's free speech, and their harassment, that turned a tussle over wages to a much broader movement. The result, three years later, was the creation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford.
Whether it's anti-Mubarak protestors gathering in Tahrir Square, or British university students clustering in commons rooms, the scene and the setting cannot be divorced from each other, and some specifics cannot be wished away. That's the lesson Tom MacMaster is learning the hard way this week.
Aditya Chakrabortty @'The Guardian'
‘Paula Brooks,’ editor of ‘Lez Get Real,’ also a man
Paula Brooks from LezGetReal is a Man – Straight Man Fraud in the Lesbian World
Burial - In McDonald's
"we just did this for a laugh and to test out the camera so don't get too worked up! :)
my love for burial is limitless and did not intend to disrespect his work."
(MoogDnB, the director)
via
Tyranny in NYC
Wasteful
The vast majority of arrests in New York City are for low-level offenses, such as misdemeanors like possessing a small amount of marijuana or violations like selling umbrellas or flowers on the street without a license. By any criteria, almost none of these activities could be considered dangerous or predatory. At worst, most city residents would view them as public nuisances.
Police officers and other criminal justice personnel -- judges, court officers, district attorneys, public defenders and correction officers -- spend hours every day, if not their whole workday, processing these cases. And these law enforcement officials are preoccupied with these seemingly insignificant cases day after day, week after week, month after month and so on.
According to the Drug Policy Alliance, just one category of arrests -- for possessing, not selling, small amounts of marijuana -- costs New York City $75 million per year.
Ineffective
The aggressive arrest-driven policing applied in New York City aimed at minor offenses has effectively caught up hundreds of thousands, perhaps actually millions, of individuals in the criminal justice net in recent years. Last year, for example, the city’s police made over 370,000 arrests. Most of these arrests occurred in New York’s low-income communities of color -- for example, although the majority of people who use marijuana are white, 86 percent of the individuals arrested for marijuana possession last year were black or Latino...
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Robert Gangi @'AlterNet'
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