—plug—

Not content with passing his driving test, the splendid LC off of Liars and Lunatics has found the time to concoct a new “experiment in citizen journalism” called The Pamphleteer, which I suggest you check out at your earliest convenience.

—end of plug—

Different voices

The BBC’s come in for a bit of abuse in recent months, some of it justified. But just as its friends begin to despair, along comes a programme like this morning’s In Our Time, discussing The Waste Land and you just want to grab all the sneering lackeys of Murdoch and the Mail by their lapels and ask them where that sort of thing’s going to come from once the licence fee’s gone.

A little less information

Comment is free, but facts are sacred, said CP Scott. That said, some facts are so sacred that journalists would rather not know them, as I discovered just now when I phoned a contact to arrange an interview.

“Hello, could I speak to Khun ******, please?”

“Sorry, Khun ******, he is in toilet.”

“OK, shall I call back in five minutes?”

[Pause.]

“Perhaps ten minutes, yes?”

Slice of life

On Sunday afternoon, the head of a foreigner was found in a plastic bag suspended from the Rama VIII bridge in Bangkok. What is assumed to be the rest of the unfortunate gentleman was retrieved from the river yesterday.

Pol Col Pornsak Surasit... said it was uncertain whether the man was murdered or if he committed suicide.

Pol Col Chawalit Prasopsin, deputy commander of Metropolitan Police Division 7, said specialists at Siriraj Hospital would need time to examine the head thoroughly to determine whether it was severed with a sharp object.

PS: Actually, it looks as if they could be onto something, unlikely as it may seem... But the bag?

PPS: It’s still not entirely clear what happened but it really does appear to have been a suicide. “Maybe Mr Tasadori had no place to go and felt guilty.” A very sad tale.

Under the covers

A glance at the tag cloud for LibraryThing, which measures the relative popularity of the identifying tags that members apply to their books, would suggest that people own a great deal of erotica, but no pornography.

Hmm.

Monkey* gone to heaven

I don’t know whether the above cartoon, published in the New York Post earlier this week to much brouhaha, was intended to be racist. As Gawker has pointed out, the artist, Sean Delonas, doesn’t appear to be a particularly sophisticated political thinker, but his peculiar obsession would seem to be homosexuality rather than race.

As with the Danish cartoons controversy (see here and here for previous rumblings), I think the aspect that everyone’s overlooked is that Delonas’s cartoon is completely crap, a far greater crime on my charge sheet than any perceived sociopolitical insensitivity.

He does, however, follow in a glorious tradition of bad, reactionary cartoonists. I have particularly fond childhood memories of leafing through my grandparents’ copies of the Daily Express and enjoying the foam-flecked daubs of the veteran Cummings. Here are a couple of his gems, that make Delonas look like a woolly liberal:





*Although, as the deliciously preposterous Al Sharpton failed to acknowledge, chimpanzees aren’t monkeys.

PS: And, if you really want to see people living up to derogatory ethnic stereotypes, here’s an Irish joke to beat them all.

Crash bang wallop

So there I am, standing at the junction of Rama IV and Sathorn and Witthayu, the point at which Bangkok’s drivers believe they’re Italian for five seconds and inevitably I think of JG Ballard and then I remember that in the early 80s you could get on Top of the Pops with a song inspired by Ballard and because I’m a lazy, busy, sloppy, half-arsed blogger, and can’t even keep to my own self-imposed rules, all I can offer is this:

Turning Japanese

I’ve been reading A Wild Haruki Chase, a collection of pieces about Haruki Murakami, written mainly by those tasked with the translation of his works into other languages. It’s a mixed bag; some of the pieces are witty and perceptive; others are as clunky and pedestrian as those stock essays you can lift from the internet (the Russian contribution is especially bad). It’s inevitable, given that most of the pieces were written in Japanese by non-native Japanese speakers, then translated into English by native Japanese speakers, that some stylistic nuances are bound to disappear. But a question arises: if you’re translating something that’s badly written in the first place, do you have an obligation to convey that badly-writtenness in the new version?

In one of the better chapters, academic and critic Inuhiko Yomota points out that Murakami’s initial success on the international market came because he was one of the first Japanese authors who transcended Western notions of what Japan was – until the late 1980s/early 1990s, a hodgepodge of samurai, geishas, kamikaze pilots and yakuza. Given a name-change or two, his jazz-loving, spaghetti-eating protagonists could just as easily have been Danish or Polish.

But then, argues Yomota, just as Murakami’s global success began to build, our image of Japan began to change, and Murakami’s Japan became ours; to gaijin readers, his characters acquired a Japaneseness they had previously lacked, because Japan no longer equated samurai or geisha. Which opens up all sorts of chicken-and-egg arguments about stereotypes and perception and reality that I don’t have time for right now, but I would just like to highlight Yomota’s phrase for the transnational accessibility of Murakami’s world: “cultural scentlessness”.