Tuesday, July 29, 2008
US astronaut confirms existence of aliens!
I began my interest in science fiction when I was about twelve. I had lived in a small village near Durham called Shadforth and went to primary school there. There were around thirty children in the school and one and a half teachers. Maybe having a half teacher gave me the necessary sense of ambiguity to be interested in SF. Anyway, the school doubled as a library. All the shelves in the hall (maybe twenty by forty feet) swivelled and the adult library lay behind. By the age of nine I was reading adult literature. By ten I had read every western in the place followed by all of the noirish novels of Peter Cheyney, Raymond Chandler et al. By eleven I suddenly discovered that half people, like my teacher, came from planets across the universe where half was the norm and the full person was an alien! Maybe by living in a small pit village but with an over-exercised sense of mental adventure, I was ripe for journeys through time and space following in the solar jet stream of ‘Dan Dare, pilot of the future’.
I even wrote a dissertation in the early sixties defending science fiction as literature when, like now, it was regarded as the work of pariahs who were barred from eating at the table of high art. I think, in all the ensuing time, I have read every conceivable exegesis on time and space travel – not that that excludes a delightful lurch into the new at some point in my diminishing biography.
Imagine my wry amusement with the news this week that the exponent of the longest walk on the moon, Dr Edgar Mitchell, US astronaut, claimed that aliens have been landing here for the last sixty years and governments had hushed it up. This was quickly followed by a denial from NASA and the suggestion that the old feller was Ed-gaga Mitchell. However, he claimed insider knowledge and so we must keep open minds. As I have over-elaboratedly pointed out, I am vulnerable to suggestions of this kind. Why, once, following my reading of some philosophy on solipsism (the central thrust being that I was the only person in existence and all else was my fabrication) I walked through the city of Norwich and wondered whether the teeming people around me were, actually, ghosts. Even bumping into them did not provide supportive evidence for Dr Johnson’s rebuttal of Bishop Berkeley’s proof that the world did not 'really' exist. I kicked stones and bumped because I was testing how strong my self-perceived world, was.
Anyone who comes out with a theory or an experience which is regarded by the majority as ‘outlandish’ (a good science fiction term) is derided or exterminated. Ask the ghost of Galileo who is sitting by your side, at this moment. The result is that few speak out, in fear of repression or of committal to the asylum that houses science fiction writers and their kin.
There is a wonderful poster on a road near here, in Accra. It has the memorable phrase:
The tip-off. Your civic responsibility
I don’t think it works here and it doesn’t work for Dr Mitchell, either. At present.
I began my interest in science fiction when I was about twelve. I had lived in a small village near Durham called Shadforth and went to primary school there. There were around thirty children in the school and one and a half teachers. Maybe having a half teacher gave me the necessary sense of ambiguity to be interested in SF. Anyway, the school doubled as a library. All the shelves in the hall (maybe twenty by forty feet) swivelled and the adult library lay behind. By the age of nine I was reading adult literature. By ten I had read every western in the place followed by all of the noirish novels of Peter Cheyney, Raymond Chandler et al. By eleven I suddenly discovered that half people, like my teacher, came from planets across the universe where half was the norm and the full person was an alien! Maybe by living in a small pit village but with an over-exercised sense of mental adventure, I was ripe for journeys through time and space following in the solar jet stream of ‘Dan Dare, pilot of the future’.
I even wrote a dissertation in the early sixties defending science fiction as literature when, like now, it was regarded as the work of pariahs who were barred from eating at the table of high art. I think, in all the ensuing time, I have read every conceivable exegesis on time and space travel – not that that excludes a delightful lurch into the new at some point in my diminishing biography.
Imagine my wry amusement with the news this week that the exponent of the longest walk on the moon, Dr Edgar Mitchell, US astronaut, claimed that aliens have been landing here for the last sixty years and governments had hushed it up. This was quickly followed by a denial from NASA and the suggestion that the old feller was Ed-gaga Mitchell. However, he claimed insider knowledge and so we must keep open minds. As I have over-elaboratedly pointed out, I am vulnerable to suggestions of this kind. Why, once, following my reading of some philosophy on solipsism (the central thrust being that I was the only person in existence and all else was my fabrication) I walked through the city of Norwich and wondered whether the teeming people around me were, actually, ghosts. Even bumping into them did not provide supportive evidence for Dr Johnson’s rebuttal of Bishop Berkeley’s proof that the world did not 'really' exist. I kicked stones and bumped because I was testing how strong my self-perceived world, was.
Anyone who comes out with a theory or an experience which is regarded by the majority as ‘outlandish’ (a good science fiction term) is derided or exterminated. Ask the ghost of Galileo who is sitting by your side, at this moment. The result is that few speak out, in fear of repression or of committal to the asylum that houses science fiction writers and their kin.
There is a wonderful poster on a road near here, in Accra. It has the memorable phrase:
The tip-off. Your civic responsibility
I don’t think it works here and it doesn’t work for Dr Mitchell, either. At present.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
God's Chariots.
I said in the last blog that I would focus a little bit more on how God infiltrates every aspect of Ghanaian culture. The evangelicals are here with a vengeance. Churches are springing up everywhere and there are some extremely gold-laden pastors, as business class passengers may have noticed on flights to Britain for the recent Lambeth shindig. Every morning I hear neighbours practising their gospel harmonies or having prayer meetings or playing God radio loud. Sunday-best pedestrians walk the dusty streets to their all-day fare of sin-letting.
Meanwhile, in the neverending river of metal and rubber, rear windows are adorned by curious messages that reflect the way Christianity is grafted on to something older, just as it also is in Europe with its paganism, Green Man pantheism and the Sheelas. A kind of neo-magic, if you like for the superstitious.
These messages range from the mundane (The Jesus is Coming Mobile Phone Company) to the cryptic (1000 hate 1000 lies). There are the short, enigmatic trumpetings (Believer, What God proposes, Angel on Board, Mercy Seat) as well as intensely personal (Kill Me, Love A).
All of which tends to be displayed in the same shivery yellow capitals that I associate with 1950s horror comics’ banner fonts).
It was suggested to me that drivers must go to a particular store and pick up whatever letters are currently available and make up the best message they can with what they've bought: a sort of religious Scrabble. Given the way that some of them drive (overtaking on blind hills and corners at high speed) it is no wonder Ghana has among the least safe roads in the world. But, with God on board, there is a double whammy. If you survive, it is because of Him and if you don’t, He can read your rear windscreen from heavenly miles away and let you in to the Holy Garage in the sky.
The perversity of it all is one reason why it is such a joy to live here.
I said in the last blog that I would focus a little bit more on how God infiltrates every aspect of Ghanaian culture. The evangelicals are here with a vengeance. Churches are springing up everywhere and there are some extremely gold-laden pastors, as business class passengers may have noticed on flights to Britain for the recent Lambeth shindig. Every morning I hear neighbours practising their gospel harmonies or having prayer meetings or playing God radio loud. Sunday-best pedestrians walk the dusty streets to their all-day fare of sin-letting.
Meanwhile, in the neverending river of metal and rubber, rear windows are adorned by curious messages that reflect the way Christianity is grafted on to something older, just as it also is in Europe with its paganism, Green Man pantheism and the Sheelas. A kind of neo-magic, if you like for the superstitious.
These messages range from the mundane (The Jesus is Coming Mobile Phone Company) to the cryptic (1000 hate 1000 lies). There are the short, enigmatic trumpetings (Believer, What God proposes, Angel on Board, Mercy Seat) as well as intensely personal (Kill Me, Love A).
All of which tends to be displayed in the same shivery yellow capitals that I associate with 1950s horror comics’ banner fonts).
It was suggested to me that drivers must go to a particular store and pick up whatever letters are currently available and make up the best message they can with what they've bought: a sort of religious Scrabble. Given the way that some of them drive (overtaking on blind hills and corners at high speed) it is no wonder Ghana has among the least safe roads in the world. But, with God on board, there is a double whammy. If you survive, it is because of Him and if you don’t, He can read your rear windscreen from heavenly miles away and let you in to the Holy Garage in the sky.
The perversity of it all is one reason why it is such a joy to live here.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Today we have naming of parts...
Place names everywhere can be fascinating when they tell a story or refer to a mystery. On the other hand (as in the UK) they can be a clogged-up banality of flowers, trees and shrubs. Laburnum Groves and Avenues, Oak Streets, Ash Drives and the like may have had a cache when the empire-building middle classes flexed their monetary muscle in the late nineteenth century but, as the new towns and villages began their post-second world war spread, they became part of the property developers’ incongruous spin in glossing over constructions that lacked a single brick’s worth of aestheticism.
I once lived in the Derbyshire hills in the aptly named Dirty Lane End Cottage. I don’t suppose I effected any improvement to its environs as a consequence! I have lived in Norwich which boasts the strangely macabre White Woman Lane. There was also, somewhere, Hanging Dog Lane. In Norwich, also, there was a pub called The Murderers but its name was changed owing to someone’s misplaced sense of propriety. I observed to a taxi driver as we were heading to the outer parts of North London, recently, that The World’s End was the ultimate name for a pub, as it would draw in all the angst-laden for miles around. He laughed and said it would be interesting to know how many suicides had drunk there before topping themselves. Come Apocalypse Now, I think everyone’ll be crowded in there or in any one of the other five similarly named, he could think of in London, alone.
These thoughts have been precipitated by my first week or two in Accra where nomenclature takes little notice of property developers but is a mix of folk lore and recent incident. I’ll add more examples as I go along with these blogs but two or three will start the train off.
In the area where I am living there is Puppy Junction, where you can buy a pup, Jacuzzi Junction named after the revelation that a former President of Ghana had had one installed in his house, there, Give-us Your-Wallet Junction where ambushes and muggings were once rife and I Only Ate Corn Junction, where some poor fellow was found beaten and left by the roadside having nicked a head of corn from a nearby plot.
Naming by the people for the people!
In a blog, soon to come, I will list some of the ways that God has descended upon the Ghanaians, infiltrating every aspect of their private and working lives. To whet your appetite, God Never Fails is the name of a small business that installs and mends car brakes!
Place names everywhere can be fascinating when they tell a story or refer to a mystery. On the other hand (as in the UK) they can be a clogged-up banality of flowers, trees and shrubs. Laburnum Groves and Avenues, Oak Streets, Ash Drives and the like may have had a cache when the empire-building middle classes flexed their monetary muscle in the late nineteenth century but, as the new towns and villages began their post-second world war spread, they became part of the property developers’ incongruous spin in glossing over constructions that lacked a single brick’s worth of aestheticism.
I once lived in the Derbyshire hills in the aptly named Dirty Lane End Cottage. I don’t suppose I effected any improvement to its environs as a consequence! I have lived in Norwich which boasts the strangely macabre White Woman Lane. There was also, somewhere, Hanging Dog Lane. In Norwich, also, there was a pub called The Murderers but its name was changed owing to someone’s misplaced sense of propriety. I observed to a taxi driver as we were heading to the outer parts of North London, recently, that The World’s End was the ultimate name for a pub, as it would draw in all the angst-laden for miles around. He laughed and said it would be interesting to know how many suicides had drunk there before topping themselves. Come Apocalypse Now, I think everyone’ll be crowded in there or in any one of the other five similarly named, he could think of in London, alone.
These thoughts have been precipitated by my first week or two in Accra where nomenclature takes little notice of property developers but is a mix of folk lore and recent incident. I’ll add more examples as I go along with these blogs but two or three will start the train off.
In the area where I am living there is Puppy Junction, where you can buy a pup, Jacuzzi Junction named after the revelation that a former President of Ghana had had one installed in his house, there, Give-us Your-Wallet Junction where ambushes and muggings were once rife and I Only Ate Corn Junction, where some poor fellow was found beaten and left by the roadside having nicked a head of corn from a nearby plot.
Naming by the people for the people!
In a blog, soon to come, I will list some of the ways that God has descended upon the Ghanaians, infiltrating every aspect of their private and working lives. To whet your appetite, God Never Fails is the name of a small business that installs and mends car brakes!
Saturday, July 05, 2008
In Praise of Nick Broomfield
Being three and a half thousand miles away from the UK seems as nought when I tune in to BBC World News, here in Ghana, and catch the weather forecast and the politics. It is true that the further you are away from the culture that helped define you, the more you see how trivialising and twisted much of it is. The pet obsessions of the media are like fast food; insubstantial, unhealthy and sprayed with a garish gloss. No longer is there even lip service paid by journalists to the erosion of the significance of the arts and intellectualism nor the corrosive governmental attack on the social infrastructure of families, traditional communities and society as a whole, which began with Thatcher and the miners and has continued, implacably, ever since. The gap between rich and poor grows ever greater, education for those who live outside the avaricious bubble of the middle classes, continues to degenerate and free market philosophy dominates all strategies to deal with any consequent eruptions of discontent.
It was, then, with a kind of nervous frisson of involvement that I watched Nick Broomfield being interviewed on BBC World’s Hard Talk. Broomfield has been around such a long time and is associated with making documentaries about the have-nots, the picaresque, extreme individuals such as serial killers or the bestiality of troops in Iraq, (the latter through the reconstruction of events where key participants in a massacre are played by ex-soldiers, relatives of Iraqi families who have died and so on).
He was heavily quizzed in the interview about his depiction of events. Was it lurid sensationalism? Was he riding, commercially, on his own radical bandwagon? Was he conspiring to deceive those who had suffered or who had caused suffering, in order to advance his own world view and reputation? Was he ignoring the good things that people did in order to skew his images to bolster the case he was making?
Throughout the interview he stuck, doggedly, to his theme. He makes his films as truthfully as he can. He tries to elicit plural perspectives of events and allow the viewer to make his or her own judgment. Everyone, from the serial killer to the soldier to the child dying in a famine is a victim of some kind and, even though we may not offer sympathy for some of the acts they might commit, we do better to try and understand how they came into these arenas of obscenity and death, rather than execute or imprison them in disgusted and vengeful ignorance. We must help societies to progress towards forms of understanding which might eliminate many of the root causes of extreme and awful human behaviour. Unfortunately, we have to learn this lesson over and over again. There will always be those in the political arena who put expediency and an appeal to the populist desire for eye-for-an-eye revenge and punishment, above any long term desire to fashion, from our troubles, a liberal and caring society. The Nick Broomfields of this world fight that fight. We become more enlightened and savvy because of what they do.
Being three and a half thousand miles away from the UK seems as nought when I tune in to BBC World News, here in Ghana, and catch the weather forecast and the politics. It is true that the further you are away from the culture that helped define you, the more you see how trivialising and twisted much of it is. The pet obsessions of the media are like fast food; insubstantial, unhealthy and sprayed with a garish gloss. No longer is there even lip service paid by journalists to the erosion of the significance of the arts and intellectualism nor the corrosive governmental attack on the social infrastructure of families, traditional communities and society as a whole, which began with Thatcher and the miners and has continued, implacably, ever since. The gap between rich and poor grows ever greater, education for those who live outside the avaricious bubble of the middle classes, continues to degenerate and free market philosophy dominates all strategies to deal with any consequent eruptions of discontent.
It was, then, with a kind of nervous frisson of involvement that I watched Nick Broomfield being interviewed on BBC World’s Hard Talk. Broomfield has been around such a long time and is associated with making documentaries about the have-nots, the picaresque, extreme individuals such as serial killers or the bestiality of troops in Iraq, (the latter through the reconstruction of events where key participants in a massacre are played by ex-soldiers, relatives of Iraqi families who have died and so on).
He was heavily quizzed in the interview about his depiction of events. Was it lurid sensationalism? Was he riding, commercially, on his own radical bandwagon? Was he conspiring to deceive those who had suffered or who had caused suffering, in order to advance his own world view and reputation? Was he ignoring the good things that people did in order to skew his images to bolster the case he was making?
Throughout the interview he stuck, doggedly, to his theme. He makes his films as truthfully as he can. He tries to elicit plural perspectives of events and allow the viewer to make his or her own judgment. Everyone, from the serial killer to the soldier to the child dying in a famine is a victim of some kind and, even though we may not offer sympathy for some of the acts they might commit, we do better to try and understand how they came into these arenas of obscenity and death, rather than execute or imprison them in disgusted and vengeful ignorance. We must help societies to progress towards forms of understanding which might eliminate many of the root causes of extreme and awful human behaviour. Unfortunately, we have to learn this lesson over and over again. There will always be those in the political arena who put expediency and an appeal to the populist desire for eye-for-an-eye revenge and punishment, above any long term desire to fashion, from our troubles, a liberal and caring society. The Nick Broomfields of this world fight that fight. We become more enlightened and savvy because of what they do.