Room 709 (or is it 706?)*

Back from a long overdue trip to China and HK, landing at 4.40am today. My body should be shutting down in the next hour or so. Why, why do I persist in the stupidy of taking a flight each day? Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, HK, all blurring into one.

Blood test bingo was not good. Most test results were fine, but two of them demanded immediate change. Goodbye vice, hello virtue xx.

The deadline for the New Writer competition is Monday, and I suspect that a certain writer won't have submited their short story. Shame.



* It's official. I hate the Crowne Plaza Shenzhen on Shennan Lu.

A Poem by Mahmoud Darwish

'Rita and the Rifle'

Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
Kneels and plays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes
And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle

Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again

Ah, Rita!
What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita

Between Rita and my eyes—
A rifle

King on Carver

From the New York Times, Stephen King on Raymond Carver.

I have been debating whether or not to buy a copy of Carver's 'Collected Stories' and 'Beginners'. Reading King's review, I think I should take a punt.

Positive Psychology & the Global Environment

Professor Seligman on R4 with Claudia Hammond.

Also, a stunning presentation on the Third World by the amazing Hans Rosling on TED (spotted at Dalty's blog). His most recent talk takes a swipe at mindsets.

Bhutanese odysseys

Whenever I think of the Kingdom, I think of the phallus, the concept of Gross National Happiness, but not this.

A quote that confirms my feeling about many writers...

'Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue'
- WH Auden

Gil Scott-Heron

A massive influence on me in several ways, on Newsnight last night.

Playing catch-up

I'm way behind on things - work, study, reading, writing, cinema, music - and especially with the LRB. A train ride into London last night gave me the chance to read the LRB from October 22nd, specifically David Runciman on evidence-based politics and David Bromwich on Obama.

I could say something about these articles, but with the links, you're better off reading them and forming your own opinion.

Listening to: ''The Astounding Eyes of Rita' by Anouar Brahem and 'A Scholar and a Gentleman' by Davy Graham.

Circular thoughts, memories

Just a quick note of some context-specific things that may turn into a short piece:

- Lack of land reform begets poverty, lack of education, crime, corruption, a collapse of institutions, which in turn beget religious extremism

- 'China is modernising, not Westernising.' That was the phrase I used to open a briefing to a bunch of execs several years ago. I wonder, that in the battle of ideas that is required when bullets are pointless, whether the vocabulary needs to be adjusted

Much of what is above won't make sense to you, sorry. They're just notes for me.

A new body part term?

Thanks to an errant finger I today created the term 'Slitoris'. To be fair, it sounds like a more appropriate name, doesn't it?

From Mecca bingo to Wigan Casino

I'm off the body shop later this week for some tests (no, not general knowledge). For some reason, I can't get this out of my head. I first caught a clip of this (dubbed in Vietnamese) within Barry Levinson's 'Good Morning Vietnam'.

Now I feel compelled to pen a poem entitled 'Blood Test Bingo'.

It isn't right. Perhaps its because I am fighting my natural inclination to rewrite the film's theme song, in a X-rated style.

Listening to: Northern Soul.

Vroom!

So GM don't want to sell Opel. Naturally, the German government and the unions are upset (the latter think they're better off with the Magna deal). The Spanish and English workers must be relieved. It's not surprising that GM wanted to keep hold of it. Opel contains lots of valuable intellectual property that GM has invested in over the years. A sale would have seen that IP go elsewhere, enabling future competitors to GM in growth markets such as Russia and China. There is also another factor, which is partly economic and partly cultural - scale. Car makers are obsessed with it. But it's a self-perpetuating cycle. A car model costs a fortune to develop, then you refresh it every 2-3 years, before launching a new replacement model after 5 or so years. That requires economies of scale. Nobody wants to be first to change that destructive model. But the World makes too many cars. There needs to be unit volume reduction and vendor consolidation, and it ain't likely to happen even in such straight-jacketed times.

Things to say in meetings that can be interpeted in a number of ways:

- 'This is a test tube to revenue process'
- 'We don't want to be raped by silverback gorillas'

Link of the day

Life on White. Also in The Torygraph.

So if you weren't studying, then what did you do?

After meaning to do so for over ten years (and replacing the copy I gave to Emma), I finally managed to read 'Heart of Darkness' by Conrad. An amazing book, even though on one read, I have barely scratched the surface of it. Something to reread after a period of reflection.

Perhaps I should now reread 'Exterminate All the Brutes' by Sven Lindqvist, an account of European imperialism and brutality.

BBC R4's Analysis
The most recent installment asked whether secrecy was a good thing or not. I was disappointed to find that it limited itself to civil service whistleblowers and the like, rather than asking itself whether British society would really want to know about how things actually get done; realpolitik, if you will. Then again, I guess that's more in the realm of 'ignorance' than 'secrecy'.