Gun-Barrel Diplomat

Facebook status debate on unpaid labour

2009-08-06T01:47:00.002+08:00

Iain Marlow... thinks that non-profits are ironic, because they exploit middle and upper middle class first world workers for the peculiarly never-ending poverty of the third world, which they can't figure out how to solve.
Yesterday at 12:17am · Comment · LikeUnlike · View Feedback (17)Hide Feedback (17)

You, Jia Muzhang Muke and Chiara Capraro like this.

Rachel De Lazzer
interesting thought, though they DO at least make a difference by this less than efficient means
Yesterday at 12:33am · Delete

Dariusz Grabka
are you suggesting that middle/upper classes are being impoverished by not-for-profits?
Yesterday at 9:37am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Not really. Merely exploiting. And by doing so, they promote a way of employment that naturally excludes those who can't afford to do unwaged work.
Yesterday at 10:23am · Delete

Chiara Capraro
iain, could not agree more.
Yesterday at 10:25am · Delete

Matthew Beatty
It is unpaid work. So if you can't afford to do it than what does it matter that rich people are promoting it amongst themselves as a way to assuage their guilt for being in that very economic situation which allows them to volunteer? If these positions were paid then it would go to skilled workers (not the poor) and/ or they would be government jobs (Hide! It's socialism!).
Yesterday at 10:58am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Matt, great point. Perhaps the poor, unskilled workers are at least partially unskilled because they never had access to skill-enhancing but unpaid internships? (By this, I don't mean impoverished ghetto residents running Amnesty, but a more lukewarm assertion.)
Yesterday at 11:04am · Delete

Mark Rubenstein
There was an op-ed in the FT about this last week
Yesterday at 11:08am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Yeah, Britain is having a Parliamentary inquiry about the ethics of companies (not just non-profits) using unpaid internships. It's hit the MPs themselves, too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/jan/16/houseofcommons.uk1
Yesterday at 11:21am · Delete

Matthew Beatty
I read about this a bunch while in uni. G.B. Shaw wrote about this quite a bit because he saw all the charity getting in the way of real reform/revolution. All the rich people propped up the glorious inequality just enough to keep it going. In Canada our non-profit sector is huge! Like bigger than manufacturing huge. But I think very little goes to... Read More helping the poor of the developing world. It's more about sewing up some safety net holes -- some might say a job government should be doing. So yes. There's irony all over the place.
Yesterday at 11:23am · Delete

Iain Marlow
From the same article: Some MPs offer a flat fee of £500 a month or pay expenses. One Liberal Democrat, John Hemming, the MP for BirminghamYardley, offered potential interns a bed in his home to ensure students from wider social backgrounds could apply for voluntary posts.

He said that he had since dropped employing interns altogether. "I am aware... Read More that the present system means that only people from wealthy backgrounds or a particular class can take up such offers which is why I offered some accommodation.
Yesterday at 11:23am · Delete

Matthew Beatty
This is the same argument from when they deregulated law school and med school -- goodbye pro bono and medicins sans frontieres.
Yesterday at 11:26am · Delete

Dariusz Grabka
hmm .. i guess i see the mere existence of voluntary labour as quite an advancement of our society. i highly, highly doubt the majority of volunteers are upper-middle-class or higher people. I would suspect the opposite actually: majority of volunteer work is done by the poor, for the poor, to improve conditions of the poor.

in that sense i think it's a myth that these jobs are created to feed our guilt complex - higher awareness, more free time amongst the working class, and capability aren't necessarily responses to guilt ... but a product of better education, higher incomes, etc.

and i'm not too sure that these can be paid positions just by virtue that they're challenging or worthwhile. the value added is very systemically low, but to the poor people that do the volunteering, the local value is very high.... Read More

internships are a different story i guess ... i see them akin to $20k/pa residencies for physicians after med school. :)
Yesterday at 11:33am · Delete

Iain Marlow
Yo Dariusz, You're right that a lot of volunteers within cities, at cook-outs or kitchens or things like that, aren't upper middle class. But we're not really talking about voluntary soup kitchen labour, but the institutionalized habit among NGOs of employing 20-something unwaged workers, who wouldn't be able to afford their internships without some form of inherited wealth.
Yesterday at 12:36pm · Delete

Dariusz Grabka
yeah i'm not familiar with that world at all. though kirsti has been filling me in somewhat. i would guess that if a) they all rely on cheap/free labour b) operating grants from CIDA .. that there are too many NGO's?
Yesterday at 12:58pm · Delete

Iain Marlow
That's, likely, a remarkably accurate assertion.
Yesterday at 1:02pm · Delete

Excerpts from a Xinjiang-dominated diary

2009-07-31T07:54:00.004+08:00

August 3, 2006 - between Beijing and Urumqi

...Still sitting on this train. Everyone's legs are starting to swell and the prostitutes across from me have staked out a spot on the floor with newspapers... The Uighur journalist across from me said I have beautiful eyes and should probably shave and that I look like David Beckham -- farcical -- and I have an extremely large Xinjiangnese gentleman looming over me, patting his swelling thighs and telling me to write. Will do...

August 27, 2008 - Lake Karakul, 200km from Pakistan

I wish I could continue on and leave my scheduled life in tatters. Pakistan will have to wait until I am older and possibly wiser. This lake is beautiful. The sun is going down behind rolling ochre and the white-capped Karakoram peaks are bathing in the glow. There is a Tajik graveyard with a pack of wayward camels. Chinese soldiers are building up the local infrastructure. People mill about... This is a border junction reached via a border city with a border province...

Xinjiang Riots

2009-07-10T00:01:00.002+08:00

How distant my last post looks from today's Xinjiang. I've been watching the violence with fear -- both for the mainly innocent working class Han Chinese, who were also victimized in Tibet; and for the Uighurs who have been swept up in all of this.

It's probably way too early for analysis. But I do have a worry that the Chinese government is allowing foreign media access in such a way that diminishes the true impact of state repression in Xinjiang. The narrative, which originally was "the Uighurs are protesting in the same way as the Tibetans", has swiveled on a pivot and become "Uighurs perpetrate senseless violence against innocent Han Chinese". It seems the local government is permitting access to hospitals and Han Chinese victims, but there is much less reporting on the impact of the violence -- I won't call it senseless -- on Uighurs.

No Uighur in his right mind would talk to the foreign press about Han Chinese mobs, in front of the journalist's government minders. Nor would any sensible Uighur want to give his full name and location, or a detailed description of their plight, in case they should be tracked down by local agents of the PSB and harassed or jailed or executed.

Adam Minter over at Shanghai Scrap has already mentioned the discrepancies between the Tibetan "protest" coverage and that of the Muslim Uighur "riots", noting that the foreign media has less sympathy for the Uighurs, and a total love-on for the Tibetans. To me, this point seems rather banal -- of course they do, the love on for Tibet and the ignorance of Xinjiang has been utterly complete for years, even during the Olympics.

Because of this, the Chinese state's narrative about Uighurs continues unabated, while we would normally report the shit out of the Chinese government's silly attempts to vilify the "Dalai clique". Sigh.

Good luck Xinjiang. My heart goes out to you.

Xinjiang, August 08

2009-02-18T08:22:00.009+08:00

At the end of August, and parts of early September, I took a trip out to Xinjiang, the northwestern-most province in China. It borders Russia in the north, Pakistan in the southwest, Afghanistan and a couple of post-Soviet 'stans to the west, and more or less sits directly north of Tibet. It is a place close to my heart; so close that people often make fun of me for it --- parroting my voice, of course, and elongating the latter syllable like neighbourhood kids used to do my name (Iain) when I was a boy in suburban Ontario.

Nevertheless, it has only became more important to me --- and the way I think about China and its problems --- over the years, despite some of the mundane, travel-related hardships I've occasionally faced there. Originally, when I applied to the School of Oriental and African Studies for my MSc in International Politics, I had proposed to examine how China was interacting, through Xinjiang, with the oil-rich and autocratic Central Asian states to China's west.

Eventually, I decided to extricate myself from that notion. It dawned on me, as any scholar of Xinjiang could tell you, that one needs to speak (and read) numerous languages to do work on the area --- at least Chinese and Russian; Uighur helps, Turkish helps, others help. The area is a confluence of historical civilizations and is hardly Chinese in any case. None of the documents are in English and the first, real academic/general-interest English-language history of Xinjiang was written only in 2007 (by James Millward; it's excellent -- also, Christian Tyler's Wild West China is good, if you're more interested in a more gripping, poetic treatment).

Since I realized I'm not a historian, and that I wouldn't be able to meaningfully advance the debate (as far as any grad student could hope to, anyway), I broadened my interest in I.P. and put forward the idea of a "Chinese cosmopolitanism," based on melding Chinese political history/philosophy and a critical cosmopolitan approach to international political theory (the very, very few who are interested can email me if they want a copy).

I was in Beijing in the summer of 08, staying with gracious friends while researching, conducting interviews, and writing my dissertation. I decided to take a trip out to Xinjiang; I missed the place. My daily dinners of laghman noodles up on Gui Jie food street just weren't cutting it. I managed to get to a few silk road cities, such as Gaochang, that I hadn't had a chance to see (or interest in seeing) the last time I went, when I knew practically nothing about the place.

I also got extremely close to Pakistan (roughly 144 km) on the Karakoram highway, referred to locally (very, very cynically) in CCP parlance as the China-Pakistan Friendship Highway. The views here were exceptionally beautiful: jagged peaks pierced up into the clouds from dry lake beds and there was a general transience about the route that moved me --- literally and emotionally. I want to go back there and cross into Pakistan that way; it's rather romantic, methinks. Also, the region is incredibly important and has stories that need to be told in a different way than we're used to.

That's it for now. I'll try and revamp this blog and keep it as a place of travel and ideas and photography, all as original as possible.

Sarah Palin

2008-09-12T10:56:00.000+08:00

I say we nominate Charlie Gibson as John McCain's VP.

Kung Fu Restaurant

2008-08-15T10:52:00.002+08:00

They presented our chopsticks like weapons. The food -- including Beggar's duck and steamed pumpkin -- was completely haphazard and made up, but was designed to make us more powerful. Theme songs from 80's Kung Fu TV shows played in the background. We ate beneath plastic weapons tied to the walls' wooden lattice work with red string. We drank beer from ceramic bowls.

Kung Fu restaurant! I love Beijing.

Beijing Opening Ceremonies

2008-08-09T17:43:00.003+08:00

----Beijing, Ditan Gong Yuan, PRC.

A bunch of friends and myself sat in Ditan park last night and watched China toast itself into the night with hundreds of fiery explosions; 2,008 drummers in long, red-rimmed white robes; and perhaps most dramatic of all, a tiny, pig-tailed school girl singing in front of 91,000 people.

From where we sat in the park, in central Beijing, we could see the sky turn electric reds and greens above the two jumbotron-ish screens that depicted China's at-times ludicrous festivities.

I'm well aware of the political symbolism inherent in having world leaders show up at the National Stadium as if to pay ancient tribute to China's one-party government. It was a bit unsettling (as James Fallows notes) to have goose-stepping soldiers hoist the flags. (Though: who else; and "Man, did you see how they hoisted the Olympic flag?!") And the camera pans past China's grim-faced leaders (with the notable exception of sparkly-eyed "Grandpa Wen") were an omnipresent reminder of just who has power in China, and what that may mean for the future of all those in this country we love and hold dear.

I was overjoyed, though, to see China celebrate in such a monumental way. For anyone who knows anything about China -- its history, its politics, its heart-warmingly kind people -- and anything of the various diplomatic and military humiliations it has been forced to suffer or forced itself to suffer over the past 100 years, seeing the young Chinese in the park participate in displays of overt nationalism seemed somehow less hollow and jingoistic than I would usually accuse such things of being in the West.

It was amusing, though, to see all the terrible journalism it spawned (though not photojournalism, if you caught The New York Times photographers). Seeing writers try to cram "lavish" and "exuberant" and "extravagant" and "5,000 years of history" and "civilization" and "culture" in a lead sentence with "fireworks" and "despite widespread criticism" and "human rights" was too much for a writer to bear.

Including my second last paragraph, the Games have already birthed some long-winded and polemically subjective passages. Let the Games of overblown prose begin!

"Grandpa" Wen

2008-05-21T15:13:00.002+08:00

In tune with the past two posts, I just figured I'd post one more thing about media, particularly Chinese media. In the essay segment I posted yesterday, I was less clear on one of the overarching "responsibilities" of the Chinese press: to shore up the Party's hegemonic control of the state (one specific way to do this would be to defuse social instability through rooting out corruption).

With the Sichuan earthquake, however, the media have brought the people closer to the party simply by broadcasting and showing Premier Wen Jiabao as a paternalistic, caring leader.

From Sunday's New York Times

“He really loves the common people, and we can see this is not an act,” said Wang Liangen, 72, a retired math teacher from the devastated city of Dujiangyan, who watched last week as the prime minister climbed over the wreckage of a school where hundreds of children were buried. “He has brought the people closer together, and brought the people closer to the government.”

This would be impossible in Burma. It's not in China. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, especially since it must comfort (at least) some people in the earthquake zone (I hesitate to write "victims" here...).

Newspapers and the truth

2008-05-21T05:17:00.003+08:00

From the Atlantic Monthly of January 1922, by Frederick Lewis Allen.

We talk a great deal about the right of of the individual to express his opinions, and somewhat less about the advantage to the community, or the nation, or the world, of determining its collective action after the freest discussion; but we are just beginning to see that it is still more vital that the individual shall be able to form his opinion upon the facts. If these facts are withheld from him or misrepresented to him, his opinion is as valueless as that of a judge who has heard incomplete or false evidence in a case. Though the individual may be at liberty to shout his ideas from the housetops, he is still a slave to illusion; and all the more completely a slave than if he were in bonds, because he fancies that he walks freely in the light.

Chinese media

2008-05-20T16:36:00.002+08:00

This is from today's New York Times

From the moment the earthquake struck on May 12, the Chinese government dispatched soldiers, police officers and rescue workers in the type of mass mobilization expected of the ruling Communist Party. But an unexpected mobilization, prompted partly by unusually vigorous and dramatic coverage of the disaster in the state-run news media, has come from outside official channels. Thousands of Chinese have streamed into the quake region or donated record sums of money in a striking and unscripted public response.

It's weird. I've seen snippets of TV coverage from clips on the web -- a reporter talking excitedly from a helicopter in high speed above the disaster zone, as a PLA soldier tossed boxes of aid relief out the open door -- and it certainly seemed "unusual". Usually, in times of natural disaster, especially if there's been any accusations of official corruption in building strength or cleanup efforts, as there has in the Sichuan earthquake, the CCP will restrain the media and prevent live reports or any detailed reporting.

Most commentators have assumed this is because the party wants to position themselves opposite to the irrational autocracy in Burma. There's likely some truth to that, though it seems to be kicking China while they're facing a tragedy. And, certainly, there has been corruption with regard to the building construction, as there always is in China. (I'm less convinced about not planning for the dam, as even industrialized countries with widespread and efficient state capacity can't plan for everything; and as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been any flooding.)

But the mobilization-via-media proves a point I was making a couple of months ago in an essay I wrote for a class of mine at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), about the role of the Chinese media in China's political process (based on English-language sources only). That although the Chinese media do operate under a degree of state control, they do have a meaningful role to play in Chinese politics and society, although this role will not at all resemble (as yet) Western notions of freedom of the press. Drawing people from across the country to come and volunteer is certainly an accomplishment, though it could also be argued that the Chinese people themselves deserve the credit here, rather than the media.

Here's my (please excuse the "academeze") conclusion:

It’s obvious from considering changes since 1978 that the press has expanded its presence in the lives of citizens and politicians, through both a proliferation of newspapers and the internet’s ability to circumvent geographical limitations to stories. The commercial imperatives introduced by market reforms have significantly expanded the permissibility of discussing political options, and though openness is not at the level it was during the lead up to the Tiananmen tragedy, there is so much intellectual opinion and commentary circulating in papers that some analysts are convinced that they may actually shape the government’s agenda, in both foreign policy settings and in the domestic political order.

As illustrated earlier, the press is still open to overt control by the CCP; yet, as one scholar points out, noting that during the Cultural Revolution Mao said he “could not even publish articles defending his own position”, this may reflect the political factionalism inherent to China’s one-party system , and may be broadly similar to the alliances – and leaked documents – between newspapers in the West and political parties in a liberal democracy.

...everywhere the press is used by politicians for obviously political ends. Two can play at that game, anyway. Citizens can use the press just as much as the state; ordinary people increasingly make up for their lack of participation in the political process by contributing to it through the media – tipping off reporters about systemic abuse in the country’s examination system, for example, thereby trigging a journalistic investigation which received a national government response; or consistently informing journalists about localised environmental abuse.

These changes were unimaginable before 1978, and clearly the role of the press in the political process has expanded to some degree. But is this role meaningful? That depends on who asks the question. Newspapers’ role in Chinese politics is meaningful to the extent that citizens are becoming more engaged in the nation’s decision-making and to the extent journalists have less political restraints.

Even when editors are forced to censor articles, they can be quite open about the process, their reasons, and go to great lengths to right the situation by publishing full accounts elsewhere. But to many Western theorists this is not enough: the role of the press is to check the power of all government, regardless of its level; that China’s media seems either unable or unwilling to do this most of the time is self-evidence for a lack of press freedoms necessary for a meaningful journalistic role in politics. Certainly, one should not hold their breath waiting for front page stories on central government corruption or investigations into officials which have not previously been earmarked by the Party.

The arguments put forward in this paper do not constitute an “Asian values” defence of censorship and authoritarian control of the media. Indeed, such an approach would expect a press that is static over time, which refused to evolve when central authority conceded the political space to do so; further, this approach would deny the occasionally vibrant, aggressive – even revolutionary – fervour with which Chinese journalists attacked politicians. The evidence in this paper points to the opposite: that the Chinese press has evolved and grown bolder despite authoritarian control, and that opportunities – such as market reforms or the pre-Tiananmen liberalisation process – were seized vigorously; further, this paper advances the idea that viewing the Chinese press from the extremes of either “Asian values” or from Western conceptions of democratic press freedoms, actually distorts the Chinese press out of its present political reality, and is unable to evaluate its role in the political process with any sense of objectivity.

But in a wider sense, it is at least partially true in most countries that systemic criticism of governmental structures is limited to small-circulation journals read by an educated, comfortable elite; and that mass-market media usually consist of jingoistic drivel that only masquerades as reportage. The hegemonic trust within China’s news media of its systemic government structures should then be expected, as it is common to most countries. When was the last time the mainstream British press castigated Whitehall for engaging in elections? Have large American newspapers at all hinted they would prefer a more benevolent, anti-interventionist communitarian White House to the Bush Administration? Not in recent memory. And so it is worth considering that Chinese journalists have made – in (John King) Fairbank’s words – “a lot more progress” in the past century than their American colleagues, and that: “If they seem still to have a lot farther to go, consider where they had to start from.”

Bearing in mind that I have only analyzed the news media, and not the mass proliferation of politicized commentary online, and the dissident culture of opinion or guerrilla news-writing for non-official sources (and here the jailing of Hu Jia is certainly an outrage), this all points towards a hopeful trend.

I was at a Press Freedom in Beijing conference in Paris in mid-April, and what seemed apparent to some of the journalist/academics there, as opposed to the democratic activists wanting to trojan-horse freedom of speech in China via foreign broadcasts, was that press freedom in China was getting better, and that it seemed the Olympics (and the accompanying media pressures for domestic journalists) were actually going to be a downward blip on an overall upward trend.

Phrases to go down in history

2008-04-29T00:26:00.002+08:00

A question for any journalist colleagues who read this: Have you ever uttered a question you immediately regretted? Many of mine revolve around speaking to grieving or upset sources by phone from within the newsroom. "How are you doing?" is a typically tactless comment I occasionally, and regrettably, employ. Anyone have their own examples? Email me or post.

Let's hope though, that none of us ever utters something like this (taken from the frontline club's event listing page):

Inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Edward [Behr] went on to write his best-selling memoirs, which became the foreign correspondents’ primer, Anybody Here Been Raped And Speaks English? The title was inspired by a request from a BBC camera crew he allegedly overheard whilst covering fighting in the Congo in 1961.

Celebrity and Class in the United Kingdom

2008-04-10T16:54:00.003+08:00

If there's one thing I despise more than class and caste prejudice, it is unabashed and undeserved worship of celebrity. My distaste for such actions applies more to political and social celebrities than sports heroes, but even then, I merely aim to, as Christopher Hitchens once said, have comments judged on their own merit and not on the merit of those who have spoken them.

With that in mind, its worth noting that London is having a mayoral election on May 1, 2008, and that only two candidates have any hope of winning. The incumbent is Ken Livingstone, a "red" bully known for his bluster and almost incomprehensible levels of corruption (see the Evening Standard on any given day for ample evidence); and the challenger is Boris Johnson, a thuggish buffoon who once collaborated with a convicted fraudster to have a News of the World reporter beaten up by hired goons, according to the Sunday Times.

The whole point of this post is that I have finally come across an interesting opinion piece in the Times that summarizes these two detestable British attributes: class discrimination and celebrity worship; this writer argues that Boris's success despite so many failings exemplifies both (Boris being a pompous Oxford clown and a media quizshow pundit).

So I leave you with this:

Then there is Boris Johnson. The gaiety of nations I understand, but the most entertaining thing about Johnson is when he puts on his serious, solicitous look. Like David Cameron, he is coming to believe in his own sincerity. Servility to celebrity has partially replaced class deference, and the adoring polls suggest that Johnson benefits from both. A Greek grocer I knew put his finger on it. Musing about how Alan Clark imagined relieving himself on the public from his ministerial balcony, he concluded: “The English don't mind being pissed on, so long as it's from a great height.”[Emphasis added]

Of Men and Marlows

2008-04-04T01:40:00.003+08:00

Last week I left the white cliffs of Dover behind me and sailed toward France, our boat chugging out into the English Channel as efficiently as the teenagers on-deck were funneling down cheap lager in anticipation of the England vs. France game in Paris the next day.

My companion -- one Josh Clipperton -- and myself reclined and watched the hooligans scuttle around the boat, racing each other red-faced and wheezing, while we examined the distance between Calais and Dover. It was, we estimated, not terribly far for any invasion force, which explains why the British sunk the French fleet out of precaution during the Second World War.

Our minds were so war-focused because of our mission: to seek out the resting places of our great-grandfathers, both of whom died during the First World War. Josh's mission was more of a pilgrimage, since various members of his family had already paid their respects. Mine was sort of improvised, brought about at the last minute by some quick typing and the discovery that my great-grandfather -- about whom I knew nothing, except that he died in the war, and that my own grandfather never met him -- had his name inscribed on the memorial to the missing at Thiepval. His G-GF fought for the Canadians; mine for the British.

After arriving in France, renting a Citroen, and buying ample supplies of bread, cheese, and wine, we set off across northern France. We found the grave Josh was seeking after a prolonged period of being lost, and then made our way further north to Lille, where we stayed the night. We dined in style at some cheese-oriented restaurant (delightful) and were quizzed by a lonely Frenchman from the south. One of his questions was "Did Canada fight in the First World War?"

Thus armed with the profound realization that war is ultimately futile and that the efforts of our forebears were capable of being utterly forgotten, we headed toward Vimy Ridge -- that ever so famous piece of elevated grass where Canada is said to have become a nation. The memorial was pretty moving. Privately, I felt as if the lily-white, high art-edness of it all sanitized the brutality; but the innumerable carved names of men much better than I silenced my forked, cynical tongue.

The most remarkable thing about Vimy, I thought, wasn't the memorial. It was the fact that after some 90-odd years, the ground is still unsafe to walk on; the grass and copses of trees have grown over the pockmarked ground, but still it erupts. This, and the fact that the countryside surrounding all of the memorials is still the same as it was in 1914, added an eerie background noise to the whole journey. Occasionally, I thought of Afghanistan, and how much blood and conflict its dusty soils has been forced to soak up.

Later in the Afternoon we drove south, towards and past Arras, to see the Thiepval Memorial, where my great-grandfather's name is carved. The Somme was and is synonymous with human carnage, where generals earned their nicknames as meat-grinders and butchers.

Sir Douglas Haig, that ignorant man who presumed a horse could canter into a German machine gun nest and maintain its place in modern warfare beside a tank, "butchered the flower of British youth in the Somme and Flanders without winning a single victory" according to a biographer of MacArthur.

My great-grandfather died at the Somme. I have not done any research to figure out where the Rifle Brigade, of which he was a part, actually fought, but his inscription -- like the 72,000 + names that surround his own -- is for those who were not offered the dignity of a grave. What this means, in macho war speak, is that he was never found: blown apart, buried under the mud, rotted, disintegrated, etc. That, or he simply died in No Man's Land when it was too dangerous to retrieve his body.

I know remarkably little about him or the circumstances in which he died. And I was the first person in my family to see his inscription on the memorial.

When I saw it, I felt melancholy. It was only when my eyes refocused on the names surrounding his, row upon row, column upon column, that I felt true sadness. It grew deeper and more intense when I thought about my own grandfather, who I had the privilege and joy to know. My grandfather was named after his father: Ernest Marlow, hence the "Marlow E." on the Thiepval wall. Before we even walked up to the memorial, we sat on a grassy hill and feasted, offering a toast to my grandfather's memory.

Having seen the memorial, and reflected, we decided to drive into Paris. We slept in the car that night after wandering the streets.

A New Rank

2008-02-14T02:19:00.002+08:00

The man behind the counter called my name. I walked up with a copy of the Times Literary Supplement tucked under my arm.

"Congratulations, Mr. Marlow. You've passed."

"Excellent," I replied.

I now have a G1 Ontario driver's license, and officially join the club of new immigrants and 16-year-old suburban teenagers who are allowed to drive with their mom.

For those of you (Yan) who dearly wanted me to fail so they could make fun of me for the rest of my life: "Suck it." Because now I am officially on my way to not having an anxious feeling in my stomach when I apply for jobs that require a license.

I am also on my way to driving with my mom, which is awesome; especially when I take turns to fast and she white-knuckles the door handle.

News! Opinion?

2008-02-05T01:29:00.001+08:00

As I type the top five articles on the New York Times' Most Popular list are editorials: the first four are columnists, and the fifth is the NYT's editorial blog. Most are about the election. Maureen Dowd's column comes in at seven.

Of the four remaining articles only one is election news.

Translated into slightly bigger picture, this means: People are being told what to think about the election. Or, slightly more accurately, people are choosing to be told about the election.

That's somewhat discomforting. We all know media spin the primaries out of proportion and everyone always complains about the media going over the top with election coverage.

But here is (arguably) the most well-read segment of the United States, tuning into a (n arguably) national newspaper and choosing to abstain from facts to pursue opinion. Discomforting? Its likely dangerous.

Sigh.

Iain's journal, July 28, 2006, West Beijing train station

2007-12-17T10:09:00.001+08:00

The thunder and crack of
a broken dusk herald
o brazen horizons!
Tomorrow I shall
wake in another city.

London, a little bit later

2007-11-27T00:51:00.000+08:00

That isn't London. It's Cornwall, where I was this past week.

I have no idea why I've chosen today to relaunch my attempts at blogging. After not doing work for practically a week (with the exception of reading and plotting and writing subheadings), my three essays are looming down upon my skull with intense pressure.

Pressure for a post-grad student, that is, which means essentially that between eating, showing up in class with a gaggle of awkward, sweater-wearing, bourgeois dilettantes, and discussing complex political theories with no real world application, I have begun fretting about essay due dates, which were created out of thin air by professors in a discipline to which I voluntarily -- nay, quite deliberately -- joined. (And post-grads speaking of poverty, and high tuition prices, is also quite bullshit; no one in dire straights ever goes, "Hey. I know what will lift me out of poverty: A degree in International Politics.")

I hesitate to think that this is an update of any kind, but in case anyone was wondering, London is great.

I have a few habits:

1) Jogging along Regent's canal, dodging bikers and sojourners and misshapen path stones.
2) Walking through Bloomsbury, looking up through the trees at the ornate fixtures on all the ancient (compared to Toronto) buildings.
3) Eating dumplings and lamb (these are not unique to London, but forged in Ottawa)
4) Strolling around London like I own the place, and turning a stiff upper nose to pre-adolescents posing in front of red phone booths on Tavistock Street, near Russell Square.
5) Reading the Sunday papers, notably: The Observer, The Sunday Times, and the FT Weekend. (These are all available in Canada, but they don't come with the plethora of goodies and they're about 3x more expensive. The Observer once came with chocolate!)

That is all. I'll leave you all with one last picture of Cornwall's coast.

Londontown

2007-09-30T23:29:00.000+08:00

It's hard to call this city beautiful when the imposing nature of all its buildings seems so deliberate. At night, and especially just before dark falls, the architecture of old London seems especially designed to belittle its inhabitants -- a feeling, I suppose, we all come here for, in part.

It smacks, quite obviously, of Rome; of empires and colonies. It's bizarre that I somehow have seen two colonies before I really saw the motherland.

(My mother will point out that this is not true: I came here when I was about nine. She would also point out that it is useless taking kids anywhere before they are nine, should they be as bratty and ignorant as the two Canadian Marlows.)

And so my frames of reference are somewhat skewed, or screwed. Does London resemble Bombay? Does it bear resemblance to colonial Shanghai? Yeah, I suppose; but I'm missing the point.

So far this city is vast and confusing, yet strangely welcoming. I love, first, how many newspapers abound here and how there is such intense competition between them.

I love also the tragedy of the megalopolis: the old woman being put into an ambulance with no family or friends around, who must have called 911 herself (or whatever it is here; I suppose I should find out).

And the snippets of conversation like the one I heard two nights ago are surreal:

"It's down the street... Oh, er, I suppose I should show you."

"Oh, no. Don't worry. This is my friend's guide dog."

I have arrived and, like usual, I'm not being completely forthcoming. I've resolved to work on that.

(Photographs by me, for Carlos/Joe)

Iain's journal, May 13, 2006; Ahmedabad to Bombay

2007-06-19T06:12:00.000+08:00

Bombay comes alive before me -- with trees of molten orange and rivers clogged with the refuse of the impoverished. The slums are endless. It is almost as if the train's front car is forever rolling out in front of us a carpet of palm trees, slums, and vibrant colours; of garbage-clogged streams and beggars; of slum cricket matches played with cracked pieces of tubing; of a past and present united in confused, exuberant failure; the arrows of clock towers falling forward as the traditional gauges of prosperity slip into the outskirts where they are mugged for pocket change and left knifed in a ditch.
-30-

Leaving

2007-04-22T10:05:00.000+08:00

Today I left Ottawa, after four years and a degree. Good friends saw me off; some shook my hands, some patted my back in one of those hand-shake-hugs, others full out hugged, some offered meek goodbyes and sarcastic but truthful "Have a good life," comments; some cried and made me feel good for them doing it.

Since Wednesday my brother had been up, and we had been drinking in the afternoons and eating at Wing's and Philly's, a dinner that has a cute small Indian girl as a waitress who, in the past 3 days in a row that we've been there, has memorized what I was always about to order.

I had become, in my three last days there, a regular. I haven't really ever been a regular anywhere, except possibly that small restaurant in Beijing near my apartment that I used to write in.

I'm going to miss Ottawa. I used to always feel torn between Ottawa and Toronto, thinking I had a home in both places. I eventually learned that I had a life in Ottawa but no home; and a home and life in Ottawa; this makes it hard to leave.

It didn't help that I was driven home - by my dad - at sunset, while CBC Radio played an Earth Day special with songs like, What a wonderful world, and REM's It's the end of the world as we know it.

Regardless. People I care about know how I feel, and how I will see them still; I also suppose they all know that all this hasn't hit me yet, and that I'll try really hard not to let it.

Aug. 5 - 8:38 a.m., Yinning, Xinjiang Province, China

2007-04-15T07:21:00.000+08:00

Arrived in Yinning by bus and discovered a pile of rubble where the internet cafe is meant to be, which is somewhat good because tonight I'll be sleeping in a tent and something is unusual about using the internet and a tent in the same day.

Near Lake Sayram

I'm now eating a large leek/egg dumpling and a steaming bowl of niu nai (hot soy milk) -- which is reminding me of Tibet, if not for the 20-odd women doing taiji (tai chi) with swords over at the next building. A young Kazakh family, veiled and shy, just arrived at this outdoor eatery. Just now, a small Kazakh (I think) boy sat down at my table and is eating mutton dumplings.

My bus ticket to Bole is for 10:50 a.m., which means I'll get to "around" Lake Sayram before 4 p.m., hopefully -- one never knows this far from Beijing. But of course, this far from Beijing you can see the stars; last night in particular, as I woke several times on the overnight bus to see a gorgeous sky laid out, through the window, above me -- gleaming as if to remind me how long it had been since we last met. I think, maybe, it's been a year; since Tibet, I doubt I've seen that many stars, which I suppose makes sense.

Since Tibet also, I doubt I've had a beard this big -- which is funny because it's deliberate: I could have shaved in Beijing, but I hate shaving anyway.

My beard, circa August 2006

I suppose Xinjiang may be some elaborate ploy to grow a beard.

Regardless, Yinning does feel like a border town, but that might be because I'm by the bus station. Everything I write about Xinjiang requires an end of sentence qualifier because of my own ignorance.

Chinese restaurants and stores have popped up all over the place -- I wonder what places they came from that to them Yinning is a big city of wonder. I bet to them, Beijing and Shanghai carry the same sort of weight as NYC must to a small boy from Alabama.

Two men just read that (lines pointing to NYC) over my shoulder; maybe they just want my table? Ha!

Urumqi, actually, not Yinning.

I keep forgetting to mention that for the past few days I feel that I have resembled a bizarre traveller from eras gone by. I'm decked out in brown breeches (rolled up), a tucked in wife beater (sleeveless white shirt, expressed unfortunately) that's too big for me, tied in with a black belt, and a plaid short sleeve shirt; my feet are filthy and so are my nails, I'm unshaven and haven't washed my hair (rain not included) for a week. For a boy from a Southern Ontario suburb, that's not half-bad.

And when I started this second bowl of milk there were three bugs; there is now one, floating on top; floating like me, but dead.

The Uighur man across from me now, has about four or five crow's feet on either eye, stretching about an inch and a half each -- but they look like they're from squinting, not smiling.

Earlier, I saw a Uighur woman -- or an old, weird Chinese -- walking in a pink great coat and cowboy boots. A Uighur man just walked by hobbling, holding a bulge coming out of his left knee with his right hand, and walking on the toes of his damaged foot -- I believe he was holding in a broken bone, afraid it would burst out his knee.

Censorship Today?

2007-04-12T11:03:00.000+08:00

...[T]he notion that news simply reflects raw events seems almost quaint -- on par with the belief that politicians just represent the voters who elect them, or that the free market gives people what they deserve.

- The Missing News, Hackett & Gruneau (2000)

Turn Off Your TV?

2007-03-28T06:02:00.000+08:00

I saw this tidbit of info on the Canadian Association of Journalists listserv, but I thought I would reproduce it here. It's particularly relevant given my recent hate-on for CBC's The Hour and for excuses made its name, such as "At least it's getting people involved with politics."

From Statcan:

The study found that the level of political engagement Canadians report is influenced by their frequency of news consumption and the choices they make from the media sources available to them.

Frequent followers of the news participate in more political activities. But the GSS data show that the media that people select does influence participation in non-voting political activities.

Those frequent users who chose only television tended to participate in fewer non-voting political activities. In fact, in terms of their involvement, people who used television as their only source of news closely mirrored those who did not follow the news at all.

This finding supports previous US research that lower rates of political participation are associated with using television as the only source of news.

One Step Ahead; Time to Contemplate

2007-03-26T04:02:00.000+08:00

The above picture is one I took of a monkey fleeing a pack of pariah hounds in Udaipur, India. The picture below is of a different monkey, in the same place, taking time to reflect on life and look cool.

Given that this monkey is, at almost all times, in danger of being run down by hounds and torn to lavish tatters, yet still manages to find time to relax, chill out, and contemplate the larger things in life (presumably), I think it might not be that hard for us to do the same type of thinking despite life's stresses.

A Poem

2007-03-25T11:02:00.000+08:00

The following is a poem by my favourite Chinese poet, Li Bai.

He is the only Chinese poet I really know, but he is loved by me for dying while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in a pond, in which he was floating alone in a boat while drinking.

He is commemorated on a fan that I display to Bay Street in my window in Ottawa; a fan hand-painted by a very bizarre man in a public park near Duolun Lu in Shanghai.

花間一壺酒。 Among flowers with a pot of liquor;
獨酌無相親。 I pour alone but with no friend at hand;
舉杯邀明月。 So I lift the cup to invite the shining moon;
對影成三人。 Along with my shadow, a fellowship of three.

月既不解飲。 The moon understands not the art of drinking;
影徒隨我身。 The shadow gingerly follows my movements;
暫伴月將影。 Still I make the moon and the shadow my company;
行樂須及春。 To enjoy the springtime before it's too late.

我歌月徘徊。 The moon lingers while I am singing;
我舞影零亂。 The shadow scatters while I am dancing;
醒時同交歡。 We share the cheers of delight when sober;
醉後各分散。 We separate our ways after getting drunk;
永結無情遊。 Forever will we keep this unfettered friendship;
相期邈雲漢。 Til we meet again far in the Milky Way.

The Things We Forget

2007-03-22T11:13:00.000+08:00

For a while now, I had forgotten a lot of the original reasons I wanted to do journalism; things that only pop up when I'm laying the rhetoric on thick in conversations about what journalism should and shouldn't be.

I saw this Marc Kelley CBC piece on homelessness tonight. It was good. I usually criticize the CBC for being too status quo and provincial -- of lacking depth and purpose, of providing comfortable middle class Canadians with conversation pieces. But tonight's was brilliant. It's what journalism should be, in a way.

And then, of all things, I throw on the Amandla soundtrack, which is about revolutionary music and its role in shaking the foundations of Apartheid South Africa.

Which brings me, in perhaps the most ludicrously positive post ever, to Kiva. I read about it in Foreign Policy and it looks incredible. It can transform you into a microcredit lender. I'm going to try it out soon enough (I have my eye on a pretty lady from Tajikistan).

The Canadian Newspapers; why I love journalism

2007-01-29T07:31:00.000+08:00

I'm reading a book called Canadian Newspapers, The Inside Story, which was edited together by some old journalist named Walter Stewart. It's hilariously stuffy and was published in 1980, just as a slew of interesting (mainly terrible) things were happening to Canadian journalism.

The people who wrote, in 1980, of their careers and time at various Canadian papers are ridiculous. Here is one excerpt, for my journalist friends, from its section on the Globe and Mail:

At one point in the sixties, the Globe was the only paper in Toronto, perhaps the only one outside Singapore, whose police reporter was augmenting his income by smuggling drugs into the country from Africa. He and a deskman in the "Report on Business" brought the dope in from Kenya, hidden inside African lampstands. They weren't very good at it. They were arrested one night shortly before deadline by a bunch of Mounties and city cops wearing hockey windbreakers.

Don't we all, though?

2007-01-21T07:20:00.000+08:00

I have wishes of a simple nature.

I yearn to be shoeless, barefoot and bribing a uniformed officer in a small, garbage-strewn railway station between provincial towns in northern India; leaves blowing across the platform and swirling around the stumps of legless beggars; bound for Varanasi, and without baggage, I would have no tickets and no friends; nothing but the money in pockets torn ragged and the sand in my hair.

Saying "Namaste," a young boy would slide across the floor to where I sat, cross-legged and contemplating the beauty of the dung-cake huts that flitted past the windows, arraying themselves chronologically in my memory; stirred at stops I would be, by small cups of chai in chipped clay cups, dutifully thrown through the window's bars and onto the tracks - collected as the train hissed out into the dusk by leperous shadows wrapped in bandages and sadness; with Varanasi on the horizon; its glimmering lights and boats with candles and lanterns; its burning bodies and tearful widows, with eyeless tourists struck with fever wandering aimlessly like zombies among the funeral pyres, having their pockets picked and their hamstrings sliced asunder.

I miss much of what I have seen in this world and desire very much to lose myself again in its utterly joyous madness.

The Boy in the Newsroom, an excerpt from An Awkward Love Blossoms

2007-01-20T08:17:00.000+08:00

"He collected nothing of interest, read books of no controversy and formed opinions and wrote articles that nobody remembered, quoted, laughed at, or even read through; to all of this, he was oblivious; he was self-content in the way that people who don’t think too hard often find themselves."

- Iain Marlow

On Happiness

2007-01-04T14:37:00.000+08:00

Happiness is not necessarily the companion of modern sanitation and the vote, nor is honesty necessarily to be got from listening to radio or reading the daily newspaper.

- in Gorkha: The Story of the Gurkhas of Nepal, by Francis Tuker

Harper's Gowned Grandstand

2006-11-25T02:10:00.000+08:00

Harper’s Gowned Grandstand
By Iain Marlow

Stephen Harper, a man who called human rights commissions an act of totalitarianism in 1999, has been considered tough on human rights of late.

The country with which he has been tough is China – a country that by some estimates has lifted 300,000,000 people out of poverty in the past few decades.

The reality is that Harper has not been tough on human rights at all.

He has simply tried to cement his image as a no-nonsense, straight talker, and he has succeeded. The dichotomy is not, as critics have asserted, between human rights and trade. The real divide is between frivolous moral posturing and an honest, realistic pursuit of human rights in China.

Because of Harper’s toughness, it is presumed, the Chinese president saucily refused to meet him. Harper got his meeting – granted, first with Vietnam – and denounced religious persecution and lack of press freedoms.

It is unknown whether Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung asked Harper about gay marriage and Canada’s parliamentary press gallery. Regardless, Harper had his warm up round.

The media back home rallied in his corner, and emblazoned their newspapers with cries of people before profit, morality before trade. Journalists actually printed the phrase “not selling out to the almighty dollar.” This should have been the first sign something was being staged.

Canada’s PM met with Chinese President Hu Jintao behind closed doors. We have been told it was a very frank discussion, and that the Chinese clearly did not expect this sort of frankness from Canada – a country as roundabout as it is large.

But buried in all these articles – as it is in this one – is the quiet Liu Jianchao, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman who said the meeting was brief and human rights were not discussed.

Canadians have ignored him because we are kidding ourselves into a punching-above-our-weight euphoria.

Harper did raise the case of Huseyin Celil, the Chinese-Canadian tossed from Uzbekistan deep into the bowels of China’s famously gulag-like prison system. He did so, however, not because of human rights – but because it was a consular case.

He did save Celil from a death sentence, apparently. For this we should rejoice. But Celil is a Uyghur. Talking about Celil in the context of human rights would involve discussing China’s brutally repressive crackdown on the Muslim minority of which he is a part. Hundreds upon hundreds of Uyghurs have been sentenced to death since the late 1990s – in what clearly has been a profoundly racist and deeply repressive abuse of human rights.

Harper has not discussed this. They do not, unfortunately, hold Canadian passports like Celil.

The media and Harper’s handlers have framed the recent tough stance on China in a misleading context, one that points to this as a continuation of policy. This is false.

Peter MacKay said the Chinese engaged in industrial espionage. What has that do with human rights? Monte Solberg also granted an honorary Canadian citizenship to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader-in-exile. But let us be honest.

The Dalai Lama is to ethnic minority struggle what Bono is to poverty. Both are good and needed, perhaps, but the Conservatives who granted him citizenship are as self-serving as the Liberals who brought Bono to their convention.

Praising the Dalai Lama, like hugging Bono, does not promote human rights. These are photo-ops, not moral platforms from which to launch abuse.

Harper has managed, incredibly, to put his chest before his stomach on this issue. He has acted in Vietnam like a diplomatic cowboy. This is quite un-Asian, and must have been unbecoming to the Chinese.

It is off-putting back home, too, to those of us in Canada who care deeply about China and its people, who want realistic dialogue and progress on human rights issues in that country. We also resent leaders who play politics with human lives, and those who cast a vibrant nation of 1.3 billion people as some monolithic, Stalinist cesspool of organ harvesting.

The bitterest part of all this, is that the only people crying out against Harper are doing so in the name of trade. Doing this takes guts, because it is so morally bankrupt that it is painful to watch.

Canada needs to be frank with itself first – and with China later. We need to start a sensible dialogue about human rights, and this requires an acknowledgement of our shriveled carrots and sticks.

Canada should talk about coalitions with moral allies. It must discuss trade rules with moral dimensions and legislative teeth. Our government should tackle the human rights-detesting corporate sector, in our country and in others, and join efforts to promote ethical corporate behaviour abroad.

Making these intellectually honest steps towards Chinese human rights requires more courage than making diplomatic asides, because it is actually within our power. Taking on China alone is not. This fact has been lost on too many.

- 30 -

Anti-theism is cooler than you

2006-11-18T02:37:00.000+08:00

"Those who believe it is possible to lead an ethical life without religion, who are agnostic or atheist, who believe in the separation of church and state must learn to fight back."

"We too have strong convictions, we too can be offended, insulted and annoyed, and we have to say we're not going to put up with it. Our opinions must be taken into account."

"I'm fed up being told that one mustn't upset the feelings of the God-believing. They keep saying their 'kingdom' is not of this world. Well, let them stick to that."

Christopher Hitchens, quoted in the Toronto Star, Nov. 19/2005, by Lynda Hurst

China snubs Canada?

2006-11-15T11:45:00.000+08:00

Apparently China is "snubbing" Canada. The first thing that pops to mind is who exactly isn't snubbing Canada and why we should care considering everybody snubs us -- for every conceivably good reason.

This time, though, the reason is bizarre: human rights.

Yes, apparently Stephen Harper is too tough on human rights to meet with his Chinese "counterpart" (as if they are close to equal in any sense) Hu Jintao. When exactly Harper has stood up for the rights of anyone is somewhat beyond me.

Actually, he wants to talk about the case of Huseyin Celil, a Uighur-Canadian who was arrested in China. The Chinese government refuses to recognize his Canadian citizenship.

In other words, it's not a human rights case at all. It's a consular case. The government is fronting "to care" because, technically, it has to. Another blow for the "universality" of human rights -- this cosmopolitan moral order of ours.

I first heard about this when I was in Turpan, on a payphone speaking to my mother; in a dusty street. I was outside some kind of strange hardware store and had with me bags of various fruit.

The plight of these people is important, but while we negotiate (or in this case, fail to even talk to someone about) his rights, lets perhaps bring up the widespread repression the people in that region (Xinjiang) suffer.

An Open Letter to the Ottawa Citizen

2006-11-04T06:20:00.000+08:00

Dear Scott Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Ottawa Citizen.

As you no doubt know, Carleton's president circulated an email encouraging students to respond to your paper's label of Carleton as "Last Chance U." As a senior student in the journalism program there, I have several problems with both him and your paper's coverage.

First, papers are free to print what they like; they should not be publicly backhanded by someone like Atkinson, who has reacted by treating his student body like an army of letter writing gremlins.

Second, your reporter should know that Last Chance U can be applied to almost any school, and is regularly; Carleton is not its sole bearer. To assume it is suggests an agenda on the Citizen's part.

Third, your paper did not declare its conflict of interest. You have a direct connection to the school through an apprenticeship program. I can see why you would not want to point this out in an article bashing the school -- having its grads and students among your staff -- but your readers might be interested.

Fourth, the Maclean's rankings are not God-like. The "comprehensive" ranking is just that, and is the opposite of discriminating.

Is Guelph better than U of T? No. Is Carleton's journalism program more prestigious than, say, Waterloo's English program? Yes. Does your article have nuance or balance? No.
--
Iain Marlow
Fourth-year, Journalism and Human Rights,
Carleton University

Let Us Drink to the Apocalypse

2006-11-04T05:15:00.000+08:00

So in Beijing’s lantern-lit alleyways, beneath garish awnings, friends and I raise paper cups of cheap Chinese beer and drink to the unreasonableness of the world; we cast playful, animated shadows with our rhetoric. We joke about the missiles this country aims at Taiwan, even as our friends in that country run frantically under the white noise of preparatory air raid sirens. In this vacuum of terror, we laugh at it all.

In No Particular Defiance

2006-10-25T11:21:00.000+08:00

This poem is from

A series of poems from and about the Chinese restaurant beside my apartment, By Iain Marlow

In No Particular Defiance

This end of an urban tempest,
A respite, amid blighted towers
Where illegalities and culture thrive,
A young woman de-skins peas.

In the restaurant of her family,
The whole world: Encompassed,
In noodles, vegetables, pork, and beer.

The mother, cropped, short hair and
Smiling – beckons, half-frantically,
Table # 4 is low on rice,
And with thinning patience, to boot.

Father the cook, and son the –
Apprentice – swish eggs and
Fish and peanuts, and dart out
Into the alley outside, for

Ingredients: new amidst old, over and
Over, and still – she de-skins peas.
As homework sits, perhaps, un-started –
But who knows, but she’s not fast

Enough for her father, though the
Restaurant is nearly empty,
And gusts of humanity blow,
Past the door; some enter and

Some live onwards – in no particular defiance.

Now she sits, elbows on table
Staring: Blankly – into
An uncertain future, but more likely
Thinking of a boy, cute, with

Cropped hair – like her mother.

We're on a train bound for somewhere

2006-10-23T11:12:00.000+08:00

It is useful, sometimes, to drink oneself beneath shallow ideals and political correctness and into depths where we lay opinions naked, ugly and shivering, as they most often should be; where we must speak unashamed and honestly, remembering to laugh and lament in equal measure, with no masturbatory, climactic conclusion. (No conversation must reach a conclusion; this is a puerile fallacy.)

Is this footage (of Tibetans being murdered) real?

2006-10-16T10:13:00.000+08:00

Please judge this for yourself.

A friend of mine sent me the link. It was originally, as far as we can tell, posted to Lian Yue's Eighth Continent, the blog of a freelancer and contributer to Guangzhou's Southern Metropolis Daily.

It could quite clearly be a hoax and an attempt to embarrass Chinese authorities. I am unaware if this has been made available to human rights lawyers or relevant NGOs or the UN, though I assume it has not.

That is one reason I am skeptical: Why would some relatively unknown news organization try to scoop the world with this, instead of handing it over to the proper authorities?

They must realize that by itself, on that website, it carries little credibility. Especially since the figures in the video - of the Chinese soldiers, and the supposedely shot Tibetans - could be actors.

Who knows? I'm doing my part by posting it. And again, please judge for yourself.

Xinjiang Beckons

2006-10-11T09:39:00.000+08:00

As we passed under the Drum Tower a small troop of cavalry came jingling towards us through the press of people. They were armed with carbines and executioners' swords, and their huge black fur hats gave them a demoniacal look. In their midst, hunched in his saddle, rode a prisoner, a burly European with a fair beard. As they passed us he raised his eyes; they were far from philosophical. 'Caput!' he said with a grimace, and went clattering out of our ken.

I wondered how soon we should have to echo him.

Peter Fleming, News From Tartary, 1936

Why TV news is dangerous: CBC on North Korea

2006-10-10T10:29:00.000+08:00

Or, CBC reports on the North Korean nuclear test. This batch of reports was dangerously misleading.

First, the experts. A British-sounding intellectual in a library who could barely get his point across; merely working at an organization with "institute for" or "center of" or "strategic studies" in its name does not qualify one for a discussion of highly specific regional security issues.

And the Green Peace guy? He was worried some countries might consider military options. What? Pardon? Invade North Korea, eh? Thanks for your insight Mr. Peace, but the United States - last time I checked - invaded Iraq instead of North Korea because they already decided 10,000 burning embers with spines lighting up the Demilitarized Zone is bad for reelection. Oh, and for the people of Seoul - who would most certainly be (instantly) liquified or vaporized or gassed or melted.

No one is talking of a military response. No one sane, or in other words, no one who should be listened to or quoted in the national news.

Mr. Peace has pleaded for diplomatic negotiations. We should all thank him. For he had advocated the policy of the entire world, for time immemorial. We should also thank the CBC (icily, and with language dripping disdain) who gave him airtime.

We should also thank the CBC for including the Korean community in their report; this was almost as awkward as their constant attempts to appeal to younger viewers with good looking boys. They interviewed people for whom English is obviously a second language, and instead of providing voiceovers for obviously concerned individuals, they quoted them in English. South Koreans, when they want to hear South Koreans be intelligent, go to South Korean news websites in Korean. If they care about what South Korean-Canadians have to say, they would probably want to hear it in Korean. No one, especially South Koreans, want to hear or see Koreans struggling with a second language.

Also, and possibly finally: Everyone knows North Korea has nuclear weapons. This was a test of something - something we most certainly knew they already had. Let us get past the shock value of its "hard newsness" and get to the proper debate - a debate the mainstream media should already have been engaged in: What do we do? And please, can we not hear from Green Peace on this one?

Perhaps the CBC should join - or give voice to, perhaps - the individuals who have been having an informed discussion on North Korea for the past couple of decades. Robert D. Kaplan wrote a good cover story for October's The Atlantic Monthly on North Korea. Go to the SOAS at the University of London (CBC does have a London bureau). Interview Jasper Becker, a longtime China correspondent and author of a book on North Korea.

Instead, Canadians get inarticulate non-experts, un-voice'd over South Korean immigrants, and bad journalism from uninformed journalists, such as an inane monologue from Adrienne Arsenault, and an intensely bored Patrick Brown of CBC's Beijing bureau, who, of all the things he could say or be scripted to be asked to say, ends up telling us that North Korea is, quote, "isolated."

Thanks, CBC. I'm not joking with this next statement. I saw a better report on this from the A-channel.

A sunset!

2006-10-09T04:20:00.000+08:00

She was more alive than anything around her, and her aliveness distorted the oil derricks behind her and the Sevo octopus and the dingy esplanade and the Turkish bumper cars, and that made it all real and lovely and true.

Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

I got drunk in good company last night. We listened to folk music from Okinawa and then went down to the beach. The day before, I went fishing with my father and walked the dog with my mother. This picture is at a mosque in Delhi.

Adventure and I

2006-10-04T11:28:00.000+08:00

"All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the world - those who stay at home and those who do not. The second are the more interesting."

Rudyard Kipling

I want and miss adventure with heart-bursting sincerity. Again, I want to laugh in another language

How to make a documentary about China: 10 steps

2006-10-02T10:45:00.000+08:00

1. Reject all semblance of nuance.

2. Have ominous drum music rumbling in the background when talking about population.

3. Have ominous drum music rumbling in the background when talking about population control.

4. Find someone young, an only child, perhaps, who is training for the Olympics. Profile them as personified national ambition. Film the parents loving their child.

5. Find someone old, preferably an artisan, and talk about how terrible the cultural revolution was for them.

6. Film in a location in the middle of the mountains, and then film Shanghai, and use a voice-over going "...but not on this side of the country..."

7. Film affluent people, and then pan to another section of the city, "...where Xiao Wang is not as fortunate. He eats vegetables and rice, unable to afford the al fresco dining of his co-citizens..."

8. Film a monk for a bit, and talk about martial arts and tradition. And how he's worried that the next generation doesn't care.

9. Take all this, slather on generous helpings of "lack of context," and serve with the last item on this list:

10. The ridiculous and widely held assumption that people in China and China itself have nothing in common with the rest of the world.

Marionette Strings of Ink: Udaipur, an excerpt

2006-09-26T07:22:00.001+08:00

May 11, 2006. Udaipur, Rajasthan, India.

The sun crackled overhead; I walked across a bridge in Udaipur, Rajasthan, and a dog shifted his position and gazed up at me, a headless dove held between its paws - I suppose all the food here is fresh.

The buildings pulsate out below me, all of us underneath the desert sun; light purple bricks flicker white and upward, saris and fabric billowing in the hot winds. It's high noon here in Rajasthan - a time for clothes to dry, when the streets empty and the rickshaw drivers take off their shirts, crawl into the back seat, and doze off.

Amidst the dust and sand and sun is wedged a palpable nobility, earned through hundreds of years of questionable decisions to settle this land. Chants drift up like heat in the distorted air, filling the slums with music when the wedding processions aren't shimmering by in noisy momentary glory.

A writer could get used to this type of life: spreading days like butter across the weeks; carefully sculpting visual and sonic stimuli and playing them off against bouts of pleasantly numbing relaxation.

When one can buy a large mango for less than thirty cents, eat a meal for a dollar from a rooftop cafe, and still have change to catch a rickshaw down to the lake (I stroll, for the record)...Why wax philosophic anywhere else?

Of course, I wish still that the days of the Maharaja were here - that horses galloped from the city gates to meet the enemy - but times change; even the imperial, hubristic romanticism of the Raj has long since been displaced...

...I'm sure the Rajputs, like all ruling classes, were to the same effect: utterly repulsive. That they have enshrined their portraits with violent battles, gory beheadings, and bodies sliced vertically off horses, is seared in my mind...

It's hard of course to write of anxiety...

...bringing moments and people to life with marionette strings of ink; with a bazaar of Indian spices as colours and a Chinese junk of authority...

...In other news, today I rented a bike and explored parts of Udaipur unexplorable without one...It was marvelous - out toward the other lakes it got increasingly lush.

A pack of street dogs chased a monkey as I watched. Several other monkeys sauntered down the side of the road, oblivous and soon one ended up - with the others - atop a pole demarking a driveway, surrounded by snarling dogs; this is unenviable - also, was my creeping up to take a picture and failing to notice another monkey behind the tree.

It turned on me and bared its teeth, emitting something like 50 per cent hiss and 75 per cent growl. I stumbled backward into a man sitting and watching me - he then mimed a pack of monkeys slashing at his own face, and laughed...

..Earlier today one (dog) trotted after me smiling and wagging its tail. I thought it rather quaint but for the whitish-yellow froth dropping from between its jaws onto the street.

The Pope vs. Sam Harris; the Pope: An Idiot?

2006-09-21T12:34:00.000+08:00

The Pope has recently said some things that were pretty unreasonable. Because of this, there is once again a flaring of passions throughout the Middle East. Though I blame this also - presumptuously, I admit - on lunatic Imams spreading this to poor Muslims without access to critical media, it is beyond doubt the Pope has acted foolishly.

Apparently, speaking out against condoms and abortion and women's liberation was just, you know, not enough.

I just read an excellent article on Truthdig.com, from one of my favourite secularists - the delightful Sam Harris - on the Pope's utterings.

Here, an excerpt:

"It is ironic that a man who has just disparaged Islam as “evil” and “inhuman” before 250,000 onlookers and the world press is now talking about a “genuine dialogue of cultures.” How much genuine dialogue can he hope for? The Koran says that anybody who believes that Jesus was divine—as all real Catholics must—will spend eternity in hell (Koran 5:71-75; 19:30-38). This appears to be a deal-breaker. The pope knows this. The Muslim world knows that he knows it. And he knows that the Muslim world knows that he knows it. This is not a good basis for interfaith dialogue."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060916_sam_harris_rottweiler_barks/

Thai coup d'etat

2006-09-20T06:31:00.000+08:00

Well, it appears that there is a coup going on in Thailand. Tanks have rumbled into Bangkok, the Prime Minister has declared a state of emergency, and a renegade general has revoked the state of emergency so that he may declare martial law.

And, as the New York Times is currently (18:26) reporting, a spokesman for General Sondhi, the coup d'etat'er has

"...apologized to the public for any inconvenience caused by the coup."

It's great that in the middle of a situation in which armed soldiers and tanks are roaming through the capital of Thailand, we can still have civility.

Of Boston Legal and Homecoming

2006-09-18T10:11:00.000+08:00

This weekend I bore witness to the mass lunacy that is Queen's University Homecoming. Saturday night saw Aberdeen turn stupider than I imagine it usually is. However, the main point of going was to see some of my best friends, namely two Dan's, a Phil, and a Jenna or two.

Friday night: Ripping shirts off to "Don't stop me now," by Queen; riding bikes and falling off; ripped Converse; chatting to several policemen about statistics and arrests; otherwise being excellent.

I carried a notebook the whole night; most of what I wrote down is illegible and, to be honest, brutally inept and unpoetic.

A sample: "This city is awash with refugees from comfortable homes and arguably ridiculous lineage."

Don't ask me what exactly I meant by that; just know that it was funny to read back, as it is again, now.

Also, me and Phil relived the brief 3-week stint I spent at the Whig-Standard by sitting around without shirts on and watching Boston Legal.

This show is excellent for several reasons: 1) Subtlety; 2) The delicious timbre of well-mic'd low voices, including Spader and Shatner; 3) The basis of a show around monologues which pay delightful homage to rhetoric, reason, and argument; 4) The bizarre but excellent politicization of Season 2.

A Missionary Becomes the Convert - an excerpt

2006-09-14T03:53:00.000+08:00

The following are selected excerpts from a short story I am currently writing. I started writing it in Beijing in July 2006 and have yet to finish it; indeed, I have no idea either how long it shall stretch to or when I will finish it.

The crumbled, smashed ruins of a suburban settlement outside Shanghai smoldered in the distance, growing fainter under the clouds of fog that had rolled in from the East China Sea, the smoke from the fires that now consumed it, and because the ship from which it was being viewed was quickly retreating southwards, back to its native port of Canton – full of looted bounty and being pursued by treaty port ships sent from an imperial outpost to defend British interests in China...

It was a windy day; the sails billowed and cracked above him, their bleached, patched surface pulsating with the changes of wind. His exhalations of smoke were quickly borne away. Kim leaned back on the railing. Around him, and strewn across the midsection of the boat amid coils of rope, was booty. Stolen livestock – pigs and chickens, mostly – poked and sniffed their way around bags of spices and numerous sacks of gold and silver. Among this mass, hunched over, with her knees in her chest, bound at the wrists and ankles, bruised and bloody, was the object of Kim’s attention.

Her name was Judith Shawl, a British missionary from outside London. She was 45 and had dark blonde hair streaked through with the silver of years. She was in the employ of the British Sisters of Charitable Mercy and had, for the past 17 years, been converting isolated pockets of non-Christians across greater East Asia...

Judith understood Kim’s act of salvation and was as grateful as one could be while tied up with pigs and chickens and having seen one’s host family raped and lit on fire. She watched Kim smoking and felt torn because he was clearly responsible both for saving her life and murdering half her village with a hearty and incredible gusto. She was in this splintered mindset when she realized Kim was watching her.

Kim tossed his cigarette into the crest of a wave and started walking toward Judith. He sat on a sack of cinnamon and looked her in the eyes.

Judith looked up at him through the smoke that wafted between them.

“Why did you kill them?” she asked in Cantonese.

“Why,” Kim replied, lighting another cigarette, “is the sky blue. Why do waves crash eternally on the shores of this land? Why is anything the way it is so?”

“Because of God. Because God has willed it.”

“Maybe your God wills me to kill, to slay men and women and children for money and pigs and spices.”

At this, Judith shuddered; Kim pulled back on his cigarette; a chicken walked between them pecking at scraps of grain.

“It is not so. God would never tell you to do that.”

“Why are you alive?”

“Because God has willed it.”

“Did God also will me to spare you?”

“He must have; otherwise, you would not have done it. You are cruel. I have seen you kill.”

Kim smiled softly, calmly. Judith sat shaking in anger, tears beginning to fall down her face – a face cracked prematurely under the strain of living in small villages, of helping elderly women sit cramped over bibles while grandchildren went unspoilt and front stoops went unswept.

She knew what he was getting at, but could not wipe the tears that fell embarrassingly down her stained cheek. Her hands were still bound.

“Then also, he must have willed me to kill everyone else in your place.”

Inaugural Airing of the Laundry

2006-09-10T02:20:00.000+08:00

I've decided - in the interest of posterity - to put online individual entries from the journal I kept over the summer. In May, I traveled alone through India; in June and July I worked as a writer in Beijing; in August I traveled through China's northwest Xinjiang Province/Autonomous Zone, and journeyed to the tropical cum Tibetan Yunnan Province in China's south.

I shall post the entries as I wrote them, and make only small edits. This is the inaugural post - two of my earliest entries.

Friday, May 5 - 6:20 a.m. / Delhi

It seems bizarre, and slightly unreasonable, that this is my third sunrise in a row in a different country. The sun crested the 401 as we drove toward Toronto's Pearson International, then it lit up the industrial smoke stack and hustle of north Beijing, and now, from a rooftop in Paharganj, Delhi, the slums of the Indian subcontinent are waking up. I'm not one for reason, or sanity, if any of those means I can't feel "this" - the personification of an evolving internationalism, the understanding that the sun rises on a shared humanity.

1) lizard on wall of hotel
2) two women named Marissa from Montreal
3) all is well

May 6, 8:24 a.m. / Border, Uttar Pradesh

We're in a colum of cars at the border; old, wizened men with cobras slung over their backs walk up and down offering to pose for pictures. Toothless bears with rope threaded in through a torn hole in their face and out their nostrils stand up for little children and their nervous parents; the bears teeth seem to have been forcibly removed, and, either from malnutrition or from the harness, their snouts are shriveled and drooping.

ETC. Indian countryside, dung huts or mud huts?

Borat

2006-09-09T02:11:00.000+08:00

From the NYtimes:

"Mr. Baron Cohen, who is appearing in Toronto as Borat, declined to be interviewed for this article and will be conducting interviews ahead of the film only in character."

Excellent.

La Poste Touche Down

2006-09-05T13:30:00.000+08:00

I am back in Canada.

The plane touched down around 3:40 a.m. and I got home a couple of hours later. I gave my parents the gifts I had bought them, and took things out of my suitcase in theatrical, story-telling fashion.

Today, in the afternoon, I spoke to a couple of very close friends and my brother and felt quite good about it. Later, I discovered that my writing had come to the attention of someone I admire; that pleased me immensely and filled me with something resembling great pride.

This evening I rested a bottle of red wine on the case of an Iron Maiden DVD case and watched a Noam Baumbach film - an old one it seems. Regardless, it was good. I also ate Thai food, though I slept through the meal with my parents at which it was meant to be eaten - I was a little tired.

The Times are Ticking

2006-09-03T01:27:00.000+08:00

The past days have been filled with the things one regularly does here: drinking, shopping, eating, discussing, watching ex-officials do living-room-tai chi in their boxers.

It is a fitting way to wind down my summer; a summer spent traveling two of the most populated countries on the planet, and indulging (sometimes to excess) in both writing and thinking. And drinking.

There have been many bizarre days, and sometimes they stretch into weeks as I watch clock hands tick down on time I didn't think I was counting, and on moments and people and phases of myself I never thought I'd be shedding - like the snakes we sometimes think we've become after a few drinks.

It's difficult for me to write at the moment, as I'm in one of those transitions; where you are unsure of whether you can stand behind what you have transcribed when you reach the other side.

So I'll stop now and, for posterity's sake, simply state that: I am flying home tomorrow.

La Poste Retourne

2006-08-29T11:00:00.000+08:00

I'm back in Shanghai and have 5 days before I fly back home. For those not in the immediate "know," I stopped work early and fled northwest on a 45 hour train ride (no seat, slept on the floor - got stepped on, spat on - and loved every second) to a Chinese "autonomous zone" called Xinjiang. Two weeks of daggers, desert, and talk of dissidence later, I was on a 53 hour train ride to Shanghai.

I then went with a friend to Yunnan province, which is in the south. Most notably, the Chinese Dai minority know how to bbq a fish (in between unseparated chopsticks, with lemongrass and sprinkled MSG). We also hiked a gorge.

I said some goodbyes in Beijing to people I don't want to have to miss, and then almost missed the train back here, to the city of many monikers. The jazz is shuffling in the background. We're going out for lunch and I have a mama Wu here to take care of me until we fly back.

I miss a lot of you. I will see you soon, presumably.

La Post World-Cup Post

2006-07-11T15:31:00.000+08:00

When Germany and France knocked Argentina and Brazil out of the world cup, I stopped watching all but the highlights. But the clearest highlight of the entire World Cup was CCTV's Chinese commentator, Huang Jianxiang, losing his skull and screaming about how much the Australian coach deserved the Italian penalty kick that booted the Aussies from the Cup.

Since then, something else insanely funny has happened. It appears that people in Nanjing are touchier at Brazil losing than even I (such, such beautiful footwork) could be:

An elderly Chinese man went on a rampage in Nanjing after Brazil's defeat to France in the World Cup quarter-finals last weekend.

The man ran amok in a city square hitting people with a stick and shouting" "The Brazilians lost! There is nothing worth watching! I don't want to watch any more games!"

(A Reuters article originally excerpted on Danwei.org 5 days ago)

All I did was make snarky comments to anyone cheering for France; this guy has one upped me in the "passion" department. Another old man apparently marched around naked with a banner declaring that "BRAZIL MUST WIN."

La Poste Eclectia

2006-07-10T17:32:00.000+08:00

I can now lay claim to the honour of having in my "arsenal" of shirts one that has managed to climb to "at least the top 3 shirts I have seen in Beijing," according to Ed, some drunk British guy I met at an outdoor concert. I didn't think "plaid" would "fly" in Beijing; I am often wrong.

Anyway, the ticket was free but the beer wasn't close enough to free for my liking. On my way home, Beijing's sky started pouring down on me until streets were flooding. I was in a taxi, though. The next day, a Chinese friend told me her Italian (congrats, by the way) friend had a flooded basement.

My first question was where on earth in Beijing do people have basements; my second, was if a house here even had a basement, why is it weak enough (as in "yo, that was seriously weak,") to flood; and my third, if I had bothered to create one, would probably revolve around my bitterness at being so far from the ground (the seventh floor, to be precise, is the top floor of my building and the uppermost level at which structures are capable of being built in China without elevators).

In other news, in one day I bought the following: a 2-person tent, a sleeping bag, a basket for my bike, some pancake thing, a belt with alternating pictures of Stalin and Mao (come on, it's kind of funny) and a zip-up sweater on which appears, in what seems to be swirling mist, the graven image of a dead robin.

I have, or will have, another profile published here, in which I write quite exuberantly. I thought it was really funny, and for that matter, borderline absurd; the Polish Embassy and my editor liked it though. So, hey?

Also, registration for classes at Carleton have been lacking adjectives like "hellish" and "annoying" only because I seem to have stopped caring. I have my journalism courses chosen and registered for, but I'm waiting on the political science department, which, for the fourth year in a row, is doing something stupid.

For how many years must human rights majors explain that the structure of their degree makes it impossible to have the prerequisites necessary for the majority of PSCI classes, which form almost one-quarter of our degree? My only guess is that it must be more than four. I am now waiting on the F.P of Maj. East Asian Powers, and the I.R of S/S.E Asia; both of which interet me.

I have also been writing things that, to me at least, seem somewhat funny. I shall excerpt a few here.

The following are three examples drawn from my "Top Ten First Paragraphs Written by NYU Creative Writing Students":

-----
It was like any other Monday. Raphael de la Fonza was checking the front pages of The New York Times to make sure he wasn’t in them.
“Phew,” he said, sitting back in the arm chair of his 5th avenue apartment. “Still got it.”
--
A+ Welcome to NYU, my child. Welcome.
--

Ken Fabian’s coat tails blew out behind him as he strutted towards the NYU creative writing department in the brisk, October breeze. He entered. His eyes, dilated behind black aviators, focused on the door of Room 204. He stopped in front of it. Taking a deep breath, he smashed his foot through the door, breaking it in half (The door, not the foot. This is Ken Fabian.)
“Hey you, professor,” he said, coldly.
“Um, yes?” said Jenkins, the cowardly jerk.
“Grade this!” Ken Fabian yelled, pulling out a semi-automatic gun and ravishing the professor like a good woman with a bad temper.
--
Ken, please see me after class.
--

Dear Professor Jenkins,
I was so about to write the assignment but this week NYC was a total vacuum of inspirati-OHH-ne. Dreadful weather too. But even the rain was, you know, somehow unpoetic. Gawd. I can’t believe I’m even writing you to explain. Cheers, Jenn.
--
…what? C-
--

This next one is from a similarly-styled list; one called "Top Ten Things Not to Say as High School Valedictorian":

“…and so instead of a boring speech I have prepared an interpretive dance, sans-clothes, in which I portray El Diabla De Esparanza, the demonic seniorita of whom I am merely an offshoot…”

“…and as for the imperialistic apologists in the Geography department who gave me an F when I labeled Tibet as not being part of China…scribbling out California on the U.S map and writing “Rightfully Mexico”…and to the bastards in the History department who dared contradict me on the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende…Finally, I got my acceptance out of this hell hole…HELLO BERKELY!”

“…Duh! I said. Man, what an asshole. Anyway, that’s why school was so awesome this year. Big ups to Jake and Paulo. Peace.”
-----

Among such mad-capped lines my mind has, of late, been a'wandering. I often think up things as I bike to work (at the Beijing offices of China Daily) and sometimes I write them on taxi receipts from my wallet in the subway. Half of it, as some of you who have called me on it have noted, is "vaguely" auti-biographical; I pray (secularly!), however, that people will enjoy it anyway, irrespective of knowing me (or for that matter, liking me).

My most recent work of non-list-style fiction is a short account of two friends on a plane bound for Peru; one of whom has replaced their only cooking stove with a 1930s-era typewriter. It is called "A Distinct Lack of Cooking Stove" and a short excerpt follows:

-----
“Rick,” Dave began, uneasily. “What did you do this time? I swear that you usually screw things up near the end – as our Visas are running out. For this, I have been grateful. But I don’t like seeing that grin while my ears are popping. What did you do?”

Rick removed his headphones: “Pardon?”

“Why are you grinning?”

Rick’s face tempered itself, like wise steel.

“Well…” Rick said, rubbing his thigh. “You know our cooking stove?”

“I am aware,” Dave said curtly, “of it’s existence.”

It must be said here that most of this trip was to be done by camping – two men, both virile, somewhat manly, and heterosexual, fighting the elements and, potentially, Bolivian bandits. A noble quest, said beautiful, drunk women, when the two had brought it up at the bar back home.

“Dave, I took out the cooking stove and replaced it with my typewriter.”

This piece of information shook Dave like the booted-kick (and subsequent kiss; the memories are still painful) of an Eastern European, tin-pot-dictatorship-funded private security guard.

“What?” Dave, now queasy (not from the flight), asked.

“Dude, think how fucking – I don’t know – romantic it’ll be? A fire; a tent; the Peruvian or Bolivian, wherever we are, wilderness around us! It’ll be great man. I’ll transcribe everything.”

The passages Rick was here imagining went something like this:

Lights shimmered in the distance. Eyes, perhaps of a feral, predatory man-eating beast, were potentially gleaming at them – literally! Gleaming! – from the bushes.

And:

As Dave pushed back the undergrowth, he noticed the rash was back. “It better not be Leprosy,” he said, bravely. “Because that would be inconvenient.”

And:

The mists over Machu Picchu swirled around me, moistening the paper jammed into my 1936 Smith-Corona L-2. I felt like a foreign correspondent assigned to cover “the life-changing experiences of Rick Glenners.” I wasn’t doing a good job: I was too caught up in “the moment.”

“Fuck you, Rick.”

“Goddammit Dave, think how many chicks this will get us? Even seeing the typewriter will snap their panties!”
-----

Among this writing, there should be witty italics; my computer seems incapable of allowing them to remain, though they enhance the work's...how does one say...esprit du corps? That's probably wrong.

Also, something I wrote (An Internal Memo to William) is now online at www.feathertale.com, a website on which some of my work appears and a website I wish I could say wasn't run by a friend willing to publish said work." It is a good site however, and funny; at least one of you regularly make out with someone who has submitted work for it (not me, ew, gross).

Precise URLs, may be the following:
-----
http://www.feathertale.com/Fiction/internal_memo.htm

http://www.feathertale.com/Contests/examples.htm (the one about the emerald)

http://www.feathertale.com/Fiction/wile_hospital.htm

http://www.feathertale.com/Fiction/superman.htm (one that is, I suppose, timely)
-----

Anyone who has gotten here without speedily-scrolling can now claim to know me as well as my parents, probably, unless you are my parents, in which case: stop reading my blog Mum, GOD, how embarrassing! (Edit: Thinking my mother would copy\paste how I spelt embarrassing, which before I changed it, was embarassing, into AskOxford.com, whereupon she would be directed to a "commonly misspelled words" section, to which she would then post a snarky reply in Waugh-type prose along the lines of "Oh Dearie, how *too* embarRassing," on my blog, ridiculing me, I have changed it already. I must say: Ha, Mum. I have one-upped you.)

And since I started on a claim, I will let you end on the one in the last sentence (above the edit, which probably counts as a sentence).

Post and Riposte

2006-07-04T15:13:00.000+08:00

I haven't posted in ages and was prompted to by an earthquake. A colleague said: "You should write about this in your blog."

Well, Zhu Linyong: I have.

There are several reasons why I haven't been posting. First, and most pertinent here, I am writing elsewhere. Second, I have been somewhat busy and the hassle of navigating the digital jet streams of the nanny state's hatred for Blogger is almost overwhelming.

That, combined with the sloth-like nature of my laptop, do not make posting easy. When I do make it through, like now for instance, the formatting is wonky and my writing is artless and mundane.

Anyway.

Things have been progressing. Today marks the "one month" since I returned to Beijing from India. Three days ago marked the day Chinese trains hissed out of stations for Lhasa, Tibet; a heavily documented escapade in which I played a minor editing role - "Um, I think we should mention the environment here." etc. I have had a few articles published, a couple held, but I am content. I am writing, and that is enough.

I have been crafting fiction, which I enjoy immensely. Some people, better friends than they know, have given me kind encouragement that will not be forgotten. I have been laughing a lot, as well. I like being able to remember vividly the last time I laughed tears; and counting back hours or days, and not weeks, to when it last happened.

My brother and Nara are flying out to Beijing soon and I will attempt to show them a good time. I am buying a tent soon.

I have been drinking in hutongs with friends (Carleton grads?). Yesterday, I was playing badminton with my friend Mu Qian when a pug walked over and pee\'d on my bag. The woman started beating it on the head with a newspaper and then I took their picture while some old men laughed. I almost die daily, but my bike (though it has seen better days, perhaps before the Cultural Revolution) is not literally falling apart on me anymore. The back wheel worries me though.

I do realize, by the way, that this post is horrible. I will continue in the hope that it drains me of my ability to be tedious and dull, so that the next post may be more lively.

I also went out to a beach house with a bunch of French people, a Beligian and some Chinese folks. That was a lot of fun. There was a company party on the beach and they had a massive supply of fireworks. I, unfortunately, fell bizarrely ill after some beach soccer matches, and woke up staring into a black TV reflecting the explosions in the sky outside the window. We also BBQ'd on the beach. Not, like, hunks of beef; but mushrooms, eggplant, potatoes, cloves of garlic, and of course, mutton. That was fun. I swam in the sea.

Also, hey apparently there's a World Cup on. I can't tell you how much beer I have drunk watching the games; but now that Brazil and Argentina are out, being eliminated by Germany and France (Say what? A farce.), there isn't too much reason to keep watching.

However, at one point, under a torn Beijing sky, I sat on the back of a Belgian's bike, while were all racing through the soaked alleyways, as Theo, a Frenchman yelled, "Look at us: A Belgian, a French, an Indonesian, and a Canadian. All soaked. All crazy foreigners." And it was pretty apt, I suppose.

Essentially, I've been reading a lot of the Atlantic, writing a lot of zany, mildly shocking things, and biking.

Today, the newspaper for which I am unofficially employed, has a front page with the following main headline:

"Emergency response law 'will ensure accurate info'"

Subhead: "Fines aim ato prevent media from misleading public, causing chaos"

Brakeless in Beijing

2006-06-11T15:41:00.000+08:00

I was biking from the office to meet someone when, in the middle of an intersection, my brake pinched against a spoke, jammed, then splintered off and shot onto the road.

In other Beijing bike-related news, I...well, have one. I am what some may call on my way to settling in - which seems to be something I am constantly doing in my life; whether it's in Ottawa, Shanghai, Beijing, or Pickering, ON. I have a bike; I just bought soccer shoes; I've done laundry, hung it out to dry, and folded it; I know several ways, by bike, to work; and have a mobile chock full of new numbers, which is a telltale sign of a good start, I suppose.

Mundane details like that are necessary. But several more exciting things have happened.

One of the first nights here, Judi and I went up the street to have some Sichuan fish outside, under the stars and in the surge. When we got up past the Wu Dao Kou subway station, the restaurant was doing brisk, profitable business on the sidewalk and the food looked delicious. But just as we were about to sit down, two large military trucks drove up and swerved to cut off the street; men in camo-garb jumped out from the backs of the flatbed trucks, and chaos ensued: men and women ran around screaming as their large tricycles, which were also doing brisk, though illegal, trade in meat skewers and other potentially state-damaging enterprises of street food, were confiscated and litterally tossed into the backs of the trucks; children were crying; and our dinner plans went awry to say the least. The restaurants didn't have licenses for serving outdoor food, though they are presumably both available and costly (I am unsure). The waitresses and cooks, who until then had been asking us what food we wanted, grabbed it all (the food) and ran away to stow it behind the building in an alley way. We did get to eat outside though, eventually - so don't worry.

Another noteworthy thing happened when we were bike-shopping: my first run in with 'Chai', which in India means tea, and in China means "destroy"; it is the Chinese character they throw up on all the buildings they're going to tear down. We went looking for bikes, and where there had been dozens, there was now one, a bunch of rubble, and some empty shops plastered with a large, four foot'Chai' character.

But now, I'll get more personal.

Beijing is a city rife with opportunities to kill oneself. Everyday is an interesting navigation of several accident scenes: as I was biking home the other night - brakeless - a girl lost control beside me after wobbling a bit, and just threw herself over the handle bars - the contents of her bike basket strewn across the road; I stopped, but did nothing, several other men also stopped to help. On that same trip home, I rammed into a three-wheeler and dislodged the "baggage carrier" (the quotations here are because I have no idea what it's called); I yelled I'm sorry, but had to apologize again when, later, the guy riding on the back of my bike noticed a bar jutting out and unnattached to key areas of the bike that it should have been; he almost fell off, and it was welded soon afterward.

The new presence of brakes on my bike has reduced the amount of death I need to circumnavigate, but chances have not dissipated entirely. I went jogging this afternoon and it wasn't smoggy, nor terribly fraught with peril. For this I am glad.

Also, those who thought I was skinny before should see what 46 degree heat in India, and one month of travelling, have done to my body.

Living here is fantastic. Beijing is a vibrant city, and much, much different than Shanghai. The roommates are fantastic, kind, and more than I could ever have asked for; whether it's helping to fix my bike, showing me where to get the best shrimp dumplings, or accompanying me to a concert where the Moscow Symphony Orchestra paired itself, dubiously, with what appeared to be a more operatic Russian Bon Jovi-esque type band, the're always willing to help.

And when you're in Beijing, and speak Chinese at the level of, perhaps, a 4-month-old infant, having friends is more than comforting - it is necessary.

The apartment is also great. The mist (read: fog) cleared the other day, and for the first time I noticed that the two streets that join in front of my window both end in mountains. That was pretty incredible, because I had always known most major Chinese cities as bastions of flatness.

For some reason, I've been reading a lot of anti-theist books. The logic draws me; as well as the way authors write, when they value logic so highly. I read Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian on the plane, and while in India, I picked up a copy of Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian; now, I'm finishing of The End of Faith, by Sam Harris. All of these are excellent, call-to-arms reads for anyone interested in either leftist, or contrarian, politics, anti-theism, theology (as an atheist or enlightened automaton, not a foot soldier), internationalism, or international politics.

Also, both Hitchens and Harris are hilarious to read whether you agree with them or not. Hitchens\' wit is knife-like, and Harris is so constantly blown away by the foolishness of organized religion that his untempered criticisms are nearly poetic: "billowing clouds of unreason," and "masterpiece of moral blindness" (in reference to Noam Chomsky), and generally language that pairs momentous acts of nature with staggering acts of credulity - I'll make one up now, for example. Um... a "torrential downpour of irrationality," he displayed "an ignorance of oceanic depths," she spoke as if "the sun had set on all thought, reason, and logic, and as if free inquiry had withered into the deserts of childhood fantasy."

Anyway. That's it for now.

Call Forth the Cannons of Madras!

2006-05-31T23:33:00.000+08:00

I sat back against the grave of a Sub-Conductor, who had died in 1915, leaving a bereaved wife and several forlorn children, and stared at the blood on my hands in stark amazement.

In front of me, pink-flowered bushes played themselves off against pariah dogs and burning garbage. Further on, a hundred feet from the cemetary's western wall, a subway clanged by on an odd-looking bridge, people hanging out the side.

Behind me Bollywood signs rode up the overpass like cowboys, and presumably, the ghosts of this man's wife and children were screaming at me in abject silence, pathetically trying to cry out from both the past and beneath the din of the traffic.

I wandered for somewhat more than hour. The guardshouse was being squatted in by an impoverished Indian family and the gate was wide open. The first few graves were covered in the family's laundry; the rest were covered in either garbage, ashes, weeds, or crows - which skitted from grave peak to grave peak in some sort of efficiently grim, unpaid employment.

The deaths were sometimes as remarkable as the graves or cenotaphs that marked them, that were erected with the jaunty arrogance that the British would still, 200 years later, be the rulers of Madras; would drive back the French to Pondicherry still, after all these years.

"...Helped put down the Indian insurgency of 1857 in Bangladesh..."

"...Perished at sea with his wife and four daughters, their only children..."

"...was, in friendship, disinterested and sincere..."

"...a Member of the Madras Signalmen..."

"...was killed, aged 18, by a shell from a German cruiser..."

Call forth the cannons of Madras, and the ghosts that manned them.

My train for Delhi (35 hours) leaves in under an hour. I am well-equiped with Waugh and Capote and earplugs and patience.

Dinner in Pondicherry

2006-05-29T15:52:00.000+08:00

The sheets were damp, my nose was running, and it sounded like rats - in a similar mood, no doubt - were leaping off the aluminum roof to their deaths beside my bed as I tried to grind my eyes shut in the unusual cold of this south Indian hill station, high in the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu.

The cold was brought on by two days of malnutrition, which itself was brought about by one day of violent illness. However, I slept for nearly 12 hours and woke up refreshed and ready to hike.

However, again, the guide cancelled on me because it looked like rain. Sure enough, later, it did rain; this is no excuse, though, as it is only rain.

Enter: Mike Dawson (whose claims follow). The son of a British lady and Indian gentleman (both imprisoned by the Japanese in the Second World War but freed by the Gandhi's violent and lesser known counterpart); he had lived in Ooty since 1952.

Since I was reading Bertrand Russell at the time, and since Mr. Dawson was unusually strange, our converstation cannot be fully recounted here in detail that does it justice; no doubt have ye, however, that it lasted almost all day and consited of Lucipherian conspiracies, Hindus worshipping Nilgiri black magic and witch doctors, the essence and point of religious fervour in more general senses, flaura and fauna, Russell vs. T.S Eliot vs. Jesus, academic unorthodoxy, the history of tea, his rotting, soon to be amputated leg, and motorcycle sprockets.

The man was a veritable fountain of the incredible.

At one point, he started pointing out where - two years earlier - four people had been eaten by tigers. A possible, unconfirmed fifth was only smelled. To understand why they didn't follow up on the smell (beside the possibility of being mauled by a tiger) , one only needs to ask the security guard who discovered the third body - which had been eaten from the chest down; essentially, a hollowed out, grisly skeleton with fleshy shoulders and a nearly intact face - who could not eat for three days. The other victims were all women, but were eaten completely; breasts, eyeballs, arms, thighs - all eaten.

It was around this point that the monsoon - with which I have been playing an unusual game of hide and seek - sought us out and began its downpour. Luckily, it was near the end of the day and provided a misty backdrop for a walk through the tea estates. We came upon a group of about 18 young women employed as teapickers who were finishing their day. Within a few minutes I had been proposed to by every one of them. I was flattered, to say the least, in a country which takes marriage as seriously as does India. My success rate was startling but unlikely to be repeated among women who share my language, and hence, the ability of finding me morally repugnant as well as physically dire.

I took another one of those mountain buses back down into Coimbatore. The experience of riding on one of these buses cannot be overstated, and the skill - or insanity - required to pilot one is beyond my comprehension. At the side of the road, at one point, a man patted his vomitting son on the back and looked around awkwardly.

Regardless, I eventually plodded my way into Pondicherry, at the coast of Tamil Nadu on the Bay of Bengal, south of Madras. The overnight bus trip was intriguing. I was constantly awoken by various things, one of which was the bus driver, outside in the rain, grabbing his vein-bulged forehead, illuminated by lightning with some sort of pronged device in his hand, surrounded by tires of various sorts; one having previously been on our bus before it exploded.

On the bus with me were several members of the Campus Crusade for Christ; people who, like the colonial buildings of south India, are physical remnants of when well-to-do religious nations were less obvious about leaving traces of their exploits.

Pondicherry reminds me a lot of other post-colonial cities, which for some reason I always end up in. Regardless, the town was packed with foreigners seeking enlightened servitude to an invented Church, and a dogma and doctrine unenforced by their parents and nurses and hence more agreeable and exotic. It instantly repulsed me.

The only friendly person was a North Korean, who promptly invited me to dinner. He was staying at the Ashram down the street and approached me as I was walking along the beachfront promenade. I never showed up because the hostels were all full and I left on a bus for a small village further up the coast toward Madras.

That night, I was wracked with the journalistic anguish of not going and suggesting that I record our conversation with my radio equipment. My consolations, however, were twofold; one, I am more intent on living my life than being a journalist; and two, I rank journalism and writing on different levels, the former being a more debased version of the latter, and I was consequently able to milk an amusing piece of fiction (like all my fiction, based somewhat in fact) out of the whole scenario.

Tomorrow I leave for Madras, from whence I will leave via train for Delhi. I will then fly out to Beijing. Today, however, I fooled someone intent on harassing me by pretending that I could not speak. When he asked me, as I walked by silently and forcefully, "Why aren't you talking!? Why won't you talk?!" - I feigned sign-language (shamefully, I know), to which he replied, "Oh. Oh God. Sorry!"

Once in China, however, I will no longer be in India; and once no longer in India, my accounts will hopefully not lose their exuberant absurdity - a turn of phrase, I hope, which is used to describe me by my close friends' future grandchildren.

The Irony of a Delhi-less Belly

2006-05-25T00:37:00.000+08:00

The irony of this must not escape you.

To many travelers in India, the words "Delhi-belly" conjure images they would rather forget: of lengthy, horrible trips to the bathroom; of tossing and turning in the early hours of the morning, wondering why you're hungover when you haven't drank a drop, etc.

So, my obligatory intestinal post commences with the lack of cliche and the intense good humour of arriving at my own version of Delhi-belly, almost 1 month into my trip and near the end, and actually in Tamil Nadu, in the southern tip of India near Sri Lanka, about as far as one can actually get from Delhi.

But...I was booking a train...from Chennai to Delhi Central Station. Oh, the richness of it all.

As the woman behind the counter jotted down the final numbers of the train I would need to board, I broke out in a cold sweat. I memorized the number and darted away. Outside or to the bathroom? I headed for the bathroom and pushed the door, which jammed.

My proper revenge came in the form of regurgitated fish masala, which rocketed from my gut all over the door. My heaving at it - not to mention my hand leaning on it - moved the door and I bolted inside.

After a few minutes of refreshing, jovial banter with the sink, I left and sat down - where I immediately started laughing, in much the same way as I laughed when I fell of the scooter in Panjim, or when I fell in the courtyard fountain at the fort in Amber.

Tomorrow I board a toy train for Ooty, a hill station in the mountains and an old, Raj-era British outpost.

I've shaved and bought a pack of Polos to commemorate the occasion.

2006-05-24T00:26:00.000+08:00

I was standing outside a line up cars, buses, and industrial-strength Ashok Leyland trucks painted in outrageous colours, when the clouds started to drift. Yanking themselves off the peaks around us and tearing themselves in the process, they drifted through the windows and made everything damp and eerie.

These are the borderlands. Where the hammer and sickle and the swastika do constant battle; one hand-painted on to rocks and cliffs and storefronts, and the other peering out mildly from temple windows and autorickshaw license plates. Kerala meets Tamil Nadu.

That morning I was lost in the tea estates of Munnar. Bright green, clipped, and ready to dry and drink; mountainsides full of them, full of women hunched over like boulders clipping and clipping. Sure, you can have some water. Help yourself to my biscuits.

In typical communist fashion, the Keralans I with whom I was riding in the tractor started berating their "manager" and screaming, in a communal manner I'm sure, at their coworkers who dared side with the - GASP - boss.

The bus to Munnar had been utterly uneventuful, by which I mean to say that the only event that did not happen was my sleep. I arrived that morning, bruised and in tatters, with an 11-hour bus ride behind me but the air was clean and crisp and made me so as well.

Currently, I'm in Trichy - a city of bewitching sunsets and lovely, fascinating bazaars. The people here are wonderful and tonight I dined with a priest. I will make it to Pondicherry and also Madras in the next week, but I am unaware of when and on what schedule.

The Dockyards of Thought

2006-05-20T15:20:00.000+08:00

I spent last night in Fort Kochi, in Kerala, India. By the docks, they have these huge cantilevered Chinese fishing nets - about 40 feet high, that sweep down into the Arabian sea and scoop out fish and trash and seaweed. I wandered around the dockyards and the merchants' export quarter until I smelled like a catch of the day, and retired to a Kathakali show.

Before I went to bed I ripped apart the Aloe plant I bought off a street vendor for 10 rupees and lathered it all over my bright red shoulders. I woke up at that awkward crack before dawn, when it feels like you're about to go fishing with your dad and he's downstairs making tea and rubbing his hands together, and prepped my backpacks.

I walked out and around the neighborhood to the main jetty, stopping for chai and deep fried coconut shavings, and hopped on a ferry to Ernakulum as the sun crested over the huge cranes that popped and whirred around me. I walked through the town whistling my favourite Bad Plus song to the street vendors and contemplated buying a copy of the Hindustan Times before I remembered that for one month, I'm going to let myself do all the thinking.

Right now I'm killing a bit of time in Kollam before I get on a canoe and drift through the rural backwaters. Tonight, I'm getting on a bus to Trivandrum - the capital of this province, the only Communist state government in India - and either tomorrow or the next day I will bus it up to Munnar, a mountainous range of tea estates and wildlife. From there, it's onward to the land of the Tamils; where, apparently, they speak no or less English and may or may not force me to abandon my regionally-centric, linguistic ignorance.

Tales from loved ones keep me warm: of Lanterns in Korea, of the Savoy in London, of mountains in Peru, of tree-climbing in Ontario, and of the various successes and ventures my friends are executing back in Ottawa or Toronto. But for me, and for now, I'm here and loving this.

I've had an immense amount of time to think and to write, with no deadlines and no formats, no scripts or word counts or 1st person penalties, or price per word or per article; I've composed poetry in post-colonial graveyards, where Portugese sailors cry out to Mary from beneath the weeds and lizards; I've pondered my future on long train rides through lush, trash-strewn palm forests, flying over rivers decked out with bathers and oxen; I've fished with Indian boys who boast they have sex with naive foreign tourists; I have supped on fresh mangos and pineapples and stared into the waves over local beer and seafood; I have dodged diseased cows in urban slums - and through and through and through I wonder and wander further still, not satisfied, sated, and thankfully - apparently - unsedated, though still tainted, by western security, values, and ideas.

Onslaught and Stowaway

2006-05-15T23:37:00.000+08:00

I'm positive it was illegal, and it had to happen in Bombay.

The beautiful post-colonial city was shining in the sunset, glowing. Like vines, the people of this land reclaimed a city built on top of them, without their permission; the tea remains, but markets and bazaars flourish - raw cinnamon bark, ginger, fish, prawns, and pineapple pierce the night air and our noses like scimitars. The moon reaches over the tops of crumbling, English-concession architecture, casting shadows on the sari-clad women who work the stoves and sweat for their children within. I pocketed some cinnamon for 5 rupees and left for the train station.

It said platform fifteen but forgot to include that it was to be an utter madhouse, a zoo, a metropolis gone insane in the heat and humidity. (There were, in fact, riots that very same day in Bombay - Jr. doctors went on strike over something or another, people died in hospital transfers and from lack of treatment.) The train was late, and when it did arrive, the surge was unreal. Waves of suitcase-carrying Indians crashed upon the ticket collectors, and aimed themselves in wedge-shaped crowds toward the traincar doors.

Looking in, one could see dark shadows and faded bulbs highlight heads jutting out at awkward angles, four feet above where they should have been. People rode shoulders; people fought; old women were knocked down screaming; children cried out for parents.

I panicked. My ticket read W/L 482 - in other words: waiting list at # 482. In even other words: Iain, you are screwed. I showed it to a collector, who shrugged, laughed, looked at me like we had met at Ypres during the First World War and threatened him with a toy gun, and told me, "That's a waiting list ticket. Go to the general carriage." I turned around to this particular carriage (described above) and panicked some more.

I ran back up the platform to the English couple I had met earlier (I made sure to pack my charm and humility.) My fair, non-Indian skin, got me into the carriage without a problem. The English couple's bunkmates were a rather homely Brit and a slight, bright-smiling Aussie. It was promptly agreed that I should stow myself away.

The camo-wearing Indian soldier patrolling the car probably would have disagreed. But to my fortune, while I was pursuing fruitlessly W/L 482 the ticket collectors of that particular first class carriage had already passed. I laid out bedding and got ready for bed, but had to go to the bathroom.

I emerge from our curtained cabin to the soldier (carrying a gun by the way, but in that tin-pot dictatorship, fake-looking kind of way, if you get my meaning). He points at me and motions me forward. My heart, at this point, was somewhere in my esophagus attempting to choke me or escape or explode under pressure, or something.

Then I realize that in my freezing, I had failed to pop a piece of cinnamon in my mouth. To my surprise, it was this he wanted. I hand it over with the sort of awkwardness inherent in giving flowers to a prom date, and wait. He cracks it in two, and throws half in his mouth. He then points to his nose and mumbles something about sinuses. I shake his hand, pat him on the shoulder, and off he goes.

I woke up the next morning, with my head stuffed under the Aussie's bunk and my feet under the Brits' - so that the only visible portion of me was a blanket covered knee or two - feeling refreshed. Apparently, I had the best sleep in the cabin. And it was both free and illegal: two things I am not used to accomplishing, especially at the same time though I suppose they often accompany one another.

I stepped onto the platform at the Karmali Train Station in Goa, India, with the sun shining. I flashed W/L 482 to the guard, who waved me by, and walked out into a new province, with new friends, sporting a grin that would make any mother on earth slap me outright.

And sand blew through the open window

2006-05-11T15:05:00.000+08:00

I spent last night huddled on the lower berth of a train bound from Ajmer to Chittaurgarh, with my luggage strapped to my waist and sand from the Rajastahni plains blowing in through the barred, open windows.

The day before I sat with an Irish man and watched a tourist with dreadlocks get fleeced by a false Hindu puja ceremony at the bathing ghats in Pushkar; that he lost so much was his own fault, that he provided me with so much fodder for antitheism is no one's fault in particular.

Before the train left I was besieged by a crowd of well-educated youngsters who excitedely shook my hand and introduced me to their mothers. I was then told that I was very handsome. To this, I flustered with speech and waved my arms and book about in the air as they giggled and smiled.

Yesterday was also my brother's birthday, to whom all I could offer was an email. 'Sup, Chris?

The Most Literary Travel Post of All Time.

2006-05-06T16:14:00.000+08:00

I never thought I'd say: "I'm blogging from a small, underground brick building in Agra, India." because why would anyone ever say that unless they were doing it; if they were doing it, it would seem pompously self-reflexive and anti-climatic.

So I'm not going to say it.

That said, I'd like you to refer to para/1 so I can get on with this.

Well then. I flew into Beijing on 2 May, but I'm not going to give you a rundown of my itinerary because that is mind-obliteratingly inane.

I did get to see the Midi Rock Festival in Beijing, which was neat - especially when The Wombats from the UK yelled, in the most hilarious cliche of rock history: "It's so great to be here in Shanghai..............."

"...BEIJING!"

The two people I'm living with - Maomao, friend of Wu Yan, and Judi, Maomao's boyfriend from Indonesia - are intensely awesome. They've done up this awesome room for me, replete with Tibetan (well, north Sichuan) goodies and stuff. Maomao is in publishing and Judi is doing a masters in architecture at Qinghua University, so with their combined powers they have: "...made it look like a girls' room." according to Judi, who apparently then, had nothing to do with the fruitier aspects of the decor.

Why I am I writing like this from a brick shack. Dammit, I swear I wouldn't say that.

Anyway, though I am rather content to think that no one has ever typed "fruitier aspects of the decor" from this, or indeed possibly, any other brick hut - I can rest content and original.

As original as one can be when stared down by the Taj Mahal, which is approximately a km or two away. Or as original as one can feel in a mosque in Delhi as the sun is setting behind it's massive dome, it's lanterns glow an eerie green against the cap'd youngsters playing cricket in its courtyard, etc., etc.

I'm on my way, friends, on my way. I have a brief sketch and some moulding train tickets showing me the way, but it's up to Iain to see how much he can screw everything up before it's all over.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm leaving things out. This is deliberate. One does not keep all eggs in one basket - especially if he can eventually entice people to pay for his beer as he takes them out, one by one, dusts them off and explains their intricacies.

With Love,

Iain

The Goodbye - China, India, China

2006-05-02T01:42:00.000+08:00

Tomorrow I leave.

First: a short stop in Beijing, during which I will somehow have time to imbibe of a Chinese indie-rock festival.

Then, I fly out to Delhi, India, where I will be travelling for roughly a month - living out of a fake backpack by the seat of my pants.

Then I fly back to Beijing, where I will be working until August.

I shall spare ye all the poetics: for those of you who made this year spin by so quickly, I thank you. To my brother and Nara in South Korea: my thoughts are with you, though I will see you soon enough.

To Wu Yan, the unstoppable force for good, thanks for all your hard work making this both possible and not as financially devastating as it might have been.

To my friends - past, present, and future - I look forward to our run-in's, our conversations, and hugs of goodbye and hello.

I shall aspire to blog frequently, but slow connections, infrequent access, and what from now shall be called the Nanny (of Internerd Nanny-state controls), may conspire against my efforts.

Nevertheless, I shall try. I can be reached at the email address in my profile.

Goodbye.

The Missionary Position

2006-04-24T08:07:00.001+08:00

In honour of the joy I will have reading and rereading sentences in Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens, I have posted below a short excerpt from an interview he did with Free Inquiry about his book on Mother Theresa's overlooked shortcomings.

The whole interview is available here.

FI: Hence the title of your book: The Missionary Position.

HITCHENS: That has got some people worked up. Of the very, very few people who have reviewed this book in the United States, one or two have objected to that title on the grounds that it's "sophomoric." Well, I think that a triple entendre requires a bit of sophistication.

FI: And your television program in the United Kingdom was called "Hell's Angel."

HITCHENS: Yes, very much over my objection, because I thought that that name had not even a single entendre to it. I wanted to call it "Sacred Cow."

Nerds, everywhere.

2006-04-21T12:59:00.000+08:00

"Demand for the product fluctuated for decades, and finally plummeted during the 1980s in the face of growing social stigma and stereotypes."

- Definition of Pocket Protector, Wikipedia.org.

From Bone and Juice, the Crushed are Springing

2006-04-20T23:12:00.000+08:00

I wrote the following words on the back, folded portion of a crossword puzzle mailed to me from a friend in Toronto - which was solved on the train from Shanghai to Beijing with my mother - while I was sitting on a bus driving into the Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, China, from which I boarded a plane and flew onto the Tibetan plateau:

They are swans that
swim in cesspools.
They farm land
between highway
overpasses,

and peddle cheap wares
in ancient bazaars.
They stack boxes in
obscure city zones
lost to all, unbroken;

battered, not crushed,
they work two jobs
but are registered
for none.
their children play naked

in nearby streams, that
cut countrysides like
snakes, and they smile
from storefronts, with
faces exuberant.

They sleep out front
of railway networks
and highway junctions,
working in travel,
families at home.

Skin tanned dark,
brown with work, sweat
and dirt. The paler
shades shun them -
they're afraid of work.

Dark maroon uniforms,
and morning rituals rear
the annoyance of the
sprawling service
classes.

Buildings loom heavy,
shadow over communities.
The red-shirted man,
gazes on, from a second
storey bus window.

Three cheers for China,
the China they're hiding.
Gleaming steel wrought,
from bone and juice, the
crushed are springing,

Up 88 storeys,
to house
sleaze and progress,
and Redress. But
it's still a mess.

Sayonara

2006-04-16T16:48:00.000+08:00

Dressed in white and whistling Lorca's Novena I will stroll sunburnt streets. My suit jacket will blow open and my loafers will kick pebbles that will bounce down the street and annouce my arrival to the back alleys. Dusk will roll across this city like a rusted wagon; the night and I will coaxe forward dreamers and liars alike.

Poets will sputter and falter when they search back pockets for words and will lose when they play dice with me. Feeling swells and spills over the rim like a glass poured with gusto; passion and summer and heat and light flood the streets. We flood the streets.

The Moot Trumpet sounds at Midnight

2006-04-11T12:52:00.001+08:00

His heel rolled off and down the curb, into pain and into trash. Apt metaphors for his life, all of them, he joked inside his drunken head as he stumbled home. It was some absurd hour; it always was – maybe it was daylight saving’s time. Regardless, it was 4:30 a.m. and Reggie had been kicked out of the bar early. He had slurred his way distastefully up to the stage during a break in the jazz band’s set and, through flattery, convinced the band’s drummer he was fit to sit in for a couple of songs.

A few drinks later and oblivious to earlier claims, Reg was called to the stage by Oberon, a thick-set black man from New York City who had tasted both his share of women and his share of competition. Reg looked up from a nursed drink, with an ego as hollow as his wallet, and remembered. He slid off his stool, and patted a friend’s arm in a wounded, pseudo-confident kind of way. As he fell toward the stage, he staggered and knocked over a chair.

He grabbed Oberon’s hand as the big man tried to ignore his way past Reg and their hands – one sweaty and one greasy – briefly met in the half-hearted shake drug dealers are used to. Reg sat back on the drummer’s stool and leaned against the wall of the club for support. He picked up the sticks and looked over at the piano player. A sagging man of 32 years, the man leaned over the ivories with a clichéd limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a limp, globetrotting whore slumped over a table in the first row – a drink in her hand, tilted and balanced. He grinned a weak smile and started up a standard. The bass player sighed loud enough to be heard over the intro and stood up from his seat, setting his stand-up against his chest and feeling for a groove with half his mind and only 3 fingers.

Reg realized then how drunk he was. The people near the bar, who were farthest from the stage, were drowning in Las Vegas haze – half heat and half smog. The ones sitting near the stage were still visible. Sluts, all of them. The ex-pats shined in their fake suits, while their equally fake broads burst out of their tops as often as they fell to the hardwood on their way to the powder room. Reg looked at the sticks in his hands and pretended to feel the music. He was trying hard to figure out what time signature the two washed-up musicians were playing in and trying much, much harder not to throw up. He swallowed his constitution’s weakness and plowed into the song as softly as his inability would allow him. It was a disaster.

The piano player’s whore had known from the start that Reg was no good. But as the musical train derailed into a field of plump, oblivious cattle, even the others began to notice. The managing consultant from Chicago looked into his screwdriver, up at Reg, down at his drink again, over at his girl on the floor by the bathroom, and became solemn. What was her name again, he thought? Reg’s incompetence began to register and he began to grimace; thinking of his wife, he got up and left. The bartender, looking nervous, ignored an obvious plea for over-priced beer and stared as the stage unwound. The bass player simply stopped playing, mid-song, leaned his bass against his chair, picked up his drink and walked off stage toward the bar. The piano player smirked, checked his whore to make sure he wouldn’t have to carry home two sets of equipment, and just stopped – staring stupidly.

Reg, stupid as he was, wasn’t dumb. He drifted off musically and did a little flourish to finish off. No one was impressed. But it didn’t matter that much. Reg’s friends – met only once or twice – had already left. The bartender refused him any more drinks, and Reg, his ego thumb-screwed into oblivion, rolled his eyes and shoulders and legs toward the door and out into the humid night. As he looked at the moon through the trees and tried to walk straight, he rolled his heel off the curb and nearly broke his ankle.

Ode and Command to Non-Fiction writers

2006-04-03T03:59:00.000+08:00

Like thick sirloin dripping blood, flopping all over a plate like a struggling poisson, bring juicy bits of lives to life; render the absurd focused and elevate what deserves to be absurd to its rightful status; piece together pictures of lives cut short, lived large, and lived wrong; don't ever forget to judge with style when judgment in more obvious ways is less funny or less apt; make us read your sentence over again, for pleasure, not from confusion; make us tell friends and lovers your story less vividly than you did, because you inspired us to try; make us laugh with disbelief, please; refuse to be boring people and live boring lives and your writing will never be boring; write when you think your thoughts are too interesting to keep bottled up, even if they have no hope of getting published; write for pleasure, not because you have to.

The Librarian and I: A conversation.

2006-03-30T03:11:00.000+08:00

The following was a conversation held over MSN between myself and a Carleton University librarian, through their ingenious AsktheLibrary MSN feature.

AsktheLibrary says:
hi

AsktheLibrary says:
it means that the book has been rec'd but has not been catalogued into the collection

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
hi! thank you, i did put a hold on it more than a week ago

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
i wsa told that would put it into circulation

AsktheLibrary says:
you can ask at the reference desk and have them rush catalogue it

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
i didn't know there was rush cataloging

AsktheLibrary says:
...they will contact technical services and have it rushed catalogued

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
could i tell you the name of the book?

AsktheLibrary says:
yes, you just have to ask

AsktheLibrary says:
no sorry, I'm sitting in a meeting right at the moment and not in my office

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
MSN in a meeting!? tsk tsk

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
haha

AsktheLibrary says:
i'm multi-tasking

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
My hat is off to you, kind librarian.

I shall call technical services and have my request rushed through.

AsktheLibrary says:
...the reference desk

AsktheLibrary says:
you're vey welcome

AsktheLibrary says:
"very"

iain is a gun barrel diplomat says:
Ah. Thank you. See if you can multi-task outside for the day's remainder.

Good day!

AsktheLibrary says:
thanks, have a good day

This time, it's personal.

2006-03-29T12:34:00.000+08:00

I figured it was time to write about how I've been "feeling." Oh god, what a tedious exercise, one which shall surely bore anyone (if, indeed, there is anyone at all) who actually reads this blog.

School has been as ubiquitous in the past month and a half of my life as sunshine and indulgence have been in the past week. I hope that's a more succint way of saying "I've been busy with school." Anyway, I'm over a hump of school work and working my way up to, and over, another; the last before exams.

Thank a God somewhere for me.

For some reason, I've actually been drumming more. We used to (I unfortunately have to say "used to") host jams in our attic here in Ottawa; a musty old place, sloping down on both sides with obviously poisonous pink insulation sticking out everywhere. My drumset is up there, as are the stacks, guitars, organs and keyboards of my cohorts and coinhabitant. I've been playing a lot more jazz style beats and solos, and hope that at some point this summer I can put my chops to some form of exuberant public display.

And about my summer...It appears that I shall be in Beijing. I am excited immensely for this, as anyone unfortunate enough to have heard me speak at all since I got back from China in September can attest to, I have been seduced. To list the many seductions a troubled, curious boy faces in the Far East - especially in cities with adulterous nicknames - is to list one too many secrets in a Googleable world. Regardless, I shall be combining in a nexus universes of my multiple passions: disappearing, writing, uncertainty, crowds, people, tall buildings, wide plains, breezes at midnight, drunkeness in alleyways, newsprint, and the loss of sanity and innocence.

Blog be gone!

2006-03-15T11:18:00.000+08:00

No matter how hilarious Scoop is, I wish it would stop being so relevant.

A friend of mine in the Chinese media sent me this article and it blew me away. It simply reinforces my feelings that foreign reporters act, probably at an unconscious level, like spies and perpetuators of homeland ideologies. Obviously, Western reporters in the East tout their civil liberties horn often and loudly, and mostly they do it because they are concerned about colleagues in the Chinese media who don't enjoy the same freedoms. But at some point, one has to wonder just how far ideology, western freedoms or communist lack of's, have seeped beneath our skin.

My friend and I share the same reaction: whoa, this is interesting. It's loaded with philosophical questions about the nature of our belief and inherent assumptions.

Anyway, enjoy:

[EDIT: To make things even more absurd, I sent this link to the above-mentioned friend who originally linked me to the story, and it was inaccessible. Blogger sites are banned in China.]

Chinese Bloggers Stage Hoax
Aimed at Censorship Debate
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and JUYING QIN
March 14, 2006; Page B3

Some well-known bloggers in China used an unlikely tool last week to make a point that Western news media and politicians misunderstand Chinese censorship. They shut themselves down.

Notices posted on the Chinese-language blogs Massage Milk and Milk Pig announced that "Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed."

Within hours, English-language bloggers and Western news media spread the word that the Chinese government had closed the sites. The BBC news service reported that Massage Milk was "closed down by the authorities," adding that the act had coincided with the annual session of the Chinese legislature. Picking up on that report and others from news services, French free-press group Reporters Without Borders issued a statement condemning the closure of the blogs.

China has recently stepped up its censorship of dissent and monitoring of the Internet, late last year asking Microsoft Corp. to take down the blog of journalist Michael Anti, among other acts. After the topic hit the front pages of U.S. newspapers and magazines, Congress held hearings in February about the ways in which U.S. Internet companies cooperate with Chinese censorship.

But in this case, it appears the Chinese government wasn't involved. By Thursday, a day after the shut-downs, the blogs were back up and running.

In an interview, Beijing-based journalist Wang Xiaofeng of Massage Milk says he shut his blog down to make a point about freedom of speech -- just one directed at the West instead of at Beijing. He calls the Western press "irresponsible" and says that the hoax was designed "to give foreign media a lesson that Chinese affairs are not always the way you think."

...

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114229717280997182.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

The Great McCartney Hunt

2006-03-05T03:52:00.000+08:00

There's a few things I cannot stand on this earth and chief among them is arrogance.

It's hard to tell who possessed more of it on the farcical debate between the fuzzy McCartney couple or the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Danny Williams: the McCartney's or the host, Larry King.

After posing with a type of seal that has been illegal to hunt since the '80s, the two go on Larry King Live and end up debating Williams.

In the introduction, Larry King pronounces Newfoundland incorrectly. Some Canadians pronounce it differently as well, as in either: New...FOUND...land, or NOOFUND-LAND.

However, all of us agree that it is not to be pronounced: Noofind-lund. And apparently, not Labrador.

What an idiot. American mainstream journalism (we're talking one of the top networks' top shows) can't even research the province of the Premier he's hosting. When doing something like this has to be called research, the whole situation is utterly degrading.

I can just imagine: And here is Mike Huckabee (yes, of Talking to Americans fame), governor of ARRRRR-CAN-ZHAS.

What an absolute disgrace.

And then there was Paul and Heather, celibree-tos with the gall to take on an elected official in their position as what...um, guitar player and woman who...married a musician? Not journalist a journalist, mano a mano, or pundit vs pundit. But poofs vs tepid, irritated anger? Inconsequential. Irrelevant. This debate shouldn't have occurred.

My goodness. It wouldn't have been bad had it actually been a debate. But leave it for someone from the Beatles to skip logical, procedural argument and engage in unwilling satire.

It's like watching a more wrinkly, less relevant Bono. And even with the sunglasses, Bono is unpleasant at best; without them, even decked out (arrogantly) in a patronizing CANADA sweater, Paul McCartney came off as a sad, old photo-op, floundering around verbally like a beated bleeding seal flopping around on the ice.

Waves Crashing on Towers Eternal

2006-02-16T10:39:00.000+08:00

She sat with legs crossed and newspapers splayed across the table. She talked wisdom as half of her face exploded outwards in colour throughout the coffee shop. A night later, someone told me they got married in a city deep in my memory, between skyscrapers and the sea, wishing I was there. I closed my eyes and let them crumble backward into my skull.

The Yellow Mountains: Visual Hesse

2006-02-16T09:03:00.000+08:00

I whistled a song down through the mountains around me and closed my eyes; I waited for the echo that never came; I let a few more breaths flow into the ether, turned around, and walked with my hands clasped behind my bank; the mountain grasses blew around me and trees bent; the dew clung on and only the mist around me stayed still; inside, things were turbulent.

Words: Who needs 'em?

2006-02-14T23:38:00.000+08:00

As I slopped myself into my bed last night and covered myself up, I realized I wanted to read. I knelt up, leaned into my bookshelf and grabbed Herman Hesse's The Journey to the East; I began rereading the excellent book from the beginning.

I threw my head back into the pillow and covered my face with the book after reading:

- ..."Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."

To a writer of both fiction and nonfiction this strikes a deep, muscle-y chord; in a Monty Python death scene kind of way, one yells "S'TRUTH!" and keels over in cinematic fashion, grabbing their own heart.

Why do I have to go to bed like this?

Then I continue reading to discover:

He who travels far will often see things
Far removed from what he believed was Truth.
When he talks about it in the fields at home,
He is often accused of lying,
For the obdurate people will not believe
What they do not see and distinctly feel.
Inexperience, I believe,
Will give little credence to my song.

To which, I tossed the book beside my bed with the others (MAO, on which rests my alarm clock, The Road to Wigan Pier, which is a library book and consequently ill-treated, yesterday's paper, and a pencil-scrawl goodbye note I woke up to, written by a seldom-seen party-goer with whom I was hanging out and feeding hashbrowns to, before I went to bed on Friday), leaned back, and let my head explode into slumber.

NB - ob·du·rate: Hardened against feeling; hardhearted: an obdurate miser.

Newsflash: Iain Enters the Cartoonish Fray

2006-02-12T11:19:00.000+08:00

My first and only Google-able reaction to the cartoon protests is thus: It is unfortunate that the decision to print, broadcast, or to omit to print or broadcast the cartoons of Muhammad is left to a select group of (mostly) men with extremely large and flammable egos; people whose job and responsibility revolve around generating curiosity in their end product; people who, by their very nature, are used to engaging in one-way dialogue and being cursory about their responsibility to anything and anyone except the tenets of their widely-detested profession; people who have something to prove; people who will, despite the gutterwash of blood in the Middle East, re-circulate jokey renditions of a prophet sacred to millions of people; people who choose to accept the nervously-moral, coffee-hazed newsroom view of free speech and not the laughably immoral high ground of gun-toting, intellectually-outdated lunatics; people more courageous than the moderates; people more interested in standing with the few rather than the many - whatever you think - and here, I will posit that you think thusly: the cartoons are bad; the reactions are also bad - you must hand it to the glory-seeking, egotistical, insensitive editors who spawned the crisis that has people shot dead in the streets, having embassies burned to the ground, having smoke-choked lunatics jump to their deaths, because they took a stand for something they believed in and refused to engage in a milky, copped out, half-assed, dilluted, and fully compromised view of the world and not bowing to the guns, Korans, Bibles, and religiously illogical lunatics of our world - and for that, I salute them: Cheers.

The Friday Morning Translator

2006-02-12T09:14:00.000+08:00

I had seen her before.

It was Friday morning. I was half hung-over, from lack of sleep not lack of sense, and was nursing a coffee and a poorly-written paper. Class started and was inanely tepid; the teacher's interaction with the class was the only thing that kept me awake.

I sit in the same spot every week, beside a soft-spoken, well-meaning guy, and my friend Sam. In a similarly rooted spot, sits a woman I assume is a Chinese exchange student. I've noticed her before, she's always sitting there, smiling, taking in the class and opening and closing her text book as the professor occasionally skims over things in the readings.

It was the first morning I noticed a little glimmer of something we had in common: being alone.

I forget what we were all talking about, some cursory discussion of essay topics or something to that effect, when the teacher absent-mindedly wrote "...fending..." on the board in the middle of a sentence.

I don't know why I know it was the word "fending" that got her, but she turns softly to her side, and picks up a little silver (again, an assumption...) pocket translator. She looked so at peace while she did it. I wondered briefly how she could be so calm, when it's at the very least a 14-hour flight to her home country, let alone her province, or town, or village, or city; her friends, her dad, her grandmother, her teachers - wondering how their pupil is faring overseas, her little brother or sister, if she has one.

I can attest to how isolated (and exhilarated) you can feel when you're surrounded by people speaking either your second language, or one you don't fully understand, or for that matter, one you understand to the exact degree of being able to order food. It's a rush to realize you're on your own, "...fending..." for yourself; but it's an intense feeling when you leave yourself to some great, secular fate; going through a metaphoric, Anabaptistic umbilical cord-cutting ceremony of one's very own.

The expression on her face was telling; somewhat tragic, a stoic resolve, a calculated compromise between immersion and unfortunate, language-forced indifference.

A Lecture: Food Spreads and Ocean Spray

2006-02-12T08:50:00.000+08:00

I have received a request to post gossip on here, instead of political commentary.

This is a valid demand, and as pointed out in the request itself, there is an ungodly amount of political commentary, as equally silly and pointless as my own, currently floating around on blogs.

However, there is perhaps even more gossip, rumour, festering pseudo-allegations against fellow bloggers and readers, etc, to sift through as well.

I will do my best to combine both in a terribly unlucrative compromise.

I went to the Lewis Lapham (editor of Harper's) lecture at Ottawa U. last night. A friend and I had a few drinks before, and as we left, we discovered an intense spread of giant shrimp, salmon wraps, sushi, bread, a wide variety of cheeses, and - my thanks here go to the Ottawa U. graduate student's association and all the tuition fees they skimmed - free booze.

After chatting with my friend and imbibing red wine and Stella's, I overheard someone say, extremely loudly, something to the effect of:

"Man, I'm a political analyst and I'm not going to take crap from anybody, even Lewis Lapham."

He was elaborating his point in a spray of vitriol all over the shirt of the woman he was addressing. She didn't looked amused and was verbally squirming in the surrounding awkwardness.

It was funny. It's not gossip, but it's the best I'm willing to divulge.

Speak no evil

2006-02-02T13:23:00.000+08:00

Hello All:

I'm shutting up.

But I'm not just shutting up randomly or permanently, which is what you all probably want.

I'm shutting up for Journalists for Human Rights' Speak Silence campaign, where group members and volunteers take a vow of silence and raise money for journalists who get shut up by force, shot, killed, threatened, coerced and so on. Essentially, all those who don't enjoy the freedom to make pretentious and highly public farces of themselves in their attempts to stick it to those with power and privilege.

Last year we - the Carleton University chapter of JHR - used money we raised to send equipment to Radio Izuba in Rwanda, a country whose media inflamed a terrible conflict. We also put on human rights-themed documentary screenings and organized speakers. We plan to continue sponsoring media in developing countries and increasing the ability of young journalists to report human rights issues responsibly.

Please find the time and pocket change to sponsor me. You can do so at this link, via PayPal and other sorts of online financial mumbo-jumbo.

https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/personalPage.aspx?EventID=4625&LangPref=en-CA&RegistrationID=153568

Also, at this link, is a goofy picture of me for your enjoyment.

Thanks.

Iain

University: high school of the 21st century

2006-01-31T13:13:00.000+08:00

I originally thought at some point in university application procedures administration managed to weed out some of the future lower echelons of academia.

Then I realized that the only people in university were those who either a) had the money to be there, b) actually had some thirst for knowledge, or c) were either inheriting something big or stalling because they're foolish.

Today, in a 4th year class on international humanitarian law, we had one presenter who dressed up in a suit (?) and did a presentation on something that was not in any way about international humanitarian law.

For those who don't know, IHL is about the laws and rules which start to apply within an armed conflict. This suited man's presentation was on humanitarian intervention and about state sovereignty and human rights; which, is all prior to actually engaging in armed conflict.

Not to be outdone, the next presenter flubbed and accidentally said "prostitute" instead of "prosecute". His eloquence proceeded to stomp mercilessly on his time limit and the professor had no time to wrap up the class.

Also, people were pronouncing jus cogens - Juice Co-jens.

This post is so arrogant.

Sushi Party

2006-01-30T13:54:00.001+08:00

Tonight my friend Alana hosted a sushi party, at which - to my surprise - we created and rolled our own sushi.

Well, duh; I suppose.

It was my impression that I would show up and gorge myself. Instead, I was expected to craft for myself these intricate little fake-crab concoctions covered in ocean weed.

All in all, it was excellent: excellent company, good music coming from the room behind my chair (read: stool, that's right Alana - I said it), and good food. I have no idea if Japanese food was going to sit well, but I had that impression about Korean food, and now I'm in love with all good foods of the Far East. It is my conclusion that Western food and meals are imbalanced, bland and tacky.

In other news, my sleeping pattern has taken a brutal smacking. Late nights and early shifts are obviously silly combinations to experiment with, though I'm sure I'll continue it.

Currently, I'm buffing up on international law, getting over a sore throat, and pondering what I'm doing this summer.

That's all.

Farewell Brother; Liberals

2006-01-26T10:58:00.000+08:00

Canada is now big C for two reasons: 1) the country's name is Canada, and 2) the Conservative Party just won the federal election.

I am not elated, nor am I terribly surprised or disappointed. The big-(L) Liberals needed the boot and all the pundits are saying it's good for the country because eventually we'll sway back to the big-(L)'s after they've thought long and hard about what they did, and all will be remedied. I, for one, somewhat agree. I think the Conservatives face a lot of constraints to policy, but I'm still fearful they could throw their (light)weight around the Commons.

I feel good in a way, though, because my riding's NDP candidate - for whom I voted - won against two candidates I thought didn't deserve to win. Among other things, I also thought them pompous during the all-candidates debate when they mudslung each other as if the other parties didn't exist.

Arrogance beset arrogance; they brought themselves down.

In other news, my brother will fly to Korea on January 28, 2006, and will not gaze down upon Canadian soil for - what is most likely to be - at least a year. I will miss him. He's more than a brother; he's a BRO-ther. Also, his friends are excellent and when we got festive in Guelph this past weekend in his honour, they treated me like, well, his brother - one of the family.

I haven't posted here in a while, mainly because I thought I would reserve this to totally serious posts.

I've relented on that.

Reports from Shanghai

2005-11-29T15:04:00.000+08:00

My colleague and friend from Shanghai, Wang Weijia, passed me a link this evening to some broadcasts from UC Berkeley's graduate journalism school.

Several of them brought back vivid memories and further inspired my will to document the fascinating city on video. One, on Shanghai's startling growth and consequently alarming rate of evictions, is excellent; due, at least in part I am sure, to the journalist consultations with Weijia.

The link is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-srv/photo/emergingvoices/
index.html?nav=cwleftnav

The one grievance I had with those I watched is that the segment on migrant workers is much too skimming, and unusually celebratory. I find it extremely difficult to believe - given the faces of migrant workers I saw, sat beside, and slept propped up against - that not one of them has anything negative to say about their situation.

One Shanghai jazz musician told me that there is a statue with melted, drilling eyes, symbolizing migrant discontent. And no one travelling for any length of time in China can ignore the train stations clogged with workers, the obvious wretchedness of - at least - some of their situations, of farmers forced of their lands, of 20 hour train rides home being unpleasant (as opposed to jovially accepted, which is how the report portrayed it). Some Chinese are afraid to seem upset about their situation.

The eviction story showed passionate, Shanghainese temper at its best; the migrant worker story showed Chinese ambivalence at its worst.

The most telling situation I can recall anecdotally, is the corner, street-level block near my apartment in Pudong, Shanghai, which was being transformed into a restaurant by migrant workers. By day, they worked in the small, dust-clogged area; by night, they slept in the same place but covered with mosquito nets. I saw one man saw glass on the sidewalk - shirtless, in sandals, with a limp cigarette hanging from his mouth, as sparks flew around his ankles. They would shower in the street and eat their meals from vendors around the corner.

I know how hard it must be for a foreign journalist, especially a student journalist, to work in Shanghai. I just think that this particular piece smacked of ignorant-orientalism; with a story angle that reflected a lack of local knowledge, quotes that did not account for dissent, a focus that ignored homeless migrants and safety issues; but I think, foremost, that I am personally bowled over by an exclusion of any visuals from the Shanghai Railway Station, to which a visit would drastically alter anyone's - even a foreigner's - interpretation of China's "newly mobile workforce."

Harbin: Disaster, yes; One of China's Biggest Cities, no

2005-11-28T03:49:00.000+08:00

Originally posted to http://www.livejournal.com/users/marpow/ on [25 Nov 2005|11:41am]

The chaos in Harbin is unbelievable. People are fleeing a city over water pollution. The poor are left filling up bath tubs, the rich are fleeing to their second houses in the country or clogging the airports and train stations.

Foreign correspondents are cozying up in the city's best hotels.

A massive toxic slick drifting through the region's main water supply is a tragedy and I, for one, hope the China National Petroleum Corp. loses the upcoming court battle and is called to account.

However, I wish journalists would STOP CALLING HARBIN ONE OF CHINA'S BIGGEST CITIES.

Harbin's population is meant to be around 3.8 million. The total population of the entire region is meant to be around 10 or 11 million. This is far, far, far from one of China's biggest cities - especially considering China is estimated to have more than 100 cities with more than a million people. Suzhou has about 5 million, Chengdu has about 10 million, Chongqing has around 30 million, Shanghai has around 20 million, Hangzhou has about 6.3 million, just to name a few.

I don't know who ran the original story, though I'm assuming it was a wire service; but it seems that numerous papers (including the Globe and Mail, for shame) have picked it up and used it in their lead.

If journalists want to size it up, say "bigger than Toronto" or something like that, don't LIE and overstate an issue that does NOT need to be overstated at all.

I automatically think back to Scoop, and how Waugh portrays the journalists as ignorant of the local culture and widely overstate, exagerrate, and make up situations. This all leads, obviously, to a desire to have THEIR OWN story picked up and run in several papers, which this wire reporter seems to have accomplished.

I hope the journalist is happy with the momentary, ill-gotten fame, and that the wire service made a pretty penny, but now Harbin - a major city for sure, but small in comparison to others - is known under an international misconception.

All for a good lede. Sigh.

Also, CTV news carried last night what I thought was an excellent TV news piece on the Harbin disaster. However, even days after its been flooding the newswires...Harbin is still being called one of China's biggest cities.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com
/art/2005/11/25/217976/Cleanup_teams_battle_massive_chemical_slick.htm

A Weird Day for International Law and the Media

2005-11-28T03:44:00.000+08:00

Originally posted to http://www.livejournal.com/users/marpow/ on [23 Nov 2005|07:32pm]

Rest easy.

They got Pinochet on tax evasion.

And as if this day couldn't get any weirder.

There are pseudo-jokey allegations that Bush had talked about - in jest or otherwise - bombing al-Jazeera in Qatar.

This makes no sense at all. But the U.S. actually did bomb - with a plane and rockets - an al-Jazeera television reporter. They killed him.

The situation is well-documented in Control Room - the powerful movie about al-Jazeera's attempt to cover the Iraq war.

They have a really intense plea to the media from the slain man's wife.

Her request was simple: tell the truth.

Earth to Earth to America

2005-11-28T03:38:00.000+08:00

Originally posted to: http://www.livejournal.com/users/marpow/ on [20 Nov 2005|08:44pm]

Earth to America is to serious political discourse as the Earth to America crowd adoring a Vietnamese Astronaut-quoting Leonardo DiCaprio is to not hilarious.

Several things became apparent while watching this awful show:

1. Entertainers should never, ever, try to engage anyone, ever, on any issue; any.

2. The Left is rarely as funny as Rick Mercer or Rob Corddry, and should not inject what is obviously an immense amount of money into any large scale production which, once again, fails to rise above the comic level of, oh, I don't know, the state of the world.

3. No one watching this show, who does not already hold the hard-to-believe political message(Um, global warming is...bad? happening?), will come away with either: a) a solid grasp of the issue, b) a feeling of not wasting however long this show will praddle on for, c) a face sore from laughing or a heart, lit anew with caring.

4. David Letterman's #1 in the Top Ten will never be as funny as the preceding nine.

5. Steve Martin is still really good at playing banjo, but will never top the discussive, radical political analysis of King Tut.

6. That I am confused by Ray Romano being allowed disastrously unfunny reign over the stage for far too long, while Eric Idle is forced to share the comedic stage with Tom Hanks.

7. Oddly enough, entertainers acting on fake news shows as journalists are genuinely more funny if they talk about politics; because, Lord knows, we're in a bad need of good satirists. However, entertainers on entertainment shows posing as a forum for a serious issue are drop-dead unfunny in their attempt to be funny. In addition, politicians posing as entertainers who then pose as fake journalists posing as real journalists interviewing fake people on a real issue in a phony context on a real show which is totally fake, are not funny.

8. I've repeated myself by using the word "unfunny" more than once - I regret nothing; furthermore, I would proceed to use it several more times in reference to this show, without a second thought.

9. The attempt to woo the 'layman republican' with a country music performance is actually really funny, if not slightly offensive to Republicans. Apparently TBS figured that the condescending concept of Daisy Does America was not enough. I can imagine the producers sitting around a long, polished oak table and having one of them blurt out: "But wait, how do we get republicans on board..?"

-----

Finally, and rampantly off topic, if I oppose anything as inhumane and pointless, it's the death penalty. Singapore is silly for engaging in the practice and I hope Canberra takes the death penalty-using country to the International Court of Justice.

But how hilarious is it that Amnesty International has rallied to the noble cause of protecting...an Australian drug trafficker?

I remember being in high school and being told by Amnesty's office that our local chapter could not hold a fundraiser for the homeless, because lo and behold, Amnesty International's mandate does not extend to the homeless.

Yet, apparently, it extends to drug traffickers - as long as, you see, it is done in the name of "human rights". It's sort of like PETA getting Pamela Anderson to whore herself out for the anti-fur movement, but weirder, and less hot.

The First

2005-11-28T03:34:00.000+08:00

Hi All:

I'm going to post some older entries into this blog from my other one; just to start things off, you know how it is.

Iain Marlow