Bryan Fischer

David Pakman (the thinking daddy's crumpet) reports here on an interesting interview with dick-headed, bat-shit insane homophobe whack-job wing-nut scum-bag Bryan Fischer, who is loonier than a shit-house rat, and then some. And some more. I admit it, I harbour a certain antipathy for Bryan. He is Director of Issues Analysis (or something) of the American Family Association, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center a a Hate Group, an organisation whose 'primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization'. Therefore I have no compunction in laying on him the colourful terms deployed in that first sentence. This interview provides a nice insight into a Christian fundy's perception of his own sexuality, and his projection of his fear of this onto the rest of us. As Louis says, the interview could go viral. I'm doing my bit.

Words On the Brain

The lock of my door broke this morning as I was trying to leave the house, so today it’s been necessary several times on the phone to use the word ‘locksmith’. An odd and rather frustrating thing: the word comes to me much more readily in Greek than in English, probably because I have had no truck with locksmiths in this country but had to avail myself of their expensive services several times in Greece. I suppose it’s all to do with context: keys + locks + frustration = looking for a phone number (usually on stickers in the lift) and mentally preparing what I’m going to say in Greek. The Greek word is ‘κλειδαράς’, pronounced, more or less, klidharás, and all morning for a few stuttering seconds it has blocked off the path to wherever the English word resides in my brain.  

There are other Greek words that do this. I have only ever had to ask for an advance on my wages in Greek, and the Greek word for ‘advance/deposit/down payment’ is prokatavolí. It always springs into my mind a second or two before ‘advance’ or ‘deposit’ do. Another curious ‘blocking’ word is periorisménos, meaning ‘restricted’ or ‘limited’. One Sunday afternoon back in the nineties a Greek queen of my acquaintance was indulging in nostalgia for the days when girls were severely limited in their movements by their fathers and brothers, and so boys turned to boys for sex. (I was some fifteen years too late for that.) Picking up a lad back then, he said, was easy as buying twenty Marlboro. The adjective he used to describe the condition of women was ‘periorisménes’, a word I had not heard up to that point, but whose meaning could be worked out from context and morphology. Correctly deducing meaning from contextual clues is a sure-fire way of fixing a word in my mind, but so often it causes this odd blocking of the English words. Whenever I need to use a word belonging in the lexical area of ‘restriction’, periorisménos bounds up wagging its tail and the right word in English is lagging a few paces behind. Same with prodiáthesi, meaning 'predisposition', which I read in a body-building mag in the far-off days when I used weights at a gym. I wish this meant that I was effortlessly fluent in Greek, but it doesn’t, especially after eight years away.

One evening in Athens I was walking home from work, racking my brains to recall the Albanian word for ‘prostitutes’. (I’m sure you do this all the time.) I had worked this one out from context whilst translating an article from Koha Jonë* a few weeks earlier. I kept getting Greek alepoú meaning ‘fox’, then lýkos meaning ‘wolf’, but couldn’t home in on the right word, and this bugged me no end until finally lupësa popped up out of the murk. Obviously! From Latin lupa, ‘she-wolf’, and slang for a lady of the night… hence the foxes... yeah, well, it was getting close. I felt dead sophisticated.

Until I started to write this post. I decided I had better check the meaning, just in case. Lupësa appears in a Google search only three times, each one the same article that I had read in 1995. It is not in my dictionary or in any online translator. I messaged an Albanian Facebook friend and meanwhile looked in my dictionary at alternative spellings. Yep, it’s lypësa, and it means ‘beggars’. Edlira later confirmed this. I’m so glad I was not trying to translate that article for anyone else's eyes, as I’ve been deluding myself for 23 years because of a typo. It occurred to me to hope that the word might still derive from Latin lupus, but no – the root is lyp-, meaning to ask or request, and nothing to do with wolves.

While we are sort of on the subject of wolves, bet you didn’t know that the English verb ‘look’ derives from the Greek for wolf. A colleague in Greece solemnly declared this to me. In Homer, she said, lýkofos means ‘wolf-light’, i.e., twilight, and you can’t deny that lyk- looks a bit like ‘look’, and you need light to look at stuff, and anyway, it’s in Homer, so QED. Thus a really chauvinistic Greek filológos – and there’s no shortage - can derive every word in every one of the world’s languages by trawling Homer for a syllable or two, and a little semantic lassoing. If I had had five thousand drachmas for every time I heard ‘Greek is the basis of all languages’, I’d have been dead of cirrhosis years ago.  

Actually, English is the basis of all the world’s languages, and I shall use the popular Greek method of etymology to demonstrate this. One illustration will serve to prove me absolutely, incontrovertibly right. The Chinese word for person is ren. It is written thus: 人 - a rather silly picture of a thing with two legs invented by people who’ve never learned to read like Christians. The word is quite plainly derived from the English ‘wren’, which, like a person, is bipedal. The Chinese failed to understand that the word refers to a bird and not a man because they are foreigners and we aren’t, and this is why the word means so much less in Chinese than it does in English.

Gus Portokalos is not much of an exaggeration.     

*****

*Koha Jonë ('Our Time') Albanian newspaper.

Most Reassuring

Close, but I'm afraid I can't give it to you.

Here is an online tool that analyses your blog and tells you who it thinks you are. Of me it says: 'giaklamata.blogspot.com writes like an old lady. Her style is personal and happy.' It reckons I'm between 66 and 100 years old.

I reckon it has the reading skills of a teenage air-head.

*****

Typalyser is more successful. Spot on, in fact. Give it a go. 

Not So Good Friday

Here we see the procession of the Epitaphios, which takes place around nine o' clock in the evening of Good Friday in every district of every town in Greece. It's a solemn funeral procession with candles and chanting, creating a heavy, sombre atmosphere as it passes below your balcony in a cloud of frankincense. Even if Christianity ordinarily leaves you as cold as it leaves me, it is impossible not to get caught up in the ever-darkening mood of Holy Week, a mood that will be shattered at midnight on Easter Saturday by rockets and fire-crackers and the proclamation that Christ is risen. It's a great piece of stage management.

I went up to Marks and Sparks a couple of hours ago. The pedestrianised High Street was busy, even for market day, so summat was obviously up. There began a solemn drumbeat of the kind that in old movies accompanies the condemned to the gallows or the guillotine, and the crowd parted to allow the passage of a procession. I looked around for a flower-bedecked glass coffin borne aloft on a bier, and a parade of musicians and bearers of tall candles. Silly of me. There were just four blokes: the drummer, two more without drums, and Jesus. Jesus was identifiable because He had His cross to bear, but it wasn't very big and unlike the ones the Romans were supposed to have used, this was a handy Wheely-Cross. ('Why schlepp!?!?') Also, He was bare-chested and had wobbly red and blue lines painted on his back. The four of them trudged along the street through the channel created by the parting of the crowd. I got up a bit closer. Jesus was about fifty-five and had round shoulders and love handles. He'd removed his shirt but hadn't gone for a loin cloth - it was snowing lightly, after all, and he probably had a wobbly bum. In defiance of all conventional representations of the Saviour, this Jesus wore grey slacks and Hush Puppies. I have no idea what the two non-drum carriers were there for, except not to carry drums.

It might have been a clever attempt at Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, as the spectacle was entirely successful in not creating awe, compassion, gratitude or any sense whatever of emotional involvement. Then again it might fuck as like. It was just a bit more style-less Brit-frump, of a piece with the awful, clod-hopping Morris dancing we'll have inflicted on us on the same street later in the year. The Greeks do it so much better.

***** 
 
Before any Greek readers feel too superior, on the occasions when we get kiddie brass bands here, those kids can play. I cannot abide brass bands, but I can appreciate technical skill. A friend and I were sitting on the sea front in Kalamata one evening where a local youth band, smartly uniformed, were giving us their repertoire. They were being applauded and cheered to the echo by everyone around us, but they sounded like sick cattle. We sank our beers and moved out of earshot.           

Listening to IELTS, etc.

Excellent advice there from the Briddish Kyncel. Far better than 'I think they should just dive in without having a clue.'

I spent the morning invigilating tests. There is a species of test known as IELTS, and overseas learners are required to do it if they want to study over here. My Art and Design kids were doing some IELTS practice tests as part of the assessment for the course they have been pretty much ignoring for the last three months.

IELTS listening practice tests are read from stilted scripts by lousy actors who employ a variety of bizarre accents. These include quasi-Oz, almost Irish, and all-purpose foreigner. Thees latter eez achieved by lengtheneeng the /I/ vowel een every word where eet occurs. In today’s test we had to listen to Bruce and Drusilla (Quasi Aussies) maunder on about organising a charity run. While the kids attempted to fill in gapped sentences and charts with information from Brucie and Dru’s brain-curdling colloquy, I sat wincing at the inability of the writer and performers to produce anything that sounded like real human communication. They used full forms of all auxiliary verbs: ‘is not’ ‘do not’ and so on. They never interrupted one another, spoke simultaneously, completed one another’s utterances, made false starts or left thoughts unfinished, but instead used well-edited, flat footed prose all the way through. At one point Dru tells Brucie what all the prizes and consolation prizes are, just so the students can tick these off on a list. There can have been no other reason. Bruce is, when all’s said and done, the bloody organiser, so presumably he knows already.

Now I happen to know a thing or two from direct personal experience about the publisher of this material, and I know that the writers and editors are just a tad on the naïf side when it comes to language analysis. They haven’t really noticed the features of spoken discourse I mentioned above, but they are obviously nagged by the feeling that their scripts need to be a teeny bit less tidy now and then. So, I imagine they sat down with their thinking caps on and said ‘guys, what happens when people talk? They often misunderstand one another, that’s what!’  This insight led them to produce scripts not dissimilar to the following:

You will hear a group of students with funny accents discussing an assignment. Listen, and answer questions seven to twelve, if you possibly can.

BRUCE: Sow, hwin we finish the assarnmunt, we complete the rid form and hand it in at the disc? Thit’s what Dr Klutz sid, raht?

ARAMINTA: No, no, he said we ave to complete the peenk form. The red form eez only eef you ave an extension. Then you must geev eet directly to Dr Pecker. Or was eet Dr Meenge?

SASKIA: Ay, golly, I thought Professor Bonestroker said the yellow form was sort of for if you had an extension! Gosh, I'm rarely, rarely confused!

BRUCE: Nigh, thit was laaahst year. Thy chynged it in Oktauber. This year’s the rid form, and if you use the pink one you get capped at 50%

ARAMINTA: 50%? I thought eet was 55!

SASKIA: Ay, cripes! And here’s me thinking it was the yellow form all along! Or is it? Goodness, I'm like say confused!

1. The essays of students who submit a yellow form:

A. Might be capped at 55%
B. Could be capped at 50%
C: Will probably not be capped.
D: Might or might not be capped.

And so on. By now students and tutors forced to prepare them to listen to this sort of verbal train-wreck have temporarily lost the will to live. I mean, if you were part of this group of students, you would hold up a hand and shout ‘CUT! Let’s go to the office and get this from the horse’s mouth’. And if you weren’t part of the group (and as a listener to a CD, you obviously are not) the exchange would be of no conceivable interest to you. Yet here you are, being forced to try to engage with this needlessly complicated twaddle just so you can study computing at Sheffield Hallam.     

More on IELTS here and here . Also here. Here as well. You might get the impression of a certain cynicism on my part.

   

*****

A colleague told me at lunchtime that a student had come to her to say he would not be attending the afternoon lesson. Non-attendance is much frowned upon and students are required to provide proof that they were legitimately absent: doctor’s note, undertaker’s bill, that sort of thing.

‘I go boast offers, giffing fenger brent.’ Aladdin said. (It’s a real name)

‘You’re going to the post-office to give finger prints?’ Alison asked. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Because many women.’ he explained.

Setting aside the bizarreness of his mission – it really does sound like something you’d do in a dream - Alison wanted to know why he couldn’t go to the post office at three o’ clock after the lesson. He had to ‘go his house’ first and get something, he said. We speculated that he might have left his fingers at home.

Any explanation as to why one might need to go to the post office with finger prints, because of many women? Answers on a post card, please.        

*****

‘Iconic’. What a bloody irritating word it’s become. The brightly yapping announcer on BBC 4 TV news managed to shove it in five times in the space of half an hour yesterday evening, almost causing me to choke on my sherry. ‘Well known’ would have done for all five occasions.

*****

The stress-trashing human announcers are all but gone from British railway stations nowadays, but the new robot announcers are still programmed by people with two linguistic left feet. At Leicester station every five minutes a female voice warns us:

‘Smoking is not permitted anywhere on our station. However, please keep your luggage with you at all times.’

What a weird non-sequitur. I think I’d prefer:

‘Smoking is not permitted anywhere on our station. So there.’

At least it’d be of a piece with that proprietorial use of the possessive adjective before ‘station’.           

Breaking News

Did you know there's a new Pope? It's just been on the telly. According to the BBC reporters, who've really got their fingers on the pulse, he's a man of 'great humility, deep spirituality', and stuff like that. He once washed the feet of AIDS patients, so it all goes to show, doesn't it? That was probably a good deal more pleasant than changing as many babies' nappies, but he's a priest and very pure, so foot washing's really impressive when you think about it, given his standing, and he's a bloke and all. He paid his own hotel bill after the conclave was disconclaved, then he carried his own luggage! In his own hands! So to borrow a phrase from the great Tony Blair, he's definitely the People's Pope. You lot are just cynical buggers.

Ratso departs in a flurry of petticoats. 'What, this old thing? Had it years, luvvie,
just threw it on cos the best frock's in the wash.'

 

 

More Cheap Chow

Chicken with cannellini beans

The blogger spell checker doesn't like 'cannellini' and proposes, inter alia, 'cunnilingus' instead. A chacun son goût. Some crude joke about cunnilingus beans might be possible, but I'm not going there.

Anyway, this dish is lovely stuff, nearly as easy as beans on toast and muck cheap. You'll need chicken thighs or breasts with the skin on, some cannellini beans and some sliced red pepper for the body of the dish, and rosemary, thyme, garlic, chili flakes, grated lemon zest, white wine, olive oil and salt to goose it up. Despite its simplicity and economy, you could serve it to guests and they'd still feel cared for, mainly because it's so tasty but partly because it promotes vigorous peristalsis. All those beans will eliminate the need for the chronically costive to stay home periodically and purge. Pepys would have raved over it.

Yesterday, all day bound and with little wind, yet I made shift to endure it and did go abroad. At noon to my Lord Suola’s, and there a poor man's dish of beans sod in wine and a brace of capons. We had nothing but only this, which being stewed with sweet aromas was a pretty enough dish, but Lord, methought, so sorry a dinner, for my Lord Suola keeps a lean table and inveighs against venison pasties, neat’s tongues, muttons and salmagundis for the stopping of the bowels, and this I thought a strange thing; and not a handsome woman in sight, which was another. Then today, from the eating of beans, a marvellous great freedom of wind, and an easy and plentiful passing of goodly stool, neither watery nor barbed: and this without physic or clyster, for which I thank God and My Lord Suola’s dish of beans.    

If you want to feel virtuously frugal, you could buy your cannellini beans dry from a health food cooperative, soak them overnight, then boil the bloody things forever, but I find canned cannellinis save on time, fuel and flatulence. Just rinse the gunk off your beans and tip them into an oven dish. Sprinkle over them your chopped fresh rosemary and thyme, chopped garlic, lemon zest and a scattering of chilli flakes. Throw in your red pepper. I used peppers from a jar last time I cooked this, but next time I'm going to use one I charred and scraped myself, to see how well the smoky flavour complements the whole thing. If it turns out tasting as if it had been cooked in an ash tray, I'll let you know. A bit of free advertising here: the only jarred red peppers I can eat are the ones from the Spanish company Fragata. I find everybody else's too soft and slimy, and I hate slithery-textured food. Fragata peppers retain a just a little bit of resistance. Where were we? Oh yeah, add a slug each of olive oil and white wine, some salt to taste and give the mixture a damn good toss. Last time I added a little concentrated chicken stock, but I reckon it'd be perfectly good without it.

Heat the oven to 200-ish, and place your chicken, anointed with oil and sprinkled with salt, on top of the beans. Cook for about 40 minutes, stirring up the beans at about the half-way mark.  It occurred to me that these garlicky, chilied and rosemaried cunnilingus beans would go well with sausages, or be perfectly acceptable as a vegetarian meal. Eat with a green salad and some good bread. We can actually get bloody good bread where I live nowadays. Anywhere else in England - good luck.

Grace to You

I frequently get into discussions online with earnest US Jesus people who want to save my soul. They just know (without my telling them) that I live entirely selfishly and consider myself accountable to nobody, and that this must cease. They have an invisible friend who tells them exactly what to do, and that is true freedom. American readers will have to forgive me, but it does seem that over there, they tend to go for the wholehearted espousal and vigorous defense of crackpot religious ideas far more than we do here. I mean, we do have Stephen Green, founder and, as far as I know, only member of Christian Voice, but he is pretty much the only completely home-grown nutter I can think of off the top of my head, apart from that bishop a bit back who told us that evil spirits entered the body via the ring-piece during man-on-man bum sex.

Why do I bother, you may ask. Well, these are often kind people whose concern is genuine. Also, their contributions are most instructive, furnishing as they do copious examples of every logical fallacy known to philosophy, along with demonstrations of selective inattention and often hilarious ignorance. Attempting to find a way into their minds, formulating an approach they cannot misinterpret, is a good exercise for a teacher, or anyone else who doesn't have a life.

What most drives me nuts is the stultifying literalism of the people I'm talking to. Ironic, isn't it, what this literal-mindedness forces you to do? You have to insist that myth (the creation, the fall, the redemption) is physical, historical fact, and that physical, historical fact (evolution through natural selection) is not even myth, but lies. You have to believe that a bunch of fervent, half-educated bible-bewitched amateurs from God-Box Ministries Inc. of Ballsack Falls, Shitsplat County, Texas have the truth ('We decided God done it all, and when we looked at the evidence, we found we were right!') while all those very smart people working so hard in the evolutionary biology departments of the world's top universities are labouring under a massive delusion. Then you call them arrogant. And you want your version of how we got here taught in schools, God help us, that you might raise a generation of scientific illiterates for Jesus.

An earnest but somewhat uncomplicated young man called Brandon asks me questions he thinks are going to stump me, such as: 'So tell me, if we came from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?' and 'what good has evolution ever done for the world?' In his overture to me, he told me that he too had once been a skeptic, but was now showered in the blood of the lamb and saved. Praise Jesus! This is a common ploy: 'I used to think like you, but then the evidence convinced me Jesus is real.' I told him he did not sound like a former skeptic, since he did not appear to understand, let alone to have entertained, any arguments against his position. I told him he sounded more like someone who'd been home-schooled, which he then admitted was the case. Congratulations, Mom and Dad. You've produced a goodthinkful little godbot who is completely unable to think outside of his immediate context.

'Everyone sinned and died. I deserve to go to hell for the wrong things I've done....I've done a lot.' He's twenty-one. His parents must have persuaded him he deserves hell simply for childhood misdemeanours. That, or it's just late adolescent self-dramatising.

'But, since I realized that Jesus died for me, to save me....I don't go to Hell. He came to save you, He came to save me. He died, so we could have the CHOICE of what we believe. He wants you to believe in Him and have a relationship with Him so you don't end up in Hell. But, He gave you the choice to believe what you want, just like a parent loves their kid and gives them a choice. It's your move. He hopes you'll make the right choice.'

I asked him how an omniscient Super-being has any need for hope, since he knows my choices before I make them, but he hadn't a clue what I meant. I might as well have asked if he thought that the inconsistencies encountered in religious imageries might be brought into harmony via a sapiential esotericism that would bring those dissonances back to the harmony of the substance.

Does not the story of Adam and Eve resonate with us because we all know that living inevitably involves a loss of innocence, that merely existing causes us to hurt others, and for many of us there's a sense of exile, and a sense of having fallen away from a better self in a better place? It has the emotional impact of a dream. Dreams often have a powerful effect on us, even if the details are absurd from the point of view of the waking self. Insist Adam and Eve were historical figures and that it all happened in physical reality, and you strip the tale of all its reverberations, making it merely silly. Did Adam have balls when God first made him? If so, what were they for, since Eve appears to have been an afterthought? Why did God plonk that sodding tree in the middle of the garden with two such innocents about? It was like leaving exposed wiring in a nursery. How, if they were innocent of good and evil on eating the fruit, can they reasonably be blamed for having done so? And so on.

After a few exchanges with people of Brandon's stripe, I need to hear music that will restore a sense of the mysterious, of the barely perceived, of a far-away mind that knows me but whose voice is obscured by the noise of this world, especially that kicked up by imaginationless Evangelical God-botherers. This is one such piece, 'Grace to You' by Jan Gilbert, from the album Sound in Spirit by Chanticleer. The words are verses four to six of the first chapter of Revelations.

4 ἰωάννης ταῖς ἑπτὰ ἐκκλησίαις ταῖς ἐν τῇ ἀσίᾳ· χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος, καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἑπτὰ πνευμάτων ἃ ἐνώπιον τοῦ θρόνου αὐτοῦ,

5 καὶ ἀπὸ ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ, ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός, ὁ πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν καὶ ὁ ἄρχων τῶν βασιλέων τῆς γῆς. τῶ ἀγαπῶντι ἡμᾶς καὶ λύσαντι ἡμᾶς ἐκ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν ἐν τῶ αἵματι αὐτοῦ _

6 καὶ ἐποίησεν ἡμᾶς βασιλείαν, ἱερεῖς τῶ θεῶ καὶ πατρὶ αὐτοῦ _ αὐτῶ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας [τῶν αἰώνων]· ἀμήν.

4 John to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne;

5 And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,

6 And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

*****

This morning I received from Amazon my copy of Writing the Icon of the Heart by Maggie Ross. I am going to start reading it on the train tomorrow. She quotes this poem by R.S. Thomas.

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God. This is the deep 

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

we launch the armada of 

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our

own fathoms. What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

So shut the fuck up. 

*****

Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church explains why there's oil under the ground.  

Arts and Farces

When I learned last September that we'd be offering a foundation course in English for Art and Design, I thought, cool; we'll have a class of lively, enthusiastic and creative young people, athirst to express their passion for art in English. They'll be dying to do presentations. They'll learn a lot from us, and we from them. I was not scheduled to teach them until January, and had October to December with a Foundation in Business English group. They were only eighteen years old and could be very hard to motivate, but they were paragons of dedication and diligence in comparison with the Art and Design students.

'Students' was not the noun most often used by their teachers to designate these kids; a selection of shorter Anglo-Saxon terms was usually deemed more appropriate. With one exception, they were a bunch of sullen little princes and princesses who would roll up fifty minutes late, sit in lessons sulking and playing with their smart phones, respond to teachers' prompts with silence or monosyllables, and frequently disappear after lunch. The teacher who had to teach them most often was crossing off the days until he could finally get the hell out. Of course they were rebuked and threatened, and their Xmas test marked most severely, and I hoped that by the time it fell to me to teach them, socks might have been pulled up and places in the scheme of things understood and accepted.

The students are from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I have them for four hours on Wednesdays. Last week it only took twenty minutes to get four out of six kids present. Joanne asks if she can leave early, as she has a portfolio to prepare for an interview. I say no, and so she goes into a sulk which she will nurse and nurture for the rest of the day. I announce that we shall be considering the illusion of depth, and launch into my powerpoint presentation, which I refuse to deliver as a lecture: it's going to be interactive if I have to resort to the rack and the screw.

I have loads of vocabulary and loads of paintings and drawings. The vocabulary is chosen to help the little fuc... sorry, students to respond emotionally to the paintings and to describe the artists' use of perspective. You would think, wouldn't you, that anyone who has made the decision to study art and design over here would a) be passionate about art and b) see the necessity for expressing that passion in English, at least some of the time? But no. They have no passion, no fears, no horror, no compassion, no wonder. They dutifully take down the vocabulary, even ask me to re-explain some of it, but they have no reaction to any of the painting beyond monosyllables to describe some obvious, overall feature: 'dark' 'space' 'clouds'. These kids are pretty fluent most of the time, except on the matters that most should occupy them.    

My last slide, ladies and gentlemen, is a mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps you know of it?

'Jesus's Last Meal,' Kevin says.

Yup. Steak, french frarze, onion rings and a pint o' mint chocolate chip arse-cream, 'fore they done fried His ass. 'Last Meal' don't mean shit up heey in dis bitch, muddafucka. 'The Last Supper' is what we call it - it sets up quite different vibrations.

They didn't know anything about the story of the last supper and the impending betrayal and crucifixion, but then again, why should they? They're from the other side of the earth, where they have myths of their own. I filled them in on a few details. Then after two hours filling their heads with vocabulary about one-point perspective, horizon lines, vanishing points, isometric and atmospheric perspective, I said 'tell me about this picture.' 

'Jesus's face is the vanishing point.' Kevin drones.

Hallelujah! A reaction.

'Yes!' Well spotted, that boy, 'Why is his face the vanishing point?'

'Cuz it's in the middle.'

A new group of Algerian pilots and technicians arrived last week. Pretty low language level. In one lesson we were discussing leisure pursuits. 'I like riding whores', one told me. He didn't mean ladies of the evening, but gee-gees.
 

Loony Module II

I spent three days at home a couple of weeks ago marking essays produced by Chinese MA students on my inter-cultural communication module. Marking these things one after the other is a mind-numbing business but there was a deadline to meet, and I wanted to get them all out of the way as soon as possible and sent off to the other tutor whose privilege it is to double mark them.

'When people who have the first time face to face the person who is not the same as me we might naturally classify he is different.'

Er, yeah, OK, go on...

'Cultural generational might avoid the stereotype by preponderance of belief culture'

Got to read that bit again...

' ...might avoid the stereotype by preponderance of belief culture are generated by human then we believe the culture perform and present our mind then it is from like that way and the more people have similar perceive.'

After marking five or so, your mind starts to wander, the gaze starts to slip down the page; there is seeing but no registering of meaning. Then you realise you have just spent five minutes staring at the margin, without a thought in your head.  

In fact, Culture is a kind of common phenomenon on the surface of the earth. For example, to western culture, the doctrine of Christianity, Copernicus's astronomy and Newtonian mechanics is a culture; 

I suppose so.

Women beam waist, fire burning Joan of Arc and abuse Galileo, is also a culture. Birds of the air, the fish in the water do not have these results. 

Jolly good thing too, I reckon. 

I'm comfortable with the way I handled that first module - pleased with myself, actually. Module no. two was intended to centre around improving the students' linguistic performance in business contexts; meetings, negotiations, memos, presentations and what-not. Language development was what I understood to be the main focus – I mean, look at that bloody essay - and this was why I had been asked to teach it. So judge, dear reader, of my horror when I found in session one that we had been joined by what I took to be two highly articulate native speakers of English. Hell, damn and shite, I thought, these two don't need anything I can offer them, nor can I offer them what they need. They don't need language for negotiations, but actual input on negotiating tactics, and if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a tactician. I’m way too innocent.  

EFL teachers have to teach English for all sorts of special purposes: I've done academic English, law, art and design, tourism and marketing, and others I know have done aviation, banking and medicine. Back in more innocent days, older teachers used to tell gibbering rookies 'oh gracious me no, bless you, you don't need to know the subject, the students are the experts on that. You just teach the language for the subject.' I didn't really believe that then, and I believe it even less now. You do have to know the subject pretty well, and if you are teaching an MA module, you'd better be an expert.

There was no point imagining that I could become an expert in inter-cultural negotiation tactics merely by boning up with a few library books in the evenings. I’d have to actually take part in a number of such negotiations, probably over a number of years. I wouldn’t be ready to teach this module for a decade. I started to get paranoid: who allowed native speakers onto a module intended to help non-natives with their language, and why? What does it do for the reputation of the university and of the MA to have someone teaching by the seat of his pants? And what does it do to me, fearing exposure as a fraud in every session? 

It did my fucking head in, is the answer. Just as an infuriating process called svchost.exe frequently sends the CPU usage screaming up to 100% and paralyses my laptop, the fear of failure dominated my thoughts to the exclusion of every other consideration and I felt nothing but anxiety, simmering and occasionally boiling over, for a week.

I went to see the lovely Professor Jiaying Wang, who’s in charge of the MA. She pointed out that the two people who were worrying me were nowhere near as clued up as I feared, that I was not required to teach business content but inter-cultural communication, and having a native speaker on the course along with the non-natives was therefore a good opportunity for all concerned. 

‘The students really like you!’ she said. ‘They appreciate your sense of humour and all the work you put in and how clear you make everything for them. The only reason I’m not trying to persuade you to go on is that I can see it’s stressing you out and I know how bad that feels.’ 

Bless you for that, Jiaying, I'll never forget it. Pity I can't use your real name here.

We agreed I would do one more session while she found a replacement for me. So feeling like a prisoner on a tumbrel being transported to Tyburn rather than a commuter on the Birmingham New Street train, I went in and did it. And it was fine. Nimit the Native Speaker was indeed as clueless about intercultural communication as Jiaying had said, and the other ‘native speaker’ Carla, was in fact Colombian and married to an Englishman, and she very much appreciated some of the vocabulary work we did.

I told the group at the end of the session that I was withdrawing from the module.

‘Oh, that’s a pity!’ Carla said.

‘You don’t teach us again?’ Rui asked.

‘No’

‘But we love you!’ she said.

I was pressed for an explanation, and mumbled some crap about needing to reduce my hours a bit for health reasons, and felt rather pathetic saying it.

‘But why is it our hours you have to reduce?’ Meixiu asked. ‘Who’s gonna teach us?’

‘Probably Professor Wang.’       

Consternation! No doubt Jiaying cracks the whip more than I do, and they won't be able to crack in-jokes in Chinese. They probably like me because they think I’m a soft touch, I thought. (Because of course, no other reason is possible.)

By the time I got home I felt completely different about the whole thing, and pretty bloody stupid. Why had I got it into my head that I needed to deliver anything other than discourse analysis and language input, as agreed? Why hadn’t I seen immediately that Nimit was clueless about both, and was going to need to learn language grading and more subtle ways of reading reactions and interpreting utterances when dealing with Chinese people? I e-mailed Jiaying to say I now felt I could hack it, but she replied that she had found someone to replace me, various inter-departmental favours had been granted, and it would all be too complicated to ungrant them.

I now think that the anxiety attack simply coincided with the first day of the module, and my mind latched onto the presence of Nimit and Carla as justification for the purely endogenous fear. The worry did not subside when I knew I was off the module, but fizzed and bubbled on for several days. There’s still the occasional pang – even writing this piece made my stomach roll as I relived how I felt a couple of weeks ago. 'Don't get so stressed,' Jiaying said in her e-mail. 'Life's not about work.' Trouble is, there's not much else in mine these days. 

It’s only been in the last two years that I’ve had these paranoid periods. I used to get just peaceably depressed, not screamingly neurotic, and if I had to choose, I’d stick with the former state. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do about it?        

Omelette with Croutons

Because I live for the evening when I can open a bottle of wine and start to cook dinner, I get through rather a lot of money. Money is in short supply these days and so I’ve economised, sort of, by buying cheaper wine. Some of the basic reds from Mark and Sparks or Tesco are not that bad when swigged pretty cold and accompanied by hearty winter food, but tonight, sod it, I’m having something with a bit more character and eating cheap instead. Before we get onto the topic of food, though, let me counsel against buying Waitrose own ‘Italian Red: Rich and Intense’, unless you’re really desperate. ‘Red’ is the only honestly applied adjective on the label. It tastes like flat Cream Soda.

These days I need food to be economical, but also colourful, nutritious and above all, not boring. Omelettes are an excellent solution if you want to eat cheaply but not feel short-changed, and the one I’m going to make this evening could hardly be more frugal; you need three eggs, a slice of bread, and a handful of chopped spring onions.      

I’m not sure where I found the original recipe: might have been Elizabeth Jane Howard and Fay Maschler. I remember they called for parmesan to be grated over the omelette just before serving. I’ll be skipping that bit. The only parmesan I have easy access to at the moment is that repellent stuff that comes ready-grated, looking like soap powder and making food taste like it’s coming back the other way. I have a horror of it. We often ordered ‘Italian’ take-away for lunch when I worked in Athens, and a little drum of this evil stuff would come with each portion of pasta. I always gave mine to a colleague who actually liked it. Tipping two measures of the vile dandruff over his spaghetti he’d inhale and pronounce connoisseurially: ‘Ααα, σαν παπούτσι μαραθωνοδρόμου!’ Like a marathon runner's shoe! The office would reek of pre-bathtime infant and I’d have to go and eat my lunch in the library.    

Well, now that we are thoroughly in the mood, here’s what you do. Cut the bread, wholemeal for preference, into cubes, chop the spring onions, green part included, beat the eggs and add a pinch of salt. Fry the bread in garlicky olive oil until crisp, then drain it on kitchen paper. Add more oil to the pan and chuck in your spring onions, whizzing them briefly around until there’s a nice savoury aroma. Finally, add the beaten egg. Just before the omelette sets, scatter your croutons on top, fold it over and slide it onto your plate. That’s it. 

Preceded by a bit of pâté, a few olives, some roasted red peppers dressed with olive oil and basil, and accompanied by a green salad, I think this omelette would be good enough to serve to guests. I wish it had occurred to me to cook it at my mother’s the week after Christmas when everyone was getting fed up of the sight of food. 

Suggestions Welcome

I haven’t written anything for a month and so the blog stats are way down. I’m still alive, though. I’ve had a few weeks of the panic and anxiety that afflicted me 18 months or so ago, and it’s been hard to concentrate on work, let alone blogging. What I took to be the cause of the anxiety has been removed from my life. The anxiety, however, has not. It’s a free-floating thing, and my brain’s always on the look-out for something to blame for it. It's all terribly tedious. I hope to get back to writing some time soon, but for the time being I have nothing to say, and what I have attempted to write in the last three weeks has ended up in the recycle bin because it was so flat-footed and not worth anybody’s time. Any suggestions for subject matter gratefully received and at least considered.  

'Tis the Season to be Sorry

I've deleted and then reinstated this post three times, on the grounds first that other people's dreams are not usually terribly interesting, and then, well, isn't it amazing how the subconscious suddenly appears to step in and say, 'right, come along, let's stop this nonsense, get a grip, what?' as if it were independent of the waking self. Anyway, see what you think.
 
The so-called festive season has frequently seemed to me to be anything but, not because of anything other people do, but because it's often around now that I get one of my approximately biannual mental arse-holings from one part of my brain against another. In the past these have taken the form of agonies of guilt over things said or unsaid, thought or not thought, done or not done, and I'd be the flagellant at the party and the rue in the Bristol Cream, even if nobody else knew about it. Lately the old depression mill seems to have let up on the guilt trips, and it does anxiety instead. I spent most of the past week struggling to suppress the - what? realisation? insight? - that everyone around me was as vulnerable as a soap bubble, and death could strike any one of us at any time. This is hardly an original thought, yet it seemed to me last week a grim truth newly stumbled on, something only I could see. Which all goes to show how these visiting demons skew the understanding and need to be ignored.      

The subconscious did me a favour last night. I'd been lying awake worrying about growing old - as if worrying might prevent that happening, for Christ's sake. Then I dreamed I was standing in a dimly-lit room in front of a tall mirror, slightly above and angled toward me. My reflection in it was huge and hideous. I moved this way and that, trying to find a more flattering angle, but each image was more repulsive than the last. I wrote it up in my dream diary this morning, and thought about an interpretation. 'This is easy for once. I'm below the image, which is hideous and magnified, i.e., greatly exaggerated. I'm dominated by my own monstrous projections.' So 'bloody well cut it out' is the message. The dream ended the gloom, and waking up from it was, well, really waking up.

Happy New Year.

*****

Odd dream from September. In a bright, modern building where I sometimes teach, I'm playing with a toy cemetery. There are little wooden graves with little wooden head stones, and little wooden coffins that fit in them. There are corpses that are like the little black stick-figures that designate male and female toilets, and these click neatly into the coffins. It's making light of death, it seems to me, reducing its trappings, which normally I find so repellent, to snappy little toys that are as pleasing to handle as wooden dominoes or Cuisenaire rods. WTF?

Fabulosa, fabulosa, fabulosa

I read last week about a new Gay Bible. They obviously don't realise it's already been done, and better. Varda, I bring you bona tidings of dowry joy.

Herd-homies varda'd flocks by night,

All seated on the ground,

The angel of the Dutchess trolled,

And Gloria sparkled round.

Bencoves and heartfaces, for the quarter Sunday in Advent, our text is from the first chapter of the Gospel of Matilda, verses 18 to 25, from yer actual Polari Bible - mince over there in a bit and have a varda. Meanwhile, let us put aside for a bijou mo the swiftly-trolling fakements of this world (the gildy clobber, the prezzies, the bevvy and the bona manjarries to come) and get us sat for a serious cackle. We varda here that Gloria Her Absolute Very Self Herself swep' into the world, becoming carnish like other homies, only better: never cottaged, never had the trade round, never took it up the chocolate starfish or even had a J. Arthur so far as we know from the Bona Glossy. She jarried with the landladies and tax-collectresses, and trolled all over, healing the nanti varda and the nanti wallop, and casting out the wicked fairies. Then - and here is the Fantabulosa Gossip - she snuffed it for all the  kertervers* of homie-kind, however manky, and on the third journo, rose from the stiff. Well, after all that, natch, She’s absolutely in bits, bless Her - three to be exact: The Auntie, The Homie Charver and The Fantabulosa Fairy. We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, cos all this is part of the Holy Cackle Fart story, but this way you get a through picture and can see it all makes perfect sense.   

(*Rom 6:23 - 'For the parkering ninty of kertever is death' - but not necessarily!) 

The Gossip of Matilda

18 Now the birth of Josie Crystal was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Josephine, before they trolled together, she was found up the duff of the Fantabulosa Fairy. 
19 Then Josephine her homie affair, being a just homie, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. 
20 But while she thought on these fakements, varda, the fairy of the Duchess appeared unto her in a dream, cackling, Josephine, thou homie chavvie of Davina, fear not to lell unto thee Mary thy palone affair: for that which is conceived in her is of the Fantabulosa Fairy. 
21 And she shall bring forth a homie chavvie, and thou shalt screech his name Josie: for she shall save his homies and palones from their kertervers. 




22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was cackled of the Duchess by the prophet, cackling, 
23 varda, a nanti charver shall be up the duff, and shall bring forth a homie chavvie, and they shall screech his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, Gloria with us. 
24 Then Josephine being raised from letty did as the fairy of the Duchess had bidden her, and lelled unto her his palone affair: 
25 And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn homie chavvie: and she screeched his name Josie. 

OK, now let's remember the prezzies, the bevvy and bona manjarries (the mustard-infused artichoke hearts in Riesling, the traditional hot-smoked organic Cornish Pasties, the limited-edition kimchee Pringles) and how much the Homie Chavvy, Sparkle of the World, sets you back every bloody December.

You might like to troll over here and have a varda, an all. 

*****

Why the Sandy Hook Massacre was OK Really

William Lane Craig Ph.D explains it all for you: the massacre of children and the wrecked lives of their parents combine to bring home to us the true meaning of Christmas. Warning: computer keyboards react badly to vomit, as do screens to fists.

Well said, Dave mate.

Hugh Grant was termed a 'pain in the ass' by an American talk-show host. 'Dave', commenting on the Yahoo News article, says:

'Brits hate our actors being pre-maddona's.'

Grant must be looking into the possibility of gender reassignment.



Raga Khamaj

Ravi Shankar (R.I.P.) and his daughter Anoushka perform Raga Khamaj.

The Night Shift

Thirty-odd years ago, my dad arrived at work in the early morning and was surprised to see the boss's chauffeur there. He had been in London and was not expected back until much later in the day. When in London, the driver stayed at a flat in St John’s Wood, and on that morning he had frantically slung his gear together, bolted from the flat, and gone high-tailing it back up the M1 in the small hours. This was because he had awoken to find a malevolent being glowering down at him, and his body flattened against the bed as if by centrifugal force. 

Many years later I found that this experience is called sleep paralysis, and it is not uncommon. It happened to me on Wednesday last, and I do hope it won't happen again. I woke to find that I was sandwiched between two bodies, indeed attached to them as though we were conjoined triplets. The one behind of course I couldn’t see, but the one in front was clearly Linda Blair from The Exorcist, in full demon make-up. I was struggling mightily but vainly to push the two bodies away, and hollering ‘insanity, insanity!’ as my panic level rose. (Odd choice of vocabulary, that: no idea what prompted it) Eventually my slamming heart beat must have brought me to full consciousness. The experience cannot have lasted more than thirty seconds, if that, but it was a fucking long thirty seconds. When I first understood that the chauffeur's experience required no supernatural explanation, I remember feeling disappointed. In the early hours of last Wednesday morning, however, I was bloody glad I’d heard of sleep paralysis, and was able to turn over and nod off again instead of leaping out of bed and abandoning the flat.  

A respondent in the Guardian article I linked to above often experiences multiple episodes of sleep paralysis a night. Not all of them are unpleasant - occasionally, he says, there's a sexual element - but it all sounds rather trying:
 

Common images are bearded, goblin-like demons laughing or whispering sinister speech, a faceless girl (usually covering her face with hair, moving around in bed moaning and feeling my body), hands appearing from the wall and attempting to strangle me. A hung man talking in the corner of the room, and some of the most bizarre experiences may include up to a dozen 'critter' entities (think Gremlins movie) laughing and talking about me.

I'm not sure whether he means a hanged man talking in the corner of the room, or whether that was one of the sexual episodes.

*****

I note all my dreams but can rarely make sense of them. Every so often, as a special treat and a change from the banal stuff involving standing in front of a group of students with no idea why I’m there, there’s a Big Dream, one of those that you feel has been sent down from the Top Floor to keep you guessing. My biggest Big Dream I dreamed in the early nineties in Athens. It was extraordinarily intense and focused, in a manner entirely unlike waking life.  

I’m in bed in my flat in Astydamandos Street, Pangrati. The room begins to spin – no, it is not the room, but me; my body is rising from the bed, whirling round as it ascends, as if in water going up a plughole. I manage to focus my attention on a candlestick, and this steadies me. Now I’m bobbing against the ceiling, looking down at my sleeping other self. An OBE! Fuck! I’m dead chuffed, but then I worry: is this body exactly the same as my physical one? I check, and yep, I still have my cock. Much relieved, I decide to explore. I float downwards and pass through the bedroom floor, seeing and feeling the floorboards, the concrete and then the wallpaper on the ceiling below. 

It’s the ceiling of my parents’ living room in England. It’s night, and there is nobody here. I float through the sitting room, through the dining room, and then through the kitchen window and down into the back garden where a boy is waiting for me. I know that unlike me, this lad is permanently out of his body; in our terms, he is dead. I reach and touch the back of my head. What feels like a steel cable protrudes from my skull and connects this temporarily discarnate me to my body, asleep back in Athens. An astonishing, thrilling thought occurs to me. I ask the boy if he can take me to see Nicolas, a young man I knew and had hoped to know better, killed in a car accident a few months earlier. He agrees to do this. I take his hand, close my eyes, and then… he’s gone. I’m alone in the monochrome garden, and Nicolas is as far away as ever.  

*****

     

My sister just texted me to say she had experienced sleep paralysis frequently in her late teens, but never told anyone about it. 'I was pressed against the wall or bed by what felt like a vortex'. Sod - it's in the family. I'm really not looking forward to turning in tonight. 

North Korea - Wish You Were Here!

Here, a cheery bunch of Aussies is sumptuously entertained in Pyongyang, the Kim dynasty's bizarre film-set capital of North Korea. You needn't watch it all - they had a bloody nice time, eating well, drinking beer, joshing, dancing and posing with carefully selected locals. That's all you need to know.

   

Can my frequent visitor from Seoul translate the texts on the banners in the photo above? I'll lay odds they are all about death to the Imperialist Bastards, but I'm open to correction.

Human Rights Watch Report 2012 tells us:

'The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) systematically violates the basic rights of its population. Although it has signed four key international human rights treaties and includes rights protections in its constitution, it allows no organized political opposition, free media, functioning civil society, or religious freedom. Arbitrary arrest, detention, lack of due process, and torture and ill-treatment of detainees remain serious and endemic problems. North Korea also practices collective punishment for various anti-state offenses, for which it enslaves hundreds of thousands of citizens in prison camps, including children. The government periodically publicly executes citizens for stealing state property, hoarding food, and other “anti-socialist” crimes.'

How far up your fucking arse do you have to be to put out a video of 'What I Did On My Hols In North Korea', and show no awareness, no acknowledgement, that you are in a state that appears to have modeled itself explicitly on Nineteen Eighty-Four? (Christopher Hitchens speculated that some time around 1950, somebody must have given Kim Il Sung a Korean translation of Orwell's novel and said 'what d'you think? Reckon we can make it fly?') How crashingly bloody insensitive do you have to be to recommend people visit this Hell on Earth 'before it changes'? This is a state where in the nineties two million people died of starvation while the Dear Leader stocked his 10,000 bottle wine cellar and sent his sushi chef to source caviar from Iran and sea urchins from Japan. (On the latter expedition, the chef managed to slip his minders and escape.) In a country where sex is not deemed a fit subject for discussion, Kim Jong Il hired girls to dance naked for his favourites while they sloshed down the Hennessy. This is a country where every individual, whether one of the privileged permitted to live in Pyongyang (so long as he behaves himself) or a serf in a forced labour camp, is state property. Did that jolly little bunch of visitors not wonder where everyone went in Pyongyang after dark? If the people are not on parade, they're under curfew. Seen from space at night, North Korea is a field of black between the lights of South Korea and China. How much is revenue from tourism going to benefit the people in that darkness, subsisting on grass and tree bark, given that the Kims have always seen them as so many expendable extras in the drama of their own greatness?

Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, always had himself depicted as sleek, plump and benign, dispensing hand-shakes and homely wisdom to his grateful and admiring people. Sometimes he was shown with a ciggy in his hand, to add an air of down-home just-folksiness to his image. The goitre that afflicted him in later life is omitted from all representations, naturally. Kim Jong-Un seems to be playing the same easy-going, noblesse oblige card - see below. Like his dad the Dear Leader, he has a fondness for the top-drawer smokes and Scotch. One day, according to Jong Il's sushi chef, Jong-Un got to thinking a bit. Picture him gazing meditatively into his Johnny Walker Black. 'We are here,' he mused, 'playing basketball, riding horses, riding Jet Skis, having fun together. But what of the lives of the average people?' Well, you horrible little cunt, read the Human Rights Watch Report, since you don't operate under the same IT restrictions as your subject populace. You needn't go further than You Tube if reading wearies you. Since Jong-Un took over that little parallel universe from his father, the young things of Pyongyang have a brand new funfair to play with and may gab to one another on cell-phones. It's impossible to make international calls, of course. The attempt alone could get you shot.. Play nicely, or else.

Here's The Dear Successor with his Mrs, opening a supermarket in Pyongyang. It looks as though the architect of Kim Il Sung's mausoleum designed it, incorporating an addled memory of  Manchester Airport. Anyway, the design way upstages the merchandise. The ritual involves the same saluting, handshaking and bonhomie that attended Kim Jong Il's visits to factories and offices, the same sense of empty display. We do not buy it.

 

In his book The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Kang Chol-Hwan, who along with his family spent ten years in the Yodok concentration camp, tells of being forced to witness executions by firing squad or hanging:

I attended some fifteen executions during my time in Yodok. ...they were [almost all] for attempted escape. no matter how many executions I saw, I was never able to get used to them, was never calm enough to gather herbs while waiting for the show to begin. I don't blame the prisoners who unaffectedly went about their business. People who are hungry don't have the heart to think about others. Sometimes they can't even care for their own family. Hunger squashes man's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunchboxes. As they scarf down the corn, they have only one overpowering desire to placate, if even for one moment, that feeling of insufferable need.                        

Well, at least those Aussie trippers got shown a good time. Here for balance is another who's less wide-eyed



*****

Stuff I've read recently:

Demick, B. (2010) Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea London: Granta.
Kang,C. (2001) The Aquariums of Pyongyang London: Atlantic Books.
Kang, H. (2005) This is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood London: Abacus.
Myers, B.R. (2010) The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans see themselves and why it matters. New York: Melville House.