i can’t stand it anymore

Michael Rosen (who somehow looks exactly like a Quentin Blake drawing himself) is the current Children’s Laureate in the UK, and in this fun clip performs his poem ‘I Can’t Stand It Anymore’ in Walthamstow. Sorry, I can’t embed a Guardian video, so you’ll have to hop over yourself. Promise it won’t be a waste of 47 seconds of your time!

lene ask visits tanzania

Hurray, hurray, more Lene Ask, and this time it’s all up online! Unfortunately, so far only for Norwegian readers (and the very patient). The creator of ‘Hitler, Jesus og Farfar’ was invited to visit Tanzania by aid agency Norad, to highlight the issue of child and maternal health through her drawings. No easy If you want to see the drawings themselves in real life, they are on show at Literatturhuset for a week starting today.

Her simple but well-formed drawings take on an additional poignancy within this theme, although they also take on the issues of poverty, illiteracy, female circumcision, and more. No easy answers to any of the problems, but an interesting and beautiful way to raise awareness of the agency’s programmes while supporting local artists.

school days

It’s back to school for many, and back to work for me. Today I read the first article in a long time, by comedian and Londoner Arabella Weir, on the public vs. private school debate that made me think and possibly reconsider (when the time comes!). It’s clearly a difficult issue and every child, school and country is different, but maybe there is space for big-picture thinking too?

by Arabella Weir

The Guardian Wednesday September 3 2008

Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying. You simply cannot imagine how this tiny little precious creature, for whom you have cared since birth, will begin to cope in an unfamiliar environment surrounded by lots of other kids, some of whom might not be as gifted, genius and sweet as yours.

Assuming you have any choice at all, picking their first school is also an alarmingly revealing moment for anyone who considers themselves to be a good, responsible citizen. It is a time when you find yourself assaulted by all sorts of terrors, nerves and unanswerable questions, most of which are so unedifying you cannot believe you are thinking them. Suddenly you forget about everyone else; it is all about your baby and only your baby.

lol bush

George Dubya got the LOLcats treatment for photos taken during his trip to Beijing, and I dare say it works even better on him than on little kitties.

what is the what reviewed

Several other books got in the way, but finally I got to read Dave Eggers’ ‘What is the What‘, his version of Valentino Achak Deng’s story of how war transported him from his village in Southern Sudan through a several refugee camps finally to his struggle to build a new life in America, with several thousand other young men collectively known as The Lost Boys of Sudan.

The book is written in the first person and jumps back and forth between America and Deng’s life story in more or less chronological order. The style was simple and concise, but variously also funny and disturbing. Most importantly for me, it gave a voice and a history to one of the many faces that stare out of photos of war zones and refugee camps. I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered how refugees get to where they are and what life there means to them. This book told me how for one person.

ishtar

Hurrah, hurrah, it’s that time of year again, for the kitsch-fest that is the Eurovision Song Contest. I have to say I only really got into this some 5 years ago, and have been wondering ever since how I managed to live without before.

The contest is best experienced with a bunch of friends from as many European countries as possible (non-Europeans are allowed wild shifting alliances). I remember clearly the year when I was gunning for Ruslana and her Ukranian wild dancers. The suspense (and serious block-voting) was enough to reduce a normally cool and collected Ukranian friend to reassure me feverishly, ‘The Poles like us, they’ll vote for us!’

This year there are so many countries participating (soon Malaysia will be eligible to join the way Europe’s borders are expanding) that there are two semi-finals. My favourite from the first on Tuesday was Belgium’s Ishtar, with a kooky tune in a language that does not exist, a huge red-and-white puffy and swingy skirt, and a lead singer who was hamming it up to fabulous effect. Sadly they did not get through (why? why?) though Norway did, with a song that was not quite as desperately mediocre as its detractors claim.

Second round of semis tonight, before the grand finale on Saturday night. Don’t call me till after, I’ll be busy!

palestine by joe sacco

Every time I visit the comic book library, there is someone different at the check-out counter. That works well as each person has their own favourites there, so I have been introduced to a host of fantastic books. My last recommendation was Joe Sacco’s ‘Palestine‘, an illustrated collection recounting his two month trip to the area between 1991 and 1992. Sacco travels to various refugee camps and interviews many of its residents, detailing their stories and grieviances in painful detail.

I have to say the book made for uncomfortable reading to start with, with its stark images and severe telling of the Palestinians’ every day lives and troubles, including graphic descriptions of torture and imprisonment by Israelis. At first, I felt overwhelmed by his drawings, similar to reading the news on the latest in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but more confronting. Also, his position as an observing Western outsider made it difficult initially to get a feel for his stance.

Possibly as his own alliances developed, and as he got to know people better, the stories grew more subtle and gentle, making it much easier on the mind to read. In one of the chapters many Palestinian women give their different answers as to why they do or do not wear headscarves. Towards the end of the book, an Israeli woman in the book expresses anger that Sacco presents only one side of the conflict, however this is as good a version as any of that side as you will ever read.

Several of the people Sacco encounters confront him and demand to know what good his reporting and drawing will do. He doesn’t have a good answer for them, and neither do I for you. But I certainly felt I learnt a lot from it, and it continues to play on my mind now, weeks afterwards.

china powerhouse

100 Chinese by Zhang Dali

It was hard enough to avoid China’s sphere of influence even before the kick-off of the Olympic torch relay, and the farce it has become. This both economically with so many products being manufactured there and culturally, with every museum who can hosting its own China exhibition. I’ve been sucked into the buzz myself.

Now the rumblings of protest about China’s poor human rights record have become louder. Jonathon Jones argues in today’s Guardian that such a response is hypocritical in light of how China (and its government) is being courted by many British museums art galleries. I feel the same way but in an economic sense, in our desire for cheap (Chinese manufactured) goods. We seem to pick all of the gain, but leave the distaste of moral outrage for others to deal with.

It’s time to question our cultural rage for China

Isn’t it a bit rich that China, with its human rights record, is being so assiduously courted by so many British museums and galleries?

Jonathon Jones, The Guardian, April 10, 2008

It was meant to be the grand climax to a triumph of cultural diplomacy. The last day of the British Museum’s superb exhibition The First Emperor, made possible by unprecedented loans from China, coincided with the Olympic torch procession through London. The route of the torch went right past the museum, in what was presumably a calculated choice to show off Britain’s cultural relationship with China. From the First Emperor to the Beijing Olympics … let’s celebrate two thousand years of authoritarian government!

I don’t actually think the history of China is exclusively authoritarian – on the contrary – but my one quibble with the British Museum’s Terracotta Army show was that it almost seemed to want to say just that, in some overly sophisticated and disturbingly relativist claim to “understand” the fact that China today is a rapidly developing economy presided over by a brutal, undemocratic regime.

leaping lizards

Just my luck. The year I decide to spend online is a leap year, so 366 posts it has to be, not just 365! I have just been alerted to the fact that I do know one leapling, a person born on the 29th of February, of which there are supposed to be 4 million in the world. This sounded a little on the low side to me but the numbers do check out – it’s clearly just a very exclusive club.

Another, sobering fact I learnt today: 1% of the American polutaion is now in jail according to a new report by the Pew Center, with Russia and China not too far behind. Interestingly, they question if the fall in rate of violent crime really is related to high imprisonment rates, and suggest alternatives may taxpayers more for their money. See here for a commentary.

And finally, a shocking disclosure. Apparently that heavenly Savoie dish tartiflette is not age old at all, and was literally invented in the 1980’s by the Reblochon makers union in a bid to increase sales. I guess it worked… on me. Is there anything else out there I should know?

what is the what?

Last night Mr Snow and I were reunited after our respective travels. Over a long dinner we exchanged news and stories, when suddenly the story of The What came up. I heard about it first last year in conjunction with Dave Egger’s book, ‘What is The What’. He ghost wrote the story of a Lost Boy of Sudan, Valentino Deng, and the story of how that book came into being was in itself an amazing one, which you can read here.

I haven’t read the book yet (none of his at all in fact), but would be keen to hear if any of you have. In the meantime though, what left a huge impression was the story of The What itself. Eggers’s version is below. Have you heard this story before?

..We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last for ever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, “What is the What?”, but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family’s wealth and the giver of life.

It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north – who, legend had it, had received the What – might have got the greatest of God’s gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.