There is a terrible truthfulness about photography.
The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model,
paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet,
and puts a nice verse from Shakespeare underneath,
and the picture is admired beyond measure.
The photographer finds the same pretty girl,
he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet,
but somehow it is no good -it is still Miss Wilkins, the model.
It is too true to be Juliet.
George Bernard Shaw
Wilson's Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Monday, 27 April 2009
Intercultural Coaching (4)
One element of my intercultural coaching is talking about the mistakes that I have made in foreign lands. Here's one:
In Thailand, the concept of standing in line is not exactly widely understood. Once, I angrily asked a guy who had just jumped the line what the Thai word for "standing in line" was. Queue, he said. That's English, I retorted, what is the Thai word for it? Queue, he repeated. Aha, I thought, that explains it - no word, no concept.
Years later, during a conversation with a Thai student at an Australian university, I said mockingly: no wonder that in Thailand people always jump the line, you do not even have a word for standing in line. Of course we have, she retorted. A Thai word? Yes, a Thai word. But is it used? Some people are using it, she said.
My conclusion? Be careful whom you're asking if you want to learn about another culture.
In Thailand, the concept of standing in line is not exactly widely understood. Once, I angrily asked a guy who had just jumped the line what the Thai word for "standing in line" was. Queue, he said. That's English, I retorted, what is the Thai word for it? Queue, he repeated. Aha, I thought, that explains it - no word, no concept.
Years later, during a conversation with a Thai student at an Australian university, I said mockingly: no wonder that in Thailand people always jump the line, you do not even have a word for standing in line. Of course we have, she retorted. A Thai word? Yes, a Thai word. But is it used? Some people are using it, she said.
My conclusion? Be careful whom you're asking if you want to learn about another culture.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
Paint your paradigm
People decide with or without the facts - if you don't get out there and paint your paradigm, someone'll paint it for you.
My what?
Pa-ra-dime. You never heard of paradigm shift? Example: you see a man with his hand up your granny's ass. What do you think?
Bastard.
Right. Then you learn a deadly bug crawled up there, and the man has put aside his disgust to save Granny. What do you think now?
Hero. You can tell he ain't met my nana.
There you go, a paradigm shift. The action doesn't change - the information you use to judge it does. You were ready to crucify the guy because you didn't have the facts. Now you want to shake his hand.
I don't think so.
I mean figuratively, asshole, he laughs, punching out six of my ribs. Facts may seem black and white by the time they hit your TV screen, but professional teams sift through mountains of gray to get them there. You need positioning, like a product in the market - the jails are full of people who didn't manage their positions.
DBC Pierre: Vernon God Little
My what?
Pa-ra-dime. You never heard of paradigm shift? Example: you see a man with his hand up your granny's ass. What do you think?
Bastard.
Right. Then you learn a deadly bug crawled up there, and the man has put aside his disgust to save Granny. What do you think now?
Hero. You can tell he ain't met my nana.
There you go, a paradigm shift. The action doesn't change - the information you use to judge it does. You were ready to crucify the guy because you didn't have the facts. Now you want to shake his hand.
I don't think so.
I mean figuratively, asshole, he laughs, punching out six of my ribs. Facts may seem black and white by the time they hit your TV screen, but professional teams sift through mountains of gray to get them there. You need positioning, like a product in the market - the jails are full of people who didn't manage their positions.
DBC Pierre: Vernon God Little
Thursday, 23 April 2009
Feldforscher
Ich glaube, ein Feldforscher sollte so wenig wie nur möglich in Erscheinung treten. Der beste Feldforscher, den ich kenne, ist meines Erachtens der Berliner Professor Hartmut Zinser. Als ich drei Monate nach seinem Aufenthalt in dem Dorf Belogili auf Flores nach ihm fragte, konnte sich niemand mehr an ihn erinnern.
Hans Peter Duerr: Auf dem Zaun oder zwischen den Stühlen?
Hans Peter Duerr: Auf dem Zaun oder zwischen den Stühlen?
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
J.G. Ballard
On Sunday, 19 April 2009, the author J.G. Ballard, 78, who grew up in Shanghai in the 1930s, died after a lengthy illness. Here are some excerpts from his autobiography, Miracles of Life:
In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now that my main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came to England after the war, a world that was almost too real. As a writer I've treated England as if it were a strange fiction, and my task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood self did when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks and temples without doors.
--
The American gunboat, the USS Wake, was captured without a shot being fired - almost all the crew were ashore, asleep with their girlfriends in the hotels of downtown Shanghai.
--
I take it for granted that if the war had continued for much longer the sense of community and the social constraints that held the internees together would have broken down. Moral principles, along with kindness and generosity, are worth less than they might seem.
--
The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post-war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry was as much with the sane as the insane.
--
I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I would stare at Crivelli's Annunciation, charmed by the peacocks, loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination to stitch these elements into a master narrative that made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming birth of the Saviour?
--
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. No one in Hemingway's post-war novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. The very notion was ludicrous, as absurd then as it seems now. Writers of so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic - their fiction was first and foremost about themselves. The 'self' lay at the heart of modernism, but now had a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just as much a psychological construct, and just as prone to mysterious and often psychopathic impulses. It was this rather sinister realm, a consumer society that might decide to go on a day trip to another Auschwitz and another Hiroshima, that science fiction was exploring.
--
Sadly, he was one of those literary writers who receive a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement, believe every word of praise and imagine that it will ensure them a prosperous career, when in fact such a review is no more than the literary world's equivalent of 'Darling, you were wonderful ...'
In Shanghai the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me, and I think now that my main effort as a boy was to find the real in all this make-believe. In some ways I went on doing this when I came to England after the war, a world that was almost too real. As a writer I've treated England as if it were a strange fiction, and my task has been to elicit the truth, just as my childhood self did when faced with honour guards of hunchbacks and temples without doors.
--
The American gunboat, the USS Wake, was captured without a shot being fired - almost all the crew were ashore, asleep with their girlfriends in the hotels of downtown Shanghai.
--
I take it for granted that if the war had continued for much longer the sense of community and the social constraints that held the internees together would have broken down. Moral principles, along with kindness and generosity, are worth less than they might seem.
--
The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post-war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous, and the business of psychiatry was as much with the sane as the insane.
--
I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that now drains away much of the strangeness and poetry of the Old Masters. I would stare at Crivelli's Annunciation, charmed by the peacocks, loaves of bread and other incongruous items, the passer-by reading a book on the bridge and the Virgin in her jewel box of a house. I was forced to use my own imagination to stitch these elements into a master narrative that made some kind of sense, rather than read an extended wall caption and be solemnly told that the peacock was a symbol of eternal life. Perish the thought, and let the exquisite bird be itself, and nothing more or less than itself. What could be more natural, and more mysterious, than a peacock and a loaf of bread appearing on the scene to celebrate the forthcoming birth of the Saviour?
--
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. No one in Hemingway's post-war novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. The very notion was ludicrous, as absurd then as it seems now. Writers of so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic - their fiction was first and foremost about themselves. The 'self' lay at the heart of modernism, but now had a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just as much a psychological construct, and just as prone to mysterious and often psychopathic impulses. It was this rather sinister realm, a consumer society that might decide to go on a day trip to another Auschwitz and another Hiroshima, that science fiction was exploring.
--
Sadly, he was one of those literary writers who receive a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement, believe every word of praise and imagine that it will ensure them a prosperous career, when in fact such a review is no more than the literary world's equivalent of 'Darling, you were wonderful ...'
Sunday, 19 April 2009
Trust the media?
Do I trust Fox News? Of course not. Does anybody? What about Asia Times Online (ATol)? More likely but, well, it is probably not a good idea to make definite statements in regards to any media for they are usually not monolithic systems. Anyway, I do not read ATol every day (and watch Fox only in hotel rooms) but I very much liked this brief summary from 25 November 2008:
"When Iraqi parliamentarians vote on Wednesday on whether or not to endorse a security pact with the United States, many of them will not have had the opportunity to study the finer points. Perhaps all they need to know is that the Pentagon and President George W. Bush are very comfortable with it. "
I also have a tendency to trust the New York Times. However, I'm not too sure that I should for, some time ago, I read David Brock's Blinded by the Right and it made me think (no, not for the first time but once again). Brock was a right-wing hitman and is the author of The Real Anita Hill. Yes, that was some time ago but quite some things often do not change that much. Brock writes:
"In time, I came to understand precisely what I had done in The Real Anita Hill. Clichés are based in truth, and one of the oldest of them is that writers can write well only if they are writing about what they know, what they see, and what they experience firsthand. The conspiracy theory I invented about the Thomas-Hill case could not possibly have been true, because I had absolutely no access to any of the supposed liberal conspirators ... all of my impressions of the characters I was writing about were filtered through their conservative antagonists, all of whom I believed without question. Therefore, the case made in the book was not only wrong and false, it was almost precisely the opposite of the truth."
Want to know how the New York Times saw it? Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the then senior reviewer, called the book: "well-written, carefully reasoned, and powerful in its logic ... must reading for anyone remotely touched by the case."
"When Iraqi parliamentarians vote on Wednesday on whether or not to endorse a security pact with the United States, many of them will not have had the opportunity to study the finer points. Perhaps all they need to know is that the Pentagon and President George W. Bush are very comfortable with it. "
I also have a tendency to trust the New York Times. However, I'm not too sure that I should for, some time ago, I read David Brock's Blinded by the Right and it made me think (no, not for the first time but once again). Brock was a right-wing hitman and is the author of The Real Anita Hill. Yes, that was some time ago but quite some things often do not change that much. Brock writes:
"In time, I came to understand precisely what I had done in The Real Anita Hill. Clichés are based in truth, and one of the oldest of them is that writers can write well only if they are writing about what they know, what they see, and what they experience firsthand. The conspiracy theory I invented about the Thomas-Hill case could not possibly have been true, because I had absolutely no access to any of the supposed liberal conspirators ... all of my impressions of the characters I was writing about were filtered through their conservative antagonists, all of whom I believed without question. Therefore, the case made in the book was not only wrong and false, it was almost precisely the opposite of the truth."
Want to know how the New York Times saw it? Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the then senior reviewer, called the book: "well-written, carefully reasoned, and powerful in its logic ... must reading for anyone remotely touched by the case."
Friday, 17 April 2009
Island Life
A few weeks ago, I decided to spend some days on Ko Samet, an island about three hours by bus from Bangkok. After my first night, I fled to the mainland for I had found the place over-priced and a bit too international - the Thailand that I like it was not. Anyway, the mainland nearby had long and sandy beaches, and lots of cheap restaurants by the sea - exactly the Thailand I am fond of.
Apart from the fact that we all are constantly looking for reasons to justify our decisions after we have taken them (in my case: arguing why my fleeing Ko Samet was a good decision), I've also started to wonder what makes so many human beings (including myself) so keen on island holidays? I mean, why look for confined spaces far away from everything and think of them as paradise?
What would you take with you to the famous island? some so-called celebrity (it was a man but, sorry, I do not remember his name) was once asked. A boat to row back, he said. Smart guy.
Apart from the fact that we all are constantly looking for reasons to justify our decisions after we have taken them (in my case: arguing why my fleeing Ko Samet was a good decision), I've also started to wonder what makes so many human beings (including myself) so keen on island holidays? I mean, why look for confined spaces far away from everything and think of them as paradise?
What would you take with you to the famous island? some so-called celebrity (it was a man but, sorry, I do not remember his name) was once asked. A boat to row back, he said. Smart guy.
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