Books

How not to travel (and not to write about it)

April 25, 2006 – 12:07 pm

After one brief, disastrous journey (to Bali as a green young Australian, with the sister of my boyfriend, who insisted I do the bargaining for her, then complained about the results), I’ve always travelled alone. Sure there are times when it is tough, but mostly it is wonderful – you talk to waiters, to people on buses, to passing strollers. You get enmeshed in the local world in the way that a couple – that self-contained unit – never do.

If I ever set out on a journey with the specific aim of writing a book, I’ll certainly do the same thing. That intention was only confirmed by reading Frances Mayes’ A Year in the World. The book is subtitled “Journeys of a Passionate Traveller”, yet the only passion she seems to feel is for the husband with whom she travels. As a self-contained unit they sweep (not around the world, as the title misleadingly proclaims), but around the Mediterranean, like a couple cuddling in their living room watching a video.

The result is a book that reads like a school report of “what I did on my holidays”. Well, that’s a little unfair; there is a reasonably sophisticated account of the culture of the destinations – although the sophisticated habit of tossing in local words when English would do perfectly well does become irritating. And it seems every meal, even every instance of window-shopping, is recounted in agonising detail:

“We stop to gaze at a window arranged with trays of candied fruits, gleaming like jewels. The prince perhaps partook of cedro candito, those huge gnarly lemons, almost all peel, as well as the whole candied oranges and lemons, and the array of marzipan fruits, and piles of torrone bianco con fighi secchi, white candy with nuts, and dried figs.”

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Feminism Politics

Morning reading

April 25, 2006 – 10:02 am

Common sense on trafficking: police are threatening to report brothel customers for rape if they use the services of women they know to be trafficked.

Men who visit a sauna, brothel or flat where foreign prostitutes are working will be being asked to ensure the women are there of their own free will before they pay. If they suspect a woman is working against her will, they will be urged to contact Crimestoppers and provide police with the establishment’s location.

I won’t celebrate too much, however; I’ll wait for the first prosecution, and the first conviction.
***
Proving that internet culture can break down even the most ingrained aspects of national cultural, The Times’s Japan correspondent reports on the behaviour of his very own “troll”.

Mr Kita (or “kitaryunosuke”, as he signs himself) plays a unique part in my life — he is my conscience, my nemesis and the closest thing I have had to a stalker. Early every morning, he logs on to the websites of the British newspapers and the BBC. He is interested in China, the Middle East and in coverage of Japan by foreign correspondents — especially, it seems, in articles written by me. These he carefully translates into Japanese and posts on to his weblog accompanied by the most violent and inventive abuse I have encountered in Japan.
It truly restores your faith in the Japanese language reading the things that Mr Kita writes about me, and his blog is an education. He’s called me a baka, of course, but that’s only the start of it. I have been denounced as a “charlatan”, a “rotten devil foreign reporter”, a “low-class foreigner” and — perhaps my favourite — “the private parts of The Times”.

***
“Good” schools get that way by selecting “good” pupils. Talk to any parent looking for a school for their child and they know this, but a survey has, surprise, surprise, found that head teachers even admit that they ignore admissions rules supposed to stop the cherry-picking. I do like the Guardian’s angle on this bad behaviour:

Just about the only thing teachers and the government can unequivocally agree on these days is pupil behaviour. It’s getting worse and something needs to be done about it. Yet the third Headspace survey of headteachers, carried out by Education Guardian and EdComs, administered by ICM and published today, suggests some heads might care to reflect on their own behaviour before pointing the finger at their pupils.
Less than three-quarters of the 822 headteachers who responded to the questionnaire said their school’s governing body followed its admissions code of practice to the letter – 13% of secondary and 20% of primary heads said they “mostly” followed admissions procedures, while 4% of secondary and 2% of primary heads admitted they followed them only “to a limited extent”. Astonishingly, 5% of secondary and 2% of primary schools claimed not to follow any part of their admissions codes.

So the pupils they reject all get dumped together in neighbouring schools, which then have problems. Surprise, surprise.

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Miscellaneous

Do not adjust your set…

April 24, 2006 – 6:48 pm

Yes, should you have happen to have had Sky News Live at 5 on at about 5.45pm British time, that was me on there talking about blogging. Almost as much of a shock to me as it was to you …

The occasion was the six-month anniversary of their blog.

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Books

Reading and listening

April 24, 2006 – 2:07 pm

Radio 4’s Women’s Hour serial this week is I Leap Over The Wall, by Monica Baldwin, about which I’ve previously blogged (here and here) – a brilliant tale from a woman who entered a sequestered order of nuns just before WWI broke out, then emerged in the middle of WWII. (You can only listen through the website – no podcast.)

And the Telegraph has a story with the words “sex” and “archives” in the same headline – and it is even worth checking out.

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Blogging/IT Science

The plastic brain

April 24, 2006 – 10:45 am

A piece today in the Guardian about an address to the Lords by Baroness Susan Greenfield expressing far-reaching fears about the effect on the human brain of the digital world.

The brilliance of Baroness Greenfield’s speech is that she wades straight into the dangers posed by this culture. A recent survey of eight-to 18-year-olds, she says, suggests they are spending 6.5 hours a day using electronic media, and multi-tasking (using different devices in parallel) is rocketing. Could this be having an impact on thinking and learning?
She begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so “build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys… One might argue that this is the basis of education … It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance.” Traditional education, she says, enables us to “turn information into knowledge.”

Now this is the comment writer’s version of the speech, but on her account it does seem to be – as one commenter says – an astonishingly Luddite one.
That was the “basis of education” in the 20th-century, but a historically specific one. It was heavily text-based, but that was a function of relatively cheap print, a trend that began in early modern times, when the equivalent of the Susan Greenfields of the time were of course exclaiming about the dreadful effect on the human mind of all this flood of print.

The brain is an astonishingly plastic organ, and no doubt those of children and adolescents are developing different to they were a couple of decades ago. But it is developing in the world as it is now, FOR it is now. Damn good thing too!

But some aspects of the human psyche probably don’t change much. An army major in Australia is commendably trying to save the memory of the men mentally crippled in the trenches of WWI, who suffered just in the ways that veterans of Vietnam and more recent conflicts do.

Madness and the Military: Australia’s Experience of the Great War, by Michael Tyquin, is the first comprehensive study on mental illness in World War I. It shatters the stereotype of the tough Anzac, an icon that he argues Australians look up to today – but which never existed.
Major Tyquin says of the soldiers who were “mentally shattered” by the war – some of whom recovered, though many did not – “I think we’ve erased them from our public memory. We like to celebrate Anzac, and I use ‘celebrate’ now because I think we’re getting away from the original intent.

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Feminism Science

Traditional ‘wisdom’ is anything but…

April 23, 2006 – 12:54 pm

As the victim of an overweight childhood encouraged by the “it is only healthy baby fat”, I was taken by this:

“BREAST-FEEDING mothers have been given potentially harmful advice on infant nutrition for the past 40 years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has admitted.
Charts used in Britain for decades to advise mothers on a baby’s optimum size have been based on the growth rates of infants fed on formula milk.
… breast-feeding mothers were wrongly told that their babies were underweight and were advised, or felt pressured, to fatten them up by giving them formula milk or extra solids.
Health experts believe the growth charts may have contributed to childhood obesity and associated problems such as diabetes and heart disease in later life.”

Then, wives who work are 50 per cent less likely to see their marriages fall apart.

“Wives’ economic activity… contributes to the continuing resilience of marriage as a social institution,” the study concludes.
…Separate new research on single dads has challenged the accepted wisdom that a woman is always the best partner to bring up the children, with growing numbers of new men becoming self-sufficient fathers.”

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