Now you see it, now you don't...

As Dr C commented five days ago, Gaza very promptly disappeared from public view as soon as the Isra'eli assault ended.

Sadly, the suffering of civilians there will not have disappeared so tidily.

Perhaps, therefore, I should be grateful to the BBC for bringing it back into the headlines and public consciousness (in the UK, at least) with a bizarre decision not to show the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for aid funds on the grounds that it might seem biased.

I generally hold the BBC to be "better than most", but this time I think they got it wrong. Ironically, though, the appeal has probably secured better publicity through the resulting row than it would have received from a BBC screening. Even the BBC is prominently reporting the row itself...

Palestine dreaming

Short and sweet: two recommended reading links.

• At VIVID: Palestine dreaming: sailing out of the storm.

• At the New York Times (for which, thank you to Mac who pointed it out to me): The one state solution. (Ignore the name of the author; read the content.)
  

Dark days for millipedes

In today's Royal Society Biology Letters is a report (dated 10 November 2007, but only just published) on deltochilum valgum – a dung beetle which has found another way.

Essentially, stripped of scientific detachment, the story is this.

There is, apparently, not enough shit in the world. Your average dung beetle in the street doesn't only have to put in a hard day's graft getting enough of the stuff, he or she has to compete for it in a seller's market. Worse still, dung beetles are not the only consumers of this valuable commodity: millipedes, amongst others, are in on the act as well.

Most dung beetles are law abiding souls and put up bravely with this dismal life: they go on getting up in the morning, diligently rolling dung, playing the game. It was good enough for their parents and grandparents, so it's good enough for them.

Deltochilum valgum, however, has decided that it can't be arsed with all this "working for a living" crap.. Instead of doing its own honest day's work for an honest day's dung, it lurks furtively down dark alleys and waits for the unsuspecting millipede to come rolling home at the end of the day with a hard won gut full of dung. Falling upon the leggy neighbour with vile oaths, Deltochilum valgum clips its head off. and eats both millipede and payload.

It all sounds depressingly like capitalism...

(Click here to view an accosted millipede)

---

Trond H. Larsen, et al, "From coprophagy to predation" in Biology letters, 2009.
DoI 10.1098/rsbl.2008.0654

Who pays the piper calls the tune

Hamas, Israel hold fire; officials say Gaza troops out by inauguration. Israeli officials said Monday the Jewish state hopes to pull all troops out of the Gaza Strip before Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama as the new U.S. president ... ... ... By getting its soldiers out before the Obama inauguration, Israel would spare the new administration the trouble of having to deal with a burning problem in Gaza from day one. (Hurriyet Daily News, 19 January 2008)

I take that passage, more or less at random, from Turkish daily Hurriyet but it was wide currency yesterday. Go to Ynet or Ha'aretz (two Isra'eli sources) and you will find the same - for example:

Israeli official: IDF to leave Gaza before Obama inauguration. ... ... ... Israeli officials have said that troops would withdraw completely before Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday as the new U.S. president. (Ha'aretz, 19 January 2009)

That explicit form of words, tying the timing of military actions to the day and time of political change elsewhere, says everything about the relationship between Isra'el and the US in general, the outgoing administration in particular.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Dr C marks the end of a third week in the ravaging of Gaza by Israe'el with an depressingly telling reading from Thucydides. It's a grim reminder of how little things change.

Before anything else, let me honour Dr C for the consistency and doggedness of his commitment to commentary on Gaza. Almost every day since the obscenity began, he has refused to let us forget or ignore it.

When Thucydides first found me, the Cold War was in full freeze and the parallels were glaringly obvious. Two power blocks faced each other. Both had emerged from a period of alliance in which their leaders jointly led successful opposition to a dire threat (Persia for Athens and Sparta; Germany for the US and USSR). One (US/Athens) was a relatively open society, the other (USSR/Sparta) closed, but the more open protagonist didn't let its ideals inconvenience actions outside its borders.

Gaza is not Melos; but it does share with Melos (and more recent "beneficiaries" of US power) the misfortune to be selected as a target by the more open of two combatants. Because let us never forget that this assault is an action in the proxy war between Isra'el and Iran – an opposition in which Isra'el is indisputably the more open society but, also indisputably, no more inclined to let that constrain its actions than were Athens or the US.

If, as a result of Dr C's post, you want to read the full Melian Dialogue but do not feel up to tackling the whole History of the Peloponnesian war, you can jump straight to it in chapter 27. You may also like to look at The Athens-Melos role play from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and/or Ursula K le Guin's devastating short story on oppression by liberal democratic states The ones who walk away from Omelas.

---

• Ursula K Le Guin, "The ones who walk away from Omelas", available in the collection The compass rose : short stories. 1988, New York: Harper Collins.
  [978]0060914479
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian war. Numerous editions and several translations, including (in English):
  • Best known: Rex Warner, 1974, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
    [978]0140440393
  • Free electronic download: Richard Crawley, 2004 from the Gutenberg Project http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7142

An exorcism regained

I'm never keen on labels. Can't live (or communicate) without 'em, of course; but I don't love them any more for that. Every label manages to get on the wrong side of me at some time or other. Look at "photography" for instance; or "photomontage"; or just plain "montage" for that matter.

Yes, yes, yes, of course - they have their uses, in fact they are essential. One of my professional lives would be impossible without them. But they are most useful when used as technical descriptors for methods of image production, and most likely to be irritating when used to suggest homogeneity of intent.

It's "photomontage" that's uppermost in my mind at the moment. Though I have never done very much of it, and that usually experimental on the level of first grade finger painting or lino cut, it has always had an irresistible fascination for me. But what does it really mean?

Look at Jerry Uelsmann, for instance, who first put his tree roots into me in the mid 1960s. His images of trees, floating above the land or surreally interpenetrating with other objects, or cruciform woman floating above a lake, have more in common with Dali's "Atomicus" paintings (Christ of St John of the Cross, for example) than with the deliberately raw photomontages of Raoul Hausmann and his contemporaries, or in the other direction with the meticulously and breath takingly crafted virtual sculptures built by the likes of Julie Heywood. Yet, all of these are photomontage (call its digital incarnation compositing, if you wish, but they are conceptually the same thing) and Dali is not.

And within the photomontage spectrum, what I have in mind is most like Hausmann in technique yet utterly unlike him in any other way.

For Christmas, I was given a copy of Penny Slinger's An exorcism. I had copy once before, in 1978, but it long ago fell victim (along with many other books, records including my Janis Joplin LPs, and sundry other artefacts) to a chance mortar shell. So, this was renewal of acquaintance after a quarter century or so.

Not every renewal of acquaintance is a happy one. An inseparable school friend from 1961 was, by 1981 ... well, never mind.

Last night I watched Antonioni's Blow up. In 1967, aged 15, I thought it superb. It now seems to me a mess containing within it brilliant bits (which if cut out would make a couple of wonderful ten minute films) and toe curlingly embarrassing ones (which if cut out should be burned). The final scene in which a group of young people mime a tennis match and our hero retrieves a nonexistent ball is sublime. The episode in which Hemmings and two nymphets jointly demonstrate a wooden inability to act made me ashamed to be in the same room with it.

An exorcism, though, has kept its promises. Constructed in the same spirit of unashamed collage as Hausmann, and with the same open espousal of a cause, it nevertheless ploughed a completely new furrow. It embodied the sexual liberation of the previous fifteen years, but Slinger made it uniquely her own. A personal exploration of the liberation struggle for an oppressed inner landscape, it applied political methods to the personal, elements combined with deliberate disregard for natural perspective or scale, ruthlessly rejecting both sentimentality and technical subtlety. And it still does all of this, to just as great effect, even though I feel no commonalty with Slinger's more recent Goddess Channel ventures.

A wonderful gift, a wonderful book, a wonderful performance (because if Julie Heywood's Equilateral is sculpture, then An exorcism is a performance in twenty one acts and ninety nine scenes), a wonderful piece of (but least importantly) photomontage.

---

• Slinger, P., An exorcism. 1977, London: Villiers Publications for Empty-Eye. 0854352740.

Two weeks on

From the latest ORG briefing paper by Paul Rogers:

"It is certainly the case that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had undertaken very detailed planning and training for a major air and ground offensive to be directed at Hamas, including a substantial increase in infantry training for urban warfare. Much of this was concentrated at a new facility, the National Urban Training Centre, the mock Arab town of Baladia in the Negev complete with refugee camp. This was built for the IDF by the US Army Corps of Engineers, financed largely by US military aid and has been in operation for the past eighteen months."

---

• Paul Rogers, "The Gaza conflict", in International Security Monthly Briefing – December 2008. 2008, Oxford: Oxford Research Group.

Nightmares hidden in plain sight

It's more than twenty years since I last experienced aerial, armour and artillery bombardment in a hapless civilian area. The occasional nightmares, however, are as vivid as the day they were minted.

My retrospective nightmares, of course, are the luxury of a "first world" dilettante who quit when he'd had enough. As a Palestinian woman said to me a couple of years ago: "You left because you could; we do not have that option." The people who were centre stage when my nightmares were minted have gone on living them in physical reality. They are living them visibly now, in Gaza and on our front pages, and they have lived them often enough without being noticed.

Even when shown to us, photographs and video in the media cannot give more than a superficial idea of those nightmares. The most horrifying picture (moving or still) cannot even begin to hint at the experience of not just seeing corpses of friends and neighbours and family but wading through them, hearing them scream and not stop as you try to stuff vital parts of them back inside, breathing the charnel house stench of them, wiping bits of their flesh and bone from your hair, clothing, eyes, nose, ears, mouth. Nor, of course, can being an outside observer, however involved, give me a hint of any of this; it was always somebody else's family member, not my own.

But such images are never shown to us anyway. Media will not use them, so photographers and film makers don't offer or even, usually, produce them.

Dr C has been puting up psychologically and emotionally potent examples of what visual material is shown. The Independent on Sunday, to their credit, invited and published reader comment on the issue, but also simultaneously illustrated the prevailing attitude with the comment "Some photographs were, we believed, too graphic to publish." Only in specialist reference material of the sort mentioned by Unreal Nature's "Consequence" post are realities in any true sense portrayed.

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." But some of us can manage how much we have to bear; others can't. I would prefer to live in a society which was at least open about what we are spared. There is something deeply obscene about seeing all kinds of violence in entertainment (horror films, for instance, where we can wallow in the vicious wet dreams of other comfortable fellow first worlders) but never even a taste of reality in news and current affairs coverage.

Despite 24 hour coverage in our all pervasive media, the nightmare in Gaza is all but invisible in any real terms. Why?

---

• "...human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." T S Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, (I). 1943, New York: Harcourt.

Ways of seeing

While reading Berger's Ways of seeing for another reason entirely, I found this passage, which put me in mind of the discussion with Unreal Nature (for example)about concepts of image as record before the invention of photography.

It doesn't, of course, prove or disprove anything, one way or t'other; it's just interesting.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y. This was the result of an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history. It would be rash to try to date this last development precisely. But certainly in Europe such consciousness has existed since the beginning of the Renaissance.

---

John Berger (et al), Ways of seeing.1972, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 0140216316 (most recent reissue 2008, [978]0141035796)

FlexPro 8 Professional

There are several ways in which a data analysis package can win the hearts of statisticians. One, of course, is to provide tools that aid the particular field in which the user is interested; another is to contain and manage information in a flexible database manner rather than forcing it into a spreadsheet. FlexPro has always done both. The database is its longitudinal loyalty feature, evolving subtly with time, but there is always a crop of tools not to be found everywhere else. The recent release 8 is no exception, offering a particularly strong portfolio of developments in both areas and others besides. [more...]

On growth and form in a micro ice age

Photographer Judith Acland has just sent me these pictures of ice on a beach.

Even in the middle of a cold snap, salt in the air and the warmth of the gulf stream mean less ice than most places.

Salt in the sand of the beach means than ice there is particularly rare.

This delicate tracery of a foothold is an unexpected delight.

Patterns on the beach – ripples, miniature dendroid run off deltas – always fascinate me.

In my (visually) formative years, I spent untold hours poring over Thompson's On growth and form.

I'm drawing the same awed delight from these.

---

• D'Arcy Thompson, On growth and form. 1917, Cambridge: University Press (see fuller details including current edition here)

A shady peep-show

Everyone has said that I might go
'Cos my red suitcase and my Ray-Bans
Weren't quite so...^*

Psst ... wanna see something nobody, but nobody, has ever seen before?

Here it is: me, as an adult, wearing sunglasses.

I have, on a couple of occasions, worn sunglasses by way of experiment to see if I really dislike the experience as much as I think I do ... and the answer is always "yes". Perhaps forty minutes of my life has been spent in such experiment. About ten of those minutes were in my childhood, and may have been witnessed by my parents or other adults. The rest have been in private. So, the above link fabricates for you a unique experience...

---

^*Tanita Tikaram, "World outside your window" on Ancient heart. 1988, WEA. 2292438772.

Mathematica 7

Wolfram's seventh major version of its core product has a different flavour to the sixth. Briefings from the company emphasise evolution, consolidation and long-term strategy rather than revolutionary additions, which is a fair description, but there is plenty that is new. Some facets are described as having been in development since well before the previous upgrade, coming to maturity in time for this one. Others are distributed across a range of aspects rather than being dramatically grouped under one or two new headings, or push forward developments in release 6. [more...]

Peace and goodwill on earth (3)

When I titled my post of 27 December "Peace and goodwill on earth (1)", I had a couple of other posts in mind to write almost immediately. I never got around to them, and the subject line "Peace and goodwill on earth 2" fell to this morning's offering.

This, nearly a fortnight late, is one of those that didn't get written: It refers to 24th December – Christmas Eve. If nothing else, it will give Julie "f*** the bus" Heyward some harmless amusement.

I was about to walk home (fifteen minutes) from town, with two bags of shopping, when a bus stopped beside me. Fair enough, I thought; five minute bus journey, ten minutes saved; so on I hopped, opened the book in my pocket, and settled back to read.

Four minutes later, only one stop and a couple of hundred metres from home, I put the book away and got ready to alight.

Then, as we approached the crossroads by the Coöp, on a narrow road with parked vehicles on both sides and space for traffic flow in only one direction, a car shot out from the left and turned right to face us. The bus driver slammed on his brakes, so did the car driver, and we finished up nose to nose.

The car driver was entirely at fault (legally, the bus had right of way at that point; from a common sense viewpoint, it was a dangerous thing to do), but the bus driver didn't help matters.

The car driver leapt out, ran up to the bus, and hammered on the driver's window and started shouting randomly assorted terms of abuse. The bus driver said nothing. After a while, the car driver pointed to a parking space (now blocked by the bus) and screamed "I f***ing want to b****y park my b*****d car there!" The bus driver replied that if the w****r backed up his b*****d car by ten metres and let the bus through, its driver could then b****y park there in his f***ing space, and everyone would be happy.

The car driver replied that he was going nowhere and the bus could reverse. The bus driver pointed out that it is illegal for a bus to reverse with passengers on board, and besides there was a line of traffic now stacked up behind the bus making any reverse impossible.

The car driver removed the keys from his car. The bus driver called his depot and the police. The bus passengers started to solidify in support of the bus driver. I asked the bus driver if I could get off and walk; he said that it was illegal to let passengers alight in the middle of a road. I got out my book again and tried to read.

The car driver got more and more abusive. Some passengers on the bus started shouting abuse back at him from the windows. One woman became particularly enthusiastic, yelling highly inventive insults and turning purple in the face. The bus driver started boasting that he used to be a colour sergeant in the parachute regiment, and if the car driver wasn't careful, etc, etc...

A crowd of onlookers formed on the pavements around the junction. They included all the staff and customers from the Coöp.

A woman on the pavement came over and asked to get onto the bus. Instead of explaining that he couldn't allow this in the middle of the road, the driver said "No - go away". The would be passenger replied in some annoyance. Passengers on board turned their irrationality on her, she got more angry still. The car driver shouted that this was a fine example of christmas spirit. The purple woman leaning out of the bus window screamed that if the car driver was so concerned about it, why didn't he give the would be passenger a lift himself?

Traffic was backed up now along the four roads leading to the cross roads. The line of traffic facing us included three buses. The line behind us stretched back to the sea front. The police phoned to say that their car had parked up some distance away and its occupants were now walking towards us. We had been sitting there for forty minutes.

An elderly woman, probably in her eighties or nineties, came unsteadily out of a nearby house and said, politely: "My daughter is trying to get here to visit me, and she can't get here. Please would you move your car?" The car driver told her to f*** off. She went back into her house.

The crowd on the pavements were now arguing loudly, taking sides, quoting traffic regulations at each other, waving arms. Some pushing and shoving had started.

The elderly woman whose daughter was trying to visit emerged again from her front door. She was carrying a golf club. She walked shakily into the road and, without saying anything, started laying into the car driver and his car with the club. Some bus passengers and pavement bystanders shouted "No!" in horror; others cheered her on. I wondered which was the greater risk: that she would injure him, or that he would attack and injure her. The purple faced woman almost fell out of her window in her orgasmic approval.

The car driver jumped into his car and started it. With the elderly householder still whacking at it, he reversed it with a clash of gears into a pavement space behind him, just on the junction itself. A cheer and a scatter of cat calls went up from crowd and bus passengers. The bus moved forward into the junction, and the process of unpicking gridlock began. An hour after the confrontation began, we reached a bus stop fifty metres beyond the crossroads, and I got off to walk the last hundred and fifty.

As I walked, I was thinking: with that sort of ridiculousness lurking just beneath our surfaces, is it any wonder that we can't sort out international relations or deadlocks such as Gaza?

The bus passed my window about fifteen minutes later.

Peace and goodwill on earth (2)

I have written and deleted two posts around Gaza, on this morning after Isra'eli ground forces launched a ground invasion. The first was a rant. The second was reasoned. Neither seemed worth posting.

But it's true, as Dr C comments, that "to remain quiet is to be complicit". There are, of course, many ways not to be quiet, and a blog is not always the most effective application of noise. Refusing to be silent is a state of mind and being rather than a physically definable event. But...

At Unreal nature, Julie Heyward says "I don’t think that I’m qualified to say anything meaningful about what is going on there. I feel extreme sorrow — and outrage and dismay. Below are links to posts by other people that reflect my opinion on the matter, and say it better than I can..." It seems to me that she has said something extremely meaningful. As I'm sure I've said more than once before, we need more Julies. If enough people joined her in feeling and expressing "extreme sorrow and outrage and dismay", things might start to change.

From Thinking through my fingers, Jim Putnam notes that "people often become very alike to that which they are most afraid". I have good friends, of nearly four decades standing, on both sides of the conflict, and every one of them wants to see an end to this endless bloodletting, but I know that a few of those on the Isra'eli side will be pained to hear me agree with Jim, too. The state of Isra'el (a very different thing, as everywhere, from the people of Isra'el) is not, and should not be described as, Nazi; but it has spent so long locked into fear that it has some facets which too closely resemble Nazism.

I take heart from the fact that all three of these are US citizens, because only Isra'el can make a beginning to the end of this tragedy and only the US can make Isra'el decide to do so. As Jim also observes: "Among the actions the US needs to take is to immediately cease funding Israel's war machine. To me, that's first. Along with that, we must demand that Palestinians be provided support to improve their economic status, schools, food, and everything that goes along with a stable, self-governing entity."

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Previous vaguely related noises:

• 2008/12/27: Peace and goodwill on earth (1)
• 2008/03/09: This is very sad
• 2007/09/15: Home is where you hang your head
• 2006/07/05: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil...