'Quasimodo predicted all this'

 

Underground for years

The following exchange was broadcast a little while ago on the BBC News Hour. The announcer, Owen Bennett-Jones, was interviewing former British Ambassador to North Korea John Everard about life in that country. At one point they reference the Google Maps of North Korea, which were just released.

Everard: You could travel freely within thirty km of central Pyongyang, which gave you the city itself and a lot of countryside. If you went outside that, the rule book said that you require permission. In practice, you could go to the beach at Nampo, heading due west from Pyongyang, and no one would actually stop you. And colleagues did the same on the beach going the other way, at Wonsan (?), going east. And on one occasion I drove about two thirds of the way up to the Chinese border to see a museum there, which I duly did, and no one seemed to (care) that I'd gone way outside Pyongyang.

ANNCR: No permission?

Everard: No permission. So the system isn't quite as watertight as people make out.

ANNCR: One of the striking things about the [just-released] Google Maps -- I don't know if it surprises you -- they've marked one of the labor camps.

Everard: Yes, so I saw. The position of the labor camps has been argued over for quite some time. And things are complicated by the fact that -- we believe -- that some of the labor camps are actually underground, so they won't show on maps.

ANNCR: Really?!

Everard: Yes.

ANNCR: Why?

Everard: Well, because, if you put a labor camp underground -- remember that these are slave laborers, often making munitions and things that the regime doesn't want to show the world. If you put them underground, you can't actually spot them from satellites, or it's a lot more difficult to do so. A colleague of mine once gained access, incredibly, to one of these places. And told me that he found that the people there had been underground for years, hadn't seen the light.

ANNCR: How on earth did a foreigner get in there?

Everard: It's a long story.

ANNCR: Which you can't tell?

Everard: Which I can't tell.

-- BBC News Hour, 2145h GMT, 29 January 2013

Everard is the author of a memoir about his time in North Korea, Only Beautiful Please.

Screenwriting columnist confirms that screenwriting is nothing but arranging clichés

Whenever I read about the screenwriting game, it always sounds to me like it's nothing more than understanding clichés as fully as possible so that they can be rearranged in such a way that's just barely different from the last time they were successfully rearranged. And nothing in the first paragraph of this fellow's column changes my mind:

Even a hero sometimes needs a push out of the front door and into the arms of adventure. Your detective needs to get himself embroiled in that mystery; your crude-humored man-child needs a reason to get a job so that the "fish out of water" hilarity can ensue; and how about your plucky secretary who is down on her luck but has a heart of gold? Well, she needs that spark to help her decide it's finally time to take her career into her own hands.

Brad Johnson in Script

Ugh. It's worse than boring. It's demeaning.
 

'Well this is arty'

I was reading a post about the film TAXI DRIVER on a cinema website and had gotten to the comments; in fact I made a comment of my own. I was about to click off the page when I noticed one of the comments seemed a bit odd, coming from someone with the name Prague Taxi Transfers:

So the taxi service in Prague was "very impressed," was it? Curious, I clicked on the name of the account, and up popped a whole series of comments made by the same account using a Disqus login. Each anodyne comment was made on a post with the word "taxi" or "cab" in its title -- 29 of them! And yet the comments have nothing to do with taxis at all. They could appear on almost any post.

Of course, what's happening is that a robot is leaving these on any blog post that has remotely to do with taxis, for the purpose of search engine optimization. The more web pages that link back to the site of Prague Taxi Transfers, the higher they appear in Google search results -- or at least that is the aim.

Taken together, the comments form a one-sided dialogue that make you feel like you're overhearing someone's gossipy phone conversation.

I have had the same thing happen to me.

It really made my day.

Well nothing amazes me.

This was very emotional.

Yes I did and thought it was shocking!

I do think it is something that deserves more media attention.
 

Sounds like a business idea to me

This tweet crossed my Twitter feed. I don't know the originator, but as you can see it was retweeted by SFMOMA:

SFMOMA, this seems like a business idea to me. Why not have a bullpen of MFAs eager to accompany visitors to your museum? They could make a few bucks and you could too.

The fictional world

With all the schadenfreude I can muster, I enjoy the uncovering of hoaxes and frauds. And the last week has been an exhausting carnival of revelations. A famed college football player's heartwarming story of a girlfriend who died; a prize winning poet; a cycling champion; and baseball Hall of Fame voters rejected the stars of the late 90s and early 00s. It's getting difficult to keep up, but Twitter and Gawker and the like are always there to spread the latest.

Also via the internet come these words of advice on writing from novelist W.G. Sebald:

You should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide. None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

It's both reassuring and not. You'll never run out of ideas, but those ideas will be rooted in the depressing plenitude of human weakness.

Imagine a story, then, about a protagonist who invents a lover, or mentor, or literary agent, or other close partner or adviser. Someone who is close to them, who provides invaluable support, and who is, for plausible reasons, not available in person -- not now and, as it turns out, not ever. Call the imaginary person Aubrey Daniels, just to use a gender-neutral first name, and name the story "The Fiction of Aubrey Daniels," which makes ironic use of the humble word of. The story is more about the weaving of the fiction, and the uses to which the protagonist puts the fictional Aubrey, though of course the story has to include the uncovering of the hoax and the reaction of all the people who were fooled by it.

(To be fooled is to be made into a fool, an interesting grammatical construction I don't know the name of and can't think of another example of, aside from the newish term to punk someone, which means almost the same thing. Perhaps this usage is related to the joke "Call me a cab." "All right -- you're a cab." I hope a rhetorician can clear this up for me.)

Without music or media

I've been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.

-- László Krasznahorkai in the New York Times blog

Of course, everyone in the world lived that way before the advent of the photograph and radio, the television, the home stereo system, piped-in Muzak, the "personal" media player, and so on.

Several years ago I spent six weeks in a remote mountain retreat. My mornings were spent in the kitchen, where music played all the time and made the time pass pleasantly. After that I enjoyed silence, solitude and time to work -- for a week. Then a young man moved in upstairs and blared his stereo. It took me several negotiations to get him to let me have, at least, the afternoons to work in silence. But the irony was that I had to negotiate silence at all in a remote mountain retreat.

Like time and space, the commodity of silence becomes more and more valuable -- especially as you get older.

From a dream

Fragment of an otherwise unremembered dream from Sunday night which I wrote in the bedside notebook when I woke:

The suffering would be immediate and actual, which was not to be desired, unless you compared it to...

'Readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives'

Loved this.

Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And by this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that one gets from reading, say, Naomi Wolf's account of losing the Technicolor Wizard of Oz–like effects of her orgasms. It should be deliberately entertaining, not accidentally funny.) Most readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives, and so it is incumbent upon the writer to make them care or draw them in by being fascinating or funny or unusually observant.

-- Katie Roiphe in Slate

Carried to extremes, this attitude might be expressed with a degree of hostility:

It turned out a couple of students had complained to the chair about my comments on their stories. He showed me a page with red slashed across: "Who cares? I don't care! Make me care!"

"What did you mean by this?" he asked.

"Simply that a narrative is worthless unless the reader can be made to care about the characters and what happens to them," I said, as simply as I could.

"You were trying to tell the student that her story is worthless?"

"In its present form, it is worthless."

-- The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag

Mu

The film segment The Heavenly Creature -- one-third of an anthology film titled "Doomsday Book," from three South Korean filmmakers -- is

... a lyrical and philosophical anecdote about a robot who works in a Buddhist monastery. The monks believe the machine has achieved enlightenment, and this presents a problem for the robot's corporation. Is it malfunctioning? Should it be destroyed? What does "existence" mean anyway for an enlightened one? This is like a koan, an excuse for dialectics between characters who assert opposing views, something to be puzzled over more than a narrative to be resolved.

-- Pop Matters

The monks believe the machine has achieved enlightenment. How could monks be that stupid? Clearly this is simply a comic premise. This presents a problem for the robot's corporation. Is it malfunctioning? A robot in a monastery which appears enlightened must be the best robot ever; how could anyone think it was malfunctioning? What does "existence" mean anyway for an enlightened one? Enlightened or unenlightened, there is no choice between existence or non-existence. He (or that) which does not exist can be neither enlightened nor unenlightened. This is like a koan. You think?

The frightening internet

Because my employer urged me to -- it seems we are all being urged to "connect with customers" over social media, not that I have any intention of doing so (I'm sure they would be the worse for it) -- I finally joined a social network called LinkedIn. And as soon as you join, they ask permission to slurp up your contacts list. No, I replied, skip it. And yet even though I had denied them the right to know my email contacts, they proceeded to present me with about 200 people who might know me. And damned if about 40% of them weren't accurate.

How the hell did that happen, I wondered. How did they get the name of someone who contributed to Frighten the Horses, the sex-and-politics zine Cris and I did over 20 years ago -- an era before email and the internet -- and whom I've corresponded through email exactly once since then? It was fucking eerie.

This blog entry helped me understand. Both the entry itself and, especially, the fourth comment, which points out that those people are already on LinkedIn and they did share their email contacts list. So that artist who did the piercing layout for us in 1992 was actually on LinkedIn before me, and shared my email address, so when I popped up, there she was as one of the people I possibly knew.

I was glad that I recognized only 40% of those 200 people (which is still a lot). Because that means that 60% of them know some other Mark Pritchard. And they can have him.

This America

Driving in the South of Market district this morning, I stopped at a traffic signal. I'd just been to the supermarket and then to a coffee bar and was on my way to a freeway onramp to come to work. I noticed a pedestrian in the crosswalk. He was a young man, no more than 25, and a little overweight. He had a shambling gait and was making weird motions, digging the knuckles of one hand into his cheek and jaw as if tightening invisible bolts; with each second that I watched him, as he slowly made his way across wide Bryant Street, I was more convinced that he was mentally ill. He wore a light jacket, not enough for the cold morning. But what struck me most was that, with the temperature about 42 F., he was barefoot.

One sees mentally ill people on the streets of every American city. The only thing that distinguished this guy was his youth and appearance. He wasn't dirty or unshaven; except for his shoelessness, he might have taken off that morning from whatever home or facility he lived in, a place where his clothes were washed and he was well fed. But his gait and general behavior revealed his illness.

I felt compassion, and thought of actually stopping and giving him my shoes and socks. I have hiking boots in my car which I could have put on, and a spare pair of socks at work. But I did nothing.

"What is hell?" asked Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamozov. "I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

Entanglement between evangelical churches and adoption industry

I've been hoping someone would look into this story for ages, ever since my fundie brother adopted two kids over 15 years ago and spoke of it as something many people in his acquaintance were doing. I knew somebody had to be making money. Finally there's a book:

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption
by Kathryn Joyce

Publication Date: April 23, 2013
Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. To tens of millions of evangelicals, adoption has become a new front in the culture wars: a test of "pro-life" bonafides, a way to reinvent compassionate conservatism on the global stage, and a means to fulfill the “Great Commission” mandate that Christians evangelize the nations. Influential leaders fervently promote a new "orphan theology," urging followers to adopt en masse, with little thought for the families these "orphans" may actually have. Christian adoption activists have added moral weight to a multi-billion dollar adoption industry intent on increasing the "supply" of adoptable children, both at home and overseas.

The Child Catchers is a shocking exposé of what the adoption industry has become and how it got there, told through deep investigative reporting and the heartbreaking stories of individuals who found that their own, and their children's, well-being was ultimately irrelevant in a market driven by profit and now, pulpit command.

Kathryn Joyce is a journalist based in New York City whose work has appeared in the Nation, Mother Jones, Slate, the Atlantic, and other publications. A 2011 recipient of the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, she has also been awarded residencies and fellowship support by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bellagio Center, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement and associate editor at Religion Dispatches.

Infra-noise leads to ghost reports

And then there is sound we can't hear — infrasonic. In 1998, a group of scientists working in a laboratory began to feel as if they were in a haunted house: They thought they saw blurry gray figures and were full of dread, a science journal reported. They finally traced the effect to an extractor fan, whose infrasonic noise happened to be "at just the right frequency to make eyeballs vibrate and so perhaps to generate visual illusions."

-- from a review in today's NYT by Katherine Bouton of
Discord: the Study of Noise, by Mike Goldsmith