Pop quiz: one of these euphemisms for torture was used by the Gestapo and the other by the Bush administration. Which is which?
(a) "Enhanced coercive interrogation technique"
(b) "Refined interrogation technique"
The answer can be found here.
Oops - forget to mention: Arts on Sunday (Radio NZ National) recently interviewed me for a piece on Look This Way (for which I contributed an appreciation of Barry Linton). You can listen to the interview here, if you're quick (it's up for another week or so). Also interviewed are the book's editor, Sally Blundell, and another contributor, Hanna O'Regan, who talks about Cliff Whiting.
Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post–September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler, brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official power.
Mark Danner, 'The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam:' The Crawford Transcript in The New York Review of Books, November 8, 2007, pg.59
Watch this documentary from BBC on YouTube. It's called 'Why We Fight,' is directed by Charlotte Street, and explores the US military-industrial complex.
I've just finished Lolita,
which is just as good as everyone says it is, and thought I'd jot down
this comment from Nabokov's afterword (not because it reflects my own
opinion, but simply because it's interesting and I want to think about
it some more):
For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
Anyway, now I'm keen to watch both film versions - especially the Kubrik one (which I don't think I've seen before) - by way of comparison. To my mind, the novel is a very slippery story and Humbert Humbert's narrative is so densely layered with delusion and subjectivity, I'm dying to see how Kubrik adapted it. I remember the Lyne version as slightly annoying - though that was before I'd read the book, and frankly, Jeremy Irons just irritates me. So I'm now prepared to give it another go.
BTW, I had to take a break half way through the novel (at precisely the point where Humbert was about to sleep with Lolita for the first time); it's a very enjoyable read, but also very disturbing and dark. By then, the disconnect between Humbert's self-obsessed and narcissistic account and the ghastly reality of what he was doing to the people around him had become too much. I needed to take a breather (by reading some nice relaxing nonfiction). Of course, once I summoned up the courage to continue, I was thoroughly hooked. What a book...!
And while I'm on the subject - how about that hysterically funny 'Lolita' scene in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers? Lord, I laughed so hard it hurt!
The perfect Xmas gift for the comics obsessive in your life: The Comics Show, a wonderful documentary about New Zealand cartoonists directed by Shirley Horrocks
(yes, she's my step-mother - but she's also an award-winning
documentary maker!), now available on DVD (which includes extra
interviews).
"The writing and drawing of comic books has remained a little-known and under-rated area of New Zealand culture. Director Shirley Horrocks reveals it to us as a highly creative subculture with a rich local history.
"Despite a moral panic about comics in the ‘40s and ‘50s (recalled here by Eric Resetar, the grand old man of local comics), later decades brought us the exciting counter-culture work of Barry Linton and the other artists of Strips magazine (such as Dick Frizzell and Grant Major), the new directions taken by women artists such as Coco and Pritika), and the publication of long-form ‘graphic novels’ such as Ant Sang’s Dharma Punks and Dylan Horrocks’s Hicksville. There are now comics for all ages and interests.
"Comics have links with animation and with music (as shown by Chris Knox and Karl Wills among others). This highly entertaining and visually inventive film takes us from Auckland street culture, to Wellington’s ‘Eric Awards’, to a do-it-yourself comic collective (‘Funtime’ in Christchurch). This is an unexpected, eye-opening arts documentary with broad appeal.
"The Comics Show screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival this year in Auckland and Wellington. Commissioned for TVNZ's Artsville."
To order the DVD, email info@pointofview.co.nz
A very interesting series of articles on copyright in the age of free downloading and file-sharing is running on the Guardian's website, by science fiction writer and digital activist Cory Doctorow (one of the people behind the blog Boing Boing). Very highly recommended!
As found in Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life:
"Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
"...Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5
"Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with
another being, being-in-itself is superfluous for all eternity."
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
"Sigmund Freud, for example, came to believe that the meaning of life was death - that the whole effort of Eros or the life-instincts was to return to a condition of death-like stasis, where the ego could no longer be harmed."
Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, pg. 115
I'm giving a talk as part of the Auckland City Library's celebration of comics on Friday 19th October. My talk will be at 6pm in the Whare Wananga, 2nd floor of the Central City Library on Lorne Street, but there's stuff happening all afternoon and evening:
Comics Fest - 2pm - 5pm in the Atrium
"Meet local cartoonists and sample their work. These humble
people are the hidden treasures of the New Zealand art world. View
comics merchandise from King of Cards and Central City Library's
growing graphic novel collection, and join us in celebrating our new
subscription to the prestigious Comics Journal."
Screening of 'The Comics Show' - 5pm in the Whare Wananga
"The comics evening takes off from a screening of The Comics Show,
a documentary all about the intriguing world of New Zealand comic book
culture, introduced by the director Shirley Horrocks at 5pm."
A talk by Dylan Horrocks - 6pm in the Whare Wananga
(my bit)
"The evening finishes off with Johnny Angel, creator of Afi, the first Samoan superhero. This uniquely South Pacific take on a traditional format is just as engaging as the cartoonist himself."
As Far As We Know: Conversations about Science, Life and the Universe, by Paul Callaghan and Kim Hill has now been published by Penguin (NZ), complete with illustrations by yours truly. There's an article about it here, from the NZ Listener, and a nice review here, from the Lumiere Reader. It's a great read - highly recommended!
