Scoot

¶ 2 November 06

I don’t suppose it even needs to be pointed out that my enthusiasm for this weblogging business has near fully waned.

We’ve had a good run but it’s no longer fun. Or useful. And I admit to a certain – perhaps misguided and no doubt ludicrously precocious – nostalgia for a once more intimate web, one with less of a noisy strip joint about it.

So I’m closing up shop to focus on endeavours of more delayed satisfaction, more careful crafting, more in line with where true passions lie.

Great gobs of thanks to all of you who stopped by over the years, and especially to those who made the joint classier with fine eloquence and wit in the comments.

 

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Prototype

¶ 29 October 06

Simply glue a bunch of electromyographic sensors to your face, mouth the words and voilàthereyougovottak!

Not sure why but this gives me the creeps. Maybe because you have to keep a blank face for it to work – erase one of the most natural and revealing forms of expression to be able to communicate with an elementary level vocabulary.

Although, the accompanying article does say that it could help with diplomatic talks – Hello. Hola. Goodameecha ….. Howsthemissus? ….. Yo wassup, man? Arriba hombre? Helloooo? Hola. – and that it’s another positive step towards ridding us of the need for translators.

Obsolete factory workers of the world, I feel your pain.

Comment [25] 

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Oh, come on, we made a few good points.

¶ 9 October 06

Didn’t we?

 

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Disassembling dissent

¶ 3 October 06

A lawsuit has been brought against [Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media”] in July 2006. The indictment demands that publishing house owner Fatih Tas, the editors Ömer Faruk Kurhan and Lütfi Taylan Tosun and the translator Dr. Ender Abadoglu should be punished with a prison sentence from 1.5 to 6 years. They are charged with publicly humiliating Turkish Republic, Turkish Grand National Assembly etc. and inciting hatred and hostilities among the population.

Of course it would be crass to bemoan the lousy translation of a story about translation.

 

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Delegalised

¶ 29 September 06

When I was 10, I had three burning ambitions: 1) to be the best horseback rider, ever 2) to live in the Beverly Hillbillies’ house with this really cute guy named Ben who was on this TV show that nobody else ever wanted to watch but I did because it had horses in it, plus they were being ridden by the really cute guy with curly hair and 3) to be the next F. Lee Bailey.

A few years later, my obsession with horses was being gradually replaced by other less pastoral obsessions, that TV show had long been cancelled and so had my love, but I continued to be insanely fascinated with courtroom drama, and dumb with admiration for the true-hearted men who dazzled and pleaded with juries that right might triumph – even if my hunger for justice would always go right out the window if the outlaw in the movie/TV show/book made me weak in the knees.

I still wanted to be the next F. Lee Bailey, but it was beginning to dawn on me that it had more to do with drama than any great devotion to the Law. And the dream finally died during my one and only time in court. Some guy had stolen my bike (which was really sad because it was a crappy bike), but got caught by my neighbour (which was annoying because he came by every day so I could thank him again for saving my crappy bike) and the two of us were called into court for the day.

I sat in that courtroom for hours and hours, watching a slow and sorry parade of dirt poor men and women being hauled in front of the judge for having stolen stockings from K-mart, being drunk and disorderly, homeless, sad, lost, rock bottomed… feeling all my illusions about the glamour of crime slip away.

Plus I never even got to testify: the guy confessed, got a warning and that was that.

But still I continue to be fascinated by courtroom drama, and always terribly aware of how jury trials seem to come down to who puts on the best show. John Mortimer of Rumpole fame once said that, if you can get a jury to laugh, you’re sure to win your case. I believe it. If you can effectively combine compelling argument with an appeal to raw human sentiment, it’s in the bag.

The other thing that always struck me about trials was the sense that, for a group of people with such power in their hands, the jury’s role in the process seems oddly passive. So I was absolutely fascinated to read Agnieszka Kolakowska’s account of her stint on jury duty in France, and especially this:

… This is perhaps the most immediately striking difference between French and Anglo-Saxon courts: the judge is also a juror, on an equal footing. He knows the dossier, directs the trial and, later, can enlighten the jury on points of law, but he deliberates and votes with them; he has one vote like everyone else, on both the verdict and the sentence. Or one might put it the other way round and say that the jury members are also judges. In the inquisitorial system, the trial – given that the investigation is complete and all the facts are known – is mostly for the jury’s benefit: an occasion to present the facts to us rather than to establish them. If at any point during the trial we want to question the defendant, or a witness, or an expert witness, we pass the judge a note and he will allow us to do so, or (more commonly) ask the question for us; notes flew back and forth during both my trials.

[…] Swarms of lawyers don’t buzz around menacingly during the pre-trial investigation; witnesses – to whom there is supposed to be no access – are not coached until they no longer know what they are saying; juries don’t flounder in a morass of legal issues they don’t understand. And the process is swift: the investigation may take months or even years, but a murder trial can be concluded in three days.

[…] not only are previous convictions admissible in court, but all court appearances, even if they resulted in an acquittal, can be brought up. Thus we were told that our wife-murderer had dispatched his son in a very similar way (by stabbing him repeatedly in the back with a large knife) ten years before he decided to attack his wife: he was acquitted, on grounds of legitimate self-defence. Perhaps this happy outcome encouraged him in the belief that his luck would hold. If so, he was mistaken; we gave him 12 years.

F. Lee Bailey wouldn’t stand a chance. Rumpole maybe.

Comment [1] 

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iPray

¶ 25 September 06

 

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The evils of boredom

¶ 19 September 06

To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an ‘ism’. It is independence of mind – that’s all.

For the past few years, I’ve been increasingly dismayed that Martin Amis had apparently lost his edge; that his second round of hot wife and toddlers had made his wit a bunny-shaped bath sponge, and that never again would we have a chance to be glad with admiration over his thesaurus-like idiolect, the blend of low comedy, sadistic bathos and stunning erudition, his schoolboy fascination with smut, and the one-two punch of an illuminating adjective or adverb placed just so.

There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame – indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. […] Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden – he is ever-living.

But a recent three-part essay in the Guardian on the “age of horrorism” has set things to right. While I may not agree with all his conclusions (nor, clearly, does Pankaj Mishra) it is a stunning piece of writing – and reassuring to find out that the boy’s still got it.

It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. […] The fatal turn was the American President’s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln (‘Mission Accomplished’) – every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too – with a difference. In ‘old’ Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush.

Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. ‘Stuff happens,’ he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad – the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power.

Comment [5] 

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Flights of fancy

¶ 16 September 06

Arguably one of the loveliest inventions of the English language are the collective names for animals:

A shrewdness of apes, an obstinacy of buffalo, a quiver of cobras, a murder of crows, a pietousness of doves, a busyness of ferrets, a charm of finches, a smack of jellyfish, an exultation of larks, an unkindness of ravens, a crash of rhinos, a murmuration of starlings, a lamentation of swans…

The fact that many aren’t commonly used – having been coined in books like Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of England, smiled at then forgotten – is a pity. So damn charming, they warrant being memorised and worked into the conversation as often as possible. What ho, is that a sounder of wild boar coming our way, or is it just your mother’s day to visit?

More curious still is that we haven’t come up with many good collective nouns for people. And so to get the ball rolling:

A bloat of politicians

A giggle of girls

A hush of librarians

An apathy of teens

A resignation of workers

A reverence of geeks

A parliament of drunks

A stare of junkies

A pandemonium of toddlers…

Comment [21] 

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Incendiary

¶ 14 September 06

The fire broke out at around 8 o’clock. The power had been dying on a regular basis for over a week, and someone must have done a bad MacGyver on the fuse box because, around 7.30, it started spitting out sparks. Dull as a sparkler at first so everyone just walked on by as though it were the most natural thing, then it began to work itself into a wonderful frenzy, spewing little gobs of fire faster and faster in all directions and clear across the hall until, woomph, it burst into flames.

This was Leningrad in 1985, where the closest thing to civil engineering I ever saw was two guys pounding the same metal rod sticking up out of the pavement with a log, in between cigarette and vodka breaks, every day for six months. Where you soon learned that things only ever got done within the system that operated below the official infrastructure (everyone was a cab driver and then some for the right price, a lavish meal for six at the poshest hotels could be had for three packs of Marlboroughs, a copy of Vogue and two Rolling Stones tapes got you gourmet treats flown in from Azerbaijan, and everyone knew that Chernenko had died weeks before it was announced in Pravda).

So in a way it was only natural that the Russians in our dorm just went about their business, only dodging the sparks as they walked on by the growing calamity. But this was the middle of winter, where daylight lasted from 10 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon and temperatures got crueller than -30°, so when the power went out in the whole building and the fire began moving beyond the fuse box and into the walls, somebody went to “call” the “fire department”.

About 45 minutes later, five firemen appeared. They ambled up and down the halls, chatting and flirting and telling anyone who pointed out that maybe they should be doing something about the fire that they were waiting for Sergei to show up because, ‘he’s got the hose.’

No-one was panicking or heading outside, drinks were passed round as students milled through the halls making bets on how long before we all burned to a crisp. And the firemen had learned that there were foreigners in the dorm, which could only mean one thing: American cigarettes. So off they went on their quest.

The halls were getting darker and darker with smoke, the only light coming from the growing inferno and occasional flashlight beam, and it was around 10 o’clock, with Sergei still on his way, that I ran into the fireman by the flaming fuse box, unlit Winston hugged between his lips, sparks flying out around him. He shone his flashlight in my face, smiled and said, ‘Got a light?’

 

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Prescient

¶ 10 September 06

Everyone in the overdeveloped world will have the tools they need to create this amazing stuff, whether it be blogs or films or games. None of it will rise to the peaks that we associate with names like Joyce or Proust, but a great deal of it will be fantastic. And there will be so much of it that it will inevitably divide into niches, into small groups devoted to the art that they are making. In a way it’s a fulfilment of the ancient dream. Everyone can have a creative life and a meaningful dialogue with the culture. Everyone will be an artist, but the price is that no one will be a great artist. There will no longer be a place for such a being.
– Thomas de Zengotita, Harper’s September issue

 

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