Iraqi cultural books article
Here’s a link to an article I wrote about Iraqi cultural books…
Given that Iraq is so topical, it’s remarkable we hear so little about Iraqi writers or aspects of Iraqi life beyond dictator, war, and occupation. We are becoming increasingly fluent on Iraq only in sectarian language and ideas. Words like Shia, Sunni, Moqtada, IED, roll off our tongues but we know little of Iraq’s rivers, soccer players, musicians, visual artists or food.
For those who protested or opposed the invasion of Iraq, a logical follow up could be to support some ongoing cultural life amidst the mayhem that prevails in Iraq. One way to do this is to actively purchase Iraqi books and thus create more publishing opportunities for Iraqi writers.
Click here for the rest.
Hairy Relief
In these orchestra slashing (poor beleagured CBC radio orchestra), and writer shafting times, it’s rare enough to find a moment of advantage (once you don’t include obvious improvements in cholera, polio, public hanging etc) but today I chanced upon an advantaged moment to being a writer in this century, at this most inhospitable of writerly times …
“A hairy face was required of writers in the mid nineteenth century…”
From Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man. (p92 Penguin).
I have been reading Tomalin’s very enjoyable biography of Hardy in tandem with an equally intriguing history of Iraqi football. Perhaps an unusual pairing, but I wonder of other such pairings, where folks read distinctly different books at that same time.
Post your pairings.
Catastrophe
Quelle catastrophe! What is happening in CBC land …? A process of alienation of the most devoted listeners. All the good aspects slowly being dissolved like vitamin powder in water.
The disbanding of the Radio Orchestra is unfathomable.
Stand up, speak out, pound your fists on the door people. The lunacy in suits are taking a slash hook to the arts, while filling up excel spread sheets, with middle manager smiles. Much blather about redirecting the money, CBC Radio Orchestra was only about ever about music, and Canadian composers and it should be left well enough alone and effort instead made to entice people out of their living rooms to hear its blessed sounds.
May the protest rise…
more here
and here with hockey analogy
A-wondering
I’ve often wondered about this and finally someone has publicly addressed it. Bravo Edward Mills
Rich Western countries, including Canada, are demolishing African medical systems and destroying African lives by continuing to lure away their health care workers, a group of international medical experts led by a Vancouver doctor said Thursday.
The problem is so bad future active recruitment should be considered a crime in international law, argue the doctors, pharmacists and researchers in a commentary released today by the Lancet.
NYRB audio and Sontag
Some curious audio links of various writers (incl Susan Sontag, Joan Didion) reading from essays they wrote for the New York Review of Books down the years.
On Susan Sontag there’s also a review in the latest NYRB of her son’s memoir (Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. David Rieff) which piqued my interest in seeking out the book. I read the review while in the throws of pneumonia and was uplifted by her extraordinary determination in dealing with her numerous health battles and the way “Her unwillingness to accept her own mortality continued onto her deathbed…”
Forget antibiotics, stock up on Sontag.
History of Mesopotamian Medicine
Just in case you were wondering after the Corp Watch piece how things were in ancient days: here’s a lively bunch of links including this one, that includes the following paragraph towards the end.
The primary center for health care was the home, as it was when the ashipu or asu were employed. The majority of health care was provided at the patient’s own house, with the family acting as care givers in whatever capacity their lay knowledge afforded them. Outside of the home, other important sites for religious healing were nearby rivers. The Mesopotamian believed that the rivers had the power to care away evil substances and forces that were causing the illness. Sometimes a small hut was set up for the afflicted person either near the home or the river to aid in the families centralization of home health care.
(from The Asclepion Prof. Nancy Demand, Indiana University)
Iraq healthcare botch up
Corp Watch piece on the woeful state of Iraq’s healthcare and the gangsters who’ve benefitted and botched it up while civilians continue to suffer.
Taking a stand link
Dr Saad Eskander, director of Iraq’s National Library, explains why he decided to return from exile in Britain in an attempt to preserve his country’s rich cultural heritage in the face of extremists and corruption. He describes what it is like to live with the threat of assassination in a city where sectarian gangs have killed thousands.
Listen to the interview here
House-ache
900 years behind the rest of the world here, and due to frugal amounts of telly watching, (aside from the unmissable or I shall surely expire… 3 versions of the weather forecast) I saw one episode of House yesterday. Instant relief Mr Laurie playing an obnoxious crankpot, mais oui, how fine, but House nowt to do mit habitation, mais non, it’s another Hopital a la tele fiasco.
Thanks to the domination of sincerely mad and nothing to be learnt from them medical dramas on the tube I have lost all interest in medical matters and acquired a medical pain in my hole at the sight of white coats or get a trolley in here on-screen.
It beggars the question:
have screenwriters/television producers had an naturally high number of encounter with obnoxious doctors or are there genuinely a very high number of obnoxious doctors populating the planet? You can find out for yourself at ratemydoctor.com
The point being I’d like to offer some alternative and varied occupations for successful onscreen portrayal and all of whom have the onscreen potential to be both interesting and obnoxious. (disclaimer: meant in the fictional sense only)
– bus drivers
– dental hygienists
– Greenhouse owners (specifically pushing the limits on tomatoes)
– librarians
– dinosaur egg experts
– elevator companies
The medical confusion that evolves from these hospital dramas is intense: what! you can’t have an MRI if you’ve plates in your face? Pity they don’t tell those of us with plates that. We have to learn it from sodding House, if indeed it’s even true. And doctors complain about hyper educated patients graduated from the medical school of Google!
When I think back down the years to working in a nameless London hospital I have the most hilarious memory of being informed by one of those NHS manager types that one snotty doctor, who I’d been greeting in what was considered in those staid old days as too cheerful a manner (you know what doctors are like he’d ho-hummed embarrassed to us …) had requested that we not speak to him.
Imagine here we are checking his patients in at the waiting area and we must not speak to him. What exactly were we supposed to do if one of them fell in a heap? The ironic thing was they were all suffering from serious illnesses and our chirpy greetings were no doubt keeping them afloat as they collected the grim news of what I think were called T Cell counts and CT scans.
Once one of the patients gave me thirty oranges (did he think I had scurvy?) another handed me a very sober looking grey wool suit (point taken, I was in a punk rock phase) another fifty quid, gloria in excelsis etc.
No doubt this is the kind of pompous nonsense (the don’t speak to me rule, not the presents) that spurned such TV shows and ruined the lives of medical students, who had to put up with his morse code style of communication. In that context ratemydoc frankly doesn’t seem such an outlandish concept.
George Eliot fogged in throat and head
In keeping with my curiosity for all things literary and meteorological here is George Eliot or Pollian as she signs the letter beleaguered by fog on 13 November 1852..
“O this hideous fog! Let me grumble for I have had headache the last three days and there seems little prospect of anything else in such an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney?…”
From a letter to The Brays. (Selections from George Eliot’s Letters edited by Gordon S Haight published by Yale Univ Press).
Meteorological-chondria perhaps. I had no idea fog could give a headache and choke you. All Dickensian induced romance on fog is henceforth abruptly dumped. Though Pollian might these days have benefitted from the lack of light according to the new thinking on the dangers of light pollution.