Category: words

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Borrowings

Wholesome

There’s an oft-quoted Zen saying that says “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” Presumably after the thrill of enlightenment has faded, all that remains are dirty T-shirts and undies. And yet, I’d beg to differ with this oft-quoted saying, or at least the preposition therein. It isn’t that laundry comes after ecstasy; it’s that laundry is ecstasy. If you fully embrace your life with all its tedium and drudgery–if you fully embrace the monotonous routine of the same old spouse as you head off to meditate, again, on the same old cushion–you discover your laundry and your ecstasy are one in the same. What is marital bliss, after all, but the repetition, ’til death do us part, of the same old chores, the same old laundry, and the same old ecstasies?

Lorianne

Sun Rises

while the days slip
into winter’s tightness
each morning the sun
rises without repeating

MB

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The persistence of insult

“You whore, you dirty whore, I’m going to kill you and your mongrel bitch.”

1.50 am and the man next door is outside, shouting, by the front door, underneath my window. Maizy had been barking, probably at a fox in the garden. The man next door does not like it when Maizy barks.

“I’m going to cut your head off, you whore.”

Maizy was now, of course, barking furiously. At him.

He wasn’t thumping on the door, he wasn’t carrying a hammer and the children were not in the house. I opened the bedroom door and Maizy rocketed in, curled up on the bed and was silent. I went straight back to sleep. Sticks and stones, after all, may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.

Yeah, right.

My mother first started calling me a whore when I was about 12. It’s a term my step-mother has employed too, although not to my face. “That whore and her half-cast bastard.” Rather like the whore and her mongrel bitch.

As I slip down the sides of the black pit I wonder why I bother to loath myself when others have done it so efficiently, so consistently, for so long. But nobody can loath me better than myself.

Never underestimate the power of words.

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Pearl River pigeon

Pearl River pigeon

My very dear friend feng37 is translating poetry again as he watches the bodies floating down the river.

So he translates poems from Chinese, an act of love and an act of homage to the writers, I’m guessing, and makes art. There’s so much happening in this one, between the characters and the paper and the river. I’ve put it all down here but go there to see it alongside the Chinese. And read here about the young migrant worker, Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose poem this is.

Paper Tiger

She’s a tiger on paper, or a rhetorical figure of speech
From the air, she sucks bodies dry, an illusionist’s symbol
Her shelter is a scream from the ashes, as eye-piercing as the setting sun
She’s concealed in the shade from a narcissus, sunset’s gentle sigh
She opens her mouth to speak the darkest sonant in a hush, the flesh of speech
A monstrosity among tigers, from its open mouth on the paper, between its teeth passes
The bright dusk of things past, the pumping sound of recollection
But it’s too slight, the sound as faint as the bug on the tree leaf
She’s too little, the rain’s too much, her fate like the humid thunder
Bringing in from afar a barenaked dusk or dawn
Whose sheens come from the tiger’s hard, pointy bones on paper
The sound of rain falls, we drink our liquor, the rain like the liquor pours over us
The rhetoric we so adore knocks us unconscious, leaves us among the beasts on the paper
The rain left to fall outside, how much does it wash away
The shyness of my youth, sigh, a tiger that’s ceased to exist
Rinsed away by the rain, it slowly left, towards the twilight

The beast on paper, a limpid planet, I will pass through the wall and leave
The wall in the air, it comes from a rusty place
The stooped tiger, slowly and silently rises up from the paper, its iridescence
Is the shadow in a word, a phrase, a poem, where there appears another
Tiger, its masculine muscularity, lush like a treetop, gives the paper
Vigor and cool shade, from up on the paper it looks down, then rushes toward the monsoon
It wants to look you in the eyes, its iridescence, like dense rain, weaves together
The nearby night flies off in fright, its eyes a bundle of remote blue light
Its hair points toward autumn’s escape, turning ashen and white
The tiger on paper, it makes no sound, just leaves tracks worth pursuing
It is a symbol or an allegory, the trees on paper begin to whither
It holds its head way up high, standing in a dry and scraggly patch of meadow, a colorful and vivid oil painting
But you cannot see its bones and its sprint, those tiger bones more solid than steel
Crouched in the dark, on the paper, bending, stretching, gathering strength
Like an exclamation, the blade of a knife piercing flesh or thought
This near nothingness of a beast, its tyranny, fills me with a feeling of being oppressed
From the paper I breathe in the inner panic it brings, still it grows
A tail much more distinct than the trees, its eyes and forehead hidden deep in the monsoon

Imagine a tiger on paper suddenly jumps up, bringing with it the sound of wind
In clarity, it presses close to my skin, the rain of a shadowy autumn day drifts down
Its senses are like a woman’s intuition, stubborn and sharp
The woman in the dark, on whatever page the tiger happens to be haunting, is calculating the moonlight
More vast than the night, in the bending of some sentence, the tiger leaves
Leaves almost imperceptible signs, the woman predicts the falling and flowing of light and flesh
The tiger on paper runs, through its deep-rooted misery
Its sharp teeth are polished smooth on mutiple lusts, one tiger and one woman
Bow to each other, like two boxers sizing each other up in the ring
The lights go bright, then go out, leaving the black ink to narrate
A tiger, it shifts, in the hidden woods, the tiger on paper drifts down
The dark red blood, red like truths are, a rain of thin wires
Rusting on the paper, creeps up like a drop of ink
In the green silence, a tiger is laid to rest in the whiteness of the paper

I’ve signed up for a short course on photo-etching at the end of the year and a slightly longer course on digital image making at the beginning of next year. I want to play with pictures and get them off the screen and onto paper. And plastic. And metal. And, oh, almost anything really. It’s scratching the itch to make things. The pigeon above is a first thought.

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More Rimbaud, words, images, thoughts

Wouldn’t it just be super cool to make images based on The Drunken Boat? (see the other day). Such colours! such images! such exclamation marks! I assumed this was so much a no-brainer that there would already be a group on flickr devoted to exactly this, along the lines of that for The Waste Land. There isn’t.

There are two interesting pictures – here and here – based on lines from A Season in Hell but no groups.

Words and images, images and words. At the exhibition on Tuesday I particularly liked the work by Victor Burgin who mixes image and text in his series UK76 and US77. (I didn’t really respond to another image-word juxtaposition in the work of Stephen Willats which I found too didactic and simplistic. Both photographers, both politically engaged, both heavily into theory but one I found sterile, the other exciting. Diffrnt strokes for diffrnt folks I guess.)

Hg and I talked about the personal power of words in framing a narrative of self, of the measurable physical effect on the brain of naming self-experience. He told me (again) to read Ursula K Le Guin‘s Earthsea Quartet. (I shall, I shall!)

The same day I went to the exhibition F and I talked about artists who feel the need to issue an instruction booklet with their work. How the words attempt to strait-jacket the art not allowing the possibility of the infinity of dialogues between object and viewers.

I am reminded of meeting with Ivy in the British Museum Great Court. We talked about the images of poetry and the poetry of images. She could have concentrated on the non-poetic image but chose words first. Wow! I’m really honoured to have been labelled a Thinking Blogger by Ivy. I now have to tag five more.

Firstly because of the punk connection there’s Jeff. Not that he doesn’t make me think all the time – he does. So much that my brain frequently hurts. However at the moment he’s remembering his friend Slim in a series of extraordinary posts, words and images. Slim the Drifter, moving between punk and country and a whole load of labels in between, defying them all.
Then there’s the hostess of the Thinkery. I mean with a blog name like that it’s a natural isn’t it. Krista makes me think and laugh and all sorts of other things. And she takes great pictures too.  And loves socks. And takes pictures of them.

Koranteng makes me think about such a wide range of stuff it makes my head spin. Most recently there’s been the issue of plagiarism to start the neurones firing. But look at the way he writes. And the music. Thanks to him and a one-hit wonder recommendation I’m now ploughing through the 14 or so albums I had to acquire in order to get that single song.

My friend and former World Service colleague Lara covers Hackney, Luanda and pretty much everything in between. And she is, completely brilliantly, growing and growing and growing. Thanks for taking us along too 🙂

I missed Oso‘s birthday. He’s had remarkably few of them and this won’t be apparent from his blog where he grapples and tussles with everything from beer to cats. Oh, and some other stuff too.  Amongst his many other talents and activities he’s the multi-stomached rambo-ruminant digester of Global Voices, the must-read synopsis of what the world is talking about.

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A way of looking at thirteen blackbirds

stamps

A package arrived today from Hong Kong bearing these wonderful stamps, but on first glance I was rather disappointed. Common magpie? little egret? scops owl? pshaw. Why send them all the way over from China when they’re available for viewing right here. The white-bellied sea-eagle is the only species not seen in the UK.

Closer inspection revealed that the owl wasn’t a European scops owl but a collared scops owl (there are, it seems, more than fifty members of the Otus family alone).

This then brought back to mind a really disturbing thought I had after admiring this picture from Mikey (and can you spot the joyfully serendipitous reason why I’m using a screenshot rather than a link?)

one of 13 ways

Wallace Stevens was not writing about my sort of blackbird. Turdus merula is not found in the States. In the new world it’s not a Turdus, it’s an Agelaius. A family with no less than 11 members. Ok, it’s not quite 13 but very nearly. Call it poetic license.

“Does it matter?” asked the friend who happened to phone up as I reached exactly this point in my musings.

Well, yes and no. Yes it matters because on an utterly visceral level I have spent decades fleshing out that highly visual poem with very clear images just like Mikey’s above. Visceral because when I realised it was the “wrong” bird inhabiting those scenes I felt a wrenching in the guts. A disillusionment almost as painful as the discovery that “unique” is not pronounced “uni-kway”.

And no, obviously it doesn’t matter. Neither a jot nor a tittle. It’s the deluded worry of an over-literal intermittently keen birdwatcher. But I confess I was relieved to find these illustrations by a fellow-countryman of the poet which show not a hint of yellow head or red shoulder interrupting the general blackness of the bird.

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun’s green,
Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.

Birds remade in all their blackness each time words fly from page to brain. A million million forms flocking the sky between issue and return.

(And here are some more blackbirds which flew into my inbox overnight, by Edward Picot who also curates The Hyperliterature Exchange.)

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How doth the little crocodile

Interesting to turn from musings on how journalists might best pluck goodies from the strands of the wondrous world-wide webbing to see that some are finding it a highly nourishing activity already.

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

Liz Hunt is a journalist who currently inhabits the waters of the Daily Telegraph newspaper and her information acquisition techniques appears to include, to one blogger at least, plagiarism:

Attempting to pass off someone else’s words or ideas as your own without proper attribution or acknowledgment. In both journalism and academia, this is akin to theft. Examples: Copying in whole or in part a published article or another student’s paper, borrowing language or concepts, lifting quotes or failing to use quotation marks where appropriate.

Journalistic plagiarism ranges from including one or two sentences copied from another newspaper without attribution, to more serious cases, such as copying an entire paragraph or story… The ease of copying electronic text from the Internet has lured a number of reporters into acts of plagiarism; column writers have been caught ‘cutting and pasting’ articles and text from a number of websites…

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah wrote one of his characteristically wide-ranging, erudite and entertaining blog posts entitled Bags and Stamps. It weaves together a number of strands around the subject of those outsized, woven plastic, plaid-printed flimsily-zipped containers known in west Africa as “Ghana must go” bags. He calls them “an object lesson in the fluidity of ideas” in an essay which touches on, among many other things, the subject of plagiarism. That was on 13 April this year.

Some time later, on 2 June to be precise, Liz Hunt wrote a piece in the opinion section of the Daily Telegraph entitled Immigrants have bags of ambition. It is a short piece, however it seems that Koranteng’s ideas had been fluid enough to percolate into her small container. Let’s note at this stage that Koranteng’s blog states, at the bottom of each page, that the contents are copyright, a move which protects it under UK law. Also that the Telegraph group itself is no stranger to the importance of attribution as regards the re-use of their own content on the internet:

Please provide attribution to telegraph.co.uk in relation to the RSS feeds either in text form: “telegraph.co.uk” or by using the telegraph.co.uk graphic (included in the feeds).

The day after Liz Hunt’s article appeared Koranteng wrote a letter to the newspaper’s editors: A Plagiarism in Plaid in which he links to a detailed textual analysis of his essay next to her article. There has been an e-mail response from Liz Hunt in which she says:

I am happy to organise a link to your blog IF you will extend the same courtesy to my (unedited) defence against your accusation which I refute.

This he has done but there’s no sign of any link on the article back to his blog, and a week after the original mail there’s still no response from the editors. Incidents like this are important for a number of reasons. Firstly the obvious… plagiarism is against journalistic ethics; it brings discredit on both the individual and the organisation and damages their credibility and reputation. Trust and authenticity are qualities difficult to acquire and easy to lose but much prized by media organisations in the global proliferation of internet information sources. Accusations should be taken seriously by both journalists and editors.

Secondly it has implications for the future of information gathering and exchange on the internet. Mainstream media news organisations are increasingly alert to unacknowledged re-use of their material. They watch each others’ output for evidence of unacknowledged borrowings. News agencies similarly monitor media outlets to ensure their material appears with appropriate attribution. It is hardly surprising that individual writers do the same. The rules, such as they are, should apply to all.

Thirdly one of the great beauties of text on the internet is the ability to make hyperlinks. It enriches the experience of communication for both producers and consumers. It is the technology which is shaping the transmission and reception of information, away from a top-down model to a more collaborative and conversational paradigm.
Searching for “telegraph” and “plagiarism” on google brings up more than a quarter of a million hits including this previous example of stealing an entire blog post wholesale. However there are already two references to Koranteng’s post in the first ten results. Plagiarism or sloppy attribution, whatever one cares to call the importation of material, including an unusual spelling mistake, requires some kind of response.

Steve Buttry of the American Press Institute, whose article I linked to above, says the following:

I’m willing to call small-scale plagiarism something less damning and punish it with something less than the public flogging that has become standard.

But given those stakes and all that attention to the issue, I find it hard to believe a journalist would copy and paste from another source without first putting quotation marks and attribution into the story (as I did when I cut and pasted the plagiarism definitions above).

If someone pleads sloppy attribution, I would thoroughly research that reporter’s past stories and thoroughly vet future stories. I’m skeptical and I’m not cutting much slack.

Our credibility is precious and a sloppy journalist is hardly better than a crooked journalist.

I’m sure Koranteng doesn’t want a public flogging. Or damages. He just wants an explanation and an attribution from the editors. Is that so very, very difficult?

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An ostrich, called Canute, head in the sand of the Severn Bore, incoming tide, shooting itself in the foot

Phew. That’s better. I am eating a cheese sandwich as I type (Tesco’s value red Leicester on Kingsmill 50/50 sliced bread). And here’s a picture of my cat.

don't mess with me

Isn’t he lovely? It’s not a recent picture but that could be because I’m using him as a narrative device. Or maybe not. Maybe my camera’s broken or he’s become unadorable or I’m just too lazy to take and upload another one. You decide.

Now then. Having established myself as deeply facile and boring I can go on to say that my snappy, attention-grabbing headline has got absolutely nothing to do with the event I went to this morning. Absolutely nothing to do with the “traditional media” in general, and of course, absolutely nothing to do with the BBC in particular. Oh no.

Uh, but hang on a bit. I’m a blogger aren’t I? So that means I might be um, less than accurate. Unlike, of course, the “traditional media”. Oh, the terrible uncertainty in the minds of my readers.

It was interesting, the discussion this morning. The most interesting thing, to me, was said by Stewart Purvis, professor of journalism, fabulously experienced award-studded former ITN head honcho etc. “I’m just waiting”, he said (and of course I’m paraphrasing here because I wasn’t taking notes or recording the session), “I’m just waiting for a really big blog hoax”.

A ripple ran around the room. Not the Severn Bore, but a perceptible ripple. Sort of schadenfreude-in-advance with an added dose of “please don’t let it be me”. The implication, it seemed to me, in both speaker and audience reaction, was that this would be proof of the inherent danger of “blogs” and that once this had happened journalists could stop being quite so concerned about them.

That’s one interpretation that might result from a “traditional media” organisation falling for a blog-based hoax. There is, of course, another. And it is that if a media organisation ends up falling for such a hoax it will demonstrate that said media organisation had not checked its facts properly. Verified its sources. Done what journalists and editors in the room this morning congratulated themselves upon, and quite rightly so (in many cases). Exercised all those skills that journalists insist, quite rightly in many cases, distinguish them from bloggers.

It really, really isn’t rocket science. You cannot eat your cake and have it at the same time. You cannot laud your own professionalism on the one hand and blame a source for being inaccurate if you transmit that inaccurate information on the other. Blogs are not journalism. Just as press releases are not journalism. Just as party political statements are not journalism. Just as stories seen in other, rival, “traditional media” do not or, rather more accurately, should not, be lifted and reproduced without being checked.

Does this attitude toward information generated by individuals and published on the internet have something to do with a perceived (or actual) erosion of power? That the future cuts both ways has already been demonstrated by the Reuters picture incident. Did the smoke of the doctored picture from Beirut which was “outed” by bloggers hang heavy but unacknowledged in the air?

It isn’t (she types, slowly and heavily, because this is sooo old and it’s soooo tedious to have to repeat it all the time) “them and us”. It really isn’t. Get your head out of the sand, get on your surfboard and ride the frikkin wave. Change is difficult, change (nowadays) is extremely fast. Entrenched, adversarial, inflexible, defensive attitudes are not going to get you anywhere.

And now, back to the cat. In a glorious example of web2.0 loveliness I have to relate that I was contacted to take part in today’s exciting event by flickr mail. By AnnabelB who, I notice, already has a picture of the event on her photostream.

She, it transpires, has been reading this blog (no doubt concerned that she’d contacted some cat-loving madwoman) and had been following the saga of the cards closely. So when we met and I offered her one she immediately demanded the one with the most embarrassing photo title. Which I think has to be “don’t mess with me”. Which is (you will have realised by now, I hope) a picture of….. my cat!

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Dog as indirect speech act

I’ve just come across a totally brilliant practice, of which I was previously unaware, among the Akan of Ghana as studied by sociolinguist Samuel Gyasi Obeng:

Like Americans, Ghanaians keep dogs as pets, for security, for hunting, and for the economic benefits derived from breeding and selling puppies. But they also keep and name dogs to create what Obeng calls “a communicative situation in which the ‘unspeakable’ may be spoken.” In such cases, Ghanaians give dogs names that address a problem or issue that cannot be addressed directly by their owners without fear of losing face in the community. “There are probably many dogs named ‘Mind Your Own Business’ in Ghana,” Obeng says, laughing. “People frequently name their dogs to call attention to a social grievance, such as ingratitude or gossip.”

In a recent paper, Obeng cites various examples of dogs with Akan names that address troubling personal issues. Many dogs cited had one- or two-word Akan names that translate into English phrases such as: “Whatever you do, people will gossip about you”; “Enough of your harassment!”; “Money matters/Life is hard!”; and the dramatically indignant, “The community must now be satisfied since the ‘evil’ it wished for me has eventually befallen me.” Sometimes the dog itself becomes a significant tool for dealing with face-threatening situations, as with the dog named “Whatever you do, people will gossip about you.” Having given his dog this name, the owner was able to show his neighbors that he was aware of and insulted by their gossip. By Akan custom, it is also acceptable to call attention to the dog’s name in the presence of the person who is indirectly addressed through the dog. “If an Akan names his dog ‘My neighbor is ungrateful,’ and he happens to pass by that neighbor’s house, he could call the dog’s name and shower it with insults,” Obeng explains. “Of course, the neighbor knows perfectly well that he is the target of these insults, but he cannot respond, because after all, it is the dog being spoken to, not him.”

Imagine shouting “EnoughofYourHarassment” across the park at the vanishing tail of your dog.

I chanced upon this as a result of reading Teju‘s piece Names are Doors 2. I have a memory that amongst the Akan, who have the tradition of naming children after the day of the week they are born on, there is a disproportionately high percentage of the prison population named for the day of the week which is considered to be of ill-omen. Unfortunately I can’t find out whether this is indeed the case, or even which day is supposed to be unlucky (although I think it might be Wednesday).

What, I wonder, is the effect on a dog of being called “The community must now be satisfied since the ‘evil’ it wished for me has eventually befallen me” and being berated and upbraided loudly when in the presence of said community. And what, I further wonder, would I have called Maizy had this device been known to me.

The former question marks me out as a typical Brit more concerned about canine well-being than non-confrontational methods of easing community tensions. So the answer to the latter would probably be “What a gorgeous dog you are”. Which is, in fact, already among her numerous noms de parc already, but most accurate and useful would be “Beware, I Bite”.