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? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.