[BRIEF NOTE] Lovely transience

As is her wont, matociquala wrote a fantastic post on writing, this one on the importance of real life, of the life experiences of people not at the epicentre of great events.

( Seven paragraphs. )

This, in turn. brought to my mind of a passage from the very end of Derek Jarman's last film, 1993's Blue

Our name will be forgotten
In time
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble.

As a reviewer argued, Jarman recites this last bit "as if this is a good thing, because it allows us to concentrate on our love, which is what really matters. Freed from self-conception as artists, queers, or anything else, we are free to become what only death can make us, human, and hence free to realize the true potential of our estate. Beyond words, beyond names, beyond subject and object." Something interesting can be done with this; doubtless, some things already have been.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Crucial Role of Facts

From an article in the EU Observer discussing the recent conviction of David Irving:

What right can we have to tell Turkey not to prosecute those who question the official view of the Armenian genocide, if we ourselves lock up people who question the facts of the genocide in Europe?

What the author misses is that, in fact, the Armenian genocide did happen just like the Holocaust did. Irving's conviction is almost certainly a mistake, though my sense of schadenfreude means that part of me is pleased that the malicious liar has finally been thrown in jail. Call me a traditionalist, if you will, for believing that what actually happened does have a pronounced and direct relevance to the situations at hand.

Turkey is prosecuting people who say that a genocide happened, because this public statement of the obvious threatens Turkey and gives the victims' survivors and descendants extra angst; Austria is prosecuting people who say that another genocide did not happen, because the public denial of the obvious serves their needs and is a nice knife in the gut to the survivors besides. Find the symmetry there.

[LINK] Two things for your reading list

nhw's review of Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation and kharin's visit to Highgate Cemetery and other Victoriana both instruct and delight.

[META] Right now I have to run

CFTAG approaches. On my return, expect my account of a PEN Canada event at the Toronto Reference Library Friday evening, a venture east to investigate the Scarborough rapid transit line with larkvi, and perhaps even a belated entry on the whole cartoon affair.

[BRIEF NOTE] Some Diasporic Politics

Even as I type, in Toronto's Public Reference Library the local branch of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change is holding a meeting. I wish them luck, but the news doesn't sound good.

[URBAN NOTE] Courting

I was a straphanger last night, riding the Bloor-Danforth line westward to home. I was standing in the back of the back of the car.

Sitting a few seats away from me was a taller man about my age, balding but in good shape. Sitting next to him at an angle was a very attractive woman, her oval face smiling and framed by her highlighted dark hair, wearing a nie cloth coat. She had two grocery bags next to her, the label on a Kellogg's box reading Flocons Givrés through the cheap thin plastic.

"I've moved from Thunder Bay just a month ago," she said to him smiling, "to pursue my dreams of acting and singing." He said something back to her, smiling. They were talking loudly, and I tried not to eavesdrop, but just before the subway came to her stop I did here her say that her name was "Tina, with two 'i's." She waved to him before she left the car quickly.

"She's a keeper, isn't she?" he said to me. I smiled uncomfortably and looked away as he began to write something down on a small notepad that he'd pulled out of his back pocket.

[BRIEF NOTE] CFTAG After-Report

schizmatic's presence anchored a productive three-hour meeting that included, in addition to myself, larkvi, pauldrye and M.

pauldrye brought his complimentary copy of GURPS Traveller- Interstellar Wars for everyone to be rightfully impressed by. It must be fun to add so much interesting stuff to the canon of such a well-established universe. If ever I gamemaster, I'm certain to mine this book for ideas.

Apart from Interstellar Wars, the main theme of the meeting's discussions seemed to focus on how some of the biggest science-fiction franchises (Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Battletech, even Battlestar Galactica to an extent) worked only as set-pieces, that as coherent worlds they tended to fail for a variety of reasons, not least of which is a surfeit of writers.

[BRIEF NOTE] Octavia Butler (1947-2006)

Via james_nicoll, Steven Barnes' report that the great Octavia Butler has died, apparently of a stroke.

I'm ashamed that I haven't read my copy of Lilith's Brood through.

[URBAN NOTE] Beyond Exile: An Evening with Exiled Writers

In the end, I'm almost ashamed to say, it was the presence of former Mr. Governor-General and prominent public philosopher John Ralston Saul as MC for Beyond Exile that made me decide to attend, Friday night at 7 o'clock. Co-hosted by PEN Canada and the Toronto Public Library as part of their Freedom to Read Week, Beyond Exile was presented on a posters as a night when three (named) Canadian journalists would interview three (unnamed) writers who'd received refuge in Canada. This is a noble cause, but I have to say that it was Saul's presence that's a clincher.

The evening was a busy night, Saul introducing the event, pointedly mentioning the empty chair that was left for Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist imprisoned by the Islamic Republic since 2000 before going on to introduce the pairings. First up was Toronto print journalist Haroon Siddiqui, who interviewed Ameera Javeria, a Peshawar-based journalist who with her husband contributed to Pakistan's The Frontier Post and The Friday Times until the publication of an allegedly blasphemous letter in the first newspaper and her relentless exposure of Pakistani honour killings resulted in death threats against her. CBC veteran Christopher Waddell followed with Sheng Xue from China, a writer of poetry and prose who fled China after the 1989 Tiannamen massacre and later became an activist of the Chinese overseas democracy movement. Last was Jian Ghomeshi, who interviewed Iran's fiction and drama writer Reza Baraheni.

The condition of being an exilic writer, installed in a foreign environment far from a dangerous homeland, was explored in these conversations. Of the three interviewees, English-speaking Javeria was best off, feeling at home in a sort of secular, left-wing and academic environment. Sheng Xue, for her part, suffered so severely from culture shock on arriving that it was only after her father's death in 1994 that she could start to write again. Fear, for their lives, their families and friends, and their countries' future was something that all three felt. Baraheni stood out for his remarkable good humour, first demonstrated when Ghomeshi asked him to respond to news reports that Iran was now the country most hated by polled Americans. Each writer read aloud a sample of their work for five minutes or so, Javeria reading the introduction to her unpublished book on honour killings, Sheng her prose elegy to her father, and Baraheni a sample of a dramatic monologue along with an English-language poem.

As I left at 9:30, clutching my Starbucks gift bag including a most excellent autographed copy of PEN Canada's travel anthology Writing Away, I worried. Sheng talked about the intensification of the Chinese government's control over Chinese society, Javaria of the rise of violent religious bigotry in her Pakistan, Baraheni more obliquely about his hopes that there wouldn't be a war over Iran, Ganji of course didn't talk at all. I take full advantage of my rights to freely express myself--in writing, in conversation--and the three writers interviewed do the same in Canada, but our counterparts in those three countries with more than one and a half billion people can't do the same. I know that good things can't come of this, and I think that I will commit myself to PEN Canada somehow. Without sounding trite, I just had the sinking feeling that it may not be enough.

[REVIEW] Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet

Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet, a historical survey of the telegraph from its origins in the optical telegraph of Revolutionary France to the beginning of its eclipse by the telephone in the 1880s, makes a superficially convincing argument that the telegraph fostered a tight-knit culture among mid-19th century telegraphists comparable to contemporary Internet culture. Before the invention of the teleprinter, telegraph operators did constitute a highly-skilled class of information workers with sufficient leisure time as workers to develop a geographically dispersed culture, online relationships resulting in everything from stock market fraud to marriages. Though Standage's analogy stumbles in that telegraph operators always formed a rather smaller minority of the general population than Internet users even in the late 1990s, used critically it does help the reader get a grasp on the way that instantaneous global communications transformed the 19th century world. It's always comforting, somehow, to find out that the new in fact has a tradition somewhere.