From The Archive: Junk Journalism

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Junk Journalism - Date: 04/10/05

At the BBC News Magazine site this article has the headline Is Junk Food A Myth based - it seems on 'A controversial new book' and requests comments. My comments are reprinted below, in case they don't appear on the BBC site.

This article seems to be more a case of Junk Journalism rather than any serious investigation into the story. Yet again, we have someone with - unsurprisingly - 'A controversial new book' to promote who - in fact - creates that very controversy in order to generate publicity for that book.

As several people have already pointed out in other comments, e.g. Jack:

Saying that there is no such thing as junk food only a junk diet is like saying there is no such thing as taking a single step only walking a mile.

Marks is doing little more than semantic juggling with the concepts of 'junk food' and 'junk diet' and not really saying anything new, or 'controversial'.

This is a good example of Junk Journalism, journalism by regurgitation of the press release. Lazy journalism that sees the magic word 'controversial' and suddenly all journalistic judgement flies out of the window.

This journalistic laziness is so often these days used by people wanting, or needing, to get media attention for their latest product, wheeze or scheme. Creating an artificial 'debate', 'controversy', 'argument' or whatever sees to be a sure way of getting media attention, whether justified or - more often - not.

Journalist - and their editors - must break free of this lazy junk journalism and actually investigate whether these claims - usually from 'mavericks' (another journalistic buzzword) have any merit, rather than just regurgitating all the PR that is fed to them.

This is not a trivial or insignificant matter. We saw during the MMR 'controversy' the damage that lazy junk journalism can do. Journalists should reject the notion that 'balance' matters more than truth or accuracy in reporting.

Review: House of Meetings – Martin Amis

[Fiction 2006]

Money by Marin Amis was one of the best books of the 1980s, an almost perfect satire of that awful decade. It is therefore almost inevitable that any novel Amis writes will be compared to that tour-de-force, and often unfavourably. House of Meetings, unfortunately does not stand up well in comparison to Money at all. In fact, there were times when reading this when I almost checked the name on the cover was actually Martin Amis, and not some pale impostor. This book seems to lack almost all of those authorial traits, touches, call them what you will, that enables one to feel an authorial presence, lack Amis himself. There are only a few – far too few – examples of his – almost trademark – linguistic dexterity and flights of fluency. Also, probably, for the first time ever with a Martin Amis book, I cannot remember laughing at all, not even smiling, as I read this. In fact, I had no sense of engagement with it at all, and felt very little authorial engagement with it either. In the end, it became a chore just to finish the book.

The novel is the story of a love triangle between the narrator, and his brother Lev and the woman they both love Zoya set in 20^th Century Russia. The central point around which the novel revolves is ‘The House of Meetings’ a place set aside for conjugal visits in the Russian slave camp where both brothers at incarcerated, and where Lev and his then wife Zoya meet for such a visit.

Of course, the tragic events of communist Russia, and post-communist Russia, are played out around this story of these three characters. Unfortunately neither the love-triangle story, nor the greater tragedy of Russia itself seems to engage the reader to any great extent, everything seems distant, almost an exercise, as if all the tragedies, crimes, mistakes and so forth of a triangular relationship, and of the history of 20^th century Russia are being ticked off on a list by the author.

It is a shame really. The world could do with yet another great Martin Amis novel, but this one isn’t it.

Secret Paths

What can we say? There is nothing. There are no words left to use. We used up every word we could say to each other before this began. Now it is over, there is nothing left to say.

The words are like autumn leaves, brown and brittle, we watch as the wind blows them away from us, heaping them in places too far for our reaching fingers to touch. All the words, the precious ones and the wasted ones, are now heaping together under the bare skeletons of trees. Trees that were once verdant green, sheltering us under their protecting shade, protecting our naked skin from the heat of the sun and the eyes that would only condemn us.

These secret paths no longer lead us to our special places. They only take us away from each other, separate and alone once more. We go back to our empty lives, full of words that sound, but have no meaning; and actions that have no time for gentle gestures of momentary tenderness. 

Monday Poem: Burst

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Burst

If I had words that could burst
through the dark of your night
like sudden fireworks of desire,

to cover you in a healing rain
of gold and silver, green and red
and all the possible colours
that make a rainbow of understanding,

then I would launch myself
up towards your night-time skies
taking all I could show you
far beyond the reaching fingers
stretching upraised arms up to the sky.

From The Archive: The Same Freedom

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Same Freedom – 09-10-2006

Of course Muslim women have the freedom - if they so desire - to wear the veil in this country. The same freedom Salman Rushdie had to write The Satanic Verses. The same freedom that, in the west, allows the pope to discuss the minutiae of theological history. The same freedom that allows Danish cartoonists to caricature whomsoever they like. The same freedom that allowed Theo van Gogh to make a film entitled Submission.

The very same freedom that allows other western women to dress as they feel like without being called sluts or whores. The same freedom that lets the women themselves decide if, who and when to marry, if and when to have children. The same freedom that allows women to have a life outside the home, to be free, to be independent, to have an education and/or a career, to make her own choices and decisions. The same freedom that sets women free from the dictates of so-called religious, or other moral, 'leaders', who attempt to prescribe how women should dress and act. The very same freedom that sees women and men equal in the sight of the law.

The very same freedom that allows them, their brothers, sons and fathers to join the British army and do what they can to help prevent their fellow Muslims from slaughtering each other in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The same freedom that was won with great difficulty and struggle from religious censorship, oppression and intolerance. The very same freedom that can all too easily be lost if people do not care for it, fight for it and cherish it.

Ideology And Religion

Here we are then, just another day. Each day passes. Each day starts with the same few words and sometimes the same sentences. It is hard to know how to start a new day without the ritual of beginning the day.

I ought to go out and find some new words, a new ritual for the start of the day. For this is how religions grow, out of such routine observances. There is no real difference between ideology and religion, both eventually lose touch with the world and insist that they are right and it is the world that is wrong.

We do not drop these things when they lose touch with reality – that is where the danger lies.

Monday Poem: Your Own Dreams

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Your Own Dreams

So, do you turn away, back into the night
like you used to, all those years ago?
Diving deep into your own dreams

to swim across the night time seas
in search of that one far-off land,
that one magical kingdom

where you can walk the streets
like the one true princess you know
one day you will rightly be.

Standing still at the busy centre
as exotic bazaars bustle around you
and urchins plead for your desires

and how they can be satisfied.
While you stare up, unheeding,
at the high white-walled palace

where solemn guards patrol
and even the songbirds are hushed.
Because, deep within a cool bedchamber

the young and beautiful princess lies
sleeping the hot afternoon away
dreaming of a strange misty country

where a woman, just like her,
swims across the seas of night time
to dive deep into her own dreams.

From The Archive: The Clocks Striking Thirteen

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

The Clocks Striking Thirteen - 25/03/05

At first, I thought this was just the typical 1984 piece - missing what I see as the most important and interesting things about the novel - but towards the end he begins to touch upon some of the reasons why 1984 tops my list of the most important books of the 20^th century.

The article finishes with this:

Yet, beneath the surface, Orwell's imagination seized on something more radically true, and which increasingly we can see all around us. The futurology of 1984 is less important than its understanding of a malign tendency in certain strains of government, namely an intolerance of difference, variety and privacy. The misuse of Parliament in order to criminalise hunting (of only certain kinds, of course), and the steady, irrational, vindictiveness shown by the government towards private schools, should remind us that, notwithstanding our material prosperity, we are not so far from 1984 as we might like to think. The object of power is power, says O' Brien. Beneath all the solemn nonsense of pledge cards and targets, this too is the watchword of that sanctimonious relative of Ingsoc, New Labour.

I do think there is a certain amount of validity in the Ingsoc / New Laborg comparison. But I don't think it is an especially New Laborg condition. Orwell, along with others like Koestler, identified this authoritarian aspect of the left back in the thirties. Although being more sympathetic - in general - to the left rather than the right, I have never really felt that comfortable with socialism, and it is mainly because of this - often rather puritanical - authoritarianism. It is - I suppose - rather ironic that the New Laborg have dropped socialism, but held onto its authoritarian aspects. Of course, as they say, it is all done in the very best interest of the people, but I can't help feeling nervous about it.

Another aspect - related to this authoritarianism - is that infamous rallying-cry of the right Political Correctness, or, to give it it's full title Political Correctness Gone Mad! This too appears in 1984, in the concept of Thoughtcrime. As the recent Summers case in America and the British law against incitement to religious hatred shows, it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak out on matters that that liberal orthodoxy has deemed beyond the pale. To hold and express - even in private - views regarded as politically incorrect is enough to get people dismissed from their jobs.

Another quote:

But in the West, aside from some isolated palpable hits, 1984 must have quickly seemed unrelated to at least the surface of life. Orwell's description of "proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally" is still on the mark:

Here were produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

Well, manufactured pop acts, along with trash TV like Pop Idol and all its equally inane siblings is the first thing to come to mind here. There are, also, such things as ghost-written Celebrity autobiographies and novels, seemingly endless quantities of lowest-possible-denominator TV. In fact, all the detritus that has turned pop culture into junk culture. A dreary mindless 'entertainment' that is as bad for the mind as junk food is for the body.

And his snippet of mathematically-ignorant proletarian conversation on the lottery – "Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!" – is wickedly accurate.

There are the parallels between the Camelot lottery and this, as well as all the other fascinations: astrology, mediums, alternative medicines and therapies and other headlong flights from the rational and empirical.

I don't think, either, that it is too much of a stretch of the imagination to see parallels between so-called Reality television - Big Brother indeed - and the show trials in the novel. These programmes always seem to produce a baddie for the totally-mashed couch potatoes who make up the audiences for this drivel to demonise in their tabloid-led two minute hate.

The constant war against Eurasia or Eastasia also has contemporary echoes. I remember saying to someone around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union that America - if not the West as a whole - would need to find itself another enemy as soon as possible.

Luckily, central casting was able to come up with the almost perfect Goldstein-esque villain in Osma Bin Laden. If had not already existed, then it would have - eventually - become necessary to invent him (who is to say that some of his more… demonic… aspects are not invention?)

The future belonged to the proles? Does it? Did Orwell himself still believe it? At the end of the novel, does Winston? Is it a cry of hope and possibility, or of desperation, or of despair?

After all, the working class never did live up to what the middle-class socialists expected of it.

When The Mud Settles

So, the days pass and we can expect nothing different. Out here, all the days do is pass, one after the other; until one day you look up and years have slipped by without anyone noticing.

Of course, back in those days it seemed so hard to make sense of anything. That was when I was young and I hadn’t realised that nothing ever does really make any sense. You – as you grow older and, maybe, wiser – just learn to live a bit easier with the confusion.

Sometimes, it seems as though it is about to make sense in some way, and then it slips out of your hand and is gone. It’s like trying to catch a small fish in a stream with your bare hands. You think you have it, then there is a sort of muscular hard twitch between your fingers and you feel it slip away. Then it is gone, lost in the eddying mud your urgent grabbing has boiled up.

When the mud finally settles, the fish is long gone. The water is clear again, but you know that is just a cover for the many secrets the mud still hides. 

Acts Of God

The rain falls and it falls on everyone, no matter what we do or how we live our lives. Tragedy too is arbitrary, showing that so-called ‘acts of god’ are nothing of the sort. The good as well as the bad, the innocent as well as the guilty are smitten as indiscriminately as the religious and non-religious, the old as well as those too young to have ever sinned against such a god.

This should be obvious enough, but there is something in the believers’ mindset, or – more probably – the lack of something in the mindset of believers that makes them either ignore such contradictions or fabricate elaborate explanations for such evidence that contradicts or shows up their belief for the absurdities it contains.

They are always making up excuses and rationalisations for any set of circumstances that questions their concept of a god involved in human affairs and controlling the world and yet the obvious answer – that no such being exists - is the one they seemingly and wilfully refuse to countenance. 

Families

We pass the treasure from hand to hand slowly. Each one of us traces the delicate surface work with our fingers. We all know the patterns now, after so many years, but still the ritual is important to us. Knowing such things is so valuable.

Such things hold so many more memories than we ever could. Our minds are small, filled with all the necessities of staying alive. It is only at these special times, times when the objects can show us the way, that we can break free of the chains that bind us to this place.

Our families have lived here for a long time. We have grown and prospered, sending many bands of third children out to found new families of their own. It is possible, these days, to walk for many days in any direction and only see families that grew from our families.

Sometimes we wonder if we are the only people in these parts. 

Monday Poem: Cunning

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Cunning

A roundness of curving and taut
skin stretched tight and neat
round from the curved bottom
between the opening thighs.

A warm heartbeat of a place
snuggled deep in its forest hide.
It waits, ready to wake and open
like a flower to the sun's touch.
It waits like an eager princess
for the magic of a kiss.

A tongue to tease along the folds,
to open for the journey inside.
A moistness, juicy as summer fruit,
a taste of all the seas of dreams,
a taste of sweat and sweetness.

Deeper inside, on the way back
to the place of all beginnings,
then the return out and upward
to tease the shy retiring bud
that promises and, hesitantly,
will deliver, if treated well.

The legs clench, tight as a promise
pulling deeper, deeper inside
demanding a deeper desire.
A shudder shivers a deeper sigh
tension paused, stiff arching.

Then a slow easing deflation
and that one final lingering kiss
that reawakens a quiescent desire.

 

 

Worldwide Admire Your Own Genitals Day

Now, it just so happens that today is the day for doing stuff that there is no other special day for. Only yesterday, for example, was National Staring At Cheese Day. So, no doubt you spent several deeply-fulfilling hours gazing in awe at a Wensleydale, or - for the more daring - at a Double Gloucester with Chives and Onion.

Tomorrow is - of course - the fiftieth Annual Worldwide Admire Your Own Genitals Day, a time for otherwise busy people throughout the world* to take one day off in order to have a long lingering look at their own genitalia.

Several national newspapers throughout this country, for example have jumped on the bandwagon have joined in the fun by stating that with tomorrow's editions they will be giving away long-handled mirrors especially designed for self-genital contemplation. For the less fortunately endowed, the NHS is giving away special magnifying glasses for the day.

The following day is - at least in the UK - National Bite A Stranger's Ankle Day, where we will see footage on the Evening News of the traditional ceremony where all the leaders of the major political parties from throughout the British Isles all line up to be bitten on the ankle by senior members of the Royal Family. Not forgetting the traditional Tupping-on-the-Marsh Tormountrisehill Hill Ankle-Biting Festival, where sometimes as many as seven people gather on the hilltop to bite each other's ankles in a ceremony dating back to the days of Mick Jagger.


*Apart from those in strict Uttabollux countries, of course, where even being in the same room as your own genitals is strictly Nhastistuff (forbidden).

Crossroads

Now I do not know which way to turn. I arrived here expecting to know and understand by now. However, things these days are not so straightforward or so simple.

Things do not get easier as you get older; you just learn to leave certain things behind. Even though it is still too easy to do the wrong thing and go chasing after dreams you suddenly find you no longer believe in or do not want; but only when it is too late.

You find yourself suddenly in a new place, standing at a crossroads like this, wondering about these things, and too hesitant to take a step one way or the other. 

A Beginning

A beginning? These things always need somewhere to begin, a place where we can find ourselves. A place before something like this came along and changed all our worlds. Sometimes it is easy to find some instant in the stream of time, around which, and from which, all new events flow, like a large boulder breaking free from the mountain and rolling down to splash heavily into the stream, sometimes diverting the course of that stream completely.

Other times, though, it is hard to say just what event caused the stream to change its course. It could be something as small as a twig being trapped between two stones, which has little perceptible effect on the flow of the stream at first. However, as time passes, that twig captures some more flotsam, then some more, and so on and on, until one day there is a blockage, a natural dam, which the stream can no longer ignore. 

Monday Poem: Ambition

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Ambition

All those bodies left in fields
blood seeping, soaking deep
like rain into the thirsty ground.

I thought I knew then.

I thought, I believed
I was there to wear the holy crown,
But I was no real king,
only ever really the fool.

Ambition gnaws away at the insides,
turns others into ciphers
for the yearned-for end.   

I have no ambition left.

It is long gone, seeping into the ground
like the fresh blood of a young fool
who believed in all the visions,
who followed an older, but no wiser, fool.

And for what?
For ambition? For glory?
And what is glory?

Peacock's feathers.