Loneliest Cabin

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

2008-11-12T04:54:00.003+13:00

This simply-told story recounts one day for a 40 something Russian man, Shukhov (Ivan Denisovich), in one of Stalin's labour camps, somewhere in northern Kazakhstan. A place described as:

“Strange! Yes, a strange sight indeed: the naked steppe, the empty
building-site, the snow gleaming in the moonlight.”

But this isn’t a story built on languid descriptions of landscape. Shukhov and his 104th team are the focus: how they fight the extreme cold, how they work together, how the guards rule every movement, and how individuals fight for every precious personal moment. These moments are sacred to Shukhov. No longer a member of the 104th, but an individual suddenly, with the rare ability to focus inwards, concentrating thoughts on something other than inspections, marching in rank, and hard labour. Shukhov finds these moments in eating. He spends his entire day negotiating, bartering, and seeking opportunities to carry out favours, all in return for extra portions of thin porridge or “skilly”.

As the skilly “went down, filling his entire body with warmth” then

“Shukhov complained about nothing: neither about the length of his stretch, nor about the length of the day … This was all he thought about now: we’ll survive. We’ll stick it out, God grant, till it’s over”.

For Shukhov there is nothing to think about outside of the immediate need to keep warm, healthy and alive. As a middle-class Western man bombarded with all the distractions and information that the 21st century can throw, cast off into a distance-less and timeless void where anything can be got and anywhere reached at speed, it is a state of mind I am in curious awe of. Oh, if one could be satisfied with the basic necessities for survival taken care of each day, instead of this perpetual longing for some thing or some place else. (I did say middle-class!)

“’Why d’you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you’re in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.’ … Shukhov gazed at the ceiling in silence. Now he didn’t know either whether he wanted freedom or not.”

Does someone really need an experience like Shukhov’s to be able to appreciate home, family and security? Of the camp Shukhov says: “That’s what everyone used to say: ‘Going home.’ We never had time to think of any other home.”

Solzhenitsyn himself spent 8 years in various camps, charged with making derogatory comments about Stalin. When he was released in 1953 he spent another 3 years in exile, eventually returning to Russia to teach, this novel appearing in the early 60s thanks in large part to Alexander Tvardovsky.

As a writer I wrestle daily with what shall I write about? Time seems to stand still and shrink all at once. Constantly I feel like I am wasting time. Personal experience seems pithy and weak. The future weighs heavy, like a distant dark cloud looming on the horizon.

“Wonder of wonders! How time flew when you were working! That was something he’d often noticed. The days rolled by in the camp – they were over before you could say ‘knife’. But the years, they never rolled by: they never moved by a second.”

Solzhenitsyn’s writing was the first to expose much of the hard facts around Stalin’s labour camps, and, to me, raises many questions about how one lives one’s life today – both internally, and in action. This novel is as vital now as it ever was.

“You can push a man this way, and you can push a man that way.”

Belle & Sebastian - Are You Coming Over For Christmas?

2008-02-23T11:51:00.005+13:00

I completely failed to check this out over the christmas period, but another friend has been busy making music. Celia Garcia sang on Belle & Sebastian's christmas tune, and you can hear her sultry tones here.

Here's Celia enjoying a typical Scottish christmas moment, with her partner letting it all out behind her.

FOUND in session

2008-02-19T18:59:00.001+13:00

My friend, Gavin Sutherland, continues to produce quality tunes - as he has done since a wee boy. This is one of his incarnations, FOUND, performing for Radio 1.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

2008-02-11T09:12:00.000+13:00

The focus of the discussion around The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (2007) centres on its main themes of mass-media circus and celebrity obsession. And rightly so due to our current cultural climate But as director Andrew Dominik displayed with his last (and first) feature, Chopper (2000), his interest is in the power struggle and fascination felt between two men – where one is charismatic and psychotic, the other weak but infatuated.

Where the aesthetic of Chopper was claustrophobic and grainy – with tight interior shots in the cell and home dominated by Eric Bana as Chopper (reminiscent of the palpable violence and menace of Ray Winstone in Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth (1998)) – Jesse James is full of light, colour and the wide expanse of middle America. There’s no mistaking the sumptuous work of cinematographer Roger Deakins (involved in anything by the Coen Brothers).

Sam Rockwell (Charley Ford) and Casey Affleck (Robert Ford) steal the show here, with Rockwell arguably the standout – his attempts to diffuse various situations with laughter and jokes makes for compelling viewing.

Brad Pitt’s (Jesse James) performance is layered and nuanced and the menace – especially sitting at the dinner table with Charley, Robert and Zee James (Mary Louise Parker) – is almost childlike as he plays with the taught emotion of the room.

Childishness is something that runs throughout the film. None of these ‘men’ seem to have grown out of adolescence. When Robert finds his brother Charley and Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner) rummaging through his box of Jesse James paraphernalia, the scene is one of boyhood bedroom bullying. The boys sleep and eat together, dormitory style, and crash around the house in fights and shouts.

Robert cannot shake off his childlike wonder and affection for James until he has shot him in the head and then recreated the murder a thousand times on stage. Affleck gives a supreme performance in awkward obsession.

Jesse James represents a period of change. A cowboy with one foot stuck in the stirrup of the past, the other on the industrial ground of the onrushing Victorian era. Holding up the train, James stands symbolically on lumber piled up on the track – the dark forest all around him, the steam-train lighting him up like a beacon. Later, when Robert and Charley flee James’ home having committed murder, we see spread across the valley floor, for the first time, an industrial landscape of factories and brick homes. Behind, silhouetted against the clear sky, James’ home, alone, on the edge of nothing.

Acacia

2007-07-31T15:44:00.001+13:00

It was with a feeling of excitement that I got stuck into David’s latest book – Acacia: Book One – The War With The Mein. First in a trilogy it charts the downfall of the mighty Acacian empire through the assassination of its king. Before he dies he sends his four children to the four corners of the known world where they are to mature and return one day to reclaim the throne.

Part of this enthusiasm, I must admit, was a selfish awareness that David had (loosely) based the main characters on my own family. King Leodan was modeled somewhat on my father, Laughton, and the four children on myself and my three siblings. Quite how far this inspiration stretched I’m not sure. Not too far I hope, as my sister, especially, comes out of it all rather dark and twisted.

David said Ursula Le Guin was an inspiration, as were Tolkien – no clearer than in the character of Rialus Neptos, his Wormtongue to the king – and other fantasy writers. He borrowed from myths around our world to create his own. And it’s a unique and very believable world. The first quarter of the book is fairly heavy going as the wheels are set in motion and the reader introduced to many characters, plots and cultures. But perseverance is rewarded with a rich tapestry of drama, intrigue and epic battles.

David obviously picked up the knowledge in pulling together massively disparate strands of narrative across such a vast landscape with Pride of Carthage. Perhaps the greatest skill he learned from that experience – and has honed here – was presenting battles in unique and arresting ways. There is film talk, and if that should ever come to fruition it will be interesting to see if they include the scene where an army (both male and female) of thousands strip all their clothes off to combat a beast attracted to bright colour!

There is a supreme sensuousness to David’s writing that comes in all forms.

It can be about physical characteristics: P.52 – “Her mother had given her the shape of her face, the character of her lips, the pattern of lines across her forehead. They had the same hands: the same rate of taper and length, the same character to the knuckles, the same thin fingernails, the same off-kilter slant to the small finger.” This passage resulting in a sublime refrain: “The girl of ten held between her palms an aged, decaying, fading grip on herself, like some strange conflation of the past with the present or the present with the future.”

It can be about sexual tension: P.418 – “She wore only a diaphanous shift, so short it was really just a shirt. Walking toward him, feeling his eyes on her, knowing the candlelight would highlight the contours of her hips and abdomen and breasts, she hummed with nervous excitement. It was the strangest of feelings. She felt tawdry and jaded, her lips moistened with oil, eyes shadowed like a courtesan’s. But she also tingled with innocence, as if she were a child again, girlish, walking in the glow of an appraising eye that seemed somehow fatherly. Very strange, she thought, but also decidedly to her liking.”

It can be about violence: P.441 – “Her sword bit into his wrist at an angle. The honed blade sliced up along the bones and cut free a sizable amount of flesh and muscle like it was soft cheese. His sword hand died, dropping the weapon.

“Despite the shock and pain of the cut, Larken was quick enough to extend his hand for the hilt. He would have caught hold of it, too, except that Mena circled her sword back and sliced the grasping hand. His four fingers twirled into the air, each of them dragging thin loops of blood with them. Mena would never forget the look on his face just then, nor in the following moment, when she carved a smile into his abdomen.”

David, unlike the work of Tolkien or C.S.Lewis, wanted a multi-ethnic world. And it is that. He takes great joy in uncovering wildly different histories, stories and myth. Borrowing from Nordic tales, New Zealand Maori myth, and an assortment of religions and animistic beliefs, his world is rich. Where he will take the next two books is anyone’s guess. He’s given himself plenty to work with.

Many people are likening his work to king of the genre, George R.R. Martin, but I haven't read any of his books so can offer no comment on that.

Like Carthage, this is a bloody, realistic portrayal of violence and power. There is a fair amount of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to some of the duels, but the battles are largely brutal and blunt. P.59 – “There was simply nothing to it other than the enemy pouncing on them and his soldiers dying, blood spray all around, limbs kicked across the sodden snow, bodies like cloth dolls strewn about in broken-backed postures impossible for the living.”

Unlike so much fantasy writing, there is no clear black and white regarding good and evil. Characters are painted in all colours, and we learn of their motivations and their place in a wider corrupt world. No one character is undeniably good or dastardly evil. There is much political and philosophical pondering bubbling under the surface narrative. It can be read in depth, or enjoyed superficially. Either way, he should reach a wide audience, and one that has been whipped into a fantasy frenzy by the recent Lord of the Rings resurrection, the end of Harry Potter and the imminent release of the His Dark Materials films by New Line.

New Zealand Film Festival - Manufactured Landscapes

2007-07-31T12:52:00.000+13:00

Most of the most interesting films at the International Film Festival are documentaries. I have added many to my 'must-see' list now as Helen and I have seen only a handful.

A lot of my interest is in the rapid development of China. Especially after researching my article, The Great River Theft. Helen and I saw Dong which was not my first choice. I had wanted to check out Still Life, Jia Zhang-Ke's examination of ordinary Chinese people displaced by the construction of The Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest - but it was one of the few films to sell out. A good sign I feel. Dong is his companion piece, also filmed around The Three Gorges and Bangkok, which follows a painter.

One other film I missed - due to the dog we are looking after having the runs! - was Manufactured Landscapes. It follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky as he travels the world observing changes in landscapes due to industrial work and manufacturing. Most of his most stunning images are of mass production in China, and the changing face of The Three Gorges where entire cities were raised to the ground by those living there by hand (the subject of Dong and Still Life) and then rebuilt, again by the same people, in new locations.

This clip is from an interesting website Ted, and is a talk by the photographer Burtynsky.

Helen and I did get to enjoy a more light-hearted documentary based in China. Les Blank has been making great documentaries for years, especially early bayou-style music stories. In All In This Tea he follows David Lee Hoffman as he searches for the best, home-grown, organic tea in China. There is a subtext regarding mass production in China as he drags the factory owners with him to the peasant farmers to show how their tea is of a much higher quality. But first and foremost it's about the cultural exchange and social interactivity surrounding tea. We are now on the lookout for a tea set so we can start trying some 'proper' tea.

The last film we saw was Build A Ship, Sail To Sadness. On paper it looked like the perfect film for Helen and I. "Solitary oddball Vincent mopeds through the Scottish Highlands with a dream of healing the community's loneliness with a mobile disco. A film about the joy of music and a yearning for the ecstasy of art."

Perhaps it was our desire to see the Scottish Highlands in all its glory that tainted our experience. The film is shot in over-saturated High 8 so the colours are lurid and livid. The best description I've heard calls it "a cross between Local Hero and Borat".

Vincent is a Scandinavian fellow in cricket jumper, rain mac and pink crash helmet who travels the bleak Highlands on his scooter. He stops and talks to various locals telling them he wants to cure everyone's loneliness through a mobile disco. It becomes rapidly apparent, as each scooter scene ends with Vincent stuffing his nostrils down the gas-tank and then passing out, that the loneliness is his own. The locals are happy enough.

The lo-fi catchy and often hilarious pop tunes are all the actor's originals, and you won't have seen the Scottish landscape shot in such an arresting fashion before, but we left disappointed - although we laughed plenty, a highlight being when he climbs a hill to convert a man burning heather to the joys of disco, only to be turned away by the man's fixation on all things heather-related.

Being ex-pats I think our idea of Scotland is firmly fixed in a traditional 'hands-off' watercolour ideal. Had we been living in the Highlands or Glasgow ourselves, this film would have been a delight.

The Scottish White Stripes

2007-07-23T11:21:00.000+13:00

The longer and further I am away from Scottish shores, the more patriotic I become. For instance, I've always been a fan of The Proclaimers, but recently I've taken foot stomping and hand clapping and jaw jutting to a whole new level when their music is playing - often with a tear in my eye.

Another favourite act has, for a long time, been The White Stripes. I'd loved their albums, but after seeing them live at The Greek Theatre, Berkeley, California, I realised just how bloody good they are.

I had noticed the use of bagpipes on their new album, Icky Thump, in particular Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn but just learned of their overt Scottish roots from my friend's music blog - The Pop Cop.

And according to The White Stripes' website they just celebrated their "aluminum anniversary in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. To further commemorate this occasion, the band have produced an array of specialty merchandise including traditional kilts, balmoral hats, kilt hose and flashes. These items are all hand made from the offical tartan of The White Stripes, available in both hunting and dress fabric."

Good god. Now the only question is: Can I wear The White Stripes tartan to my wife's brother's wedding?

Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century) (2006)

2007-07-22T10:07:00.000+13:00

I'd decided to check this film out mainly because it was Thai. Helen and I had spent 9 months there and I knew that we would take something from it regardless of content. We were both quietly blown away by it. This is a meditative piece of cinema in the David Lynch mould of narrative bending. Apichatpong Weerasethakul tells a simple story based on his own life (his parents were doctors in a hospital) of a female doctor. The story begins in a rural hospital with an interview and then carries on delightfully with a funny exchange mostly off-screen as the credits roll. You realize the director is having fun when one of the characters says he is already bored with this film-making process. The other replies that this is only take 5, there is a long way to go. Characters often break into natural fits of laughter as they talk. There is a gentle understanding of people, and they are given room to breathe.

Like Lynch's Lost Highway, halfway through the story begins again. Same characters, only this time the setting has changed, and the perspective we are given also differs. Now we are in a modern urban hospital. As the classic Thai saying goes: "Same same but different."

The characters' discussion of Buddhism, reincarnation and previous lives now takes on heightened meaning. You try to remember what was said before, just as they try to remember who they were before. "I was not human in my previous life."

Symbolism plays a large part in the film. Water, mirrors. We are given lingering shots of The Buddha and modern statues and a droning soundscape grows as the camera fixes on long interior corridor shots.

This is a lush, funny, patient and poignant film that asks many questions. I will be seeking out his other works.

This is the trailer:

This is a sequence near the end of the film:

Biyeolhan geori (A Dity Carnival) (2006)

2007-07-22T09:51:00.000+13:00

Next up was A Dirty Carnival, a South Korean gangster flick with heart.

Obviously low-budget, I was feeling a little detached from the drama unfolding on screen. But from nowhere the film surprised me with a sudden visceral burst of extreme violence. Fist on flesh kind of stuff. Perhaps a few spinning round-house kicks, but nothing that looked too out of the ordinary for our hero - well played by In-seong Jo - which reminded me of the natural fighting talents of Phanom Yeeram (Tony Jaa) in Ong-Bak.

A Soundtrack fueled by a pseudo-Greek waltz on the accordian lent the film a world-weary air, although within the film were strategic set-piece musical sequences as each main character had a go in expressing themselves through karaoke.

This was a film within a film, and linked nicely to the previous showing of Herzog's Rescue Dawn in its shared need to blur fiction-reality. Recommended for all Korean film fans.

New Zealand International Film Festival - Rescue Dawn (2006)

2007-07-21T16:16:00.000+13:00

The lights came up, credits continued to roll, I sat till the very end. The only person in front of me shook his head and chuckled knowingly at the final title to appear: "Top Gun Productions 2006" Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn had just finished, Christian Bale's character escaping his vietcong prison and surviving the jungle. I knew I should also find it funny, and kinda did, but not as much as the other guy.

As I collected my coat I realised no one had left the theatre yet. It must be a film festival audience.

It is New Zealand's 36th International Film Festival, and being a writer I was free to attend most of the day.

It was my first time in Wellington's Embassy Theatre and the main cinema is a majestic three-tier affair reminiscent of Glasgow Film Theatre's Cinema One.I'd never actually seen a Herzog film at the cinema. And he has a taste for man vs wilderness in epic tales of struggle. Stuff you should really watch on the big screen.

So I was quietly enthused as the lights went down (although slightly annoyed to see the margins of the frame over the curtains, something I have become heightened to since working as a projectionist). The story is of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German-American fighter pilot who was shot down over Laos in 1965. Captured and viciously tortured by the Viet Cong, Dengler seized an opportunity to escape, taking two American POWs with him.

Herzog seems to have found in Bale his new Klaus Kinski - an actor willing/capable of undergoing extreme duress and characterization to fulfill a role - although Jeremy Davies seemed to be outdoing him in the prison camp with a caved in malnutrition-ravaged skeletal frame that Bale wasn't even close to in The Machinist.

Davies was also a delight with his twisted finger pointing paranoid rants like Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. There was a good vein of humour throughout, with the pilots watching a dated jungle survival video and making jokes before going on their fateful mission. I will be trawling my way through the Herzog films I have missed so far after seeing this.

The Great River Theft

2007-07-16T11:33:00.000+13:00

SOUTH CHINA
MORNING POST
AGENDA
James Johnston
Jul 15, 2007

A plan to redirect water from the Himalayas is dire news for the mainland's neighbours, writes James Johnston

Visitors to Arunachal Pradesh - India's most northeastern state - cannot fail to be struck by the beauty of this largely unspoiled rural region which has borders with Bhutan, China's Tibet region and Myanmar. Through this countryside runs the mighty Brahmaputra, a life giver and provider for tribal fishermen and farmers who rely on the river's bounty and water.

Unfortunately, for the residents of Arunachal Pradesh the 21st century is intruding on their rural paradise.

For energy-hungry India, the potential hydropower of the river is too great to ignore. For the water-scarce regions of northern China, the river may help solve the problem of water scarcity plaguing its north and west. The river is called the Yarlung Tsangpo before it crosses from Tibet into India as the Dihang and then the Brahmaputra.

In fast-growing India, with a population of 1.1 billion, energy is badly needed. The interests of the million or so people in Arunachal Pradesh, most of whom live in close proximity to a river, are very much secondary.

However, an even greater threat to the livelihoods of the people of Arunachal Pradesh, not to mention those downstream in Bangladesh where the Brahmaputra becomes the Jamuna, is posed by Beijing's plans to exploit the upper reaches of the great river.

For the mainland, a rapidly expanding super-economy hungry for resources, finding adequate supplies of water is a matter of national urgency.

Whether it is to meet the energy needs of the largest population on Earth at 1.3 billion - the mainland has built more dams than any other country - or meeting the nation's food needs, where irrigation is used for over 70 per cent of food production, vast quantities of water are needed. But headlong development has come at the expense of water quality.

In China's arid north and west some 300 million people are short of water. And much of that available is heavily polluted.

At the highest levels the question is constantly being asked: where will the water come from?

"The central and local governments have all realised that water shortages have become a key constraint to the country's economic and social development," says Zhu Guangyao, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

"There's growing tension among rural interests, urban interests and factories over who gets water in China," says Yukon Huang, a Singapore-based adviser to the World Bank. "Water will become a major problem for China in the next decade."

Beijing is looking to deal with the problem by means of a bumper solution.

One stage of the solution was completed in May last year, when the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze - 12 years in the making - had its final layer of concrete put in place. The dam, which has resulted in the displacement of around 1.4 million people, will be fully operational in 2009.

The completion of this monumental project is only one part of a much wider water strategy - the South-North Water Diversion Project. By 2050 engineers hope to move an estimated 45 billion cubic metres of water annually from south to north through an elaborate series of tunnels, aqueducts and canals.

Already half a million people have been relocated as engineers seek to link the country's major arteries: the Yellow River, Yangtze, Huaihe and Haihe. The scheme requires construction of three diversions in the eastern, central and western parts of the country at a cost roughly twice that of the Three Gorges Dam - somewhere in the region of US$62 billion.

It is not only mainlanders who will be affected by this wholesale realignment of the country's water arteries.

The geography of South Asia is such that every manipulation of a river by the mainland impacts on those downstream.

Tibet is known as the "Roof of the World" for good reason. It is the catchment area for 10 of the world's greatest rivers that flow through deep canyons into Asia like giant gutters after heavy rain, supplying almost half of the world's population.

Tampering with these vital waterways in an age of growing climate change awareness seems ludicrous, yet that is exactly what Beijing is proposing. Picture the Himalayan glaciers as a massive natural water tank. The mainland authorities wish to punch a great hole in that tank and siphon water away from its neighbours through a buried pipe no one seems to have noticed.

Work is well under way on two of the diversions: the central and eastern routes. The western route is an altogether more difficult proposition as it involves diverting water from the mightiest of Tibetan rivers, the Yarlung Tsangpo.

Since the late 1990s the mainland has been interested in exploiting the Yarlung Tsangpo. However, the river is not important to the mainland alone. For India's states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam and Bangladesh, it is a vital water source. Its journey takes it through the Zangpo canyon, which contains the Tsangpo gorge: eight times steeper and three times larger than the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. At a sacred site the Tibetans call Pemako - the last hidden Shangri-La - the river makes a dramatic U-turn from east to west, flowing into India at The Great Bend. In just 200km the river descends 3,000 metres - the greatest hydropower potential in the world.

Following preliminary studies in 2003, the mainland's proposed plan - as outlined by the chief planner of the Academy of Engineering Physics, Professor Chen Chuanyu - would involve using nuclear explosives to blast a 15km tunnel through the Himalayas to build a dam capable of generating twice the power of the Three Gorges Dam. The hydropower potential would be sufficient to pump the river water 800km into the desert regions of northwest China, eventually linking with the Yellow River. This would fulfil the final third branch of the mainland's South-North Water Diversion Project.

The sheer effrontery of diverting a river of such importance to the mainland's neighbours has perhaps ensured the rest of the world remains sceptical that it will proceed.

"Man should intervene with nature and reorganise her for his purposes," Professor Chen has said. "With this project the drought in northwest China could be terminated and the flood catastrophes in Southeast Asia brought under control."

Some experts are not so confident. "The south-to-north project will alleviate shortages in China's northern plain, but it won't come close to solving them," says Eva Sternfeld, a Beijing-based director at the Environment and Sustainable Development Reference and Research Centre. "Water demand in northern China is just too huge."

Professor Chen plays down the effects of the project on southern neighbours, suggesting cheap electricity could be sold to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His words are unlikely to assuage the fears of those downstream. With the mainland's potential ability to turn the "taps" on or off, flood control takes on a far more sinister dimension. Control over Tibet's largest river is as great a political tool as any military force - like laying siege to an enemy fortress from the safety of your own home.

"China's green light for the [Yarlung Tsangpo] project could be considered by South Asia as a declaration of war," says Claude Apri, an Indian-based writer and journalist.

There is already a tense border dispute between the Tibet region and India. The McMahon Line, marking the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet, has never formally been recognised by the mainland and military incursions are frequent. Last year, Sun Yuxi, the mainland's ambassador to India, declared: "In our position the whole of what you call the state of Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory ... we are claiming all of that."

The Indian response has so far been meek, perhaps daunted by the realisation that the mainland can quickly mobilise a force in the Himalayas by train and road access through a region India has barely explored on foot. "China seems intent on aggressively pursuing projects and employing water as a weapon," says Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Beijing maintains that it would seek approval for any water diversion project. That remains to be seen.

In 2003 India denounced the plan to divert the northern source of the Brahmaputra, but it seems to have changed tack. New Delhi has now extended the velvet glove by backing plans to dam a section.

This payoff has been likened by one Tibetan publication to the Indian fable regarding a rural simpleton who chopped off a tree branch he was sitting on. It is unlikely that any of the rural locales in Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam or further downstream would support something so suicidal.

In any case, India has its own plans for exploiting the Brahmaputra and the communities along the river will pay the price.

They will be forcibly displaced from a river with which they have lived in harmony for as long as anyone can remember. Millions downstream in India and in Bangladesh are reliant on the river to provide vital soil sustenance and irrigation. They, too, will suffer.

And if India is not prepared to stand up to the mainland, then Bangladesh is up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

Maminul Haque Sarker of Bangladesh's Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services says the water flow of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna will decline by one-third if the project goes ahead.

"Around 15 to 20 small and medium-sized rivers including Dhaleshwari, Shitalakkha and Balu will die," he says, with devastating consequences for the country's agriculture and fishing industries.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg

(c) South China Morning Post

From Dungeons & Dragons to Torrents

2007-07-12T18:32:00.000+13:00

“What is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mysteries?” – PC Wiggum, The Simpsons.

I have an unnerving penchant for watching numbers flick, collate and collect. Hours can be spent monitoring and mentoring the gently increasing file transfer protocols generated by downloading Torrents through Azureus.

I’ve always had this strange fascination. It perhaps started with Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) – that game so engrained into the collectively agreed-upon psyche of geeks.

The following images are from The Acaeum - a site for all things D&D. Sorley, if you're reading this, check out the prices you can get for the rule-books! We could've been rich.

It began in 1974 and involved a vivid imagination, lead figures, graph paper, a pencil, rubber and sharpener and the use of dice. But not just six-sided dice. Oh no. My brother and I had a 20-, 12-, 8- and 4-sided die. The 4-sided was my favourite. A sharp pointed triangle.

In later years it became impossible to continue playing Dungeons & Dragons and expect to kiss girls. But I always kept the dice. And I remember at some lonely stage, having moved schools at 14, creating my own football league and teams on paper. The dice were used to work out scores, scorers, crowds, bookings etc.

Even at University I spent the majority of my first two years with the doors closed playing Championship Manager with my friend, Chris, and then James. It’s a football game based on statistics. You watch the game in sped-up time, with formulaic text appearing as commentary. The rest of the time involves signing-, training and repairing-players. Riveting.

All of these statistically-driven pursuits could engross me for days at a time. Even now, as I write this on the desktop, my laptop screen is visible, the torrent numbers listed like some scene from The Matrix.

Acorn Electron & BBC Micro

2007-07-11T11:34:00.000+13:00

I had forgotten all about my early computing days until reading an ex-pat blog by a family now living in New Zealand.

They had posted about wasting time playing Elite and Chuckie Egg.

Better still they had Chuckie Egg embedded into the post!

When I lived on the Isle of Rum - inner Hebrides of Scotland - at one point there was just me and one other kid in the school. The entire island had about 20 folks living on it. Naturally I spent an inordinate amount of time on my computer. My teacher was something of a whizz and I learned a fair amount of BASIC language and general computer know-how through him.

Anyway, Elite and Chuckie Egg were a big part of my life. And thanks to the Dawes family they might be again.

Free Flash Games

Rejection-Rejection-Rejection-Rej...Oh

2007-07-11T10:36:00.000+13:00

So I was all ready to write a bitter account of a writer's daily battle with far-away faceless editors who control you like some sick puppet master.

I had written an article, researched it, edited it, proofed it and had someone else check it out - Helen Harper - then came the part of sending it out.

I drew up a list of editors and publications and went about punting it via email. Oh the horror when I realised I'd sent it to various sections of the Guardian without attaching the article! Schoolboy error. Basic stuff. Really, really embarrassing.

How many of those editors immediately deleted any correspondence from me after that?

Then the waiting.

And waiting.

Then the first reply.

Rejection.

The process of watching your inbox reminds me of Luc Besson's The 5th Element when Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) is told by the floating Chinese take-away host that he has mail. Korben wearily says he's not interested. The Chinese man very brightly says he should read it. Korben tells him to read it. The Chinese man opens it and exclaims: You're fired!

Most of the rest of the editors hadn't even replied. So I awoke early this morning, sometime around 4am, and couldn't get back to sleep. I shuffled into my slippers and pulled on the dressing gown and fingerless gloves. I had to do something. I came to the computer ready to post about the depressing position of being a writer.

The mailbox said I had a message from the South China Morning Post.

Click.

YOU'RE FIRED!!!

Actually it said they would be running the piece this weekend.

Huzzah.

Onto the next thing, and the next series of rejections.

My conscious

2007-07-03T21:21:00.000+13:00

My conscious is divided up thus: 50% of each day thinking about writing, 40% beating myself up for not writing, and perhaps 5% of it concentrated on actually writing. The other 5% involves food and the like. Okay, so those figures are embellished, it’s probably nowhere near that. But that’s how it feels.

After spending a couple of weeks almost full-time writing at home a whole lot suddenly happened to divert my attention. This always seems to happen.

I went for a writing/research job with a Wellington-based company, Story Inc, which looked really interesting. They put together exhibits, interactives, signage and the like for all sorts of things: Museums, nature reserves, industry headquarters.

It took two days to write my application, then four days of worry before I heard back. Then they asked for two samples of writing. One was to write 115 words about an endangered New Zealand bird, The Stitchbird or Hihi. The other was to design an interactive exhibit that explained the Buddhist notion of karma in one A4 page. Both were to be for an uninformed young audience. Have fun with it, they said. I did for the first 30mins. For the rest I sweated. That was another three days. Then another four days of waiting.

That week I wrote an article We All Live Downstream which I am currently trying to sell.

On top of that I took on part-time work at the Lighthouse Cinema nearby. It fulfills a boyhood dream of working as a projectionist. I’ve already managed to drop an entire film, Ocean’s 13, which took over 2 hours to put back together. It’s great threading the film up and then adjusting the frame, setting the lens, and fretting over whether you’ve done it right.

I got an interview for the job. So that was another day of preparing and another three days of waiting.

I didn’t get the job, but strangely they invited me in the next day.

I spent the next two weeks in their offices working freelance. I worked on a Maori Rock Art exhibit in Timaru, South Island, New Zealand, and an exhibit for a museum in Bangkok, Thailand about the earliest people in Southeast Asia who settled in a region called Suvarnambhumi.

So the fiction is, as usual, on hold – except for in my mind where it continues to fester.

I have plans to write some more articles before leaping back into the novel.

We All Live Downstream

2007-06-17T00:32:00.000+13:00

I just had this article accepted at the South China Morning Post. It will be run in their Sunday Agenda section on Sunday, July 15th.

Unfortunately they charge to view archived articles. It may appear on the website but I don't know yet. For now I will leave sections of the article here, and hopefully be able to provide a link once the SCMP has run it.

-------------------------

Ismail Serageldin, former Senior Vice President of World Bank: “The next World War will be over water.”

When rafting on the many tributaries that make up the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh – India's northeastern most state – I learned first hand that rivers are the economic and cultural backbone of South Asia. Journeying through that largely unspoiled rural region which is bordered on three sides by Bhutan, Chinese-controlled Tibet and Myanmar, I met the tribal fishermen and farmers who rely on the river's bounty and water, was witness to the natural beauty of the deep canyon of the Brahmaputra, and found myself enjoying the tribal Siang (Brahmaputra) river festival. The festival has become an annual event, unifying diverse and scattered tribes, linked through the life-giving and life-taking Siang river.

It was shocking to peacefully float down a river in a raft where the only signs of man are bamboo bridges, then to turn a corner and be faced by a gutted forest and mass construction. The Indian government are moving quickly to “develop” Arunachal as its potential hydropower is realised, and its scattered tribes can be damned. Governments appear to play a numbers game when it comes to displacing those who have lived by a river for generations. In fast-growing India, energy is needed for a population just over one billion. There are a million people in Arunachal, most of whom live in close proximity to a river.

The distribution, manipulation and pollution of river waters is creating mounting tension and displacing those downstream (and upstream) all over the world. Water is a matter of life and death.

When talking about water though, you have to consider China. One runs out of superlatives when describing China's energy and water crisis. Water is catastrophically scarce in a country that has built more dams than any other in the world in an attempt to provide energy for the largest population on earth. The little water that is available is heavily polluted. In the arid north and west some 300million people lack clean drinking water. Statisticians tremble at future pressures on the world food supply in the knowledge China uses irrigation for more than 70% of its food production. At the highest levels the question is asked: where will the water come from?

..................

The geography of South Asia is such that every manipulation of a river by the Chinese has a trickle-down effect. Tibet is known as ‘the roof of the world'. It's the watershed area for ten of the world’s greatest rivers that flow through deep canyons into Asia like giant gutters after heavy rain; feeding almost half of our entire planet’s population. Tampering with these vital waterways in an age of growing climate-change awareness seems ludicrous, yet this is exactly what the Chinese are proposing. Picture the Himalayan glaciers as a massive natural water tank for the world. China wishes to punch a great big hole in that tank and steal water away from its neighbours through a buried pipe no one seems to have noticed.

...........

Work is well underway on two of the diversions: the central and eastern routes. The western route is an altogether more difficult proposition as it involves diverting water from the mightiest of Tibetan Rivers, the Yarlung Tsangpo, some 800km from the mountainous Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Since the late 1990s there has been Chinese interest in harnessing the hydropower of the Yarlung Tsangpo – that becomes the Brahmaputra when flowing into India through Arunuchal Pradesh, then the Jamuna in Bangladesh; a water source vital to both countries. Its journey takes it through the Zangpo canyon, which in 1994 Chinese geologists announced was the biggest in the world. It contains the Tsangpo gorge: eight times steeper and three times larger than the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. Most importantly, at a sacred site the Tibetans call Pemako – the last hidden Shangri-La – the river makes a dramatic u-turn from east to west, moving into India at The Great Bend. In just 200km the river descends 3000m – the greatest hydropower potential anywhere in the world.

............

The sheer outrageousness of diverting such an important river has perhaps ensured the rest of the world remains sceptical. They should start listening. For China it is never a question of 'Should we...?' but always 'How do we...?' Chanyu has proclaimed: “Man should intervene with Nature and reorganize her for his purposes. With this project the drought in Northwest China could be terminated and the flood catastrophes in Southeast Asia brought under control.” He also suggests cheap electricity could be sold to India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

His words are unlikely to assuage fears for those downstream. With China’s potential ability to turn the taps, as it were, on or off, flood control can take on far more sinister qualities. Control over Tibet's largest river is as great a political tool as any military prowess – like laying siege to an enemy fortress from the safety of your own home. Claude Apri, an Indian based writer and journalist, has said: “China’s green light for the [Yarlung Tsangpo] project could be considered by South Asia as a declaration of war.”

...................

South Asia’s river network is a manmade mess of diversions and reservoirs; the pollution levels unsustainable. But International Rivers Network campaign director Aviva Imhof has not given up hope. If there is a coordinated and concentrated effort to harness alternative power sources and efforts are made to clean up the water then the rivers are salvageable. “It doesn’t take as long as you would think to restore a river,” she has said. “There have been a lot of dam removal projects in the US and the river has returned to life in a very short space of time, sometimes as short as five to ten years.”

China continues to seek large-scale structural solutions to its growing energy and water crisis, but no matter how great their achievements, the crisis only seems to deepen. The tentative schedule for the initiation of the western component of the North to South Diversion Project has always been 2009, the year the Three Gorges Dam is to be fully operational. China has denied the project at various intervals in the past, but after the Grand Canal, the Great Wall, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Three Gorges Dam, it seems futile to deny the possibility of the 'Great Bend Diversion'. We must avoid yet another footnote in our damning history.

No Country For Old Men

2007-06-17T00:26:00.000+13:00

I was real excited to learn that the Coen brothers have made a film version of Cormac MacCarthy's No Country For Old Men.

You can watch the trailer here.

Tommy Lee Jones will no doubt have the best self-deprecating one-liners.

The Coen brothers' sly humour will serve the dark novel well I'm sure.

Found - Gav Sutherland

2007-06-01T01:56:00.000+13:00

Considering I'd lost touch with Gavin Sutherland for many years it's certainly ironic the name of his most successful (but definitely not his only) musical act is 'Found'. This is a video from their recently launched new album.

You can buy it here

And another of theirs

Synth Like Minds

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Visit the official FOUND site and their myspace page.

FOUND are Ziggy Campbell, Tommy Perman, Kev Sim, Alan Stockdale and Gavin Sutherland. Ziggy, Kev and Tommy met while studying art in the cold granite city of Aberdeen. Since 2001 they have collaborated on various audio and visual art projects. Though they are occasionally drawn back to the gallery environment, the start of 2005 signalled a new beginning as they enlisted the musical abilities of Gavin Sutherland and decided it was high time they formed a pop band.Recently Mr Alan Stockdale has joined in on the fun and is playing live drums and percussion.

Over the past 12 months the band have enjoyed a rapid rise to success. They have played gigs across the UK, recorded exclusive radio sessions for BBC Radio Scotland, Radio Magnetic and The Selector and made a debut TV appearance on BBC Scotland’s ‘The Music Show’. MTV Europe have just snapped up the video for ‘Mullokian’ ( a collaboration with young Edinburgh animator Joe Richardson) and they have just recorded a live session for a major US radio station in the legendary ‘Beatles Studio’ at Abbey Road.

Their much celebrated performances have drawn comparisons to The Beta Band, Tortoise and Tom Waits. From the outset it was considered a necessity that the music being produced by the quartet could translate effectively to a live audience. This desire, coupled with the band’s suspicion of, and general feeling of boredom towards, the “laptop set”, pushed them to create an ever evolving live show which combines new technology with their extensive collection of acoustic instruments.

While FOUND are always keen to experiment and push themselves in new directions, their music has a strong grounding in melody and structure. It’s not often the terms accessible and forward-thinking sit happily together but in the world of FOUND they are the definition of what Pop music should be.

Until now

2007-05-25T16:28:00.000+13:00

This blog has been somewhat random to date. Mainly compiling other people’s articles, blogs and websites of interest. And of course images found during my continuing search for the loneliest cabins. But there has been very little comment of my own. My aim is for that to change. What I intend to do is chart my progress as a writer. Part of my reluctance to engage myself in actually writing on the blog has come from a fear of putting too much into it and not enough into anything else. But I’ve come to realise that writing, in any form, will help overall.

In a southern American twang: “Well what we gat here? A ree-dah?” – Bill Hicks.

First then, the story till now. As a kid I read a lot. Unlike most kids I lived in some fairly remote places, including the Isle of Rum – population around 20. This definitely fuelled my interest (need) in books, music and computers. My father, Laughton, read many books to me (that I subsequently reread), and the ones that stick in the memory most are The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, a lot of Roald Dahl, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and the Wizard of Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin.

By the time I was seven I had written (and recorded on cassette) my first poems. One of them I remember a little of: “and the noise went beep beep beep all night long / Oh what a noise.” This was inspired by a stint in the Sick Kids Hospital in Edinburgh.

The first time I remember turning my hand to fiction was soon after when I began a sequel to Lord of the Rings. The first scene involved the principal characters searching for Gimli’s axe in the rubble of Helm’s Deep. I bashed this out on one of the typewriters in the Nature Conservancy Council office on the island.

Over the years I kept a diary at various junctures, and wrote many letters to my siblings who all lived abroad at different points. The other memories I have of my writing came through school. At James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh I had a stereotypically larger than life English teacher, Mr Campbell, in the mould of Alasdair Gray. He sang at you in a theatrical voice and was prone to embellishment and great humour. He had the required physical characteristics: corduroy suits, a missing thumb, wiry grey hair that surrounded a bald dome like a bird’s nest, and a glass eye. On one of my old jotters my friend Gavin Sutherland and I had been writing the name of our band, Amorphous Head, in different styles. And below this Mr Campbell has written: So this is what goes on in the secret corner! He was inspiration in itself.

At Breadalbane Academy in Aberfeldy, Perthshire, another elderly English teacher gave me full marks for a piece of creative writing. No one else had had such a privilege for a long time, he said. But what marked it out for me was the content of the piece. It was a gritty, no holds barred (well, I thought it was for a fourteen year old’s English submission at school) piece about young folks going off the rails at a house party. I may be embellishing the story now, but I remember my classmates were shocked that such content was not just accepted, but prized.

Had there been an undergraduate creative writing course available back then I’m sure I would have applied. For as long as I can remember I’ve always imagined writing for a living. As it was I ended up studying Film & TV and Scottish Literature at Glasgow University. With the advent of email a lot of my writing became enmeshed with communication back to old friends in Edinburgh. Stories involving them as the principal characters and the like. I also got into journalism and became Sports Editor for the Glasgow University Guardian.

Studying Scottish Literature has had a profound effect on my writing. I learned what texts were important (from Barbour’s Bruce to Stevenson and Scott to House of the Green Shutters and Confessions of a Justified Sinner to MacDiarmid to Alexander Trocchi to Kelman and Gray to Spark and Lochhead to Banks to Welsh to Warner) and how they slotted into a Scottish psyche. All courtesy of an inspiring department led by the enigmatic Douglas Gifford.

With the emergence of the Creative Writing Masters at Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities I decided to apply. There was something appealing in the fact applications were approved based on a folio of writing, rather than previous studies and qualifications. So for the first time in a while I sat down to produce a few thousand words of fiction.

Once accepted I spread out the studies as thinly as possible. It didn’t seem worthwhile to complete the course in one academic year, unless one had produced that barnstorming novel. Instead I did the course part-time which seemed to make my studies much the same as those students who were full-time. I had the same amount of access to the staff. Could be present at just as many lectures and workshops. But I knew I would have another year of the same.

The first year for me was run by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, two of the most famous Scottish writers, and I had studied them during my undergraduate years. I spent the majority of this year attempting to write a screenplay as my mind was fixed on being involved in film. I was also terribly caught up in the mechanics of producing two anthologies with funding from the course, and in coordinating and running a weekly reading night at the Scotia Bar. In hindsight I believe my priorities were all wrong, and I don’t think I took advantage of the staff and course nearly enough. Which is why I am glad I decided to take a year out (spreading the course out as much as possible).

When I returned the course was altogether different. Kelman and Gray had retired, and Willy Mayley had returned from a sabbatical. His positive energy altered the makeup of the department considerably. On a personal note, the time away had also fixed my mind on prioritising the writing over anything extracurricular. So it was that I devoted my time to writing for this academic year 2004-2005. I had a deadline of six months – between October and March – as I would be returning to California for a job. I finished my first novel, a landmark. Again though, with hindsight, I can now see that my need to complete the novel in that timeframe affected the quality of the prose I produced. There was little rewriting, redrafting or redressing. Instead I pushed on to finish the story. My study of Scottish Literature and time at Glasgow University (going on six years by this point) also affected my work and the appreciation of my peers’ work. I found the cosy scene claustrophobic and was turned off by writing that I found to be Scottish short-sighted navel-gazing. It was all too close to home

Ever since then I have been travelling and living abroad and waiting for life to get out the way so I can continue to write. Two years later I’m now realising life won’t do that for you. But I find it hard to slot in small stints of writing amongst other work pursuits. So far it has been all or nothing. I need a few months of dedicated time to write. In the past year I created that time to produce more prose in Thailand, and now in New Zealand I have the time to dedicate myself to it again. The outsider perspective of living abroad will, I hope, give me the necessary inspiration to dig a little deeper this time. There is no cosy scene to get lost in.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve come to appreciate that any form of writing is a good thing. So I supplement the frustrating production of fiction with blogs, travel writing and various non-fiction stories for websites, newspapers and magazines in the hope that I can earn enough to write for a living.

Mary Gibbons Art

2007-03-15T15:40:00.000+13:00

My wife's brother's fiance, Mary, recently launched a website to showcase her art.

In her own words: "My landscapes explore themes around stillness and desolation. They are often empty landscapes featuring a man-made structure that will cause the viewer to wonder about habitation, abandonment or desolation."

Loneliest Cabin anyone?

My kind of art.

Iranian blogs

2007-03-15T15:14:00.000+13:00

A good blog is supposed to inform, with panache.

When I learned that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had started his own blog I was shocked. Remember, this is a country that has heavily censored internet traffic, even jailing bloggers who voice political dissent. Ahmadinejad recently hosted a forum to discuss: The Holocaust – did it actually happen? He also shutdown access to Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia and the New York Times in an attempt to “purge the country of western cultural influences”, according to the Guardian.

[Image from Berryburger]

And one of my favourite recent Guardian stories, Shoppers see red and President feels the heat over tomatoes, began with: “History is not littered with cases of heads of state being brought down by the price of tomatoes but, with his critics growing by the day, Ahmadinejad could be in danger of earning such a distinction.”

With all this in mind I was eager to check out his blog.

But it’s a bore. I knew it when I found myself reading the comments with more interest than the posts themselves. Due to the nature of my work – subediting and writing – the broken, disjointed, badly spelled and grammatically error-strewn text had my mind quickly wandering.

The comments from readers are rather more interesting, saying a whole lot more than the President lets slip. Not least, “What a joke this blog never updates!” chirruped Adil Kamal. “Very nice, but could you update this more? Its been the same thing for nearly two months,” sighed Eric Sortomme. I couldn’t agree more. Tokenism anyone?

Okay, so you’re unlikely to ever read George W Bush’s hilarious but caustic From within the Whitehouse blogspot.com, but President Ahmadinejad has broken the first rule of blogging: KEEP BLOGGING!

And with that comment I hide my hide deep in the sand. I apologise. I have been absent for too long.

So what about the Iranian people? Well, while countless blogs seem to concentrate on the female form and little else, Amir Normandi takes a rather more intelligent view of the body and censorship in an Iranian photo-blog which believes, “it is unconscionable to accept … extreme gender inequality”.

A good blog is also a gateway, providing useful and related links to other websites, blogs and news stories. For up to date information on Iran (and a host of links to liberal blogs) look no further than Dr. Zin’s. It analyses the various bodies providing (mis)information regarding the country’s political stance and interpretation of human rights. Not a lot of laughs, you might expect.

But Dr. Zin is a smart, witty writer. For instance, he reported that our poor blogger, President Ahmadinejad, has (apparently) backed an alarming law that would enforce strict dress codes to separate Islamic followers from other minorities. Dr Zin writes: “’Iranians have always worn trousers,’ says Mostafa Pourhardani, minister of Islamic orientation. What men will wear on top is not clear yet. Some … propose only a waistcoat.”

[Image from JeffreyDeanFoster]

More worrying to me was that “some Majlis members tried to include articles determining the shape and size of men's beards and moustaches and impose an Islamic standard for male facial hair”.

These are worrying times indeed. Thank you, Dr. Zin, for informing with panache.

Royal Writing

2007-01-25T19:31:00.000+13:00

Moving to the remote shores of New Zealand has sharpened my senses in terms of what the Internet can offer. It all became clear in my Dubai hotel room while flicking through the Guardian Weekly (stockpiled from the past month) and reading article after article that threw up words and phrases like 'blog', 'media multi-tasking', 'transmigration' and discussed 'YouTube' and Military Videos.net These were articles riddled with web reviews, URLs, email addresses and podcast discussions. I began to channel all this competing information through my brain while listening to the Times Online's 'The Game' football podcast on my iPod.

In a strange synchronous manner my wife and I recently got hold of an old Royal Typewriter and I wrote this blog entry in a new notebook. Technology has somehow forced me to write once again by hand, to ink-stain my fingers with newspaper print and to erase the mistakes from a stream-of-consciousness rant with the use of tippex - something I haven't done since school it seems.

When on my laptop and connected to the Internet the possibilities seem to freeze any creativity. I barely write emails like I used to and all my time is sucked into the vortex of information consumption, Short Circuit-style - "More input". I read a host of blogs, trawl the torrent sites for music and film and watch endless videos on YouTube.

To create I've had to step back from the keyboard. The blog has certainly allowed me to link ideas and open up doors but I've found it has been mostly other people's work and thoughts: quotations, links and reportage. Cut and paste. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

This is where the typewriter and notebook come in. Thoughts congregate and spill out unmediated and unchecked. There is no possibility of just instant cutting and pasting. 'Did that paragraph work? No.' Start again from the beginning.

With a computer that initial block of text is like a lump of badly-formed clay. It resembles what you intended to only a small degree but hints at possibility through manipulation. So that's what you do. Prodding, cutting, pushing, pricking and pulling, all in the hope of making something better. But it becomes dirty, dry and formless. Better to start fresh with that initial form still sitting as it was, a reminder of your first failed attempt.

For me the simple act of physically writing has restored to my ever-increasing dependence on technology a more natural and healthy balance.

Debate continues ...

2006-12-22T08:24:00.000+13:00

More hot talk as the 'debate' over Scottish Literature continued with words from Stuart Kelly, in response to Alan Bisset's blog.

The canon will roar in classic clash of the publishing titans
Stuart Kelly
Scotland on Sunday, December 17th

AS 2006 draws to a close, and the Pick of the Year log-rolling and back-slapping fade to a distant memory, the Browser's eyes turn to the New Year, and the advance hype about what will be the titles to watch in 2007.

I can confidently predict a rush of wunderkinden, some weighty tomes by established names, which will receive "height of powers" and "over the hill" reviews in equal measure, a surprise non-fiction bestseller and a spat over the Man Booker Prize. It's August, however, that looks most interesting.

Random House has announced 20 titles, including a book about an orphan lured into crime and abused by the establishment by "Charles", a maths-and-meanings drugs fantasy with a prepubescent heroine by "Lewis", a tragic rural love triangle with incestuous overtones by "George", and a lad-lit extravaganza of bonking and boozing by "Henry". Or, in other words, Dickens' Oliver Twist, Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, Eliot's The Mill On The Floss and Fielding's Tom Jones.

Random has set its sights on the lucrative classics market, which at present is dominated by Penguin, which has 65% of the market share. By Christmas next year, Random House intends to have 50 titles, and promises half a dozen or so each month for the next five years.

It's a smart move - no pesky royalty payments for most of the authors, for one thing - and the recent success of Headline Review's "chick-lit" style rebranding of Jane Austen shows that there are ways to build new audiences for literary greats.

There's another, more self-interested reason: Random House wants to 'protect' its contemporary authors from drifting into the Penguin Classics range as they leave copyright.

Already, the Vintage division has been releasing as "future classics" successful titles such as Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife. It will be interesting to see how this clash of the titans shapes up.

And while it's easy to see why Random House would be keen for a slice of the "costume drama" classics - all the ones yet to be adapted by Andrew Davies or star Keira Knightley - I hope they'll also look at the more esoteric titles. Penguin is pushing hard to release African, Arabic, Indian and Eastern titles. Will Random House expand its already considerable commitment to Chinese and Japanese authors?

Hunting of the snark

I am, apparently, a snark. I should explain: I recently participated in a debate for Product magazine, about Scottish literature and criticism, with Professor Willy Maley of Glasgow University. And a merry old ding-dong we had, as befits a fair and frank exchange of views between professionals.

I was therefore a little surprised to see a rather partial account of it on the blog of a young writer called Alan Bissett. Most of his blogs revolve around the perfidy of critics - the old "any opinion as long as its good" conundrum. I am not only a snark, but a jeer-leader, and the bad cop, and presumably when I'm not reviewing books I'm pulling the wings off flies and telling children the truth about Father Christmas. A stark contrast to the "sheer delight in writers" which Bissett attributes to Maley.

For the record, Bissett teaches on the Glasgow Creative Writing course, the co-founder of which is Professor Maley; and even dedicated his latest anthology, Outside Of A Dog, to his boss ("a scholar and a gentleman"). Apparently critics are supposed to provide "Legal Aid" for writers. So I suppose I should clarify what the Book Pages are not: an extension of the marketing departments of publishers or, for that matter, creative writing courses.

-------------------------------------------------

Alan Bissett, Glasgow / 5:39pm 17 Dec 2006

I should point out that I did not dedicate Outside of a Dog to Willy Maley, nor call him 'a gentleman and a scholar', but the students - who put the anthology together and merely asked me to write the introduction - did. Nor is Willy Maley my boss. The convener of the Creative Writing MLitt is Professor Michael Schmidt.

Shall we call this a 'partial account' of my 'partial account'?

Trailer Mash

2006-12-13T20:50:00.000+13:00

This is something I've dreamed about doing since I was a kid: cutting up classic movies and reimagining them. For a while I kept a list of great falls in movies. Off the top of my head I always remember Carrie telekinising the kid who name calls at her off his bike next to a tree. Then there was the trailer for the movie with all the Beatles covers for the soundtrack. It starred Sean Penn and was called I am Sam. I never saw it but have the soundtrack and remember the trailer because he does this hilarious slip and fall going down a hospital corridor. Anyway, it was my dream to splice together a montage of great slipps and falls in movies to some unforgettable piece of music. I never could fix on what should be played.

Anyway, this website called The Trailer Mash reimagines movies by making up a new trailer spliced together with other movies. I just watched The Shining reimagined as a romantic comedy. Next up is Lord of the Rings - Transformers.

Glen Baxter

2006-12-12T17:15:00.000+13:00

Love-hatE

2006-12-12T15:56:00.000+13:00

As a Scot, I have a love/hate relationship with the country. And as a Scottish writer, I have a love/hate relationship with its literature.

I read the Kelly-Maley debate in full and posted it without critique or analysis, the reason being it all hit so close to home I had no idea where to start.

My gut reaction to a lot of the praise for recent Scottish writing has been to cringe (sorry Maley). But I believe a major reason for this is the personal dilemma regarding my own (Scottish) writing, and the jealousy over other writers' publication success.

Somehow we are all shamed and feel guilty about our backgrounds. I have this in spades, especially as a writer.

So far I have avoided the issue by simply not writing about Scotland. A few years ago I was unable to even lift a Scottish book, skipping Louise Welsh and giving Anne Donovan an extremely wide berth.

While studying for the M.Litt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University I purposefully avoided Scottishness in all my writing, and cringed at the Scottishness coming at me from all the other students. I couldn't stand it. I realise now I was paralysed by the idea of writing about something close to home.

Instead I attempted to write an American novel about California. I finished it, but it wasn't real. [Read an extract at Glasgow Seeker.com]

Once out of Scotland and living in Thailand, where I taught English, I began to write again. Still America, but this time about a young teacher. Ahh, something closer to home.

Now that I'm resident in New Zealand, Scotland feels closer than ever. I recently read The Cutting Room [perfect for film, stripped down like a screenplay, a lot like my recent writing] and devoured Robin Jenkins' The Changeling [The Cone Gatherers is my favourite of his]. Amazing how getting some distance from things allows you to breathe again.

Scotland has a proud literary history - Burns, Stevenson, Scott, Hogg, MacDiarmid, Trocchi, Kelman, Gray, Spark, Welsh, Warner - and like our national football team, we will gladly sing its praises after a few drinks among company, but as soon as the print media becomes involved, it's all back-slapping and stabbing, a rather murky affair.

My reason for cringing at a lot of the praise is personal: I can't stand the chest-thumping that comes from journalists; as an unpublished novelist I have plenty of selfish jealousy, an inordinate amount of novelists have come from the M.Litt course I studied on; I have a deep-rooted Scottish shame ('who cares?' I ask myself, 'who wants to read about Scotland?'); and there is something sad in the ever-increasing somnambulistic style of book buying from high street chain stores after reading someone else's opinion.

But there's no doubt, more Scottish writers are being published than ever before. Does that mean the literature is in a golden age?

We're Scottish, we don't know how to handle success.

The snarks and believers battling over Scottish letters

2006-12-12T15:44:00.000+13:00

Another ex-tutor of mine, Alan Bissett, has been writing a book blog for Guardian Unlimited. He has generated some interesting debate, primarily around use of the vernacular and working-class writing. I should have known he would comment on Willy Maley's (his colleague) debate on the Golden Age of Scottish Literature.

-------------------------------------------

Alan Bissett

December 11, 2006 11:38 AM

Guardian Unlimited: Arts Blog

Is Scotland going through a golden literary age? It all depends on whom you listen to.

Far be it for me to wade into another spat, but it's stuff like this that keeps the literary world interesting. The protagonists this time are Professor Willy Maley of the University of Glasgow and Stuart Kelly, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday. Regular readers will note my suspicion for reviewers, critics and academics (so much sound and fury, as Shakespeare wrote, signifying nothing), but when they disagree as vehemently as these gents, my antennae sense real ideological difference. This is always political, thus worth noticing, whatever its guise.

The recent case of Rachel Cooke v Susan Hill over blogging was, to me, an argument about democracy, not one about "standards", and a similar divide exists in Maley and Kelly's feud. They slug it out in the new issue of Product, Scotland's finest - if most peripatetic - arts and politics magazine, over the oft-repeated claim that Scottish literature is going through a "golden age". Maley is the cheerleader; Kelly the jeerleader. For Kelly, Scottish writers "need a high bar, a rigorous scepticism that won't wallow in hype, but judiciously examine our claims to greatness". For Maley, "Scottish writing has been judged excellent at the bar of international opinion, despite wing-clipping at home by carping culture-vultures."

Maley's is a slightly different version of an appeal by the American writer and critic, Heidi Julavits, in The Believer, about the standard being set so high by critics that only carping and snarking takes place, instead of sheer delight in writers attempting serious fiction. In this context, Kelly is a Snark, Maley a Believer. Both feel they are best serving art. Maley's good cop is proud of Scottish writers' achievements; Kelly's bad cop demands ever-greater proof of the success. For those uninterested in Scottish letters (actually, aren't you what the debate's about?) this is a similar discussion to that which surrounds English writers' perceived failure to compete with the American novel.

We must be careful when examining national literatures though, especially from within that nation. All appeals to the sanctity of a nation - whether saluting the flag or cheering the football team - are preparations for the mindset of war. And art is not war. But Maley is defending the national culture against the national cringe, and Kelly seems to represent for him those Scots at pains to see only their country's shortcomings. It's a familiar exchange in Scottish life. The charge of "parochial" comes from those who declare themselves "cosmopolitan", except that one man's "parochialism" is another's cultural protectionism, and one man's "cosmopolitan" is another's hatred of the homeland. What Kelly doesn't recognise is that Scottish writers just can't exist on a level trans-national field. If Alasdair Gray's Lanark were set in New York instead of Glasgow, it would often be mentioned in the same breath as DeLillo's Underworld. The news from Scotland, a post-industrial outpost of a faded empire, simply cannot seem as important as reports from the vast, engorged heart of the new one. Yet when I go abroad people often ask, "Who are the Scottish writers to read?" ("besides Irvine Welsh," they usually add, but that's another blog. What are we supposed to say? I'm sorry, but there aren't any as good as Thomas Pynchon?

Scepticism is a healthy intellectual trait, but if Scots won't champion Scottish literature, who will? The Danes? It's one thing to claim that the final arbiter has to be international (though I personally think the opinions of school students in Dundee as valid as those of some global "council"), but if that court isn't even aware of our works - because our critics don't provide Legal Aid to our writers - then we face the death of regional literatures, and a critical establishment open to only the most glamorous clients.

Golden Age Rage

2006-12-11T12:53:00.000+13:00

During my first year of study for the M.Litt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University the programme was run by the giants of Scottish Literature James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard. It was a year of humbling and wonder.

The following year Professor Willy Maley returned from a sabbatical and immediately there was a wind of change. He is an exciting and excited character, deliciously interested in literature. I remember him bubbling with enthusiasm as he let slip the title to a recent piece of literary criticism he had written: From T.S Elliot to Missy Elliot. He brought a much greater sense of possibility to me. Rooting writing firmly in whatever context or background one may find themself in.

Below is a sample of the way Willy Mayley's debates soon descend and swoop.

‘Golden Age Rage: Is the Claimed Renaissance in Scottish Literature Real?’, (an exchange of views between Stuart Kelly, Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday, and Willy Maley), Product: Over the Counter Culture 11, The Modern Myths Issue (Winter 2006-7), pp. 36-41, ISSN 1468-9901.

“In a small country, the nest of genius is well hidden” (Dubravka Ugresic).

Dear Stuart

The quotation chosen by Chris Small to open our exchange makes me uneasy. I’m suspicious of the notion of “genius”, nesting or otherwise, unsure too as to why it should be more “hidden” in a small country. For some reason I’m reminded of the Irn-Bru 32 cuckoo with its cry of “Wakey-Wakey!” Or worse still, the Dead Parrot sketch. Before I take flight, I want to follow that quotation with a more grounded comment from James Kelman: “Good art is usually dissent; I want to be involved in creating good art”. I like this, not just because it’s by a Scottish writer, and roots our discussion in the small country we live and work in, but because it raises the issue of dissent, whereas Ugresic implies we can all agree on what constitutes genius – or greatness – once we find its nesting-place. I might stretch it and say: “Good criticism is usually dissent; I want to be involved in creating good criticism”. We’re not birds of a feather, you and I, so I expect by the end of this we’ll have agreed to disagree. Genius aside, I don’t believe we can come to a consensus over what makes – or breaks – a “good” writer, precisely because good writing, like good criticism, is all about “dissensus”, to borrow a term from African American critic Cornel West. Does “good” writing in Scotland get the criticism it deserves? Or do cuckoo critics evict fledgling geniuses from the nest, in the interests of feathering their own?

Willy

Dear Willy

Well, I’m also discomfited by the notion of ‘genius’, but for reasons we’ll come on to in due course. It rather perplexes me that, in order to advance the claim that “good criticism is usually dissent”, you appeal to the authority of James Kelman. Surely, following that logic, you should dissent from dissent itself?

But, to the questions with which you end your opening salvo: “Does “good” writing in Scotland get the criticism it deserves? Or do cuckoo critics evict fledgling geniuses from the nest, in the interests of feathering their own?”

Taking the first question, I’m glad you put good in ironic, finger-twitching quotation marks. I think the point of this debate is to analyse what we mean by good, since there is a veritable tintinnabulation of critics, arts bureaucrats and writers chorusing that we live in a Golden Age of Caledonian Letters. My position is clear: our contemporary writers might not get what they want, but they should get what they need. A high bar. A rigorous scepticism that won’t wallow in hype, but judiciously examine our big claims to greatness in a little world.

In terms of question two, I don’t really understand what you are implying, particularly since you use a term of which you’ve already said you’re suspicious. To call critics cuckoos also seems problematic: the cuckoo, notoriously, doesn’t make its own nest. It is an interloper, a con-artist, a deceiver, an exploiter. It doesn’t really chime with the idea of a “professional dissenter”. You propose the ideal critic as a persistent nay-sayer to a nebulous, conspiratorial consensus, and then figure the critic as a bloated impostor who mimics the writer for his or her own advantage.

To Chris’s questio n. I’m sure we agree that Scotland is a small country. I take Ugrasic’s quotation as meaning that genius is rare and takes subtlety to discover, especially in small countries, where the necessity of advocating cultural uniqueness might mean that a great deal of local literature makes claims to being of global importance. Or to put it another way: is Kelman or Lochhead or Gray as good as Gunter Grass, or Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or Thomas Pynchon? The question of greatness will haunt this debate: once you declare your own aesthetic agenda (I have mine), we might be able to argue, rather than swirl in the mire of agreeing to disagree.

To quote Breyten Breytenbach, might we find uncitizens of Scotland who are “defined... not so much by what they oppose or even reject? [Who] ventured into zones where truths no longer fit snugly and where certainties do not overlap”?

Stuart

Dear Stuart

It’s good to squawk, and ruffle feathers. First off, I never “appeal[ed] to the authority of James Kelman”. I quoted him. And I do dissent if his notion of “dissent” implies writing of a particular political persuasion. I’ve never subscribed to Sartre’s idea that “The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy”. Literary art is edgiest when bound up with tyranny. Bad politics produces good writing, as anyone familiar with Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” knows. Conor Cruise O’Brien asked of it: “How can that political ugly duckling be turned into this glorious Swan?” All my geese aren’t swans. Accusing me of envisaging “a nebulous, conspiratorial consensus”, you invoke a conspiracy of “a veritable tintinnabulation of critics, arts bureaucrats and writers chorusing that we live in a Golden Age of Caledonian Letters”. If such a chorus exists, this Don isn’t part of it. I experience Golden Age Rage too.

Stuart, your argument perplexes me. You’re “sure we agree that Scotland is a small country”. Granted. You “take Ugresic’s quotation as meaning that genius is rare and takes subtlety to discover, especially in small countries, where the necessity of advocating cultural uniqueness might mean that a great deal of local literature makes claims to being of global importance”. I’d dispute your extrapolation. If that’s what Ugresic means, I don’t agree with her either. You then “put it another way” and ask: “Is Kelman or Lochhead or Gray as good as Gunter Grass, or Ngugi wa Thiong’o, or Thomas Pynchon?” Now you’ve lost me. You speak “especially” of “small countries”, then invoke Germany, Kenya, and America.

If you’re making serious comparisons, the artist formerly known as James Ngugi comes closest to Kelman. Ngugi writes in English and Gikuyu, Kelman in English and Scots. Both are “committed” writers. Ngugi got the idea for his last English novel, Petals of Blood, travelling north from Leeds to Inverness in the late 1960s, wondering what it would be like to introduce capitalist modernity to remote parts. Scotland inspires great writers as well as producing them.

You say: “The question of greatness will haunt this debate: once you declare your own aesthetic agenda (I have mine), we might be able to argue, rather than swirl in the mire of agreeing to disagree.” Swirl in the mire”? “Wallow in hype”. Stuart, you need an editor. Declare your “aesthetic agenda” and be damned. I’m open to all kinds of writing. I’ve no hidden aesthetic agenda. My bar’s not high but broad. I like the Breytenbach quote – that prominent Afrikaans writer who took French citizenship knows the pitfalls of prejudice. Our own Republic of Letters exists within a larger monarchy where citizens are subjects. I like close comparisons. Closer than Ugresic’s Croatia or Breytenbach’s South Africa is Irish writer Eavan Boland’s question: “What is this thing – a nation – that is so powerful it can make songs, attract sacrifice and so exclusive it drives into hiding the complex and skeptical ideas which would serve it best?”

We agree on the need for scepticism, but I see indubitable talent where you see a high bar, with you as Olympic umpire. Consider two intimate outsiders on Scottish literature. Yeats contrasts two classes of poet, those like Coleridge and Wordsworth who “write for a clique, and leave after them a school”, and “the bardic class – the Homers and Hugos, the Burnses and Scotts – who sing of the universal emotions, our loves and angers, our delight in stories and heroes, our delight in things beautiful and gallant. They do not write for a clique, or leave after them a school, for they sing for all men.” I take Yeats’s judgment seriously. More recently, Colm Tóibín, introducing The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, contrasts the vibrancy of new Scottish writing with a more cautious Irish literary landscape: “Most of the work being produced in Ireland now is formally conservative…This new conservatism among fiction writers both north and south of the border is most clear when you compare the calmness of contemporary Irish writing with the wildness of contemporary Scottish writing. It is as though the legacy of Sterne and Swift, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien had taken the Larne-Stranraer ferry; in the writing of James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway and Alan Warner there is political anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery. Books are written, as in Ireland in the old days, to replace a country”. I take Tóibín seriously.

For these formidable Irish writers, Scotland presents a shining example. You beg to differ. You see a self-congratulatory conspiracy. I see a national literature judged the world over as of unparalleled excellence and influence. Dissent and doubt are necessary, so is nurturing. We’ll never reach a neutral notion of good writing, but in denying Scotland has contributed disproportionately to world literature, you’re having a laugh. Wakey-Wakey! Scottish writing’s been judged excellent at the bar of international opinion, despite wing-clipping at home by carping culture vultures, the old nobody-here-but-us-chickens cultural cringe. This small country’s produced literary giants with unquestionable international reputations: Burns and Scott, Hogg and Stevenson, Gunn and Gibbon, Kelman and Spark. Its oil’s been squandered, not its ink. Patrick Kavanagh contrasted the parochial view – good work arises from one’s own backyard – with the provincial view – good writing happens elsewhere. Which side of the fence are you on? Set the bar high – then toss the caber.

Willy

Dear Willy

I’m going to run through your quotations and objections relatively briefly, and conclude with my own methodology for judgement.

In terms of the dissenting nature of criticism, it seems to me that dissent must be dissent from; hence my invocation of its implied consensus. It is intrinsically bound with its own opposition, to the extent of (quasi)legitimising that from which it departs. The Golden Age brigade is certainly no conspiracy I’ve invented, but an observation: a present day “Golden Age of Scottish literature” has been advocated by Allan Wilson MSP, Gavin Wallace of the Arts Council and the British Council on its website. Similar claims – “Scottish poetry is in its healthiest state for hundreds of years” (W N Herbert); “In the last 25 years Scottish writing has undergone a Renaissance” (Scottish Publishers Association), “The last 15 years in particular have witnessed an unprecedented flowering” (yourself, in the 100 Best Scottish Books) – such assertions are ten a penny. I wouldn’t deny anyone the right to make such claims: all I ask is that they make the criteria for their

judgement explicit.

I’m sorry that my argument was not clearer before you lost me. Wee country – can it punch above its weight against a big country? Is our local up to being global? Are we in danger of doing an “Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards” and celebrating at home what is ignored abroad?

That a bar is high does not preclude a wide range of taste. Again, it’s a question of uncovering how we judge – saying “Is Iain M Banks better than China Mieville?” or “Is Ian Rankin better than Henning Mankell?” is no different from saying “Is Muriel Spark better than Margaret Drabble?” By the way, a broad bar, I think, is a kind of plank. Or perhaps stumbling block.

Your quotes then come thick and fast, and I don’t feel that trading favourite quotes is a particularly effective way of exploring. The Yeats quote, while interesting, seems typically scant on evidence. Was there a school of Wordsworth? Influence certainly, imitation occasionally, but a school? And is Scott so ‘universal’? It’s easier to see a school of Scott than of Coleridge. Colm’s quote is, again, interesting; and I’d agree with him about a certain conservatism in some contemporary Irish writing. But why not look West, to the writings of Millet, Rosenberg, Danielewski, Homes, Kalfus… or around the globe to Yang Lian, Etienne van Heerden, Amelie Nothomb or Tor Bringsværd; writers to my mind far more politically engaged, formally innovative and subtly radical than, say, “Porno”, “The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven” or “You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free”.

It’s here that things start to become conflicted. Do I think Scotland has produced great literature? Emphatically yes. Has it produced a disproportionate amount? Well, given that, as a Scot, I know it better than I know the history of Persian, Belgian or Magyar writing, I might notice it more often, but I can’t really say: and neither can you. The fact that most of Scottish Literature is accessible to an Anglophone audience, and given the global reach of English, a certain disproportion is built into the assertion. How would one even go about validating the claim you have made, the one that if I dissent from I’m “having a laugh”? Playing the “tartaner than thou” card is easy.

Is the writing being produced now of a stature to stand proud on an international stage? Again, we need to decide what we’re talking about. If there were a Da Vinci Code from an author in Hoy or Hawick would that be a triumph for Scottish literature? There are living writers whose work I admire a very great deal; there are also writers whose works I feel are over-wrought, under-thought, ill-conceived or shoogly in their plotting to say the least.

The French, for example, feel no need to insist that with Villon, Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, Corneille, Racine, Laclos, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Mallarmé, Proust, Aragon, Céline, Jaccottet, Perec, Leys and Darrieussecq they deserve to be recognised as a great literary nation. It’s not the cringe I fear, but the tantrum, the look-at-us! look-at-us! You are doing an admirable job as a cheerleader, but Wakey-Wakey Willy! There’s a world out there that exists for reasons other than providing blurbs for Scottish writing. Shaking other people’s pom-poms is different from proof.

So: my agenda. Wikipedia, that free-for-all internet encyclopaedia, has a feature called a “Disambiguation Page”. Great literature is the opposite of that. Before you reach for an old copy of F R Leavis, and berate me again about my supposed Olympian pose, let me make this very clear. Language, the world, and individuals are complex, complex entities. I admire the literature that unveils as it unravels that to the reader. Complex doesn’t mean difficult: it can be deceptively simple; as in Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child, or MacDiarmid’s “Empty Vessel”. If writing reduces the reader – by stereotype, by monoglossia, by complicit limitation – it performs something aggressive against the whole idea of reading.

I have some final questions. You’ve said that your bar is broad: tell me who you rejected from the two hundred books mentioned in your 100 Best Scottish Books, and then, for example, why Alan Massie isn’t there in the top 100 but J K Rowling is? At least 200 choices were made: what were the reasons behind those decisions?

PS: is our literary production edgy at the moment? If so, are we bound up with tyranny? Answers on a postcard to Amnesty.

PPS: “We agree on the need for scepticism”. How then can something be indubitable?

Dear Stuart

I can’t speak for Allan Wilson or Gavin Wallace, but I imagine they were speaking in an official capacity, promoting Scottish literature. I was publicising a particular project, the 100 Best Scottish Books, to which you contributed (thanks). Context is everything. There’s a time and place for puff and blurb. Like here: “Is the writing being produced now of a stature to stand proud on an international stage?” Yes: Alasdair Gray, AL Kennedy, Don Paterson, Alan Warner.

Conversely, you mention Scottish writers chiefly as a putdown. All your comparisons show them in a bad light. You talk of “the global reach of English”, ignoring Scots and Gaelic. You act like political writing was the province of others. You urge me to “look West” – young man! – where the real talent is. I see it in the West of Scotland. You insist other “writers” are “far more politically engaged, formally innovative and subtly radical than” selected Scottish counterparts, but you list only three novels without naming the authors. How can you compare nine diverse “writers” to three recent books? It’s a false comparison, a smokescreen. We’re discussing good writing in a Scottish context. You urge me to “look West … or around the globe”. You say: “Language, the world, and individuals are complex, complex entities.” The only complex at work here is the inferiority complex or cultural cringe.

You say “as a Scot” you know Scottish literature “better than … the history of Persian, Belgian or Magyar writing.” Many Scots grow up unfamiliar with the history of their own literature. Some go to University to study “English Literature” – there’s only one Department of Scottish Literature in Scotland, at my University. You ask important questions aimed at “uncovering how we judge”, profound enquiries like “Is Ian Rankin better than Henning Mankell?” Come off it. Can’t we judge Scottish writing on its own terms, acknowledging it’s earned an international audience? There’s lots in translation. Your whole argument boils down to saying Scottish writing isn’t a patch on what you read on your holidays. Your “methodology for judgement” is to ask if Muriel Spark is better than Margaret Drabble. The answer’s yes, but that’s beside the point. Drabble wrote a silly review of Spark’s The Takeover in the New York Times 30 years ago in which she described Not To Disturb and The Driver’s Seat as “thin” novels with “thin” subjects. This suggests she’s not risen to the challenge of Spark.

I say again, for you, good writing happens elsewhere. Witness your long list of better thans and short list of Scottish also-rans. I believe good writing happens here. I knows it – I grows it. You don’t invoke these pairings to compare or contrast, only to glibly demean the contestants, like some cheesy game show compère. I might want to compare Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe with Jackie Kay’s Adoption Papers, or Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City with Kelman’s A Disaffection, not to see who’s the bestest but to discover how writers engage with adoption and urban angst. Reading is an armchair activity, not arm-wrestling. To conclude: none of your comparisons are serious. Critics beyond Scotland compare Kelman with Kafka. To his credit, Kelman shrugs off such comparisons.

You say certain Scottish writers “are over-wrought, under-thought, ill-conceived or shoogly in their plotting to say the least”. Who do you have in mind? Scottish writers excel across genres. This disconcerts you. When Yeats looks enviously across the water he wants for Ireland what Scotland has. Nobody’s neutral. Everyone has a stake and chips on their shoulder – you, me, everybody.

When Chris Small contacted me initially about this dialogue the suggested topic was “whether Scottish writing is currently experiencing a ‘golden age’, as is often claimed; the quality of opportunities available to emergent writers; and the manner in which the work of Scottish writers is promoted and marketed”. Later, Chris told me “Stuart is keen to discuss how in Scotland we come to a consensus over what makes a ‘good’ writer”. However, your real interest lies in listing writers who have nothing to say about this, or nothing you’re prepared to offer. You name-check thirty non-Scottish writers but can’t bring yourself to name the authors of the Scottish novels you so readily and rudely dismiss. Sir, you are impertinent!

You ask who I “rejected from the two hundred books mentioned in … 100 Best Scottish Books”. That I managed to showcase 200 writers in a list of 100 Best Books speaks volumes for my ingenuity and inclusiveness. Remember this was a list of books, and among those “rejected” in favour of others, Lanark yielded to Poor Things, The Busconductor Hines gave way to A Disaffection, Kidnapped succumbed to Jekyll and Hyde. Many of my first choices yielded to others’. Massie surrendered to the masses. I compiled, in consultation with experts in the field, a list of 200 writers, each the author of a distinctive Scottish book, broadly defined, covering every corner of the country, every form and genre, balancing prestige and popularity. Some books with broad appeal supplanted others. I’m still reeling from the sheer brio of it. The end result is a stunning cornucopia. In my introduction, and in articles in Scottish newspapers, I expounded the rationale. There’s no need or room to repeat it here. I’d like to see your counter-list.

Quote me happy. I never claimed to be “tartaner than thou”. You refer me to the Wikipedia’s ‘“Disambiguation Page”’ to tell me “Great literature is the opposite of that.” Is this your “aesthetic agenda”? You said dissent was “intrinsically bound with its own opposition”, so maybe you mean great literature is really Wikipedia – a novel idea. As for the French not needing to insist they’re a great literary nation, can I quote you on that? I’d appreciate some evidence. They’re likely proud of their literary culture, as I am of mine. You “admire the literature that unveils as it unravels”. I admire writing that veils and ravels. I loathe criticism that reduces writing to a beauty contest.

As for tyranny, check out the Amnesty website. Read about rendition flights going through Glasgow International, Edinburgh, Leuchars and Prestwick, the latter also the conduit for bombs for Israel. Scotland, a stateless nation within a state (Britain) within a state (America), is bound up with tyranny. Still, its writers have the attention and respect of the world. There’s genius, greatness, goodness in the nest. That’s a feather in our cap.

I’m sure of Scotland’s writing talent but sceptical about its critical establishment, especially its literary reviewers You can have the last word for now. But let the conversation continue. Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred thistles get grasped. Let dissent take the place of descent. Rather than judgements handed down from on high, critic to writer, let our writers teach us things about language and life that we, with all our bookishness, never knew. We need to look under our noses, not down them.

Does my tartan tantrum look big in this?

Willy

Well, now I'm worried. Reading your final response, I'm agog that you so persistently misread what I'm saying. All the phrases that imply I see myself as some kind of arch-arbiter - the Olympian, looking down his nose, making comparisons to "glibly demean" - have been conjured up in your own imagination. I am posing questions, and am genuinely interested in the answers that might arise. Somehow you are threatened by this, it appears, and resort to name-calling.

You accuse me of believing that literature happens elsewhere. I'm happy to refute this: in the past few years I have written positive reviews of writers such as Frank Kuppner, John Aberdein, Janice Galloway, David Kinloch, W N Herbert, John Burnside, Kirsty Gunn and Catriona McPherson.

It's not that I think it only happens elsewhere, but that it also happens elsewhere. I would have hoped that, by the beginning of the 21^st century, it might be acceptable to be a Cosmopolitan Scot; but evidently no. Don't panic, Willy: if you want to sit with your fingers in your ears, I'm happy to leave you there. But you're missing out. You might -

Heaven forefend! - find a book you like better than a Scottish one.

Now, there are Scottish writers whose work I find less impressive. Is that somehow unpatriotic? It is forbidden in the New Golden Age to think that Irvine Welsh has gone off the boil; that Val McDermid's prose is exceptionally awkward; that Des Dillon's poetry is numbingly simplistic; that Carol Anne Duffy has become programmatic? I'm happy for independent minded readers to disagree with me, and therein lies the difference. I want a debate and you want a gang. I'm curious as to others' process of judging, you wish to stifle dissent if it's not dissent in the right direction.

As for the French, I'd recommend Dernier inventaire avant liquidation by Frederic Beigbeder - a rather less insular take on the making of lists.

Why this bizarre attitude? I'm more than happy to say that there are great Scottish writers; but I'm never going to be so arrogant as to claim that Scotland is unprecedented, superior, or singularly blessed by the Muses. I've laid out my agenda - to state it in another form, I like TARDIS books that are bigger on the inside, and leave the reader feeling fuller yet pared down. You, on the other hand, throw out myriad different agendas. It's about others saying we're great. It's about translations. It's about us saying we're great. It's popularity. It's prestige. And when asked a simple question - why was Massie in the lower 100 and Rowling in the upper - you add the caveat that it was done "in consultation with others". Come on - defend your decision, rather than say some other kids made you do it. I'm curious. I'm listening.

And, dear me, but you're awfully pleased with your list. Self-praise, as my Mum says, is no praise. It was, admittedly, an interesting selection, and I was happy to write about two of my favourite authors, Hume and Friel. But the minute a debate started, you got defensive. The plain silly decision to include Woolf, Conrad and Orwell consumed far more column inches than the virtues of the Scottish authors.

So why this desire for me to be the ogre, and literary reviewers to be the one thing you're genuinely sceptical about? I think you rather give the game away with the "I knows it - I grows it" comment. Tempting and inaccurate though it might be to say "and I mows it", your agenda is at least plain here. A hundred flowers bloom, under the tender eye of

Groundskeeper Willy. Of course we're living in Eden: after all, you planted it.

I'd make no such claims for literary journalism. It is a modest affair, soliciting the opinions of others, allowing them to speak for themselves. I sent out one book that had a story by a friend of mine: the reviewer singled that story out for dispraise. I ran the review. The reviewer and I then spoke, and got to know better why and how that call was made. And that was good. That was a debate.

William McIlvanney recently said that he "thought there is a need in Scotland now we've got the parliament to over-praise all things Scottish. That's a very unScottish thing to do". I agree wholeheartedly with him. It's not a Golden Age, it's Wonderland, where everyone wins and all shall have prizes.

The nest of genius is well hidden, given the cacophony of territorial chirruping. A plethora of seagulls croak louder than a nightingale.

Stuart

2006-11-27T09:09:00.000+13:00

Alan Warner on writing

2006-11-11T18:54:00.000+13:00

Alan Warner: How I write

TimeOut London

June 5th, 2006

Is there anything unique about the way I write? Well, I feel so incredibly ill-disciplined, and I have a kind of paranoia that all other writers are very disciplined. I don’t write at any set times; I just write when it takes me. When things are going well I’ll go for 12 hours, but when things are going badly I’ll just look out the window. I think the basic rule is that if nothing’s coming then nothing’s coming. It’s really hard to force stuff for me – it’s that Hemingway thing. Now, he used to write standing up, but I think that was because of his haemorrhoids, so I can understand that. Not that I’m a sufferer; it’s one of the few afflictions I’ve been spared. So far.

When things are going badly, I sometimes flit between the book and email. Which is deadly, but I’ve more or less stopped that. I noticed for a while that I was going into my study and dedicating far too much care to my angry letters to the electricity company: ‘The Collected Letters to Scottish Power’. I should return to that opus one day.

I know a lot of writers listen to music when they write and I do too, but it has to be ambient or something like that. If you have something you really like on, the music can add a soundtrack to what you’ve just written and you can think it’s much more interesting or dramatic or moving that it is.

Could I conceivably have a day job? Not any more. I’m too fat and spoiled, I’m afraid. The first novel I wrote was completely done between night shifts working on the railways in Scotland. I stopped going out and just worked on the book. But the shifts were quite good discipline because you knew you only had those hours. Once they stopped and the luxury of time arrived, I’m sure my work ethic crumbled quite a bit. Fiction feeds off the life you’ve led or are leading. I think that’s why so many novels in England used to be, or still are, dull.

A lot of writers would just come down from Oxbridge and land a good office job – not digging roads or anything – so for many years there was a kind of predictable sheen on every writer’s life experience. American literature comes out so rich because there are so many different lived experiences out there, so many cultures. Even in the 1950s you had your Cheevers and Updikes – urbane New York – alongside the Beats, living a completely different kind of life. And writing about it in a way that, at the time in Britain, was almost inconceivable.

The romance of being a writer diminshes. It was more romantic when I started out ten years ago. And that romance itself is rather limited; it’s a space in your own mind. It hits suddenly one day in the pub – say, by yourself on a Tuesday with a pint of Guinness. You go, ‘Ah, for my next novel, what I might do is…’, and you look at yourself and go, ‘Wow, Warner. You’re in the pub going, “For my next novel…” ’ And that’s quite romantic. Or you’re in a café and some friend introduces you as ‘Alan, the writer’. Boom. But I don’t think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as a reader. Or a skiver.

Alan Warner’s new novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ is published by Cape

The Road, by Cormac Macarthy

2006-11-11T18:19:00.000+13:00

After the sparse, stripped-down prose of No Country For Old Men, Macarthy is back with a chilling post-apocolyptic vision of the future. The following review is from Alan Warner, author of the Scottish existential angst-ridden Morvern Callar. The only thing missing is a mention of William Gay among his Tough Guys.

The road to hell

The Guardian Saturday,
November 4th, 2006

Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.

We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald. You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural.

The Savants' blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted "failure" fatally dispiriting.

But in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. They could include novelists Thomas McGuane, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Leon Rooke, Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Mark Richard, James Welch and Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy is granddaddy to them all. New York critics may prefer their perfidy to be ignored, comforting themselves with the superlatives for All the Pretty Horses, but we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare.

The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, "each other's world entire". The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering.

America - and presumably the world - has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a "cauterised terrain", the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration. Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and "bloodcults" plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: "Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each." Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief.

All of this is utterly convincing and physically chilling. The father is coughing blood, which forces him and his son, "in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep", on to the treacherous road southward, towards a sea and - possibly - survivable, milder winters. They push their salvage in a shopping cart, wryly fitted with a motorcycle mirror to keep sentinel over that road behind. The father has a pistol, with two bullets only. He faces the nadir of human and parental existence; his wife, the boy's mother, has already committed suicide. If caught, the multifarious reavers will obviously rape his son, then slaughter and eat them both. He plans to shoot his son - though he questions his ability to do so - if they are caught. Occasionally, between nightmares, the father seeks refuge in dangerously needy and exquisite recollections of our lost world.

They move south through nuclear grey winter, "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world", sleeping badly beneath filthy tarpaulin, setting hidden campfires, exploring ruined houses, scavenging shrivelled apples. We feel and pity their starving dereliction as, despite the profound challenge to the imaginative contemporary novelist, McCarthy completely achieves this physical and metaphysical hell for us. "The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true."

Such a scenario allows McCarthy finally to foreground only the very basics of physical human survival and the intimate evocation of a destroyed landscape drawn with such precision and beauty. He makes us ache with nostalgia for restored normality. The Road also encapsulates the usual cold violence, the biblical tincture of male masochism, of wounds and rites of passage. His central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy. He tells his son: "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that ... We are the good guys." The other uncomfortable, tellingly national moment comes when the father salvages perhaps the last can of Coke in the world. This is truly an American apocalypse.

The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description. As has been said before, McCarthy is worthy of his biblical themes, and with some deeply nuanced paragraphs retriggering verbs and nouns that are surprising and delightful to the ear, Shakespeare is evoked. The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms out-held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle."

Set piece after set piece, you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised with disgust and the fascinating novelty of it all: breathtakingly lucky escapes; a complete train, abandoned and alone on an embankment; a sudden liberating, joyous discovery or a cellar of incarcerated amputees being slowly eaten. And everywhere the mummified dead, "shrivelled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth".

All the modern novel can do is done here. After the great historical fictions of the American west, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, The Road is no artistic pinnacle for McCarthy but instead a masterly reclamation of those midnight-black, gothic worlds of Outer Dark (1968) and the similarly terrifying but beautiful Child of God (1973). How will this vital novel be positioned in today's America by Savants, Tough Guys or worse? Could its nightmare vistas reinforce those in the US who are determined to manipulate its people into believing that terror came into being only in 2001? This text, in its fragility, exists uneasily within such ill times. It's perverse that the scorched earth which The Road depicts often brings to mind those real apocalypses of southern Iraq beneath black oil smoke, or New Orleans - vistas not unconnected with the contemporary American regime.

One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, "things he'd no longer any way to think about". Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely. The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose. It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can.

· Alan Warner's latest novel is The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (Cape)

2006-11-09T10:33:00.000+13:00

Action woman

The Scotsman - February 9th 2002

From Elizabeth Balneaves’s kitchen window you can see a bird-table all a-flurry with shrill visitors. It’s a cheering sight but somewhat more domesticated than the view she had of the North Rhodesian bush, 40-odd years ago: "The smell of elephant lay heavy in the blazing heat of the afternoon ... a couple of black storks careened down through the treetops to land uncertainly like helicopters on the soft sand … A cloud of Zambesi lovebirds flashed emerald green almost across our faces and a lone baboon roared like a lion from the depths of the thicket."

It’s a far cry from the weekday afternoon lassitude of Cullen, the quiet Banffshire resort where Balneaves now lives; not quite so distant in memory, however, as this disconcertingly vigorous 90-year-old is busy writing her memoirs on the computer her sons gave her for her birthday last September. Balneaves’s main document sorting area is the kitchen table. It is littered with diaries, scrapbooks and photographs - depicting her stooped over a camp fire in the Hindu Kush, or wading in an African river hanging on to what she calls "the nonoperative end" of a sizeable python.

She is surveying her eventful life just as a biography has appeared of another Scots traveller, author and film-maker Isobel Wylie Hutchison. Balneaves herself was friendly with a third adventurer and chronicler, the Shetland-based Jenny Gilbertson, who, like Hutchison, filmed the indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle. All three ventured, often alone, into what was very much men’s territory.

Artist, author, film-maker, Balneaves has led what most of us, save perhaps the terminally adventurous, might describe as a full life. The daughter of an Aberdeen headmaster, she graduated from the city’s Gray’s School of Art in 1934, already engaged to psychologist Dr James Johnston: "We met at Wormwood Scrubs. He was on the staff and my uncle was a visiting doctor there."

At the end of the 1940s, they were living in Edinburgh and she was combining painting with looking after their four children until, as she puts it with a disarming insouciance, she "took off" for Pakistan, and not with her husband. "It’s … um … I’m writing my memoirs just now and it’s rather difficult, but I met this chap and went off with him and by the time I’d decided it wasn’t on, it was too late."

If the emotional attraction proved misguided, the relationship with Pakistan would be a lasting one, and formative - in order to live, she nursed, became temporary head of arts and crafts at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, wrote for Punjab Gazette and helped found and edit the Pakistan Review.

Returning to London, she launched into freelance journalism and promptly landed a commission for a book on Pakistan which sent her back there, taking her own photographs after the arranged snapper fell through. The result, The Waterless Moon, sported a foreword by Sir William Barton, former political agent in Swat and Chitral, describing it as "an extraordinary book, written by an extraordinary young woman of courage and grit … and with all this that rare gift of close observation and the faculty of describing what she sees in vivid language."

Plaudits apart, the book hardly made her fortune and, by this time in her late forties, she started taking photographs for companies involved in hydro-electric power and other schemes in Pakistan. One such job involved clambering up the outside ladder of a water tower. "I managed to get to the top and the German engineer I was with said , ‘Ach, you vomen of today!’ If he’d only known that the woman of today was shaking like a jelly. But I got the photograph."

Another book, Peacocks and Pipeless, resulted. Around that time, largely at the behest of their children, she re-married the long-suffering Johnston who was posted to Carstairs State Hospital. "I had a marvellous time. I taught eight murderers to paint," she says with some glee.

When one of her sons, Stewart, got a job in tobacco farming in what was then Northern Rhodesia, she seized the opportunity and ended up documenting the rescue of animals as, during the late 1950s, the Kariba dam project was flooding a vast area, displacing both people and animals. Her Elephant Valley was about game and tsetse supervisor Joe MacGregor Brooks, who was carrying out a private animal rescue operation of his own.

She returned with her first film camera and also a commission from Edinburgh Zoo, for whom she’d been working as a PR, to bring back some animals. She made a short film for schools television on the capture of an aardvaark: "I edited it in the attic, wrote the commentary and read it. They wanted ten minutes and I think it was just a minute out," she recalls.

Further films followed, articles in The Scotsman and National Geographic, among other journals; there was a return to Pakistan and the Hindu Kush, and another book, Mountains of the Murgha Zerin.

Many of her forays were made virtually alone, or in very much men-only environments. Did she ever feel at risk? "No. I feel more at risk here when someone bashes on my door at half-past 12 at night. The only time I did feel at risk was in Calcutta, where I was burgled one night."

She and her husband moved to Shetland, which prompted another book, The Windswept Isles, and where, through their respective daughters, she got to know the Glasgow-born documentary film-maker Jenny Gilbertson.

Gilbertson had become hooked after seeing amateur holiday film of Loch Lomond and, self-taught, had gone on to make a string of film documentaries about Shetland life at a time when, thanks to the likes of Michael Powell and Robert Flaherty, films about remote communities were becoming popular. Gilbertson emerged from the Scottish hotbed of documentary film making, encouraged by the crusty pioneer John Grierson, who described her first effort, A Crofter’s Life in Shetland, in 1931 as "an extraordinary job of work.

Among Gilbertson’s other films were The Rugged Island, made in 1934 about the life of a Shetland crofter - whom she ultimately married - and a film about Shetland ponies which took her four years to make.

Gilbertson, recalls Janet McBain, curator of the Scottish Film Archive in Glasgow, may have been small in stature, "but she was ten feet tall in action and energy". Gilbertson died in 1990 and the archive now holds much of her material, while seats in both the Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh Filmhouse are dedicate in her name by Shetland Islands Council.

"We had a lot of fun together," Balneaves recalls of Gilbertson. The pair travelled together to Papa Stour, filming the island’s famous sword dance, though the film itself seems to have vanished without trace.

Still feeling that outward urge in her 70s, Gilbertson headed for the Canadian Arctic to film the changing life of the Inuit, among other things documenting the 300-mile journey made by one dog team. Balneaves was supposed to join her on one such Canadian expedition, but caught pneumonia beforehand so Gilbertson, as she did so often, went alone.

Balneaves, for her part, made her last working trip in 1982, after her one-time book subject, Brooks MacGregor, asked for help in publicising elephant poaching in Zambia. "I did 15 miles through the bush, twice, with a game guard - got some super photos of buffalo." She was 71.

Jenny Gilbertson would almost certainly have known, or at least known of, the third and perhaps most remarkable in our triumvirate of doughty Scots women travellers, authors and (all self-taught) film-makers, Isobel Wylie Hutchison.

Brought up at Cardownie, a Scotsbaronial mansion outside Kirkliston, West Lothian, Hutchison grew from a reserved and private girl into a remarkable yet still little-known traveller, botanist, poet, author and film-maker, who between 1927 and 1936 made four major journeys to Greenland, the northern coasts of Alaska and Arctic Canada, at a time when it was rare for women to go any further north than the goldfields of Alaska and Yukon. She brought back botanical specimens, film footage and the makings of several books, including On Greenland’s Closed Shore, North to the Rime-Ringed Sun and Arctic Nights’ Entertainments. Her film footage, held by the Scottish Screen Archive, shows Greenlanders stepping out enthusiastically in Scottish dances taught to them by visiting whalers a century before.

Hutchison, who died in 1982, was an enigmatic combination of the wilfully determined and the near-mystical, seeing the hand of God in the sublime and awesome Arctic environment, and who did much of her travelling alone, or in the rough and ready, all-male company of sailors, trappers and hunters. As Gwyneth Hoyle of Trent University, Ontario, puts it in her newly published biography of Hutchison, Flowers in the Snow (University of Nebraska Press), "Leading a sheltered life in a Victorian home until she was nearly 30, Isobel expanded and blossomed in personality with each new adventure … She was like a flower whose bud remains tightly closed until the right circumstances cause it to open."

She was, as another commentator puts it, "gloriously out of step with the conventions of her time".

Was there something in the air, or the water, that should produce the likes of Hutchison and two other redoubtable Scots women traveller-film-makers within a couple of decades? David Munro, current director of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, whose journal Hutchison edited for ten years, points out that within the Scottish tradition of producing notable explorers, several of them were women, such as Hutchison, or Ella Christie from Dollar, who travelled on foot from Istanbul into Central Asia and made a similar journey from Moscow.

"We seem to have a remarkably high proportion of women with boundless energy and insatiable curiosity, and that’s a very Scottish trait," says Munro. "In Hutchison’s writings she is always pulled on by what’s beyond the horizon. And she is undaunted by the discomforts, another Scottish trait. And you have these traits balanced against the fact that it was very unfashionable for women to be doing this sort of thing."

The Scottish education system, he reckons, was crucial, "but there was also the social system, with all sots of push-pull factors operating, from the Highland clearances to the claustrophobia of Edinburgh society."

Hutchison assiduously noted domestic details among the Icelanders, Greenlanders and Inuits she visited, what they cooked and how - not the kind of thing you’d find, as Hoyle remarks in her biography, "in the heroic narratives of male Greenland explorers".

Munro agrees that women travellers observe differently from their male counterparts: "With Hutchison you get to meet the people and you encounter the landscape, she notices everything, whereas with many another early travel writer it’s all about them … I can think of writers who don’t even tell you the names of the guys who are carrying the baggage for them."

According to Hoyle, Hutchison would never have called herself a feminist - "merely an independent person who may have observed the bonds of conventional society at home but was prepared to be as unconventional as necessary in her travels". Unconventional all three women’s lives may have been, but they were also long. Elizabeth Balneaves is still rattling away at her computer, a spry 90; Gilbertson was re-editing some of her films within two years of her death at the age of 88; Hutchison was 92 when she died, outliving all her family and most of her friends. Whatever the rigours of going it alone as a woman traveller, it doesn’t seem to require a government health warning.

Elizabeth 'Betty' Balneaves

2006-11-09T10:07:00.000+13:00

My grandmother lived a full life until the day she died, November 7th. Just a few short weeks ago she celebrated her 95th birthday with a party at her home - matching the stragglers, my brother Sorley and cousin Tim, with whisky-drinking endurance into the wee hours of the morning. I have decided to return from New Zealand for her funeral in Scotland. Travelling round the world to celebrate her memory seems fitting. She was the most intrepid explorer I have ever known. My father, J Laughton Johnston, wrote the following obituary for The Scotsman (Tuesday 14th November 2006):

Elizabeth Balneaves (1911-2006)

Elizabeth, or Betty as she was known to friends and family, author, painter and filmmaker, was born in Aberdeen, the only child of Annie and Alexander Balneaves. She graduated from Aberdeen Art College and married the psychiatrist Dr James McL Johnston of Shetland extraction in 1934. Although they were separated for several years, Jim supported her in her work throughout their married life.

Betty wrote six books, made a number of documentary films, drew many portraits in pastel and charcoal and painted many landscapes, latterly mainly of Shetland and Cullen. In Shetland, which she first visited with Jim in 1934, she is perhaps best known for The Windswept Isles (1977), which she wrote during the 20 or so years she and Jim lived in retirement in the old manse at Bigton in the 1960s and '70s. This was her tribute to the people and the islands whom she always felt had adopted her.

During those years she also made a documentary film of Shetland for the BBC: People of Many Lands - Shetland. Although painting was her first love it was her writing that brought her to a wider public attention, one of the first signs of her literary talent being a poem published in 1945 in Poetry Scotland (2^nd collection), that wonderful series of Scottish poetry books published by William MacLellan & Co.

In the early 1950s Betty travelled alone to Pakistan, particularly to Karachi and the Frontier with Afghanistan , where she stayed for several years, resulting in The Waterless Moon (1955) and Peacocks and Pipelines (1958), both of which received some critical acclaim. Later, she returned to the area with her son, Stewart, resulting in a third book on the area between the Hindu Khush and the Karakoram, The Mountains of the Murgha Zerin (1972) and some unique film footage of this remote area and its culture.

At a later date they returned to the Sunderbunds (in then East Pakistan), this time concentrating on documentary filmmaking. In 1959, between her second and third books, Betty visited the area being flooded (in then Southern Rhodesia) by the new Kariba Dam where Stewart was working. Here she made a documentary film of the effects of the flooding on wildlife - Logging in the Sundarabans, East Pakistan - and wrote the story of a colourful Scottish Game and Tsetse Supervisor called Joe McGregor Brooks entitled Elephant Valley (1962).

Just prior to this trip Betty worked as a publicity officer for the Edinburgh Zoo and as with everything she did, she made use of this experience in her only work of fiction, Murder in the Zoo (1974).

Betty had a great zest for life, travel, cooking, uisge-beatha and good company that continued into her old age, becoming computer literate on her 90^th birthday and spending her next 5 years, right to the end, sending and receiving emails from her family and many grandchildren scattered across the globe. During this time she also began putting together the text for her final publication, her memoirs, which, alas, she never finished. Betty was an only child and it never ceased to astonish her that she had so many descendants. Betty died quietly in Elgin on the 7 ^th November, just eight weeks after celebrating her 95^th birthday with most of her immediate family. She is survived by her four children, thirteen grandchildren and eleven great grandchildren.

Burning Man

2006-10-18T14:30:00.000+13:00

My friend, Brook Buswell, who took me under his wing for the two years I spent at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, recently sent me a reflection of his time at the free form arts festival that finished last month. It reminded me that I hadn't included the article I had published in The Herald Magazine on this blog. So here it is, in all its fiery glory. The pictures (except the last, which has me in the front row, 3rd from right) are all courtesy of my river-guide colleagues, Jasmine Jackson and Iain Morris, who managed to persuade the owner of our company, Whitewater Voyages, that taking a company van and raft would help sales of trips. Marvellous.

The Herald Magazine: Burn Baby Burn!
by Jamie M Johnston

My friend, wearing Stetson, flip-flops, shorts, goggles and with painted chest, turns to me and says, “Let’s get on the Dragon Bus.” “Where does it go?” I ask naively. “I have no idea,” was the suitably vague reply.

Five minutes later the driver of the Dragon Bus, an eighty foot construct of wheels and trailers fronted with a steam train and seats for one hundred crazies, looks back at me cross-eyed and screams, “Your not in Scotland now!”

We pull away from the dance tents, and streams of bikers, performance artists and scantily clad hippies, moving quickly into the desert. The wind whips dust into my army surplus goggles and I hold my hand tight over a cool Tanqueray and tonic. Spotting what looks like a tank I watch in fascination as it shoots flame high above the dust into the clear starry sky. Is this Madmax, or perhaps Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

Neither, it is Burning Man, the annual free-form arts festival founded by Larry Harvey that began as a beach party in San Francisco back in 1986 with the burning of a small wooden figure and has quickly become the event in America.

It springs up out of the desert floor and, in a bursting ball of flame, just as quickly turns to ash to merge with the clouds of dust that swirl and rage indiscriminately across this lunar landscape.

For one week only Black Rock City becomes the third biggest city in Nevada with figures of around 30,000 in attendance. It is situated some 120 miles northeast of the gambling, strip club, neon lighted Reno where most stock up on supplies for the week.

Enjoyment of the art, the people and the music can only be truly appreciated if one has arrived dutifully prepared with food, water and good accommodation. As my grandmother always said, “Recharging of the batteries is essential for a week long hedonistic festival.”

The best information to be found on the event is at www.burningman.com. The site comes fully loaded with essays, pictures, ideas and documentation of previous Burning Man festivals.

For outsiders who see Burning Man as a hippy fest of long hair, little amount of clothes, and pagan like dancing around huge bonfires, the incorporation of up to date technology in the art and in the running of the festival may come as a shock.

The ethos at work, according to the site, is that “Burning Man is an annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” This covers the main three areas at work in Burning Man.

The first, temporary community, means that one has to stay and immerse one’s self in the event. Here you can only be a participant. There are no spectators. Signalling this is the fact there are no day passes sold or discounts offered for partial duration.

To feel the true essence you have to become part of the community that is based on giving and sharing where you need and rely on others whom, in turn, need and rely upon you.

Larry Harvey’s comments on the shift in the media’s coverage of the event in an interview with Darryl Van Rhey from 1998 also highlight this idea of inclusion.

“…..they had to come, camp, live and survive among us. They had no choice but to immerse themselves in the story. This is radical inclusion – very Burning Man … as actual citizens of our city, they realized that our talk about community betokens something real.”

Secondly there is radical self-expression. Every year is themed and this year’s was the Vault of Heaven. But Black Rock City is a semicircle of smaller themed camps created by the citizens themselves.

They ranged from a car with tent that offered a chance to throw darts at pictures of the Royal Family (hugely popular) to a giant canopy with living quarters for twenty boasting a Full Contact Croquet League.

The atmosphere changes with your location. If you want madness go and fight your friend in the recreated Thunderdome, or chat amicably with strangers in centre camp, or dance like a madman at Disturbia, or simply stare at the sky peacefully in The Mausoleum with 360-degree alien desert noises.

No money is made from the festival. People are stripped of their creature comforts and normal social boundaries are left back in Reno. People wander freely completely naked, or paint themselves blue. Some come in their RVs. Some have a tent. But everyone becomes equal due to the saturation by the playa dust that gets in your food, in your bed and sooner or later, into every orifice.

Lastly there is “radical self-reliance”, or more aptly, survival. The only items one can buy are coffee and ice. Anything else you require must be bartered for from the other citizens. There is no legal tender or corporate sponsorships. If you want a drink, drugs, food or a hat then you must offer something in return.

To come unprepared is suicide. Sure you can swap a few things for some food and water. But who do you call on when it is 107 degrees and you have no shade, when the wind picks up to 70mph and your tarp whisks off into the sky, or when during the night the temperature plummets and your shorts and t-shirt are no longer adequate.

There is a reason for Burning Man being situated where it is. Here the elements are harsh and unforgiving. One has to look after one’s self and then look to the fellow man. There is no vending. The community shares and thrives.

To get around this vast 400 square mile dried up riverbed one should really bring a bike, moped, or trumped up lawn mower. My only brush with authority came when riding my moped. Unbeknown to me vehicles can only be used if they are licensed art vehicles. So after a facelift for my moped I went to the local DMV – the Department of Mutant Vehicles – to register my new vehicle.

To be honest this is the only kind of pressure to be found at Burning Man. The need to conform to nonconformity. You are not normal, or part of the crowd, unless abnormal. Funny then that Harvey, the founder, struts around with shades, trademark Stetson, shirt and jeans. He comments on his attire, “I’ve hated going along with the crowd all my life.”

As with any major contemporary festival drugs are rife and easy to get hold of. However, with so much man made visual stimuli on offer suffused with the natural dramatic backdrop of open desert and clear sky a natural high pervades the mood.

This is not a gathering dictated by the drugs on offer. This is Burning Man. Where a mist of mellowness, slow watchfulness and fascination sweeps over all. Life is brash, bright and loud, but equally slow and cautious. Burning Man is an altered reality that is literally burned to the ground after a week. Looking back it feels like you were hallucinating. But for me drugs had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Multitudes of workers and helpers arrive and leave sometimes months before and after the thousands of Black Rock citizens. Although the festival proper begins on a Monday and climaxes on the Saturday night with the burning of The Man, a forty-foot wooden construct atop an altar that towers above it all.

The climax approaches. Out in the playa the citizens gather around The Man. We are treated to a spectacular fire show with various Mad Max-like vehicles shooting balls of multicoloured flame at The Man and leather-clad fire-dancers spinning poi to a hypnotic drum beat.

With a full moon competing for attention the crowd chants “Run Burning Man Run”, until the whole neon effigy becomes a giant bonfire. As The Man collapses to the ground, the crowd rushes in screaming to dance madly around the white-hot embers, throwing in material possessions and things of sentimental value.

For the rest of the evening the citizens waltz from one fire-show to the next. The art projects dotted around the playa, carefully laboured on for the best part of a year, are quickly burned to the ground. When I saw a hundred foot matchstick-made cathedral go up, it burned so white it felt like my eyeballs would melt.

Fresh ideas and new beginnings are the name of the game.

This year’s theme asked a few questions: Where does everything come from? Where does everything go? And where and how, in this vast scheme of things, do we fit in? While sitting in a field of flapping flags with nothing else in sight I plucked up the courage for one brief moment – I’m British – to strip off and sit and contemplate my existence like Hugh MacDiarmid on his raised beach, or more aptly, Rilke in the Arabian desert.

Although Black Rock City disappears physically every year, people never leave quite the same. Everyone is talking a little piece of Burning Man back to his or her prospective realities. The Burning Man website acts as a gateway into the ever growing matrix of sites created by participants over the years who wish to prolong the reality at work in Black Rock City.

Along with this we now have Danger Ranger’s journey through America that is being documented on the website. This “Mystic Shaman Cowboy” has a mission to cut short the anxiety felt by the citizens of Black Rock after the Burning Man event when they realise that they have another 358 days to wait until the community is reunited once again.

“Danger’s message to you is that you need no longer wait. Take what you have learned from your experience, organize with friends and fellow burners, and be ready to greet him.”

The temporary community is slowly finding ways to elongate itself and prolong the reality at work in Burning Man. The message is clear, “Burning Man is not an event, but a new way of doing and being wherever you are. It is a movement, a force, a river: a culture with a thousand tributary streams.” This festival in the desert acts as a reminder. That life is only what you make it. With the global terrorism crisis our generation seems set to endure over the coming years, who says that the Burning Man mantra does not have a place in our world?

William Gay

2006-10-18T12:48:00.000+13:00

The one author - aside from my brother-in-law David Anthony Durham - who's progress I monitor most eagerly, is William Gay. His writing crackles with vivid description and lucid melancholia capable of making a tee-totaller reach for the bottle. His is a world of the American south.
Gothic, humorous, elemental and dark.

As a writer I often feel like a fake, a phony, regurgitating the thoughts and words of others. Gay is someone who seems true to his work. How far does his imagination stretch? Are these stories he's picked up from saloon conversations, long-dead uncles or grandparents? Durham once read with him on a book-tour for Doubleday and he described a man just as I'd imagined after reading his books.

He has a new novel coming out soon, Twilight, about a young man who uncovers the murky truth behind a local undertaker. Chased through the witch-ridden woods by a local hired killer, Gay rewrites the gothic fairytale for the modern American South.

The following blurbs came from Amazon:

Gay (The Long Home) fills the book with haunting imagery and shocking, morbid and (surprisingly) hopeful turns as twisted justice gets meted out. Language lovers who are not faint of heart won't want to miss this one.
(Oct. 20) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Though Gay has sometimes been compared with Faulkner, it's Davis Grubb and his wonderful novel The Night of the Hunter that provides much of the inspiration here (a quote from Grubb opens the novel's second section). Though veering sometimes dangerously close to melodrama, Gay seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, and Twilight is further redeemed by his brilliant gift for dialogue, his occasional dark humor, and his utterly convincing portrayal of the reality of ruination and of evil.
Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Elizabeth Magill

2006-09-17T11:07:00.000+13:00

For some reason it took me years before my first visit to Newcastle, and this despite living with a larger-than-life Geordie for my undergraduate years in Glasgow. We finally made it there in October 2004 and visited the Baltic, Centre for Contemporary Arts. I fell in love with the work of Northern Irish artist Elizabeth Magill who had an exhibition on. My wife, Helen, gave me a book of her paintings and one day I will get my favourite lonely cabin shots from it up on this blog. For now, the above will have to suffice.

T Gray

2006-09-17T10:49:00.000+13:00

Face Off:

Construction Destruction:

Wyoming Schoolhouse:

Robidoux Trading Post:

Going Nowhere:

Although not all of cabins, these pictures are certainly lonely. I found them on www.flickr.com just doing a routine search. There are some amazing pictures out there just waiting and wanting to be displayed. Hope T Gray doesn't mind.

Muckle Bousta, Sandness, Shetland

2006-09-17T10:24:00.000+13:00

I should have really begun my loneliest cabin series with Muckle Bousta, my parents' croft on the Shetland Islands. I'll need to pester my brother to see if he has some black and white or sepia shots of the place.

John Carolan

2006-09-17T10:11:00.000+13:00

It has been my intention to collect pictures, paintings and photographs of the loneliest cabin. This series are all from the lens of John Carolan, and are all, I think, in Shetland.

Helen and I bought a photo of his for my sister Beth's wedding to Nick.

Thomas Fraser

2006-09-15T16:46:00.000+13:00

While visiting my friend Paul in Hong Kong (en route to New Zealand from Thailand) last month he showed me an article he'd kept a hold of, knowing my Shetland roots, and love of music. Here's the opening to it:

How a Shetland fisherman found fame in Nashville almost 30 years after his tragic death. From the Isle of Burra, Peter Culshaw reports
Sunday June 18, 2006
Observer Music Monthly

The Tale of Thomas Fraser

"It feels as if this might be the start of an initiation into a cult - one which is growing by the day. We have found the room in the croft in Outterabrake, in the Shetland Islands, where Thomas Fraser made his first recordings. We have the key fetish objects - the Grundig tape machine he recorded himself on, and the Levin Goliath guitar he played - which we are photographing, imagining Fraser himself playing away, the peat fire burning, on one of those endless winter Shetlands nights where it gets dark by 3pm. Fraser died, aged 50, in 1978 - but only now is he reaching an audience."

Back to me. I visited his website and you can listen to a sample of the songs. They're brilliant. Plenty of country yodelling, a strong voice, and solid accompaniment on the guitar.

His blues and laments have added weight when you know Shetland, and can imagine him playing in his croft with the wind trying to rip the roof off.

My faither's novel

2006-09-15T15:42:00.000+13:00

Delighted to announce my father, Laughton, has his first fiction novel published this year. It's a tale about growing old but not forgetting your youth. I read somewhere that the older you get the more you regress back to your youth. Grandparents are always great with young kids aren't they?

The picture below is my dad and his grandson, my nephew, Ben.

A Dream of Silver, by J. Laughton Johnston

2006-09-15T15:13:00.000+13:00

Shetland Times
July 2006

Due to the decline in his health, an old man is forced to move from his retirement cottage on Shetland to live at the Edinburgh home of his 10-year-old grandson. As a way of making contact with a child he hardly knows, and who hardly knows him, the old man begins to tell the boy the story of his own childhood and of his encounter with the works of the two giants of Scottish literature of the 18th and 19th century.

It is a moral and physical journey; the narratives of the grandfather and grandson, and that of the old man’s childhood, closely interweaving. The pair seek out the old man’s first home by the sea front at Newhaven where the nightly beam from a lighthouse, flickering on the wall above his bed, became the one dependable fixture in his otherwise unstable world and where escape from painful reality induced an imaginary relationship with the ambiguous hero of his favourite storybook.

From the old fishing village they trace the path of the old man’s childhood misadventure along the shores of the Forth to Queensferry and then over the sea to Shetland. In Shetland, the narratives come to a climax at a lighthouse perched on the most southerly point of the islands, where the historical paths of the two Scottish novelists cross, and where grandson, grandfather and the child that is now an old man, all face and comprehend uncomfortable and unavoidable truths.

Laughton Johnston is better known for his writings on natural history and nature conservation. He has written and co-written four books in this field, including two accounts of the wildlife of Shetland. Prior to, and in the early days of working in the natural environment, from where he gained the material for these publications, however, he also published poetry in several Scottish poetry magazines and anthologies resulting, in 1980, in a Scottish Arts Council award. Writing fiction has always been a long-term ambition and A Dream of Silver is his first novel.

Although he was brought up in Edinburgh, Johnston has spent a number of years in Shetland from where his father’s family originated and where he and his wife are now resident. He is presently finalizing a biography of a notable Shetland landowning family, gleaned from their many scientific, political and literary publications and private letters; it is to be published by The Shetland Times in the near future.

Published by the Shetland Times Ltd., Gremista, Lerwick, Shetland ZE1 0PX
Tel 01595 693622 Fax: 01595 694637
email: publishing@shetland-times.co.uk
www.shetland-books.co.uk
Sale representation by Seol Ltd.,
West Newington House, 10 Newington Road, Edinburgh EH9 1QS
Tel: 0131 668 1456 Fax: 0131 668 3777
Distributors for Scottish Mainland and Western Isles are Book Source, 32 Finlas Street, Glasgow
Rest of UK and world-wide by The Shetland Times Bookshop, 71-79 Commercial Street, Lerwick, Shetland, ZE1 0AJ
Tel: 01595 695531 Fax: 01595 692897
email: bookshop@shetland-times.co.uk
For further information please contact Charlotte Black, Publications Manager. email: c.black@shetland-times.co.uk

The Voluntourists, by Jamie M Johnston

2006-09-15T13:51:00.000+13:00

Issue 14: Eco Adventures

Jul / Aug 2006
Lifestyle and Travel Magazine

Pictures courtesy of North Andaman Tsunami Relief

Before Jamie M. Johnston set off for Thailand, he and his wife researched possible destinations
using internet search keywords like ‘responsible travel’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘sustainable tourism’.

They knew that ecotourism has a lot of potential for developing countries that boast a broad range of unique and pristine natural features. They found a lot more than they bargained for.

Some of the first areas to develop ecotourism – such as Kenya, the Galapagos Islands and Thailand – have already greatly suffered from weak development controls and ever increasing numbers of tourists. My wife and I arrived in Bangkok pragmatic, yet hopeful for some real cultural and adventurous experiences.

After a spell up north, and a disappointing introduction to the south, we made our way to Khao Sok National Park, which in turn led us to the small town of Kuraburi – a popular rest stop for those heading to the Marine National Park of Koh Surin. From there we visited Golden Buddha Beach, an eco-resort with a resident Sea Turtle Conservation project on the stunning small island of Koh Phra Thong. We strolled hand in hand, along kilometre after kilometre of untouched, pristine, golden beach with a fiery red and orange sunset painting the distant rain clouds, not another tourist in sight – an experience that was becoming difficult to envision in southern Thailand.

But there we were also witness to the lingering effects of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. This was no popular tourist destination like Phuket or Khao Lak; there had been no large corporate-funded rapid rebuilding here.

Instead, almost a year later, there were still uprooted trees, half-standing buildings and debris everywhere. Despite that, Golden Buddha had dusted itself off and done its best to reopen the doors not washed away. The rain and unchecked view out across the Andaman Sea took on a more haunted quality.

Within minutes we had fallen in love with the area, to the degree that we decided to stay and teach English with the pioneering group, North Andaman Tsunami Relief (NATR): a grassroots organisation born out of Golden Buddha Beach by Bodhi Garrett, an employee who was home in America during the tsunami. He was moved to action when Koh Phra Thong and its neighbouring coastal villages were largely overlooked in the relief efforts.

Mustafa, a local guide, teacher and environmentalist told me how overblown the aid had been in terms of construction of boats and houses. As he so succinctly said, “You can’t put your name on education, but you can put your name on a boat or a house.”

At NATR, at which we are now volunteering, we quickly learned that all the qualities that had attracted us to the area could also be its undoing. With the cultural diversity of traditional Buddhist, Muslim and Moken communities living alongside one another, a largely undeveloped coastline, plenty of rare and abundant wildlife and some of the oldest jungle terrain in the world, the area is ripe for an ever-expanding tourism market. Yet as tourism becomes a more prominent economic force in the area, there is a danger of local communities being unprepared, both in terms of job skills and cultural resilience. This could lead to rapid community, and natural, degradation.

NATR works with the coastal communities of the Kuraburi and Suksamran Districts (Phang-Nga and Ranong provinces, respectively) to facilitate a long-term strategy for development. The difference is that “development”, when NATR uses the term, is about sustainable livelihoods, vocational training, education, and income-generating projects. NATR has also been exploring the potential of Community-Based Tourism (CBT) by setting up pilot homestay tours in the tsunami-affected villages they serve – a cultural exchange where tourists stay with a local family and participate in traditional forms of livelihood and custom. CBT ensures the community’s unique heritage isn’t degraded and, with the extra income from small numbers of visitors, is instead allowed to flourish.

So what can you expect on a CBT home-stay tour? Well, I had my first experience of one in the village Ban Pak Triam (population: 119). Their pre-tsunami village was on a peninsula surrounded by mangroves and accessible only by boat. After the waters of the tsunami washed right over it, sweeping all 50 homes away and claiming the lives of two children, the peninsula became a small deserted island. Now the village has been relocated to the mainland and is closer to the markets and schools – a trade-off the community seems largely happy with. Upon arrival we were greeted by our Muslim English-speaking guide, Mustafa, and the unique whooping sound of Gibbon calls from the surrounding jungle. Mustafa is not a resident of the village, but he possesses intimate knowledge of the community and, through translation, gave a voice to the villagers who followed our progress eagerly. He took us to our home-stay to meet the woman who had opened her doors for six strangers.

Ma Da, like the majority of residents, lives in a sparse and small two-storey house. The floors are tiled and pictures of the King adorn the walls. She explained, through Mustafa, that the village as a whole had accepted the idea of CBT but that only a minority was actively participating. She said CBT wasn’t the sole answer to providing for her family’s long-term future, but rather one more small way of eking a living alongside other means. All this reinforced the importance to us of how CBT ‘fits’ into the communities’ lives, not the other way round. Mustafa reminded us that livelihoods remain based upon traditional methods, such as cashew nut harvesting, fishing and rubber tapping. But the pressures of progress are having a detrimental effect. Intensive commercial fishing and large-scale shrimp farms are lowering fish stocks and driving market prices down. There is, in fact, very little economic diversity in the area and slowly, year by year, most of the young, talented people leave the village to find work in larger cities. Mustafa was keen to point out that CBT gives the villagers the opportunity to manage tourism on their own terms and, vitally, in their own time.

We were then led to the community centre where a group of women run a tie-dye collective. We participated in ‘tying’ the material with elastic bands to create the patterns and saw how the material is then boiled in natural dyes: rhododendron flowers for a light purple, and turmeric for a sharp yellow. From there, our itinerary said: ‘12pm to 2pm relax’ – so we did.

In the afternoon we high-tailed it on a long-tail boat with one of the local fishermen, known as Superman. Donning a mask and grabbing a spear he slipped into the water and splashed around to attract his prey, emerging victorious on more than one occasion. Mustafa explained he was diving to his traps. They had no float or means of locating them. Superman just remembered where they all were, and in this way they could not be stolen or tampered with.

We visited a krachang – floating fish farm – further inland amongst the mangroves. Each mesh tank became a frenzy of fins, teeth and writhing bodies when the farmer threw in scraps of food. He fattens red snapper, grouper, tarpon, barramundi and even a few lion fish for the markets and exports to places like Japan and Malaysia. Have I mentioned the food yet? At mealtimes, we were bombarded with sweetmilk curries, fresh seafood, eggs, organic vegetables and the obligatory white rice. (As this was a Muslim village, there was no alcohol or pork.)

For the grand finale we went back to sea with a larger crew for a few hours of night fishing. Blessed with a threequarters moon, twinkling stars and a fairly sedate swell we chatted, dropped our prawn-baited hooks and learnt quickly that there really is a method to line fishing. The next morning, before we were allowed to leave, we were given coffee, sticky rice, roti and Chinese doughnuts.

For now, NATR is facilitating the outreach for tourists to the villages. We’ve had individuals and entire families come and sample a multi-day tour of multiple villages. Our experience had us in agreement that for a successful CBT, you need a specific type of tourist – the ‘voluntourist’: one who wants to respect and observe customs and experience culture first hand. Long-term voluntourists may stay for weeks, enjoying the same fun activities but also taking part in community-based projects like day-care, English lessons and construction. But the truth is that NATR will only complete its work when it can withdraw fully from the various projects it has set up.

To faciliate this, NATR began a six-month training program last April for 25 carefully selected locals who are motivated to participate in vocational training focusing on Adventure-, Community-, and Eco- (ACE) tourism – the ACE Expert team. This core group will help to lay the foundations for successful community-driven tourism in their villages.

Trip Information:
Trips can be customised around various activities and any group size catered for. As well as the fishing, tie-dye and Krachang mentioned here, there are also opportunities to harvest and roast cashew-nuts, visit a Gibbon sanctuary, help in mangrove restoration, explore how natural rubber is made and participate in other handicraft ventures like card- or soap-making. For the adventurous, there are canoeing, trekking, biking and snorkelling opportunities. Generally, trips are three days long and the price – depending on activities but including food, accommodation, and transfers – for a group of four people, averages USD 38 (Baht 1,500) per person, per day, with an English speaking guide.

North Andaman Tsunami Relief
Tel: +66 (0) 1 787 7344
relieffund@inet.co.th

The age of horrorism (part three) by Martin Amis

2006-09-15T13:36:00.000+13:00

Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma - the community of believers. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his copious writings, often returns to this theme. He unindulgently notes that believers in most religions appear to think that, so long as they observe all the formal pieties, then for the rest of the time they can do more or less as they please. 'Islam', as he frequently reminds us, 'isn't like that.' Islam follows you everywhere, into the kitchen, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, and beyond death into eternity. Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of mind. That surrender now bears the weight of well over 60 generations, and 14 centuries.

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War - a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.

So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin. And one hardly needs to labour the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-semitic, anti-

liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fuelled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning. Sam Harris is right:

'Islamism is not merely the latest flavour of totalitarian nihilism. There is a difference between nihilism and a desire for supernatural reward. Islamists could smash the world to atoms and still not be guilty of nihilism, because everything in their world has been transfigured by the light of paradise...' Pathological mass movements are sustained by 'dreams of omnipotence and sadism', in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase. That is usually enough. Islamism adds a third inducement to its warriors: a heavenly immortality that begins even before the moment of death.

For close to a millennium, Islam could afford to be autarkic. Its rise is one of the wonders of world history - a chain reaction of conquest and conversion, an amassment not just of territory but of millions of hearts and minds. The vigour of its ideal of justice allowed for levels of tolerance significantly higher than those of the West. Culturally, too, Islam was the more evolved. Its assimilations and its learning potentiated the Renaissance - of which, alas, it did not partake. Throughout its ascendancy, Islam was buoyed by what Malise Ruthven, in A Fury for God, calls 'the argument from manifest success'. The fact of expansion underwrote the mandate of heaven. And now, for the past 300 or 400 years, observable reality has propounded a rebuttal: the argument from manifest failure. As one understands it, in the Islamic cosmos there is nothing more painful than the suspicion that something has denatured the covenant with God. This unbearable conclusion must naturally be denied, but it is subliminally present, and accounts, perhaps, for the apocalyptic hurt of the Islamist.

Over the past five years, what we have been witnessing, apart from a moral slump or bust, is a death agony: the death agony of imperial Islam. Islamism is the last wave - the last convulsion. Until 2003, one could take some comfort from the very virulence of the Islamist deformation. Nothing so insanely dionysian, so impossibly poisonous, could expect to hold itself together over time. In the 20th century, outside Africa, the only comparable eruptions of death-hunger, of death-oestrus, were confined to Nazi Germany and Stalinite Kampuchea, the one lasting 12 years, the other three and a half. Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama: such men only ask to be the last to die. But there are some sound reasons for thinking that the confrontation with Islamism will be testingly prolonged.

It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken but also cynical emphasis on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them. The fatal turn was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

We should parenthetically add that Tony Blair succumbed to it too - with a difference. In 'old' Europe, as Rumsfeld insolently called it, the idea of a political class was predicated on the inculcation of checks and balances, of psychic surge-breakers, to limit the corruption that personal paramountcy always entrains. It was not a matter of mental hygiene; everyone understood that a rotting mind will make rotten decisions. Blair knew this. He also knew that his trump was not a high one: the need of the American people to hear approval for the war in an English accent. Yet there he was, helplessly caught up in the slipstream turbulence of George Bush. Rumsfeld, too, visibly succumbed to it. On television, at this time, he looked as though he had just worked his way through a snowball of cocaine. 'Stuff happens,' he said, when asked about the looting of the Mesopotamian heritage in Baghdad - the remark of a man not just corrupted but floridly vulgarised by power. As well as the body language, at this time, there was also the language, the power language, all the way from Bush's 'I want to kick ass' to his 'Bring it on' - a rather blithe incitement, some may now feel, to the armed insurgency.

Contemplating this, one's aversion was very far from being confined to the aesthetic. Much followed from it. And we now know that an atmosphere of boosterist unanimity, of prewar triumphalism, had gathered around the President, an atmosphere in which any counter-argument, any hint of circumspection, was seen as a whimper of weakness or disloyalty. If she were alive, Barbara Tuchman would be chafing to write a long addendum to The March of Folly; but not even she could have foreseen a president who, 'going into this period', 'was praying for strength to do the Lord's will'. A power rush blessed by God - no, not a good ambience for precautions and doubts. At that time, the invasion of Iraq was presented as a 'self-financing' preventive war to enforce disarmament and regime change. Three and a half years later, it is an adventurist and proselytising war, and its remaining goal is the promotion of democracy.

The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room - did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The 'electoral policy' of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, 'has been classically summarised as "One man (men only), one vote, once."' Or, in Harris's trope, democracy will be 'little more than a gangplank to theocracy'; and that theocracy will be Islamist. Now the polls have closed, and the results are coming in, region-wide. In Lebanon, gains for Hizbollah; in Egypt, gains for Sayyid Qutb's fraternity, the Muslim Brothers; in Palestine, victory for Hamas; in Iran, victory for the soapbox rabble-rouser and primitive anti-semite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the Iraqi election, Bush and Blair, pathetically, both 'hoped' for Allawi, whose return was 14 per cent.

Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd - a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the US Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep in one piece. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis hate Iraq - or 'Iraq', a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomisation.

Third, only the sack of Mecca or Medina would have caused more pain to the Islamic heart than the taking, and befouling, of the Iraqi capital, the seat of the Caliphate. We have not heard any discussion, at home, about the creedal significance of Baghdad. But we have had some intimations from the jihadis' front line. In pronouncements that vibrate with historic afflatus, they speak of their joyful embrace of the chance to meet the infidel in the Land Between the Rivers. And, of course, beyond - in Madrid, in Bali (again), in London. It may be that the Coalition adventure has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation.

There are vast pluralities all over the West that are thirsting for American failure in Iraq - because they hate George Bush. Perhaps they do not realise that they are co-synchronously thirsting for an Islamist victory that will dramatically worsen the lives of their children. And this may come to pass. Let us look at the war, not through bin Laden's eyes, but through the eyes of the cunning of history. From that perspective, 11 September was a provocation. The 'slam dunk', the 'cakewalk' into Iraq amounted to a feint, and a trap. We now know, from various 500-page bestsellers like Cobra II and Fiasco, that the invasion of Iraq was truly incredibly blithe (there was no plan, no plan at all, for the occupation); still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable. This is a familiar kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. We must hope that something can be salvaged from it, and that our ethical standing can be reconsolidated. Iraq was a divagation in what is being ominously called the Long War. To our futile losses in blood, treasure and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.

An idea presents itself about a better direction to take. And funnily enough its current champion is the daughter of the dark genius behind the disaster in Iraq: she is called Liz Cheney. Before we come to that, though, we must briefly return to Ayed, and his belt, and to some quiet thoughts about the art of fiction.

The 'belt' ending of The Unknown Known came to me fairly late. But the belt was already there, and prominently. All writers will know exactly what this means. It means that the subconscious had made a polite suggestion, a suggestion that the conscious mind had taken a while to see. Ayed's belt, purchased by mail-order in Greeley, Colorado, is called a 'RodeoMaMa', and consists of a 'weight strap' and the pommel of a saddle. Ayed is of that breed of men which holds that a husband should have sex with his wives every night. And his invariable use of the 'RodeoMaMa' is one of the reasons for the rumble of mutiny in his marriages.

Looking in at the longhouse called Known Knowns, Ayed retools his 'RodeoMaMa'. He goes back to the house and summons his wives - for the last time. Thus Ayed gets his conceptual breakthrough, his unknown unknown: he is the first to bring martyrdom operations into the setting of his own home.

I could write a piece almost as long as this one about why I abandoned The Unknown Known. The confirmatory moment came a few weeks ago: the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder. For quite a time I have felt that Islamism was trying to poison the world. Here was a sign that the poison might take - might mutate, like bird flu. Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.

In Twentieth Century the late historian JM Roberts took an unsentimental line on the Chinese Revolution:

'More than 2,000 years of remarkable historical continuities lie behind [it], which, for all its cost and cruelty, was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe's assault on the world in early modern times.'

The cost and cruelty, according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography, amounted, perhaps, to 70 million lives in the Mao period alone. Yet this has to be balanced against 'the weight of the past' - nowhere heavier than in China:

'Deliberate attacks on family authority... were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and delation, but attacks on the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. Similarly, the advancement of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond 'progressive' feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to those of pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia.'

There is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation. And there is no time, now, for a leisurely, slow-lob enlightenment. The necessary upheaval is a revolution - the liberation of women. This will not be the work of a decade or even a generation. Islam is a millennium younger than China. But we should remind ourselves that the Chinese Revolution took half a century to roll through its villages.

In 2002 the aggregate GDP of all the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the UAE, listed in 33rd place, between Reunion and Macau.) Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society. We may wonder how the Islamists feel when they compare India to Pakistan, one a burgeoning democratic superpower, the other barely distinguishable from a failed state. What Went Wrong? asked Bernard Lewis, at book length. The broad answer would be institutionalised irrationalism; and the particular focus would be the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people. No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male. But we can dwell on the memory of those images from Afghanistan: the great waves of women hurrying to school.

The connection between manifest failure and the suppression of women is unignorable. And you sometimes feel that the current crux, with its welter of insecurities and nostalgias, is little more than a pre-emptive tantrum - to ward off the evacuation of the last sanctum of power. What would happen if we spent some of the next 300 billion dollars (this is Liz Cheney's thrust) on the raising of consciousness in the Islamic world? The effect would be inherently explosive, because the dominion of the male is Koranic - the unfalsifiable word of God, as dictated to the Prophet:

'Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme' (4:34).

Can we imagine seeing men on the march in defence of their right to beat their wives? And if we do see it, then what? Would that win hearts and minds? The martyrs of this revolution would be sustained by two obvious truths: the binding authority of scripture, all over the world, is very seriously questioned; and women, by definition, are not a minority. They would know, too, that their struggle is a heroic assault on the weight of the past - the alpweight of 14 centuries.

Attentive readers may have asked themselves what it is, this ridiculous category, the unknown known. The unknown known is paradise, scriptural inerrancy, God. The unknown known is religious belief.

All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so impeccably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone. When challenged, or affronted, the believer's response is hormonal; and the subsequent collision will be one between a brain and a cat's cradle of glands. I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant. I knew then that the phrase 'deeply religious' was a grave abuse of that adverb. Something isn't deep just because it's all that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion - illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.

In Philip Larkin's 'Aubade' (1977), the poet, on waking, contemplates 'unresting death, a whole day nearer now':

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die...

Much earlier, in 'Church Going' (1954), examining his habit of visiting country churches and the feelings they arouse in him (chiefly bafflement and boredom), he was able to frame a more expansive response:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

This is beautifully arrived at. It contains everything that can be decently and rationally said.

We allow that, in the case of religion, or the belief in supernatural beings, the past weighs in, not at 2,000 years, but at approximately five million. Even so, the time has come for a measure of impatience in our dealings with those who would take an innocent personal pronoun, which was just minding its own business, and exalt it with a capital letter. Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally. People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too. We should be with Joseph Conrad:

'The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is - marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

'Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness.' ('Author's Note' to The Shadow-Line, 1920.)

The age of horrorism (part two) by Martin Amis

2006-09-15T13:25:00.000+13:00

Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer

In The Unknown Known my diminutive terrorist, Ayed, is not a virgin (or a Joseph, as Christians say), unlike Sayyid, on whom he is tangentially based. He is, rather, a polygamist, confining himself to the sanctioned maximum of four. On top of this, he indulges himself, whenever he has enough spare cash, with a succession of 'temporary wives'. The practice is called mutah. In her justly celebrated book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells us that a temporary marriage can endure for 99 years; it can also be over in half an hour. The Islamic Republic is very attentive to what it calls 'men's needs'. Before the Revolution, a girl could get married at the age of 18. After 1979 the age requirement was halved.

In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.

As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.

There is almost an entire literary genre given over to sensibilities such as Sayyid Qutb's. It is the genre of the unreliable narrator - or, more exactly, the transparent narrator, with his helpless giveaways. Typically, a patina of haughty fastidiousness strives confidently but in vain to conceal an underworld of incurable murk. In The Unknown Known I added to this genre, and with enthusiasm. I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of nettles and poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruellingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman 'quite openly' undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins 'the "Prism"', and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.

As Ayed keeps telling all his temporary wives, 'My wives don't understand me.' And they don't; indeed, they all want divorces, and for the same embarrassing reason. With his paradigm-shift attack on America now in ruins, and facing professional and social disgrace, Ayed suddenly sees how, in one swoop, he can redeem himself - and secure his place in history with an unknown unknown which is sure to succeed. For this he will be needing a belt

Two years ago I came across a striking photograph in a news magazine: it looked like a crudely cross-sectioned watermelon, but you could make out one or two humanoid features half-submerged in the crimson pulp. It was in fact the bravely circularised photograph of the face of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband. In an attempted murder, it seems: at the time of his arrest he had her in the trunk of his car, and was evidently taking her into the desert for interment. What had she done to bring this on herself? In the marital home, that night, the telephone rang and the newscaster, a prosperous celebrity in her own right, answered it. She had answered the telephone. Male Westerners will be struck, here, by a dramatic cultural contrast. I know that I, for one, would be far more likely to beat my wife to death if she hadn't answered the telephone. But customs and mores vary from country to country, and you cannot reasonably claim that one ethos is 'better' than any other.

In 1949 Greeley was dry... It has been seriously suggested, by serious commentators, that suicide-mass murderers are searching for the simplest means of getting a girlfriend. It may be, too, that some of them are searching for the simplest means of getting a drink. Although alcohol, like extramarital sex, may be strictly forbidden in life, there is, in death, no shortage of either. As well as the Koranic virgins, 'as chaste', for the time being, 'as the sheltered eggs of ostriches', there is also a 'gushing fountain' of white wine (wine 'that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason'). The suicide-mass murderer can now raise his brimming 'goblet' to an additional reward: he has the power, post mortem, to secure paradisal immortality for a host of relations (the number is a round 70, two fewer, curiously, than the traditional allotment of houris). Nor is this his only service to the clan, which, until recently, could expect an honorarium of $20,000 from Iraq, plus $5,000 from Saudi Arabia - as well as the vast prestige automatically accorded to the family of a martyr. And then there is the enticement, or incitement, of peer-group prestige.

Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter, in Terror and Liberalism, is mildly entitled 'Wishful Thinking' - and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.

After the failure of Oslo, and the attendant consolidation of Hamas, the second intifada ('earthquake') got under way in 2001, not with stonings and stabbings, like the first, but with a steady campaign of suicide-mass murder. 'All over the world,' writes Berman, 'the popularity of the Palestinian cause did not collapse. It increased.' The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'. And when Sharon replaced Barak, and the expected crackdown began, and the Israeli army, with 23 casualties of its own, killed 52 Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, the attack 'was seen as a veritable Holocaust, an Auschwitz, or, in an alternative image, as the Middle Eastern equivalent of the Wehrmacht's assault on the Warsaw Ghetto. These tropes were massively accepted, around the world. Typing in the combined names of "Jenin" and "Auschwitz"... I came up with 2,890 references; and, typing in "Jenin" and "Nazi", I came up with 8,100 references. There were 63,100 references to the combined names of "Sharon" and "Hitler".' Once the redoubled suppression had taken hold, the human bombings decreased; and world opinion quietened down. The Palestinians were now worse off than ever, their societal gains of the Nineties 'flattened by Israeli tanks'. But the protests 'rose and fell in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people'.

This was because suicide-mass murder presented the West with a philosophical crisis. The quickest way out of it was to pretend that the tactic was reasonable, indeed logical and even admirable: an extreme case of 'rationalist naivete', in Berman's phrase. Rationalist naivete was easier than the assimilation of the alternative: that is to say, the existence of a pathological cult. Berman assembles many voices. And if we are going to hear the rhetoric of delusion and self-hypnosis, then we might as well hear it from a Stockholm Laureate - the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. Again erring on the side of indulgence, Berman is unnecessarily daunted by the pedigree of Saramago's prose, which is in fact the purest and snootiest bombast (you might call it Nobelese). Here he focuses his lofty gaze on the phenomenon of suicide-mass murder:

'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'

Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' - to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence. The suicide-mass murderer asks his prospective victims to contemplate their fellow human being with a completely new order of execration. It is not like looking down the barrel of a gun. We can tell this is so, because we see what happens, sometimes, when the suicide-mass murderer isn't even there - as in the amazingly summary injustice meted out to the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in London. An even more startling example was the rumour-ignited bridge stampede in Baghdad (31 August 2005). This is the superterror inspired by suicide-mass murder: just whisper the words, and you fatally trample a thousand people. And it remains an accurate measure of the Islamists' contortion: they hold that an act of lethal self-bespatterment, in the interests of an unachievable 'cause', brings with it the keys to paradise. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, stresses just how thoroughly and expeditiously the suicide-mass murderer is 'saved'. Which would you prefer, given belief?

'... martyrdom is the only way that a Muslim can bypass the painful litigation that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment and proceed directly to heaven. Rather than spend centuries mouldering in the earth in anticipation of being resurrected and subsequently interrogated by wrathful angels, the martyr is immediately transported to Allah's garden...'

Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the president's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the USSR (in whose defeat, incidentally, the 'Arab Afghans' played a negligible part). Still, a sympathiser like the famously obtuse 'American Taliban' John Walker Lindh, if he'd been there, and if he'd been a little brighter, might have framed the following argument.

Now would be a good time to strike, John would tell Osama, because the West is enfeebled, not just by sex and alcohol, but also by 30 years of multicultural relativism. They'll think suicide bombing is just an exotic foible, like shame-and-honour killings or female circumcision. Besides, it's religious, and they're always slow to question anything that calls itself that. Within days of our opening outrage, the British royals will go on the road for Islam, and stay on it. And you'll be amazed by how long the word Islamophobia, as an unanswerable indictment, will cover Islamism too. It'll take them years to come up with the word they want - and Islamismophobia clearly isn't any good. Even if the Planes Operation succeeds, and thousands die, the Left will yawn and wonder why we waited so long. Strike now. Their ideology will make them reluctant to see what it is they confront. And it will make them slow learners.

By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with entirely secular aims - to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq than during the entire intifada. And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:

'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'

I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing - and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems.

Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:

'Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favourite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilisation... Pragmatism, when civilisations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right - about anything - seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity".'

The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone; so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se. Prison beatings, too, are evil in themselves, and so is the delegation of torture, and murder, to less high-minded and (it has to be said) less hypocritical regimes. In the kind of war that we are now engaged in, an episode like Abu Ghraib is more than a shameful deviation - it is the equivalent of a lost battle. Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.

There is another symbiotic overlap between Islamist praxis and our own, and it is a strange and pitiable one. I mean the drastic elevation of the nonentity. In our popularity-contest culture, with its VIP ciphers and meteoric mediocrities, we understand the attractions of baseless fame - indeed, of instant and unearned immortality. To feel that you are a geohistorical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: 'join', and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 towards its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners, in Aleppo, would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden - he is ever-living.

In July 2005 I flew from Montevideo to New York - and from winter to summer - with my six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco (though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj terminal in Tehran's Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security. Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my youngest daughter isn't like that. She is a slight little blonde with big brown eyes and a quavery voice. Nevertheless, I stood for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack - staring shrewdly at each story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her fluffy duck.

There ought to be a better word than boredom for the trance of inanition that weaved its way through me. I wanted to say something like, 'Even Islamists have not yet started to blow up their own families on aeroplanes. So please desist until they do. Oh yeah: and stick to people who look like they're from the Middle East.' The revelations of 10 August 2006 were 13 months away. And despite the exposure and prevention of their remarkably ambitious bloodbath of the innocent (the majority of them women and children), the (alleged) Walthamstow jihadis did not quite strive in vain. The failed to promote terror, but they won a great symbolic victory for boredom: the banning of books on the seven-hour flight from England to America.

My daughters and I arrived safely in New York. In New York, at certain subway stations, the police were searching all the passengers, to thwart terrorism - thus obliging any terrorist to walk the couple of blocks to a subway station where the police weren't searching all the passengers. And I couldn't defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al. In the guilty safety of Long Island I watched the TV coverage from my home town, where my other three children live, where I will soon again be living with all five. There were the Londoners, on 8 July, going to work on foot, looking stiff and watchful, and taking no pleasure in anything they saw. Eric Hobsbawm got it right in the mid-Nineties, when he said that terrorism was part of the atmospheric 'pollution' of Western cities. It is a cost-efficient programme. Bomb New York and you pollute Madrid; bomb Madrid and you pollute London; bomb London and you pollute Paris and Rome, and repollute New York. But there was the solace given us by the Mayor. No, we should not be surprised by the use of this sempiternal ruse de guerre. Using their bodies is what people do.

The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind - that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else - a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband. (Continues)

The age of horrorism (part one) by Martin Amis

2006-09-15T13:20:00.000+13:00

Martin Amis
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer

It was mid-October 2001, and night was closing in on the border city of Peshawar, in Pakistan, as my friend - a reporter and political man of letters - approached a market stall and began to haggle over a batch of T-shirts bearing the likeness of Osama bin Laden. It is forbidden, in Sunni Islam, to depict the human form, lest it lead to idolatry; but here was Osama's lordly visage, on display and on sale right outside the mosque. The mosque now emptied, after evening prayers, and my friend was very suddenly and very thoroughly surrounded by a shoving, jabbing, jeering brotherhood: the young men of Peshawar.

At this time of day, their equivalents, in the great conurbations of Europe and America, could expect to ease their not very sharp frustrations by downing a lot of alcohol, by eating large meals with no dietary restrictions, by racing around to one another's apartments in powerful and expensive machines, by downing a lot more alcohol as well as additional stimulants and relaxants, by jumping up and down for several hours on strobe-lashed dancefloors, and (in a fair number of cases) by having galvanic sex with near-perfect strangers. These diversions were not available to the young men of Peshawar.

More proximately, just over the frontier, the West was in the early stages of invading Afghanistan and slaughtering Pakistan's pious clients and brainchildren, the Taliban, and flattening the Hindu Kush with its power and its rage. More proximately still, the ears of these young men were still fizzing with the battlecries of molten mullahs, and their eyes were smarting anew to the chalk-thick smoke from the hundreds of thousands of wood fires - fires kindled by the multitudes of exiles and refugees from Afghanistan, camped out all around the city. There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren, over the border, in exchange for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.

'Why you want these? You like Osama?'

I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given - reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the foetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: 'Well I quite like him, but I think he overdid it a bit in New York.' No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:

'You like Osama?'

'Of course. He is my brother.'

'He is your brother?'

'All men are my brothers.'

All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.

Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses. This is of course not so in the East, where, we acknowledge, almost every living citizen in many huge and populous countries is intimately defined by religious belief. The excuses, here, are very persuasive; and we duly accept that 'faith' - recently and almost endearingly defined as 'the desire for the approval of supernatural beings' - is a world-historical force and a world-historical actor. All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.

Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being. Judged by the continuities he was able to set in motion, he remains a titanic figure, and, for Muslims, all-answering: a revolutionary, a warrior, and a sovereign, a Christ and a Caesar, 'with a Koran in one hand', as Bagehot imagined him, 'and a sword in the other'. Muhammad has strong claims to being the most extraordinary man who ever lived. And always a man, as he always maintained, and not a god. Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta.

Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is 'a civil war' within Islam. That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.

So, to repeat, we respect Islam - the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.

I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. But first I must turn from great things to small, for a paragraph, and talk about writing, and the strange thing that happened to me at my desk in this, the Age of Vanished Normalcy.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say. The original idea, the initiating 'throb' (Nabokov), encounters certain 'points of resistance' (Updike); and these points of resistance, on occasion, are simply too obdurate, numerous, and pervasive. You come to write the next page, and it's dead - as if your subconscious, the part of you quietly responsible for so much daily labour, has been neutralised, or switched off. Norman Mailer has said that one of the few real sorrows of 'the spooky art' is that it requires you to spend too many days among dead things. Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me the episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom - to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known

Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat:

'The message is: there are known "knowns". There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.'

Like his habit of talking in 'the third person passive once removed', this is 'very Rumsfeldian'. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: 'We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don't know we don't know.' Anyway, the three categories remain quite helpful as analytical tools. And they certainly appealed very powerfully to the narrator of The Unknown Known - Ayed, a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama bin Laden is still rumoured to lurk.

Ayed's outfit, which is called 'the "Prism"', used to consist of three sectors named, not very imaginatively, Sector One, Sector Two and Sector Three. But Ayed and his colleagues are attentive readers of the Western press, and the sectors now have new titles. Known Knowns (sector one) concerns itself with daily logistics: bombs, mines, shells, and various improvised explosive devices. The work of Known Unknowns (sector two) is more peripatetic and long-term; it involves, for example, trolling around North Korea in the hope of procuring the fabled 25 kilograms of enriched uranium, or going from factory to factory in Uzbekistan on a quest for better toxins and asphyxiants. In Known Knowns, the brothers are plagued by fires and gas-leaks and almost daily explosions; the brothers in Known Unknowns are racked by headaches and sore throats, and their breath, tellingly, is rich with the aroma of potent coughdrops, moving about as they do among vats of acids and bathtubs of raw pesticides. Everyone wants to work where Ayed works, which is in sector three, or Unknown Unknowns. Sector three is devoted to conceptual breakthroughs - to shifts in the paradigm.

Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001. Paradigm shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that 11 September was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10am the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for 71 minutes, from 8.46, when American 11 hit the North Tower, to 9.57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm - the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10.03 United 93 came down on its back at 580mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, 20 minutes from the Capitol.

I found it reassuringly difficult, dreaming up paradigm shifts. And Ayed and his friends in sector three find it difficult too. Synergy, maximalisation - these are the kinds of concept that are tossed from cushion to floormat in Unknown Unknowns. Here, a comrade argues for the dynamiting of the San Andreas Fault; there, another envisages the large-scale introduction of rabies (admixed with smallpox, methamphetamine and steroids) to the fauna of Central Park. A pensive silence follows. And very often these silences last for days on end. All you can hear, in Unknown Unknowns, is the occasional swatting palm-clap, or the crackle of a beetle being ground underfoot. Ayed feels, or used to feel, superior to his colleagues, because he has already had his eureka moment. He had it in the spring of 2001, and his project - his 'baby', if you will - was launched in the summer of that year, and is still in progress. It has a codename: UU: CRs/G,C.

Ayed's conceptual breakthrough did not go down at all well in Sector Three, as it was then called; in fact, it was widely mocked. But Ayed used a family connection, and gained an audience with Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Islamist cleric who briefly ruled Afghanistan - an imposing figure, in his dishdash and flipflops. Ayed submitted his presentation, and, to his astonishment, Mullah Omar smiled on his plan. This was a necessary condition, because Ayed's paradigm shift could only be realised with the full resources of a nation state. UU: CRs/G,C went ahead. The idea was, as Ayed would say, deceptively simple. The idea was to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.

As the story opens, the CRs have been en route to G,C for almost five years, crossing central Africa, in minibuses and on foot, and suffering many a sanguinary reverse (a host of some 30,000 Janjaweed in Sudan, a 'child militia', armed with pangas, in Congo). On top of all this, as if he didn't have enough to worry about, Ayed is not getting on very well with his wives.

Those who know the field will be undismayed by the singling out of Greeley, Colorado. For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible - but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late Nineties. At that time, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.

Since then the world has undergone a moral crash - the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies. All this should of course be soberly compared to the feats of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.

Things started to go wrong for poor Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, 'a drunken, semi-naked woman' tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned 43. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early - and routinely baffling - admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women 'dishonourable', and confessed to unhappiness about 'their current level of freedom'. A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was Thorns. Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem, 'Once Bitten, Twice Bitten'.But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of 'sufficient' moral cleanliness, he resolved to stick to virginity.

Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalised him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine - another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the moderniser and secularist, Nasser, in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested - and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.

Sayyid was presumably still sorely shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Arab armies), but at first, on the Atlantic crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytising Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytising himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that 'the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim'. God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probable that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently drunk a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.

He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalised, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with 'thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs' and a coquettish manner ('the calling eye, the provocative laugh'), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But 'the father of Islamism', as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron - to the pullulating hellhouse - of Greeley, Colorado.

During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ('money, movie stars and models of cars'), American jazz ('a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies - their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal'), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammelled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club - where an epiphany awaits him. 'The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,' he wrote; 'the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.' You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry

'And the air is full of lust.' 'Lust' is Bernard Lewis's translation, but several other writers prefer the word 'love'. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love. Qutb:

'A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh.'

In his excellent book, Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman has many sharp things to say about the corpus of Sayyid Qutb; but he manages to goad himself into receptivity, and ends up, in my view, sounding almost absurdly respectful - 'rich, nuanced, deep, soulful, and heartfelt'. Qutb, who would go on to write a 30-volume gloss on it, spent his childhood memorising the Koran. He was 10 by the time he was done. Now, given that, it seems idle to expect much sense from him; and so it proves. On the last of the 46 pages he devotes to Qutb, Berman wraps things up with a long quotation. This is its repetitive first paragraph:

'The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet] tells the Muslims that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed. Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God, are honourable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.'

Savouring that last phrase, we realise that any voyage taken with Sayyid Qutb is doomed to a leaden-witted circularity. The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonised by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the 'last' Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.

Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia - barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to 'exterminate' Islam - and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam

'This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, 'the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men' (Qur'an, CXIV, 4, 5).

Lewis might have added that these are the closing words of the Koran. So they echo.

The West isn't being seductive, of course; all the West is being is attractive. But the Islamist's paranoia extends to a kind of thwarted narcissism. We think again of Qutb's buxom, smooth-legged nurse, supposedly smacking her thirsty lips at the news of the death of Hasan al-Banna. Far from wanting or trying to exterminate it, the West had no views whatever about Islam per se before 11 September 2001. Of course, views were then formulated, and very soon the bestseller list was a column of primers on Islam. Some things take longer to sink in than others, true; but now we know. In the West we had brought into being a society whose main purpose, whose raison d'etre, was the tantalisation of good Muslims.

The theme of the 'tempter' can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the tempter is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humourless civil servant, and turgid anti-semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonoured him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.

Qutb has perhaps a single parallel in world history. Another shambling invert, another sexual truant (not a virgin but a career cuckold), another marginal quack and dabbler (talentless but not philistine), he too wrote a book, in prison, that fell into the worst possible hands. His name was Nikolai Chernyshevsky; and his novel (What Is To Be Done?) was read five times by Vladimir Lenin in the course of a single summer. It was Chernyshevsky who determined, not the content, but the emotional dynamic of the Soviet experiment. The centennial of his birth was celebrated with much pomp in the USSR. That was in 1928. But Russia was too sad, and too busy, to do much about the centennial of his death, which passed quietly in 1989. (Continues)

2006-09-11T13:36:00.000+13:00

Solipsistic Egotism

2006-07-06T01:09:00.000+13:00

So I have written nothing here since inception of this lonely, lonely blog. How lonely my four year old self must have been on that first posting all this time.

Well the promise, as always in life, is to change.

I feel this blog could be a space for me to vent and write the odd thought (what else could it be?).

My wife and I share a blog, Gingers On The Run, which provides a narrative of our lives together so far. Since most of that time has been spent travelling it has been relatively easy to feel the urge to post on it.

This space is a little different.

As a writer, and faced every day with all forms of 'resistance' (to quote Steven Pressfield), I have at last been thrown a morsel from the bounty of the wider press.

The previous review is my first as a published fiction writer. Although unnamed, only four of the twenty seven writers are given mention, I am referred to, having contributed a piece of "solipsistic egotism".

I thank you.

Snacks After Swimming

2006-07-06T01:04:00.000+13:00

Sun 11 Jun 2006

Books round up

James W Wood
SNACKS AFTER SWIMMING
Freight, £9.95

Garish, overwrought and pretentious, the typography and production of this book suggest it might be possible to judge a book by its cover. There are four writers worth reading among the 27 represented: these names apart, this collection will give support to those who believe creative writing programmes are self-indulgent covens for the creatively impoverished. Jennifer McCarthy confirmed the accomplishment shown in her piece by being picked up by Penguin; elsewhere, Jane Alexander, Jason Donald and Kate Orson show promise. Otherwise, it's solipsistic egotism relieved only by numb flirtations with the erotic. The poems are terrible and the turquoise typeface does not entice. Those looking for the best in new Scottish writing should look elsewhere.

2005-09-07T07:11:00.000+13:00

Since this is most likely to be a travelling blog - at least for the next few years, what with Thailand in November, then India and perhaps Nepal, followed by a year in New Zealand - this picture seemed apt.

I'm 4 year's old and already got my sack and am out the front door.

Never look back.

Is this thing on?

2005-09-07T07:05:00.000+13:00

Probably this will turn out to be the biggest distraction I have ever come across.

Talk about fighting resistance.