lundi 22 mars 2004

A surfeit of muses? Not likely Since around the middle of last week, the Condition has made one of those sporadic and irritating comebacks I was warned about by the doctors last year. This is a minor and tiring nuisance, but also a "warning sign". I'm very glad that in a few days, I'll be enjoying a stretch of real holiday, when I can catch up on overdue medical follow-up, family phone calls, outstanding e-mail and unwritten reviews. Right now, I return with relief to a favourite subject. Women. And one "remarkable writer" of a man. There's no pecking order here. Each of the women, "chicks", "girls," I mean to mention have outstanding qualities. First comes Cindy the "squip", who informs us, with a link to Clive Thompson's 'Honesty Virus' in the NYT magazine that "When online, we are oddly prone to telling the truth." Would you believe it? "This snippet from the essay made me laugh: 'I spend about an hour every day visiting blogs, those lippy Web sites where everyone wants to be a pundit and a memoirist. (Then I spend another hour writing my own blog and adding to the cacophony.)' (I now have visions of all blogs with big red lips on them, not unlike the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse "kisses" urinals.) ;-)" Great stuff at 'Dusting My Brain'! Will Cindy shoot me if I mention how she's confessed that she's a "wild and crazy chick" (WCC)? It was that kind of self-definition -- and the impossibility of self-definition -- which cropped up last night when I had a wide-ranging chat with the Wildcat. After an hour, I had the Wildcat call me back. As you know, I learned many a lesson last year, about bills as well as about women. The Wildcat is in fine fettle. If I haven't mentioned her for some time, it wasn't because we're still fighting. For weeks, I didn't 'phone her and failed to answer the telephone when I knew it was her, knowing she'd leave a message if an emergency arose. My hope was that if we weren't nattering to each other, she'd be getting on with the writing she excels at when she puts her mind to it. And indeed she is, not every day but for herself when she's not doing it for the Factory. This is excellent news and I hope that it'll make her famous one day. The Wildcat's also feeling far healthier than she has for months, having survived the worst winter of her life, but the arrival of the sun where she is means that she faces the urgent problem of finding enough money to replace a fridge which has broken down and the shoes she'll need for the summer. I fear that she'll soon have to emerge from her anonymity and acquire some celebrity if she's going to make a living, because it's certainly not the Factory's policy regarding the wages of people like her that's going to make her rich. It was for the Wildcat, among others, that I've today managed to do one of the things otherwise postponed, because just as I encourage her writing, she it was who pressed me for an update here on the French battle for intelligence. She professed to be startled at my enthusiasm for 'Bloggers with Boobies' like Cindy, having apparently forgotten how gorgeous she looks herself -- if dangerous too, as now we know -- and how very hungry I get when women are as creative, "crazy" and unconventional as many are lucky enough also to be stunning to behold. I have now definitively forgiven her for fleeing at Christmas time when we could have gone to bed with each other. On the "chicks" and "girls" label that annoys some women but worries other not at all, the Wildcat informed me that she told one bloke who called her a "femme fatale" that she'd rather be known as a "fille fatale". There was then some debate as to whether or not she'd had more lovers than Carla Bruni... But I digress! Natalie has WCC qualities, of course. And the track that led me from her to Cindy and the other happily boobied bloggers -- or was it the other way round -- is too tortuous to describe, but we find common ground at one of my long-postponed "meaning tos". I've been meaning to write of Cass Brown, who gave another well-merited good review to 'The Joy of Letting Women Down' at 'Cancergiggles'. Yup. You read that correctly. Cass has describes his blog and more thus: "This site is hopefully an idiot's guide to accepting, living with, laughing at and dying from cancer. The very, very last bit I can't be absolutely sure of but then who the hell can? I could have put together some beautifully crafted, grammatically correct essays but I hope you will understand, that when I say 'I don't have a lot of time' I mean it far more literally than you do. I wanted to publish some thoughts which may just light a spark in some people." He succeeds, more modest than he need be about his writing. At the end of his own most recent post at 'Cancergiggles', Cass says: "If you ever, for one nano second, feel sorry for yourself, just simply be ashamed. Sorry to turn this on its head but this ISN'T ABOUT YOU. It's about the people you will leave behind and soon you will have absolutely zero input into the situation. Use whatever time you have to make them happy and for God's sake MAKE THEM LAUGH. If you have devoted your entire life to being a miserable, selfish, mean and entirely unattractive excuse for a human being, knock it off now! If you are bankrupt, don't have a friend in the world and your family has deserted you, get off your ass and make somebody else laugh. You get just one crack at this. You can't die happy if what you leave is a world of shit and grief. If at some stage in the future my name comes up and it elicits a wry smile from someone that's good. If it makes somebody laugh, you'll hear me jumping on the clouds." In his piece on Nat's book, he explains that he's "a partially reformed drunkard and a totally reformed womaniser." I'm a totally reformed drunkard. That proved so necessary that at the time it even seemed absurdly easy. As to the rest ... the Wildcat enjoyed herself last night. This was when I admitted that I had been wary of some women I found very attractive because I had considered myself "too old" or them "too young". The sheer stupidity of this inhibition came to light in the course of my encounters with Dr F., the psychosomatic "shrinkess", as one of my friends calls her. Whatever the Wildcat didn't do, she and Natalie both contributed to a crash course. Even if I've still much to learn. It gets worse. My acquaintances include a woman who's up to something extremely interesting I'd like to blog about, if she lets me. Now it would be dishonest to claim that her almost distressingly good looks have nothing to do with a conversation that went, in part, like this: "...but the last time I asked you out to dinner--" "Which was about 150 years ago," she interrupted. "--you set impossible conditions!" I finished, so astonished at the way she'd responded that it was a miracle I managed to complete the sentence. I don't know whether she and one or two other women who have inspired me in recent weeks, making life infinitely more palatable simply by being there, are WCCs. Yet. But the Wildcat, like Dr. F, thinks I've been one of the idiots of all time for hesitating to find out. Yes, I'm really looking forward to that week off, now that it's spring. "Why do we get all our funky new Aries Beginnings (Sun, Moon, and Mercury are partying up a storm in the sign of the rambunctious Ram) just as we slide into Winter? At least you northern Hemisphere-ites get some Spring into your step just as you're getting jiggy with it...," Goldie moans ('dramaqueen') That's simple. It's our turn! As to the Kid, time flies! The last weekend we were together, she decided to interrogate me about what brought me to France in the first place, and was delighted to learn that it was not a matter of what, but whom... Question after question, her eyes shining. "And after her," Marianne asked, "how did you meet Mum?" "You mean she's never told you?" "No," said the Kid, who's grown into a "blogger with boobies" herself in the past year. Well, possibly she wanted to hear the story all over again. Because now she's begun to understand what it's like. And as to the poor lad who couldn't tear his eyes off the Kid on the train, then thrust a hastily scribbled note of admiration and phone number into her hand just as she was getting off, oh heavens...! No. She never did call that number. 10:29:32 PM  link   your views? [] Minor iGripe: cleaning the Windows John Udell is a browser switcher. And the figure he mentions explains a little something which gnaws at my pride while possibly highlighting my incompetence. "In January 2004, 94.8 percent of Web surfers used Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, according to the Web analytics research company OneStat.com. Not me, though. For many months I’ve been using a Mozilla-based browser that can’t seem to settle on a name: Phoenix, Firebird, now Firefox. Identity crisis notwithstanding, it rocks. Trust me on this — I’m no knee-jerk open source bigot. During Mozilla’s long nuclear winter, I stuck with IE because I wasn’t willing to live with compromises. Then the tables turned. Suddenly, IE was the compromise I could not live with. Bugs didn’t get fixed. Standards support didn’t improve. New features didn’t appear. And the last vestige of cross-platform ambition evaporated when IE for the Mac was killed last year. The message is clear: Internet Explorer is dead in the water." 'Firefox fills the IE void,' John wrote at 'InfoWorld' on Friday. I'm happy with the browsers I've got, but here's Firefox 0.8 for Windows (and Mac). As to my pride, we are compelled to use IE 5 in the Factory. On Windows. And, unlike Explorer 5.2 for Mac, exceptionally in use in the following screenshot to prove my point, my computer at work obstinately refuses to display this experiment of mine as it should be seen. If the statistics John mentions are correct, up to 94.8 percent of my visitors conceivably do not see the right-hand column of my blog as anything other than a vertical mish-mash -- the way it looks at work and not as it does in the pic. I've done all that I can to rectify any errors in the HTML code. Nothing works, yet the site looks right in every other browser I've tried. So, sod it! Barry would recommend going to the Opera! 5:51:49 PM  link   your views? [] Three hefty blows to 'the Establishment' When there's so much of abiding interest to take in, meditate on and write about and so little time, the BBC's online 'Listen Again' feature is more than useful. It's a public service gift and necessity for busy people who need to plan ahead. Since I've had positive feedback about my previous links to programmes as Net subscription prices come down and more and more visitors here go "broadband", today's recommendation is something essential. This year's Reith Lecturer is going to be no less a figure than the phenomenal Nigerian writer, playwright and poet Wole Soyinka. His five weekly talks on a red-hot issue of our "terrorised" times, 'The Climate of Fear,' begin on Wednesday April 7 at 8:00 pm (that'll be 1800 GMT, I think, with the change to summer time imminent), with repeats on Saturday nights. The titles? 1. The Changing Mask of Fear 2. Power and Freedom 3. Rhetoric that Binds and Blinds 4. A Quest for Dignity 5. I am Right; You are Dead (more details at Radio 4 - Reith 2004). Soyinka sharpened the appetite this morning with an introductory appearance on Andrew Marr's 'Start the Week,' with other guests worth hearing too. Yesterday was "quiet" enough in the Factory to give me time to work on a couple of good feature stories from Africa. One of them -- written by a woman of such breath-taking beauty that she recently inspired a couple of my more elliptic entries here -- was such an original look at what it's like to be gay in Gabon that it was a real pleasure to render it into English! Her article included good quotes, that vital something some of us back in the engine room occasionally despair of getting from correspondents out in the field, particularly too many of the French ones. Born in a country long plagued by an institutional and turgid approach to the news, these people ruin potentially worthwhile stories by sending us pontificating ego-trips they classify as "analysis", which are regrettably prime candidates for the P13 treatment (my entry of March 9, to be pursued). However, that particular kind of pundit is an endangered species. Anne-Laure's story hasn't made it to the Web yet, so I can't link to it, but I can reference the more academic 'Heart of Lavender: In Search of Gay Africa,' written by Eugene Patron in 1995 for the 'Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review.' "The notion of Africans being 'innocent children' of nature, corresponds to European views that African sexual practices were primal and largely devoid of emotionally constructed associations. Likewise, homosexuality has also been vilified in western thought as being incompatible with intimacy and true romantic notions of love. As viewed from a defensive position, the ascribing of homosexual behavior to Africans and people of African descent can be regarded as doubly denying the emotional component of their sexual lives. It is not surprising then the popular view both in Africa and the African Diaspora that homosexuality is seen, as reported by Dynes, 'a "white vice" forced on healthy people to drag them down.'" The whole of Patron's essay is reproduced in 'People with a History' (Fordham University, NY). Yesterday's elections in the Comoros were so boring that even if we duly churned out several hundred words about them, I can't find almost no evidence that they ever happened on the Net. However, I'm delighted to mention a 'Setback for French government as Socialists surge' (AFP/Yahoo): "'This is a rejection of the government's policies..., a rejection of their effects in terms of employment, public services, education, research. In short the French wanted to deliver a serious warning,' said Socialist party leader Francois Hollande." After the second round of polling next weekend, I'll have more to say. Meanwhile, anybody would think that Hollande might have been reading 'Les Inrocks'. The sole contribution I could make to this "rejection of the government's policies", since I've never bothered to acquire dual nationality, was signing that petition I've reported on (the 'Appeal against the War on Intelligence'). Not only does the fight go on, but that document has led to the publication in the press of a mass of material I'm still wading through with the intention of summing it up here. This includes dozens of accounts by people bearing personal testimony to the destruction wreaked on whole sectors of society by the current government's policies of privatisation and other features of Thatcherism revisited. "Oh, that magic feeling Nowhere to go Nowhere to go-ooo" From 'L'écume de mes jours' (illustrated) Worse still, artists and scientists alike have been writing at length of the systematic suppression of creativity, intelligence and vital cultural activity considered to be of no economic value. Most interestingly, the war against such a mercenary approach at the top is no longer being waged merely by the "intellectuals" who sparked off a counter-attack from people in power. A few of the most telling contributions published in the latest issue of 'Les Inrockuptibles' itself, based on people's day to day experience, have been submitted by a medical secretary, a costume designer, an out-of-work actor, a young student of architecture... Some of these "witnesses" make a point of saying they don't think of themselves as intellectuals, but consider that they are in the front line of victims of the government's notions of economic success. Their "evidence" stands alongside that of people like the director of the Théâtre de la Bastille, whose website has gone as far as to publish a separate editorial -- in French -- about 'L'offense faite à la démocratie' (warning, Flash with an irritating sound effect!) Interestingly, a term that appears often in these articles, both on the Internet and in the written press, is "la résistance". Nowhere has the magazine that started all this fuss spoken of a "resistance movement". Instead, this idea is raised by different people from across the country who've begun to explain why they signed or support the petition. On March 4, though 'Libé' has slid a long way towards mediocrity since the paper I remember of the 80s, it gave column space for a reply to Xavier Darcos, junior minister for school education ('Libération'). Darcos makes mention of a "collective project" for society which he alleges forms part of the government's plans. First I've heard of it. The very use of the word "collective" by any member of the current crew of clowns strikes me as an ideological contradiction in terms. "2003/2004, l'année des menteries. 2003/2004, trois chefs d'Etat de trois grands pays ont menti. 2003/2004, Bush-Blair-Aznar. Ainsi vont la vie et le vice." ('mensonge(s) d'état et songes disparates', at davduf) Yes, but we knew that. What about here? Now? In France? The same day in the same paper, Pierre Marcelle was among the first to break the entertaining tale of how the prime minister asked his ghost-writers to start peppering his speeches with "a bit of culture" ('Raffarin et l'intelligence'). It was a dreadful mistake. Even a ham actor could have read those quotes as if he understood what he was saying. It may not be The Revolution. But I'll keep you posted on the Resistance. 4:16:41 PM  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.