Essays and Blogs Archive
Posted by Adrian Toll on April 8th, 2009 - Add a comment
Reading about the unfolding credit crunch, a name which now seems rather quaint given the burgeoning catastrophe throughout world markets and personal finances, has been rather like rubbernecking a car crash around the corner, only to realise too late that the car in front has slammed it’s brakes on and you’re about to plough into it. As the consequences of the crisis in financial markets trickle down into everybody’s lives (”trickle down economics” never before contained such bitter irony), it seems an appropriate time to survey some of the more readable and enlightening articles about the crisis, while taking a look at what happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen in the future.
In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by Adrian Toll on March 6th, 2009 - Read comments and add your own
Sven Birkets writes in The Atlantic about his fear that the Amazon Kindle will mean the end of the “deep” contextualisation that physical books give – libraries, book shops, history.
What’s at stake here is not so much the physical / digital book divide, but culture and human psychology: what digital books will do to culture that is expressed through the written word and its environs. Birkets’ view seems to be based on a pessimistic view of readers – that they would willingly give up their human need for deep context for the sake of convenience. But I can’t help feeling that the human need for deep context is deep itself. There may be a period of time when people do give up that context for convenience’s sake. However, I think that the need for it will start to reassert itself – you don’t miss the water until your well runs dry, but when it does you don’t just sit and die of thirst, you dig a new one.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by Adrian Toll on March 6th, 2009 - Add a comment
John Lanchester, in the New Yorker, reviews what sounds like a fascinating book “Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed, which takes a timely look at the role of central banks and central bankers in the world’s financial markets: Heroes and Zeros
The portrait of Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, reminded me of a piece from the notebooks of Geoffrey Madan, a well-heeled London socialite with many artistic friends. (Harold Macmillan, in his introduction to the notebooks, described Madan as having “something of the look of those young men who stand about to no apparent purpose in Renaissance paintings”).
This morning I saw a magnificent sight. I came up to the City in the Underground rather late, about half-past ten. At Bond Street a man got in whom I just know, and have spoken to three or four times in my life.
He wore loose clothes, a ringed and jewelled tie, a crumpled black hat. His general presence made a most distinguished effect, suggesting all manner of romantic things: a Restoration poet, a historic French admiral, a bearded nobleman of Spain – the ideal which everyone would like to think his own great-grandfather attained, to adapt a famous obituary phrase. This strange being was in a state of high tension. He lay back looking half strangled, as it fallen from a great height, or praying to be supported in some heavy trial; darted a glance away, focussing a distant passenger and slowly dropping his chin; glared round with the queer look of a man swelling with laughter and longing to share it with someone else; or groaned aloud in pain.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by LoveHowlMuse on January 18th, 2009 - Read comments and add your own
Richard Pryor shows how farcical the idea of a black president seemed in the 1970s. Eddie Murphy seems to think that it’s a bit closer in 1983 – at least if enough white folks get drunk before voting – but hopes he’s nimble if he does win. More than 20 years later, Dave Chappelle still shares his fears and suggests a Mexican vice president as insurance. James Earl Jones has to deal with becoming The Man in 1972 (”It took an accident to make this man President of the United States. What they do to him now won’t be an accident.”) Finally, Obama’s refreshingly honest and thoughtful speech about race in the USA during the election campaign. (This is a YouTube playlist. If you want to see a list of the videos, click the icon next to the play button at the bottom left.)
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DCE00CBABA0758D0
There’s also a 1964 clip from the BBC where Martin Luther King predicts a black president in less than 25 years. Only a few years late…
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by Lelyn R. Masters on January 18th, 2009 - Add a comment
Mahmoud Darwish was born in Galilee in 1941. The specific conditions we are born into is a crapshoot, and Darwish just lost. In 1948 his family fled to Lebanon. He became the poet laureate of Palestine, an expression of a dispossessed people. Like many in his generation his influences included Ginsburg and Rimbaud. In 1971 he moved to Cairo and worked in Al-Ahram. In 1973 he joined the PLO, and was hence banned from entering Palestine.
Published in 1987, his landmark Memory for Forgetfulness expresses the plight of the refugee under siege. This book is an eyewitness account of the peak of shelling in Lebanon during the civil war, called Hiroshima Day. Comparable to Slaughterhouse 5 or Murakami’s The White Sky of Hiroshima, Memories for Forgetfulness is a coherent exploration of a life that is already forfeit, a life of isolation, injustice and alienation.
When he died in 2008, discussions were held with Israel to bury him in his home town. He was buried in exile from that home village so that he could be where all Palestinians can visit. His remains rest in Ramallah at the heart of the disputed West Bank.
What follows is a short excerpt where Darwish recalls going out into the city streets under bombardment.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by Lelyn R. Masters on November 14th, 2008 - Read comments and add your own
I met Spartacus when I first got to Egypt and was looking for a job. She is an imposing personage. I tend to have a different experience of Egypt from her, for reasons you will no doubt understand from the following excerpt of an interview I held with her. We are obviously touching here on issues of gender and race. Whereas I agree that one shouldn’t generalize to the point of being prejudiced, I do hope the reader will be open minded about the events here related. Every truth is partial, and there is much truth to what Spartacus has to say. She has been living in Egypt, off and on, for the majority of the last decade, and by that very fact she deserves the respect of anyone who seriously wishes to understand this deeply troubled country.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by Michael Curran on October 27th, 2008 - Read comments and add your own
I want to riff on birds, riffing as a way of exploring morphic resonance between different kinds of material. Out there in the world, in art, music and literature, birds are ubiquitous. See Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened By A Lark or re-run Hitchcock’s The Birds. Listen to Patti Smith’s Birdland while reading The Raven by Poe. Recall the Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie, Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Jim Morrison’s Bird of Prey, Leda’s Swan, Coleridge’s Albatross and perhaps the saddest bird of all Lewis Carroll’s Dodo. The augurs of ancient Rome would interpret the will of the gods by studying the behaviour of birds, their flight patterns, eating habits and songs. I make no such soothsayer’s claim for my activities, which are more akin to an open play of fanciful pattern matching.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by Adrian Toll on September 6th, 2008 - Add a comment
We start with a commentary on the Olympic opening ceremony as seen from Egypt by Lelyn Masters, Our Man In Cairo:
Envy is at the root of much racism, against China, against America, against the Jews.
I saw the Chinese spectacle. The Arabic commentator, in the dress of a sheik, explained to us that the Chinese were using the spectacle to intimidate the world. It was quite interesting to me how the Chinese adapted the Greek ceremony. It was as if the far east and the west had joined together and skipped the Arab world.
When the commentators spoke of Arab competitors they spoke of competitors from the “united Arab nation.” They didn’t speak of them as if they were from individual countries. The broadcast was from Dubai, of course, and there was no rhetoric of Emirate superiority in sports, the way it was no doubt spoken of in the US. Again, the key phrase was “Arab unity.”
PanArabism is an interesting movement, often at odds with Islamists, but equally enraged at the existence of Israel. It is in a spirit of Panarabism that Egyptians would feel personally threatened by Israel and the US, whereas these two countries are doing nothing against Egypt, but rather are giving tons of financial aid.
So actually, all this talk of Arab unity could be read as antisemitic, anti-Chinese (who are trying to intimidate us) and ultimately an expression of one thing: envy.
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by LoveHowlMuse on August 9th, 2008 - Add a comment
From 8th to 31st August 2008, the Arnolfini in Bristol is running a Directors Focus season on the disfigured wunderkind of the new German cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As part of this season they will be screening The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty, a video portrait of Fassbinder by Viralux, drawn from his writings, screenplays and interviews.
In honour of the life and work of Fassbinder, LoveHowlMuse is offering a free MP3 download of the soundtrack to The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty during the Arnolfini’s season.
Download the MP3 »
Watch the video »
Fassbinder Directors Focus season overview »
The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty will be screened before these films:
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (8th Aug)
The American Solider (16th Aug)
Fox & His Friends (24th Aug)
Fear Eats the Soul (31st Aug)
Read the full post and add your comments »
Posted by LoveHowlMuse on August 9th, 2008 - Add a comment
Here’s a joke about politics. A man climbs the Kaaba during Ramadan (for Muslims, the Kaaba is the nearest point to heaven). He won’t come down unless Hosni Mubarak (the Egyptian President) comes in person to ask him. The authorities call Mubarak, and he arrives. Mubarak says, “son, come down from there.” The man says that Mubarak has to come up first. As soon as he does, the man lifts him up and yells to the sky “take him!”
Traditionally, Egypt had local Imams they could go to if they had political problems. The Imams had great power in the establishment. When this model was replaced by Western parliamentarianism, it was unclear to Egyptians how they would interact with the government. Political activism is alive in Egypt, but there is a cultural drag on it because of this history.
However, what is really stifling Egypt at the moment is Mubarak. Several years ago presidential elections were held. Mubarak was opposed by Ayman Nour. Originally Nour was a stooge of Mubarak’s that they picked to put on a show of having another candidate, but he rebelled and actually tried to win the election. For his pains he was put in prison for forging signatures – but how many signatures did Mubarak forge? Given that there was no real opposition to Mubarak you could argue that the entire election was forged.
Egypt is waiting for Mubarak to die.
Read the full post and add your comments »
