in Politics
Meeting
I would call it An Avatar at my Table.
This is one of Carl Barber’s works. He makes pictures by introducing cyber people into a photographic scene. See more of them here.
He has an exhibition of his pictures at:-
BLUE BEAN
272 Portobello High St
Edinburgh EH15 2AT
Interest declared – he’s a great friend of mine.
I love a good hoax. A hoax is a scam and a con job, but not the sort when a low-life flogs off expensive energy deals to pensioners. Although some hoaxes have made money, that should not be what a hoax is designed for. Its object should be to make the pretentious and pompous look stupid, to expose the vanity of those in high places. The Emperor’s New Clothes is a satisfying story, but there would be little point to The Peasant’s New Clothes. Hoaxees are gulled for believing what they want to believe, usually something flattering. A hoax is cruel but its victims are not pathetic innocents. You see them as being humiliated as they deserve. Also, a good hoax confirms the prejudices of the on-lookers. They have always known that the hoaxee had it coming to them for their superior airs and crackpot ideas.
Some hoaxes:-
The Sokal Affair. Alan Sokal submitted a paper called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, to the cultural studies journal Social Text. The journal in all seriousness published this paper which among other things stated that “quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct”. The dupes were a bunch of post-modernist pseuds and academics. They looked like posturing idiots and those who had suspected post-modernism was a shack of jargon were full of glee to see this eyesore get trashed.
The Hitler Diaries. This was more of a forgery for gain than pure mischief, but the egg faced and out of pocket were Rupert Murdoch, the editors of The Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek and the German magazine Stern, and the journalist who “discovered” the diaries, the Nazi-obsessive Gerd Heidemann. The Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times said later: ” When such a scoop is offered, you don’t really want to hear anything that would cast doubt on its veracity.” Those of us who regard Rupert Murdoch as being a disgrace to truth and decency were justified by the greedy old despot saying about the affair “After all, we are in the entertainment business.” As a bonus, potential readers, the sort who are creepily fascinated about anything to do with Nazism, were cock-teased as well.
The poems of Ern Malley. A hoax by a couple of Australian litterateurs on the editors of an avant-garde poetry magazine. They concocted an unknown poet called Ern Malley and sent in his poems, which they had written deliberately badly. The poetry magazine ran a special issue celebrating this new important voice in poetry. The victims in this case were those who are overly impressed by literature that is obscure and difficult.
(Kingsley Amis wrote a story on a similar theme called Dear Illusion, about a poet who knowingly writes inept poetry that is lauded by the critics.)
The Dreadnought Hoax. Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury mates pretended to be Abyssinian royalty and were entertained by the Royal Navy on HMS Dreadnought. I don’t think it was that amusing, because I suppose the Navy officers had no choice but to be civil to foreign guests, but the fact that Virginia Woolf did this blacked up, bearded and in drag makes it stand out among hoaxes. The Navy chaps gave the instigator, a poet and constant prankster called Horace de Vere Cole, a token smack with a cane afterwards to satisfy their honour.
Virginia Woolf is at the far left
These days our armed forces have dwindled in size and power so a hoax on them would be silly childishness, whereas a successful hoax on, say, the Daily Mail or Simon Cowell, would delight a chunk of the British public.
The Conquest Letter. I can’t find a link for this but Kingsley Amis recounts it in his Memoirs.
Robert Conquest, another poet and prankster and a distinguished Sovietologist, sent a letter to Philip Larkin marked HMG and stating that Larkin’s collection of pornography was to be investigated by officialdom. Larkin dashed off to his solicitor’s office and spent the whole day hiding there. He later billed Conquest for the solicitor’s time. This event didn’t spoil their friendship. Conquest is a prolific writer and has been married four times. He must have a lot of excess energy.
Philip Larkin wrote (bad) pornography himself, so there seems to be some justice in this hoax.
My sister L. This was not a pure hoax, more of a wind up but L took a snapshot to school of a heart-throb pop-star, sitting right up close and smiling at her. In fact, she had got a picture from a magazine, pinned it up on the garage wall and photographed that. It did look very convincing for those who hadn’t seen her other snaps, where she was inclined to cut off people’s heads, or catch them as blurs in the corner. This was funny and harmless. If she had gone to school and said, for instance, that our mother had cancer, that would have been more in line with the Muchausen syndrome school of hoaxing, that is, unhealthily seeking attention.
Myself. Once as art critic for a kind of Time Out magazine I did a piece of deliberate pretentious nonsense about an exhibition I’d seen – no-one spotted it but then I think no-one read it. The magazine’s editors thought they should cover exhibitions and as everyone else had snaffled the music side they gave that spot to me. I should say I was, and am, fairly indifferent to painting and sculpture. Those who like them should enjoy the Van Meergen hoax. He faked a Vermeer which met an art critic’s theory that Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting. Van Meegeren was happy with this result which confirmed what he had come to think about the Dutch art establishment and then found he could sell a phony Vermeer for a fortune so carried on faking.
The televisual hoaxer Ali G. I can’t stand the unfunny little arse and when he interviewed people who were very polite to him no matter how stupid and crass his questions, I was on their side. I think the real dupes of his hoax were the idiots who found him entertaining.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – all right, drop the jokey tone. The fact that this fraud is taken seriously still as a view of how the world works makes me howl.
So – a good hoax fulfils a victim’s wishful thinking. It’s easy to see why Hamas loves the Protocols, why the Sokal hoaxees believed a real proper physicist endorsed their views about science and why the Australian avant-garde grabbed hold of their very own Dylan Thomas.
The Gay Girl in Damascus is not a classic hoax since it was not created to show up the main dupes, the well-meaning progressives who sympathise with Syrian protesters. The hoaxer Tom MacMaster is pleased with himself for adopting a persona that was so convincing it fooled his readers, but there’s no sense that he’s laughing at them for setting up and signing petitions demanding Amina’s release from a Syrian jail. MacMaster’s idea of wit is sarcastic jeering (common among activists). One thing he does say is that his false blog exposed the “liberal Orientalism” of the west.
Heresy Corner interprets :-
The clue to what he was playing at lies in the phrase “liberal Orientalism”. It’s not clear what liberal orientalism he thought he was exposing – perhaps it was the concern some (but not all) western liberals display for the plight of gay people and women in repressive Islamic societies. A perception which, of course, made “Amina” such a brave and representative heroine. It’s even possible that he was deliberately creating a character who would prove irresistible to Western liberals, someone around whom they could unite – as indeed, for a time, they did.
MacMaster’s own brand of liberal Orientalism, however, seems to have been of a different order – the celebration of an idealised Islamic society characterised above all by tolerance, pluralism and freedom. A picture entirely at odds with the burkhas and beheadings image perpetuated by that other sort of “orientalism” that sees Islam as irredeemably backward and savage. [The whole article is worth reading].
The “liberal orientalism” motive looks like an afterthought. What the Gay Girl resembles is another literary counterfeit, the poems of Ossian. A writer who cannot advance his works by their own merits passes them off as having been written by a more romantic figure. MacMaster used the beautiful lesbian rebel Amina, James MacPherson a druidlike bard called Ossian. Both met the taste of their times. Amina’s protest, authenticity and identity politics are much admired in modern culture. Macpherson’s eighteenth century had developed a new interest in an ancient and native literature. In Scotland this was “heightened by post-1745 nostalgic romanticisation of all things relating to the Highlands,” (the progenitor of today’s tourist industry). Many contemporary Scots passionately wanted to believe in Scotland’s antique literary heritage.
Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes
The Gay Girl is a writer’s hoax – of wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, because MacMaster does believe that his own work is of high quality that just needs a publishing break. He also has strong sympathies with the Syrian uprising and so he coupled a writer’s vanity with the unscrupulousness of a politico who feels justified in lying and forgery for a good cause.
Samuel Johnson was famously sceptical about the Ossian poems which he called “an imposture” and what he said about MacPherson goes for MacMaster, going by this interview:-
stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.
A niche topic, perhaps, but one which takes in some rather good books. Be warned – this post contains quite a few spoilers.
I bought Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna because I enjoy alternative histories focused on Rome. But Judaism is an important, though submerged, strand in the novel, which is really a collection of loosely linked short stories, spanning 1500 years, set in a world in which the Roman Empire never falls and the Exodus from Egypt ended in failure. Silverberg teases the reader by creating quite subtle points of contact with ‘real’ history and also with other literary texts. I won’t give away the book’s conclusion, but the final chapter is very much focused on the Jewish characters, still mostly based in Egypt, and their search for a promised land.
Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos are major sf novels, highly recommended, set in a future world which has been afflicted by the Rubicon virus. This was created by the Global Caliphate who wanted to destroy all Jews – in fact it turned out that it was fatal to all humans – apart, ironically, from the Israelis who managed to discover an antidote. Although I’ve read the novels twice I had to check those details on Wikipedia – for Simmons is a wonderfully inventive writer who plays with a whole range of mind-bending ideas – and the Rubicon virus (which could have been the focus of an entire novel) is actually a comparatively marginal motif.
Illyria, the setting of Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine, has been compared with Israel by several commentators. It’s a secular and rational country in a world which has been taken over by (all forms of) religious fundamentalism. Beckett compares his science fictional interest in edgy barriers between worlds with his attraction to stories about real life conflict zones.
“Even when it comes to the news, I find myself drawn to stories about places like Northern Ireland, or Israel/Palestine, or Cyprus. I’ve also noticed all three of my finished novels – The Holy Machine, Marcher and Dark Eden – involve characters crossing a forbidden frontier. The word ‘Marcher’, in fact, actually means someone who lives in a border area.”
Finally, a novel which a colleague of mine has recently recommended and which is now on my ‘to read’ list, Philip Jose Farmer’s Jesus on Mars. Its premise is the discovery of a colony of (Messianic) Jews on Mars, living according to Jewish law and speaking Hebrew. Some of them are aliens, some human. Sounds intriguing …
Fans of the more innovative and experimental sounds emerging from the contemporary drum & bass scene will find much to enjoy in Doc Scott’s ongoing ‘Future Beats’ series, which can be streamed or downloaded via Soundcloud.
February 2011′s installment includes the fantastic ‘Nine Times‘ by Amit featuring Rani and the purpose of this post is to draw readers’ attention to Amit‘s work.
Creative and genre-defying, while firmly rooted within drum & bass, Amit’s considerable output has brought new sounds into the dance music scene, with his work featuring both South Asian and Middle Eastern musical styles, offering listeners an experience which embodies and illustrates the positive opportunities and benefits that ‘melting pot’ Britain can offer.
Here are a couple of favourites. There are plenty more on YouTube and this mix showcases a variety of his tracks.
I wanted to post a link to Desolation Row but Dylan’s YouTube presence is very minimal. But here is something to watch/listen to and here are the lyrics to Desolation Row – which work (though don’t ask me what they mean) even without the music.
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row.
Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing
He’s getting ready for the show
He’s going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row.
Now Ophelia, she’s ‘neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession’s her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row.
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They’re trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row.
Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains
They’re getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get outa here if you don’t know”
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on ?”
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row.
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke ?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can’t read too good
Dont send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
I have no idea what the answer is to the first question – I was hoping you might have some thoughts. Sometimes I help teach a course on sf and we always hesitate about what text(s) to include after Neuromancer. Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow is certainly a contender, as are several of Dan Simmons’ works. But much of the more recent sf which I’ve particularly enjoyed doesn’t seem to belong squarely in the genre in the same way a text such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End does – many of Stephen Baxter’s novels, for example, are sf/historical hybrids, whereas others, such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, draw on sf themes but always get shelved with literary fiction.
And I thought people might enjoy voting in this poll for the best sci-fi film never made – or moaning about what wasn’t on the list.
This is a guest post by Ben Cohen
“Happy Pay-sack.” Mick Jones’s opening greeting at New York’s Roseland Ballroom, reliably delivered in his South London brogue, won roars of approval from the assembled crowd, many of whom were skipping the second Passover seder to see the original line-up of Big Audio Dynamite in the flesh. As a collage of sampled voices erupted from the stage, I was nudged by the man next to me. “Mick’s Jewish, you know,” he shouted over the first bars of “Medicine Show,” from BAD’s debut album. The undertone of pride in his voice was unmistakable. Kvelling, they call it.
For a short time, it seemed like this gig was going to be all about identity and politics and identity politics. Next up was “Beyond the Pale,” another deeply personal composition in the tradition of earlier Jones tracks like “Stay Free” and “I’m Not Down,” in which he sings about his Russo-Jewish roots. “I’m half Welsh and half Russian,” he explained, by way of an introduction.
Then came a brief interlude when the focus shifted to Libya. Jones told us that he’d done a radio interview earlier in the day. The presenter had asked him why he was supporting Gadhafi. This was, he continued, a shocking accusation that was completely unfounded. To prove his pro-rebel credentials, he dedicated the next number to Omar al Mukhtar, a teacher of the Qu’ran who became the leader of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonization in the early twentieth century. Al Mukhtar, canonized as as the “Lion of the Desert,” had a grandson who was presently, Jones reported, fighting with Libyan rebel forces. Only then did BAD launch into “A Party,” a song originally written as an indictment of South African apartheid.
I was, I must confess, a little bemused at this point. In part, because al Mukhtar’s legacy has been embraced by both Gadhafi and various Islamist currents but not, so far as I know, by purveyors of groove. In the main, because I couldn’t believe that I was contemplating such issues at a BAD gig. While Jones was never a vacuous celebrity type, he was also the one member of The Clash who despised the posturing of ultraleft groups like the Socialist Workers Party and never apologized for his rock star ambitions. Jones, don’t forget, was the man whose petulant love song, “I’m So Bored With YOU,” was hacked by Joe Strummer into the anti-American chant, “I’m So Bored With The YOU-S-A.” And yet, here he was, delivering a political lecture of such complexity that the audience missed their applause cue.
In the event, I’m glad to say that BAD’s performance didn’t descend into a series of isolated songs punctuated by political speeches. Jones has a charm that does not sit well with evangelism, and he knows it. A sleek figure who glides around the stage dressed in a gleaming white shirt and nattily-cut suit, he is first and last a musician, and a brilliant one.
As BAD proved on stage in New York, the key to achieving legendary status is not writing songs that transcend the time in which they are written: after all, the unashamed use of drum machines on BAD’s studio albums locates the group firmly in the mid-to-late 1980s. What really counts is establishing one’s place in the evolution of rock’n'roll. Listening to BAD with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that they were a bridge between the sonic experiments of the later Clash, from “London Calling” through “Sandinista” and “Combat Rock,” and the dance-inflected rock of later acts like Leftfield and The Happy Mondays. The vocal samples, scratching and intense echoes which brand BAD’s sound are evidence, too, of their debt to dub reggae, as well the pioneering hip hop of acts like the Bronx’s Afrika Bambaataa, who fused the elastic rhythms of soul with the rigid, relentless beats of European electronic music.
The sense of history is amplified by watching Jones alongside bassist Leo Williams and keyboard player Don Letts. It was Letts who, more than anyone else, was responsible for introducing the first wave of punk groups to the Jamaican sounds of roots and dub. And it was Letts and Williams who invited Joe Strummer on the night out that resulted in the late Clash frontman writing”(White Man in) Hammersmith Palais.” Speaking of Strummer, he was the invisible man at the BAD gig, the producer of their most accomplished album, “No. 10 Upping Street” (geddit??), which, twenty-five years after its release, accounted for much of their set.
Still, if the night belonged to anyone, it was Mick Jones. At every significant juncture – “C’mon Every Beatbox,” “Bad,” “V-13″ – he wrapped the audience further around his pinkie. By the time BAD climaxed into a joyous rendition of E=MC2, the crowd was in ecstasy. Herein lies Jones’s genius. Like an eternal Bar Mitzvah boy, he wants to create enduring memories. Only the meanest of spirits would chide him for that.
Diana Wynne Jones (16 August 1934 – 26 March 2011) was a writer of fantasy, mostly aimed at older children. I have vivid memories of my first encounter with her work, back in the 1970s, when The Ogre Downstairs was read on Jackanory. The central idea, a chemistry set with conventional chemicals on top, and a second layer of much stranger substances underneath, is a great vehicle for Wynne Jones’ invention and wit. Another, slightly darker, early favourite was Eight Days of Luke, in which David, an orphan who is bullied and neglected by his unpleasant relatives, finds his life transformed when he somehow stumbles upon a spell which summons the engaging yet elusive Luke to his side. David’s loyalties are torn as he slowly begins to really exactly who – and what – Luke is.
But my absolute favourite has to be Charmed Life, which I chose to write about over on normblog as part of his ‘writer’s choice’ s series. This is the story of another orphan boy, Cat, and his bossy older sister Gwendolen, whose adventures really start when they go to live with an old friend of their father’s, the powerful enchanter Chrestomanci. It’s an absolutely delightful book which I reread regularly, and encapsulates that wonderful blend of magic and matter-of-factness which characterises many memorable writers for children – Joan Aiken, Edward Eager and, of course, E. Nesbit.
Although one tends to be most fond of the children’s books one first encountered as a child, I’ve rarely failed to read each new novel as soon as it appeared, and very much enjoyed Enchanted Glass which was published in 2010. Like so many of her books, it builds on a much earlier, well-known story – but I won’t say which one, as the process of finding out is part of the fun.
Diana Wynne Jones received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2007, and will be much missed by her many fans.
The great boogie-woogie artist is dead at 97.
Here he is performing at the youthful age of 91 at the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas.
“I remember the days when I played at chicken fights and your only pay was the dead chicken,” he once told the New York Times. “But now I can’t retire even if I want to. Everybody’s calling me.”
