Drifting around the Balkan corner of Youtube, from my Slovak clips to Roma to Serbian folk music I notice the deep and hearfelt patriotism expressed by many commenters. But then I came upon this (in response to some lovely Serbian accordion music):
Serbia is just too precious to me! SERBIA FOREVER! CCCC! Serbia is an outstanding country&the Serbs are phenomenal people out of the ordinary! Your music is eternal&rules! May others understand Your history, get it straight&support You a lot more than today! May Your country be fast-tracked to prosperity&Your glorious past acknowledged all over the world! You deserve it so much! Živela Srbija!!! VOLIM TE SRBIJO! Wish I could be heading there immediately! POZDRAV! from a Norwegian.
Random thoughts on Slovakia
Last summer I spent a couple of days in Slovakia. The only people I talked to about the country were the Dutch couple that ran the campsite I stayed in. they had decised to move there and settle down and send their children to school there. We talked about the Roma and about how there is serious prejudice against them. They mentioned a hotel where the owner employed a Roma girl and everyone refused to work with her. I heard on the BBC World Service the other morning that the Slovaks had build a great fence (I can’t remember where) in order to keep the Roma out. On youtube just now I was revisiting the short clips I made there and clicked onto someone’s film, from their car, of Roma people selling fruit by the roadside. Some cheery Slovak commented:
Miretz919 (7 months ago) Show Hide
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Why you filmed gypsies?:( Slovakia is nice country too and gypsies are shame of our country and shame of all Europe.
But they mostly dont want live as a cultural peoples, all their houses are broke cause they are problematic..
Berry Selling Gypsies
Writing, speech-which is parasitic? A new slant on an old debate
Which is the real, original – speaking or writing? Jacques Derrida and others argued that speech is parasitic on writing rather than the other way round (for example Plato condemned writing as a bastardised form of communication, according to Derrida and Jonathan Culler. When we come to evaluating the trustworthiness (whatever we mean by that) of religious systems we often come up against the ‘problem’ that its founding texts were only set down in writing many years after the death of its founder. So it was quite revealing to come across the following in Bhikku’s Blog from a month or so ago: “Pali was originally a spoken language only, and was not committed to writing until several hundred years after the Buddha’s time. During the Buddha’s own lifetime writing was, in India, a fairly recent technological innovation and was used only for practical purposes such as commercial and diplomatic messages. It was still considered improper to use such a vulgar medium for religious texts.” Even Ferdinand de Saussure (early 20th century founder of structural linguistics) saw writing as dangerous and open to ambiguity and other weaknesses that are not, accoring to him, features of spoken language. So that puts this problem of the authority of religious texts (and by extension, teaching) into a new light.
Uneasy Reader: review of Riding with Rilke by Ted Bishop
This had to be the book for me: written by someone with a love for bikes and literature – and the snippets I had read on the net were excellent: ‘It wasn’t a mid life crisis that got me on the road, but mid life money’ (well something close to that). This book has lovely aspects – that self-deprecating, almost characterless Canadian tone, some insights into the personal politics of major literary archives, some fascinating information about T E Lawrence (yes I mean him, not D H), some nice moments of humour. However, somewhere in the book Ted says he is looking for a way to link biking and literature but he can’t find it. And for me this is the book’s weakness – his sometimes laboured attempt to find suprising connections between these two worlds and sensibilities. And trying to wind these two together seemed to result in a book that did niether very well. This book is never quite travel writing. I also had the feeling that there wasn’t quite enough material for a book and that Ted had dived into some research to fill out various parts (mind you, knowing that 11 North Americans are killed every year in incidents involving vending machines is priceless – not for the victims, obviously). The North American editors must have been nervous about the readership: surely even a biker who has never left Edmonton (the one in Canada – only marginally nicer than the one in North London – I’ve been to both) doesn’t need it explaining that ragu is an Italian pasta sauce or that when Albert Camus wrote ‘je voudrais m’acheter une motorclette’ that he really meant ‘I want to buy a motorcycle’.
For me the nicest part is near the end when the author hobbles back after breaking his back in two places in a bike accident. We’re prepared for the ultimate anti-climax – that he decides never to get on a bike again – but instead in a couple of sentences we see him reunited with the beauty of his Ducati Monster – and of course he has to ride it home from the mechanics – and at over 100mph.
This review is on Amazon. The book is available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Riding-Rilke-Reflections-Motorcycles-Books/dp/0393330745
Funny BBC News article mentioning Steve Jobs
I’ve just read this on the BBC Technology News site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8458880.stm)
“Leading technology figures may have an image problem in the UK, according to a survey.
In a poll of 1000 British people, 20% had never heard of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs and a further 10% thought he worked for a trade union. (They also say Steve who? One in 20 surveyed thought Steve Jobs was a footballer.)
Fifteen percent believed that web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee was either head of MI5 or an Arctic explorer.
Microsoft boss Bill Gates was the most well-known but 5% of the group thought he was a comedian or a famous thief. ”
I suppose they were kind of right.
Avatar: a microreview
Avatar seems to be publicised as much for its innovative 3D CGI as for its storyline. That seems about right. Although there are some pointers to ‘issues’ like ‘fighting terror with terror’, exploitation and ecology, its the punch ups, sonic reverberations and grizzly end of the baddie that provide the real enjoyment of this film. The 3D effects are impressive, especially of the holographic computer displays that are used. Characters are stock baddies and powerless goodies-with-consciences that eventually win out. The film does seem to echo previous movies including Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jettee where a test subject is sent into the past and future by scientists through being put to sleep in a laboratory, the Matrix and of course Star Wars.