Jun
14
2008
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Black sand beach in California's Lost Coast
IN HIS EPONYMOUS collection of writings, the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu claims to have once dreamt of being a butterfly, entirely unaware while flitting about of being anything else. Upon waking, he wrote, he was not sure if he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. This butterfly dream, as it came to be known, would be later invoked repeatedly and its skepticism elaborated upon, most famously by Descartes, to question the legitimacy of sensory experience and the indisputability of an objective universe. Keep reading→
May
14
2008
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For Part I of Lament for Michael Kilburn click here
THE UK has an efficient rail system with comfortable high-speed trains that run frequently and on schedule. While last-minute ticket prices are unreasonably costly for long distance travel, one can travel inexpensively by booking a seat several weeks in advance. In this sense, the trains operate much like air flights. Should you book ahead and later decide you want to alter your travel date, you must pay a change fee as well as the difference in price between the old ticket and the new. This pricing scheme benefits those who plan weeks in advance, but obviously disadvantages off-the-cuff travelers, who must either opt for slower and less agreeable bus travel or dig deep to cover those hefty last-minute ticket fares, which seem like little more than subsidies for the well-organized. Keep reading…
Apr
4
2008
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ANYONE who regularly reads an English-language newspaper in a former British colony-where there are inevitably large numbers of English expats and tourists-will on occasion encounter the phrase ‘whinging Brit’ in the Letters to the Editor section. Since ‘whinging’ is a British variant on ‘whining,’ the phrase is invariably used, often with ironic self-disparagement, by the British about the British: generally from expats mortified at those compatriots of theirs who seem to spend their entire vacation abroad complaining about the host country and making unfavorable, imperious comparisons with the motherland. Of course, this notion begets another sub-category of those who do little else but whinge about whinging Brits. In short, there is plenty of complaining to go around, some justified, most of it tedious banter. Keep reading…
Jan
4
2008
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LAST SEPTEMBER I found myself in the bizarre situation of once again being—and I still can’t say it without an unsettling jolt of bewilderment—a student. Months earlier, while I was still in the army, I learned that I had received a Chevening scholarship for Cypriots through the British Council. The award entitled me to a fully funded one-year Masters in the U.K. Twelve months, all expenses paid, a kind of unexpected manna from heaven.
I’d been out of school for almost a decade and so it was inevitable for me to initially suffer from a minor identity crisis that comes from the déjà vu feeling of being caught up—albeit in this lifetime—in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal recurrence. It was impossible to not feel that I had regressed in some fundamental way. But phobias and flashbacks aside, I soon found that study in the U.K.—where instructors neither hold hands nor wield whips—was especially well-suited to us older sorts who are referred to, despite the lack of evidence, as ‘mature students.’
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IN JULY I flew into Nairobi to write a series of newspaper and magazine articles on the Orthodox Archbishop of Kenya. Towards the end of my three weeks there, I accompanied the Archbishop to a church service in Kibera—the largest slum in Africa with an estimated population of one million, all living in an area the size of New York’s Central Park. During the liturgy I set off with some locals on a walk through the shantytown. There is something unavoidably repugnant about a white man wandering through an African slum with a camera, even if he can claim a journalistic motive. Continue reading
I HAVE attended a half dozen or so European Union press events over the past year, most of which have taken place in Brussels, and I am struck each time by the sums of money spent and the dribble of material actually presented. It is near impossible to sit through them without wavering between sanctimony, hilarity and despair. There may be a few among the veteran press core who – due to mind-numbing years of exposure to bureaucratic babble – approach these events with the same solemnity of the event organizers. But most reporters consider them shams, though they do so only in private. There are never headlines the next day that read, “EU spends quarter million on tea and cookies” or “Nothing said in two days of jargon.” Continue reading
THE NOVELIST is a private creature, the reporter a public one, and the two have little to nothing in common. That more or less sums up the first half of this essay—last month’s entry. I am going to spend the rest of it trying to demonstrate another mundane assertion: one cannot be both a novelist and a reporter at the same time.
Unless you share, along with Dr. Jekyll or Gollum, the capacity to instantaneously morph into another creature for a few hours, it is not possible to be at once a novelist and a reporter. Part of the difficulty is that both the newspaper and the novel are slave drivers who demand, even while stroking your ego and chuffing you up, that you offer your soul—something that cannot be shared like bread. You may serve one but not two masters.
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EVERY NEWSPAPER REPORTER at some point in her hectic career flirts with the idea of cutting loose to write a novel, just as every novelist dreams in his wretched solitude of a more gregarious life at a daily newspaper. This is to a great extent due to the misperception that the pasture is greener on the other side of the literary fence, but there is also a deeper sense that there exists the same blood-bond between the reporter and the novelist as there exists between twins who have been separated at birth and raised at opposite ends of the globe; naturally one dreams, even if mundane realities prevent it, of dropping one’s job and setting off for the willies in an oh-brother-where-art-thou trek for the long lost twin.
There is also the fact that every writer—or at least the anxious, competitive, insecure sort of writer, which accounts for a hefty chunk of the good ones—is continuously measuring his or her life by the lives of past writers, and any glance at the biographies of canonized writers will suggest that a ‘real’ writer should not be a virgin in either reporting or fiction. Of course this is baloney and many of the best fiction writers have never been reporters, and the same holds vice versa. But the myth nonetheless remains, and so the leapfrogging of writers between fiction and reporting goes on, only further perpetuating the illusion that there is some essential bond between the two.
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