For no particular reason apart from the fact that I’ve always liked him, and this apparently featured in the Sopranos recently, here’s John Cooper-Clarke’s Chickentown:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEWT6pdjON8&w=425&h=350]
and here he is finding an English Desolation Row in Beasley Street:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37QUUwp9xIs&w=425&h=350]
ti, who lives in southern Helmand province, had married another man to whom she had been betrothed since they were both children. Once the parents had agreed on the match and the terms, the deal was almost impossible to break, even after her fiancé was seriously injured in an accident.
Her father died when she was young, and her widowed mother did not have the means to resist pressure to honor the contract.
Gulghoti duly married her disabled fiancé when she was 19, but he died after a year, leaving her a widow.
According to custom in this predominantly Pashtun region, once a woman marries, she remains more or less the property of her husband’s family. If she is widowed, she will commonly be married off to a relative of her deceased husband.
“I had to obey these rules, and marry my husband’s younger brother,” said Gulghoti.
This happened despite the fact that Hekmat was only three at the time.
“They forced me to marry this baby,” she said. “By the time he reaches adolescence, I will be an old woman.”
Hekmat does not understand that the woman who bathes him, looks after him, and prepares his meals is actually his wife. He calls her khala – “auntie.” He is small and shy, and shrinks away from strangers. He does not attend school – no one in his family is literate.
A parable for our time (via):
A friendship-building football match between Muslim and Christian clergy in Norway was called off after a row over the participation of women players.
Muslim Imams had refused to play against women because it went against their beliefs about close physical contact with the opposite sex.
But when the church decided to drop its women players, the priests’ team captain walked out in protest.
The game was meant to be an enjoyable end to a day-long conference in Oslo.
Members of the two faiths had been discussing ways of encouraging greater inter-faith dialogue at the “Shoulder to Shoulder” event.
Martin Amis reviews “The Islamist“:
Ed Husain has written a persuasive and stimulating book. But as he builds to his affirmatory conclusion he visits a false dichotomy on us, and one that has recently gained an undeserved respectability. He wants to be “free from the fanaticism of secularism or religion”; he wants to “oppose hatred of all forms, secular and religious”. In this view, fundamentalists are on one wing, atheists are on the other, and the supposed centre is occupied by moderate believers and a few laconic agnostics. Secular fanaticism, secular hatred – these equivalences are fictions. The humanist pitbull Richard Dawkins, I am confident, has very few affinities with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout, “God is great!” When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?
s: “What strange sound went gliding along the banister at whose foot the transparent apple was dreaming.” The author is Robert Desnos, a surrealist poet and member of the French Resistance who died in Terezin, soon after the Liberation. Fifty years on, I suppose he might have been quite pleased to find his poetry alive and well on a Selfridges receipt.
It’s not as if parliament has banned the statues (which are, after all, publicising Gormley’s forthcoming show on the South Bank). That might be a cause for complaint. They just think it’s inappropriate to have one at Westminster. Seems entirely reasonable to me. That this should provide evidence of the “impoverished intellectual climate of the capital” suggests someone who’s just searching for a whinge. As indeed does the first part of her column. A talk to her sisters in Saudi Arabia might help.
[And that Robert Desnos line. Good for Selfridges and all that, but really, that surrealist juxtaposition of disparate images, “the banister at whose foot the transparent apple was dreaming” – that’s just leaden.]
r Qutb speaking:
[there] is a natural struggle between two systems which cannot co-exist for long.
It is Qutb; but it could have been taken from the writings of thousands of followers of Marx, if not from Marx himself, including Mao Tse-Tung.
The violent imposition of a socialist and Islamic society is justified in the same way in Marx and Qutb: if people were really free, that is to say suffering from neither false consciousness not jahilliyah (ignorance of divine guidance), they would accept the socialist or Islamic state not merely without demur, but joyously, as being for their own good freely chosen. True freedom in both Marx and Qutb is the recognition of necessity. Everything that prevents people from seeing the truth of their messages is an enemy of real, as against merely apparent, freedom.
A Marxist would perhaps argue that Dalrymple’s conflating Marx here with Lenin, but still…
Lenin, of course, still has his admirers – see here, and the discussion here and here.
to name their own children without [a man’s] consent… forbidden to take out a passport without permission… forbidden to leave their homes without permission… forbidden to take a job without permission… forbidden to change the color of their abayas, forbidden to go to school or to the university without permission… forbidden to purchase shares or to open to a [bank] account in their children’s name without permission.
“[A woman] is not allowed to expose her face in some cities of the kingdom… [She] is not allowed to marry without permission… not allowed to stay married if [one of] her male relatives decides that her husband’s [tribal] lineage is inferior to hers… not allowed to sue for divorce without apologizing and paying a fine, not allowed to keep her children after the divorce, unless she gets permission… not allowed to hold a senior position in the private or public sectors, not allowed to vote or run for office… not allowed to travel alone with a chauffeur… not allowed to annoy her husband, and finally, a woman’s voice is considered [a form of] defilement, and she is forbidden to speak in public, so that her affairs will remain shrouded in secrecy.
“A researcher [studying the limitations on women] would [probably] stop here, since the list is endless, and since he would conclude that whoever doubts the [injustice] inflicted on women either lacks awareness or derives some benefit from the discrimination. The damage [caused by this discrimination] is obvious, and the solution has been delayed, causing the problem to grow [even] more severe. There is need for immediate intervention in order to stop the deterioration.”
Good luck with that.
urnalists killed and imprisoned. Among the victims was my courageous compatriot, Anna Politkovskaya, the award-winning journalist and human rights champion who dared to speak the truth about the war in Chechnya. After her brutal murder last autumn, the small community of Russian independent journalists and human rights defenders realised how utterly vulnerable they all are.
On March 2 this year, another Russian journalist, Ivan Safronov, a military affairs correspondent for an independent daily Kommersant died in Moscow. He fell from a window of his apartment building and his colleagues believe it was a murder masked as a suicide. If their suspicions are confirmed Safronov’s name will be added to the list of 13 Russian journalists killed for work-related reasons since the year 2000, when Vladimir Putin became president. Not a single one of those contract-style murders has been properly investigated. […]
Independent press in Russia is becoming a rarity. Television has fully transformed into a mouthpiece of Kremlin’s propaganda. Recently, Russian Internews, a media capacity-building organisation whose work has been largely focused on training regional and local TV journalists, had its office raided and its servers seized in connection with a dubious criminal case against the head of the group.
The Committee to Protect Journalists includes Russia as one of the worst backsliders on press freedom. But, back at CiF, the familiar voices hold sway. By the third comment, Lokshina is accused of being a “professional pro-western zealot”. [The first two comments weren’t exactly complimentary.] In comment #4, we learn – as we surely knew we would – that things are as bad if not worse in the West, where Bush is “an enthusiastic killer of journalists”. Yes, it’s CiF business as usual.
Good to see Steve Bell continuing his rich vein of smug predictability telling-truth-to-power, by the way. Blair’s last days as a reprise of Hitler in his bunker: what genius!
hat be?
DB: Mm-hmm.
DL: So when you ask a question like that, you’re coming up against the evolutionary-origin question. I’ve been thinking about this, actually, and it doesn’t surprise me that we use art and music to communicate so many things that language won’t. What surprises me is that we’re able to get as far as we can with language.
Describing something using language, I think, moves it further away from the actual experience. We resort to dance, visual art, music, and lovemaking as a way to express things that are not expressible in language. I think that those are the primary forms of communication, and language is secondary.
I was listening the other day to Yazoo’s “Only You” (via DG), here sung by a solo Alison Moyet. It’s a great song, very emotional, but of course the words, as with so many pop songs, are really quite banal. Well, apart from that repeated title, Only You, which contains all the resonance you need to give emotion to the song. On the linked clip, Moyet is, I believe, singing to a German audience, and you think, well, they’re probably better off not understanding, supplying their own idealised lyrics of heart-rending lost love or whatever. [It’s not a great version of the song, to be honest. This is better, with Vince Clarke, and a younger Alison Moyet looking distinctly ill at ease, but then you have to put up with Keith Chegwin at the start.]
Often – usually – the unintelligibilty of song lyrics is a positive advantage. I’ve listened to salsa and Cuban music for years without understanding the words, and, given that they’re normally along the lines of, “Hey, look at Conchita, she’s really hot when she dances the guaganco”, I think that, far from missing out, I’m probably better off. It’s very rare to find lyrics that actually enhance a song – Dylan being a case in point.
I’m also struck by the memorability of music. It amazes me that I can hear a snatch of music, and if I’ve heard it before I’ll know straight away. Even if I can’t name the song; that’s the verbal part of memory, which seems somehow shallower and less reliable. The music itself is lodged permanently deep inside.
Of course the feeling that music is somehow deeper than language is no proof that it’s earlier or more fundamental in evolutionary terms, but I’m certainly sympathetic to that point of view.