Gimlé

I was born into a large peasant family: father, four wives and about twenty-eight children. I also belonged, as we all did in those days, to a wider extended family and to the community as a whole.

We spoke Gikuyu as we worked in the fields. We spoke Gikuyu in and outside the home. Ican vividely recall those evenings of storytelling around the fireside. It was mostly the grown-ups telling the children but everybody was interested and involved. We children would re-tell the stories the following day to other children who worked in the fields picking up pyrethrum flowers, tea-leaves or coffee beans of our European and African landlords.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o—Decolonising the Mind

I’m bilingual. I speak and read English and Icelandic equally well. Both qualify as my “native tonge” (I think in both languages, often switching back and forth without noticing it). Add to that my basic reading comprehension of French and Danish and I’d say that I’ve got a bit of an angle on the “how language affects your thought” thing.

There is one difference between Icelandic and English when it comes to my reading skills. My English vocabulary is larger than my Icelandic one. The reason for this is simple: English has more words in it.

The reason being that the English (and English-speaking cultures) have the tendency to invent new words (“blogging”, anybody?) whenever they encounter a new thing, context or situation.

The Icelandic on the other hand tend to use the grammatic flexibility of the language to imply new meanings in old words and as recycle old unused words rather than inventing new ones, the classic example being the reuse of the word “sími” (meaning a thin string or thread) as the Icelandic word for telephone.

Now “sími” means telephone.

The few English who care enough to form an opinion on this tend to think that Icelandic is a bit impoverished because of this cultural frugality with words.

The Icelandic on the other hand often think that the English are lazy and have no respect for their language, and put no effort into maintaining its elegance and beautiful flexibility.

Well, the English are lazy when it comes to their own language. They treat it like a ten dollar hooker with no self-respect and a high tolerance for having the shit beaten out of her.

It was after the declaration of a state of emergency over Kenya in 1952 that all the schools run by patriotic nationalists were taken over by the colonial regime and were placed under District Education Boards chared by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference.

Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culbrit was given corporal punishment – three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks – or was made to carry a small metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o—Decolonising the Mind

Anybody who knows the history of the Icelandic language and still thinks that language forms culture as opposed to the other way round must have skipped about a dozen chapters in Icelandic history. It has always been a tool, a weapon in our fight against the Danish for independence, treated with care and love but always pragmatically.

We, for example, used legislation to drop the “Z” out of the language and alphabet a few years ago simply because we thought that it didn’t add any value to the language (it was pronounced exactly like the Icelandic “S”).

Culture forms language. Language is a symptom, not a cause.

There has been an interesting discussion on linguistic relativism on several weblogs recently.

The discussion fails to recognise that language is a cultural product.

A Weapon.

The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conwuest and subsequent political dictatorship.

But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people percieved themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o—Decolonising the Mind

Linguistic relativism is the equivalent of staring down the barrel of a gun while ignore the person whose finger is on the trigger.

Language, linguistic dominance, are the cannons of cultural warfare. Without a language, a culture is defenseless.

The linguistic relativists might be right in all of their observations, but they are simply staring at the bullet and mistaking it for the lock, stock, barrel and sniper all rolled into one convenient lump of lead.

Language is wielded, formed—your arms and armour.

It kills. Just ask the Welsh, Kenyans, Native Americans or South-American Natives.

Linguistic relativism is a nice idea to those who belong to a dominant, still imperialistic culture (and this applies to the English, Japanese, Koreans and Germans, all cultures that are strong and on the offensive in the war of globalisation).

But there is nothing relative about a bullet in the head.

Or fighting for the survival of your nation and culture.

The odds are stacked against us, in your favour.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I, for one, do understand the urge to not publish or reveal certain content to the public.

I didn’t, for example, put on this weblog, my long and hateful rant against a sleazy, badly-written, ultra-conservative, anti-industrialisation, racist, pastoral piece of fantasy trilogy piss that I will not named here but has plagued our bookshelfs for a long while (the movie versions have so far been better simply because it does not include as much of that Winnie-the-Pooh-esque prose and awful poetry but contains the same horrid ideology).

It’s not escapism, its propaganda for ultra-conservative English rural aristocrats who hate progress and want to keep the working class down in the mines.

And the bastard pillaged Norse mythology without any respect for the ideology (this is what riles me the most, I can’t refer to a single name in Norse mythology without having a swarm of people looking for a certain dwarf click their way over here from google).

Only a few friends of mine via e-mail had the privilege of thinking that I was a crazy arsehole and disagree with me on that particular topic.

So with that in light I certainly understand Dorothea’s tendency to post potentially controversial stuff on a friends only Livejournal.

I just wish she hadn’t told the rest of us about it ;-)

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I’ve just returned from meeting up with my sister and my mother in Lancaster. All three of us were returning for the first time in eighteen years to a place where me and my sister spent important parts of our childhood and where my mother did both her undergraduate and her masters degree.

My dad had returned there a few years ago so he could warn my mother about the changes that had taken place there over the years.

Me? I couldn’t remember a thing about the place, my memory has long since specialised in information and stories, to the detriment of my memory for experiences and events.

And my sister, whose memory works in the completely opposite way, was too young at the time to have any memories about it.

The best part was meeting my sister and my mother. Haven’t seen them since Christmas, which is a very long period of time considering how family-oriented most Icelanders are. A large proportion of my social life back home in Iceland was with family. Sunday roasts. Afternoon coffees. Renting video with my uncle and my dad. Meeting up with the step-siblings. Always something, somewhere.

It hasn’t been too bad since my sister moved to Wales last autumn (a bit of a contrast to Florence, Italy where she had been living for the preceding to years). So it’s relatively cheap to call or visit her.

Meeting up with family, that part of the trip was fun. Train cancellations and delays were not (my Mother was supposed to have arrived in Lancaster at around 16:00 but instead only arrived at around 21:00).

Lancaster had a strange vibe. It was like feeling the emotion of the memory without actually recalling the memory itself.

There was something familiar about my old school there, in an eerie sort of way.

The road and house we used to live in… Haunting.

Something squirming and scratching around in the back of your brain, failing to evoke images but succeeding in generating the relevant emotions.

Like the feeling of hearing your favourite tune, but without actually hearing, remembering or recalling in any way the tune itself, the emotions only generated by glancing at the title in the storefront of a store for used vinyll records.

Weird does not really begin to describe it.

So it was fun. We took a lot of picture. Alas, us being poor we don’t have digital cameras. And with my camera buggered at the moment I will have to wait for my mother’s and my sister’s scans of their pictures before I put anything up.

Only of interest to family of course, but I have only one weblog so this sort of family stuff will have to come with the package.

Nice to be back in your own place, even if it is only a small, rented bedsit. Am about three or four weeks behind on my e-mail but intend to make one brave attempt to answer them tonight and tomorrow.

Also read Tom Holt’s Here Comes the Sun on the train back. Reccommended to me by Tom Abba. Good fun.

More later when I’m less knackered and it’s not Sunday.

Baldur. Clifton, Bristol.

So it went. Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others might the ritual of birth, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso stomach to accept also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccoes and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city’s still-lighted windows, searching for who knew what specific image.
Thomas Pynchon—The Crying of Lot 49

I got into this to tell stories.

Not to be famous, get known, be acknowledged, inspire, fascinate or even tell them well.

Stories just happen to be what I enjoy making the most. Writing non-story stuff comes as a close second—and reading is a very close third.

Not that I’m any good at anything but reading. Not awful. Not good, either.

I did a three year stint of writing for myself and my friends. “The practice period”, is what I call it. Most of it complete garbage.

Finished my BA. Did about two hours worth of radio documentary material for the Icelandic Broadcasting Service. Did a short film course where we made a short fifteen minute movie. Worked for a few months as a vision mixer for live news broadcasts and debates.

Storytelling or the second best thing. Saw people around me edit their radio inserts on desktop pcs. Was fascinated by the wave of webcomics that was then just starting. Figured that’s where things are heading and applied for several courses in Interactive Media/Multimedia.

Got accepted in all courses. Picked Bristol because I liked the city.

I don’t regret it at all. Had I not done that Masters I wouldn’t be here, doing this Phd today.

Nevertheless the contrast between then and now is interesting.

Somehow I landed slightly askew. Suddenly I was an Art Theorist, practicing digital art in an art community.

And I hate Art, it died when the turd of relativism surfaced as an acceptable perspective in art theory and practice. That the “idea” and the work‘s “contextualisation” matters more than the work itself.

That storytelling is a quaint thing of little import.

I got swept away with the people.

And then we have the mythical beast called “interactivity” that had to be an integral component of any interactive media effort. Which completely ignores the fact that the most profound changes the computer has effected onto media happen at the cross-section between the new and old. Not right smack in the middle of the digital desert.

Diaries crossed over with the personal homepage to create weblogs. The daily newspaper strip mutated into daily webcomics, which, although they might not be as innovative as modern graphic novels, are more vibrant than the newspaper strip has been since the demise of Krazy Kat. Films crossed over into DVDs to create an experience that in the olden days was only to be had by cornering the director in the bar at a film festival.

But apparently that’s too linear and not interactive enough.

Weblogs take linearity to a new level. Chronological as hell, and extremely reliant on current events and affairs. As is the daily comic strip. And, although their form is, strictly speaking, implementable in traditional media, the new economic reality and communicative power of the internet creates a whole new tapestry of media and structure. Media that is more disruptive than the “revolutionary” hypermedia structures simply because unlike hypertext, which is still, and will be for a long while, locked in the coffers of academia, anybody can write, draw, and publish their stuff on the net.

Anybody can write and be read.

Most of us, mind you, won’t get any sort of readership to speak of.

But even only a hundred readers on a regular basis—readers who are largely writers as well—that’s still a hundred more than you would have had otherwise.

And it’s gratifying. You write something bad, no response. The hollow, ghastly pit of silence receives your half-arsed piece of text. Write something good, get a bit more of traffic. Write really good and one or two of those new readers will start coming back on a regular basis.

Unlike the writers that preceded us we know the score and can follow it in our logs, trackbacks and google ratings.

While the barrier of entry to the professional writing world remains as high as it has always been, the barrier of entry for normal people to tell their stories, to improve their storytelling, to pour their thoughts out into crafted texts and to draw a small crowd…

To write and get feedback on your writing.

Critique.

I got into this to tell stories.

By “this” I mean pretty much anything I do on a regular basis.

The weblog form has frustrated me. It has its limits in what can be done, what you can get people to read, and what you can write.

Right now, the form—the medium—is focused on interesting lives and interesting thoughts. Whether weblogs will expand to give some sort of mercy to those of us, like myself, who have neither is an interesting but altogether separate question.

I think not. At least not for now. Veritas—truth (I am a snob, I know)—and immediacy are important qualities of today’s weblog. These online journals of ours are the literary world’s Dogme95 equivalents. Playing around with those qualities too much risks invoking the feeling of betrayal in your readers—estranging them.

It’s like trying to squeeze fiction writing into personal correspondence. Annoying at best, gravely insulting at worst.

The maturity of online writing, the art of it, will develop slowly in the form of satellite structures around the writers’ weblogs. Constantly in orbit around the main body of nonfiction, as it always has, in every medium.

It will happen slowly, it has to happen slowly. People need to be drawn in. Their hesitant minds, so acclimated to the “non-fiction” of information, news, reality-tv, gameshows and talkshows, need to give up the notion that fiction is made by the few, comes in big packages and in big numbers.

They’re not used to the idea of fictional stories being told by normal people to a small crowd.

Like virgins, they need to be approached with great care, and treated gently, so as to not turn them off the very concept for the rest of their lives.

Before they know it, we’ll be having them telling stories with the best of them.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I have what seems to be an unusual attitude to fonts on the web.

My view is that those who care about how text looks will have more fonts around than others.

So you design with those few in mind, and the rest won’t really care if they only see Verdana and Georgia.

Mac OS X has changed that a bit, mind you, since it comes with a large number of good fonts by default.

So the body here is supposed to be in Sabon (or in Bitstream’s Sabon lookalike Classical Garamond), and the headers are supposed to be in Univers (or Bitstream’s lookalike Zurich).

Everybody else will probably only see Georgia and Verdana.

Which is alright. I don’t mind.

The only thing that you are almost guaranteed to see is the main header, which is a H1 tag, with the content hidden using “display: none” and the image displayed using “background:”. It is set in Englische Schoolbook.

And I’m over my infatuatation with Optima, honest. Although I still want to find an excuse to use Iowan Old Style.

New design. I think I’m going to stick with this one, after having gone through a series of half-arsed, temporary designs. It’d be nice to hear what people think.

A few things to keep in mind.

Namely, that those images aren’t there. The HTML file holds only text and the CSS file only inserts images in those browsers that support it (IE on the Mac, for example, doesn’t support generated content).

So I’m sure that this design will look completely fucked up in some browsers, which I’ll probably fix when people tell me about it or as soon as I get around to testing it.

Strangely enough, a large proportion of the traffic to this site (well, excluding RSS readers, which are in a vast majority, which I don’t mind) consists of people using Mozilla, Mozilla-derivatives or Safari.

Mozilla has been tested. Will test Safari soon.

That leaves the last two major browers in my logs, Windows IE 5.5 and 6.0.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a freak in this regard. I am probably one of the last few human beings on the planet that doesn’t have regular access to Windows machines. I don’t want to resort to an internet cafe so any Windows testing will have to wait until after Easter break when I can use the Art Media and Design Faculty’s mythical Windows lab (otherwise a Mac department).

Unfortunately that room also serves as a haven for the faculty’s undesirables, freaks, weirdos and runts (businessmen, accountants, video directors who do Lord of the Rings pastiches). This is an art faculty, mind you.

It also seems to serve as a smoking room.

The only times in my life that I’ve had to use Windows is when I’m testing a website, flash- or director-project. Or in the computer lab in Menntaskóli which was only used to play Doom deathmatches.

I seem to be a part of an endangered species.

Been busy, too busy. Had my last day with the foundation students last week. Attended and argued with Tom Abba at his presentation on the Dust Or Magic conference. Worked with MA students. Watched MA Dissertation students present a bit of their dissertation work. Was impressed with Ian Weir’s project (who was also at the Dust Or Magic conference). Met up and drank with some of the other Media Phd students. Met up with Mike who has returned after going to Canada for three weeks, getting married in the process.

Busy days.

But I’ve got a week, this week, where i can focus on reading and writing. Next week I’ll be meeting up with my mother and sister in Lancaster, the place we used to live as kids (my mother got a cheap ticket from Iceland), so don’t expect much writing from me then.

And the weather’s good. Makes you feel bad about staying inside. But I’ve got a stack of essays on hypertext downloaded from ACM that I want to read.

Oh, well. Maybe I’ll go out for a walk.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol

Dust or Magic Conference Report (Part Two).

Ideas. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulstion at being dragged into what they call “discussion of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.
Milan Kundera—The Art of the Novel.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with hypertext.

I remember sitting, locked in fascination, in front of my dad’s Mac SE, playing with a few Hypercard stacks that he had acquired from God-knows-where.

I remember being around sixteen when I bought my first modem ten years ago and had, for the first time, the freedom to explore on my own on the net, to wander from mad homepage to mad homepage. A world of personal story with barely a commercial venture in sight.

I was sixteen, hooked, and I remember being annoyed beyond belief.

The concept of hypertext has always fascinated me and at the same time infuriated me.

I’m a sap. If you can’t write a story that plucks at my heart’s strings then you’re incompetent (I’m a Capra fan for crying out loud). Loved Notting Hill, thought Titanic was the living equivalent of Purgatory (proving my ‘incompetence’ statement). I blubbered at the end of Toni Morrison’s Sula. Felt heartbroken at the end of The Third Man. Mourned at the end of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

When it comes to cheap, emotional closure, I’m easy. So why haven’t I found a hypertext that affected me?

Eastgate’s more famous hypertexts were an interesting exercise but if you want confusion then Pynchon and Paul Auster did it in a more emotionally effective way.

But there’s something there.

Social software? Bah, humbug. When I want people’s opinion or input in something I read, I’ll ask them.

I just want a well told story

A different kind of story. Told in a different kind of way.

It’s only recently that the web began to, in my mind, fulfill its promise of being a public medium. The well crafted equivalent of a good pub chat with the other regulars. Like being in a campus pub at a college that has the majority of the country’s best conversationalists as daily regulars.

Like a pub where you can tune out the loud drunk in the back but keep on chatting with the physicist and the priest on ethics in science.

And Mark Bernstein’s talk (The Eastgate Story) on the second day of Bob Hughes’s Dust or Magic conference makes me think that the same might be happening to hypertext literature.

You can quite fairly assume that anyting smart or profound in the following text can be attributed to the presention that I’m rehashing, summarising, pondering and analysing at that point.

Proving that I need to catch up with what he’s been publishing in the last couple of years. The HTML hypertexts in Eastgate’s Reading Room do not look promising. Ugly, ugly, ugly. I’d bin any print novel that had equivalent aesthetics. HTML with stylesheets does not have to look that plain.

And, yes, I have returned a book because its typographic design was horrid, unattractive and unreadable. I see no reason to give HTML works more leeway when i know web design can easily be much more attractive and readable.

Civilized Software and Cottage Industry Publishing.

Civilized software. Respect for art and science. Human values. Literate computing.

It seems that Mark, in the first few minutes of his presentation managed to sum up the hopes and desires all of us had towards computers. Conjuring up an image of digital culture rather than simple digital consumerism.

Balanced. He pointed out that the state of hypertext critique (or new media critique for that matter) was horrid.

But the fact that Eastgate, the epitomy of a niche publisher, is still around gives us hope for the future.

And the past. As he gave us an overview of how far hypertext has come in the last twenty years, one thing became obvious.

Most of the fears turned out to be baseless. Legibility, especially with recent flat panel screens is not an issue, anymore.

He took issue with the longevity/archivability argument (“It won’t last”) pointing out, quite rightly, that texts will last as long as somebody cares.

Although he conveniently ignores the countless times in history where we didn’t know we cared until it was too late. We only know the Greek tragedies that the Arab scholars cared about (scholars in the same city that we are now bombing the shit out of).

Quite a few of the texts that were noted for their quality in contemporary Greek writing are lost to us.

But archivability is not a digital problem. 90% of the 20th century’s literature and film is out of print. We risk future historians regarding the Twentieth Century as a cultural wasteland if we’re not more careful (although preserving some works might only emphasise and strengthen our future ‘wasteland’ status).

The problem in digital art is not archivability (which is something we’ve never had the knack for, really) but openness.

I can’t read Storyspace hypertexts on my iBook running Gentoo Linux. Nor can I view flash files.

I’ve got no issue with authoring tools being closed but closing the format and the player software as well is just begging for obsolescence, isolation and dissappearance.

At least Eastgate controls its own authoring tools. Others are beholden to Macromedia, vainly believing that Macromedia will continue to view Director as a profitable enterprise in perpetuity.

Want to release a FreeBSD and Linux version of your cd-rom work?

Tough.

Even if you could prove that it would be a profitable enterprise for your publishing company, you’d still have to prove to Macromedia that many more of you would be interested in a Linux version of Director as well. Which is not likely if you are a niche publisher catering for a specialist market (which, if you are a new media/hypertext publisher, you almost certainly are).

Being indebted to a large corporation and tied to a closed proprietry format is destructive for a small scale, cottage industry, digital publisher.

You are not independent anymore. You are just another soiled organ, a serf in our world of corporate feudalism.

Which highlights how advantageous it has been for Eastgate to be in control of their own main authoring tool.

That’s what allows them the luxury of being a small publishing house in an industry full of worn cogs.

Afternoon is still available, though. Allowing Mark Bernstein to prove his own point rather effectively.

And in turn it highlights why archivability and two-platfrom availability isn’t an issue, contrary to the worries of the academic herd.

Ideas that Worked

The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
And I said…
Eurythmics—I’ve Got and Angel (Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This): Track 2)

“The audience is smarter than your think” and, to be honest, once you realise that, most of your problems and worries go away.

What matters is the quality of the writing, the structure and associations (otherwise known as links).

Virtual reality, the holodeck dream, will never really work according to Mark. Add a sensible person to Hamlet and the whole play falls apart.

What people want are stories, texts, and a chance to be engaged, immersed in a narrative (to use a word with about as much value as Baghdad currency).

Weblogs are a hope for the future. Not because they are new things (just homepages by another name) but because it gets people writing, criticising, analysing, debating and gossiping.

Things are happening. Tekka.net has just started. People are becoming authors in greater numbers than ever before. Opining and telling stories on their weblogs. Mark’s presentation demonstrated that the past, while not brilliant, was alright. That the present, although barren of money, has interesting things happening.

That if we work hard, the future might be alright for the small scale digital publishing house.

And he also proved that the subject of hypertext can spark a lot of thoughts, ideas and rubbish writing in a person like me, who prefers hack writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett over overblown noir clones like William Gibson.

Bob Stein

Ryan is better now.

The hallucinations have passed. Some dreams still disturb him, but not seriously.

He paces the spaceship. He paces down the central passageway to the main control cabin and there he checks the coordinates, the consumption indicators, the regeneration indicators and he check sall his figures, at length, with those of the ship’s computer.

Everything is perfectly in order; exactly as it should be.
Michael Moorcock—The Black Corridor

Bob Stein, a pioneer in digital publishing who along with his ex-wife Eileen Stein founded the Voyager cd-rom publishing house, had urgent questions.

Why are we doing this?

What kind of world are we going to invent here?

If we are to create any sort of long term vision for the new media industry we need something to aim for. Fumbling about, and competing aimlessly with mainstream media will only result in the same sort of zombie culture we’ve been living with in tv and other mainstream media.

We can encourage thought and reflection, publish our ideas, put them out for others to respond to.

Or we can recreate the same old dumb media we’ve been force-fed for the last fifty years.

Where does new media lie in the large scheme of things?

The original vision of a new kind of discipline.

New media workers for social responsibility.

The artificial separation between your daily work and your political work.

The internet is fabulous but is descending into a bogstandard broadcast model. The media expells their gunk, the masses consume/download. The pipes are controlled by a small number of people—the internet is not under our control.

It’s only a matter of time before we get too subversive and they come down on us.

The great firewall of China proves that the internet’s freedom of speach is an illusion the allow us because it sells.

Believing in technology does not make sense. People—not hardware—change the world.

Paraphrasing Bob Stein.

Bob Stein’s call to arms comes at a time where the last remnants of the naive nineties belief in an inevitable technologically created utopia is being torn to shreds by the Anglo-American war-machine.

And in a spirited presentation he pointed the other door out to us:

• Refuse to be hopeless about it.
• “My work should be my political work”
• Talk to each other about things that matter is how things work.
• Digital publishing, small publishing houses, personal stories, personal expression. Political expression. It’s all coming to a boil.

We’re faced with a medium with megatonnes of untapped potential. What should you do when you’ve got the cultural equivalent of an A-bomb in your hands?

And That Covers Only Friday Morning.

I can’t really do justice to the thoughts and ideas presented in Bob Stein’s and Mark Bernstein’s presentations, or the debates that followed. My rambling thoughts and summaries are inadequate. They don’t manage to represent to you that feeling of hope that was pervasive in throughout the conference.

That glimmer of faith.

A bunch of people. Jaded youngsters like me. Victims of the dot-com crash. Academics that have been ground to dust. War. People that, all things considered, shouldn’t really have any faith in humanity or progress.

But there’s one thought that the conference lodged in my mind, and I’d like to think that the same applies to all the others that went there:

“We can change things—

No.

“We will change things.”

More on the rest of the conference later.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

‘I was all right,’ he said at last. ‘I dreamed about being home. I woke up and I was all right. I was in bed at home. Only it wasn’t any home I’d ever had, the other time, the first time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn’t remember it. I mostly don’t. I can’t. I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.’
Ursula K. LeGuin—The Lathe of Heaven

I used to suffer from insomnia.

I’d lie in bed, awake, trying to fall asleep until I either finally gave up and just got up, or until I finally fell asleep for a couple of uneasy, fitful hours.

You can’t get anything done in a state like that. A tired mind is a relatively useless mind. So those waking hours, rather than adding anything useful to your life, actually do nothing but bleed your brain dry.

You can’t write. You can’t edit things already written. And although you’re constantly thinking (partly the cause for the insomnia), the thoughts, observations are blunt. An edge dulled by the constant drone of sleeplessness.

I can’t stop thinking and that keeps me awake some nights.

That, added to the fact that my lungs are crap (I’d be dead by now if I were a smoker) which cause me mild discomfort on a semi-regular basis (caused by anything from pollution, to dust, to pollen, anything small that gets into my lungs) used to keep me awake every night.

Not pain, just something that borders on it. Or maybe it is pain and I simply have gotten used to it.

Insomnia is a black hole. Anything useful, productive and enjoyable gets sucked into it, experiences disappear before you had the chance to enjoy them.

It sucked about three years of my life away. Three years that I hardly remember (or remember less, given my already horrible situational memory). Books, movies and writing kept me alive.

I’d write when I felt the sharpest. Essays for my undergraduate course in literature and fiction.

I’d read when I wasn’t quite sharp enough to write.

And at night. At the times when I simply gave up and needed something to fill the numbing, voracious maw that was my dulled mind, I’d watch movies.

And, strangely enough, I remember them all.

At that point I made a point of only renting classics and world cinema. With almost no new American cinema at all (I tend to define new as anything made or published in the last 25 years thereby exposing myself as a snob).

Movies, books and writing kept me sane.

But I first got properly cured when I moved to the UK. I don’t know whether it is simply that the English winter is more compatible with my psyche than the Icelandic winter, or simply the added independence of living in a different country, but something simply clicked in my mind.

And sleep came much more easily.

Which makes weeks like last week all the stranger. For five nights I only got about fifteen hours sleep in total, leaving me fairly incapable of being productive during daytime.

And last night I slept like a rock from around eleven in the evening til two o’clock in the afternoon. Fifteen hours straight.

It feels wonderful.

It’s the feeling that, this is what normalcy feels like. This is what feeling alright is like.

It’s being overwhelmed with an appreciation for the not-too-happy, not-too-sad feeling.

Ecstacy is overrated and depression, however romantic, sucks.

Sitting in the sun. Hearing Miles Davis echo from somebody’s car or apartment. Worrying a bit about bills and rent. But generally feeling alright.

That’s what it’s all about.

It’s good, in balance and harmony with the bad.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I’ve been doing a crap job of debating when it comes to this war. I say all the wrong things and alienate people.

Thankfully I haven’t had to do that much offline, I’ve only run into about two people that are pro-war here at work or in my social life.

I’ll talk about the protests. And I’ll mention the fact that I agree with pretty much everything Shelley Powers says in her post on her weblog. Although, unlike Shelley, I don’t think that it is possible to reform the media.

We can change things. And we have to try.

Haven’t quite finished the report for the second and best day. Can’t focus today after last night’s short battle with insomnia (happens rarely these days, used to be a frequent problem when I lived in Iceland). Mark Bernstein has made a few comments on the conference on his weblog. More eloquent than my directionless ramblings.