Saturday
Globalisation's cheerleader, The Economist, really hates Naomi Klein. I was very surprised at the language used to denounce her ...very unlike anything I've ever read in the economist before. "Ms Klein's harshest critics must allow that, for an angry adolescent, she writes rather well. It takes journalistic skill of a high order to write page after page of engaging blather, so totally devoid of substance. What a pity she has turned her talents as a writer to a cause that can only harm the people she claims to care most about. But perhaps it is just a phase"
I don't know how the Economist can dismiss No Logo as "engaging blather." I think it is best written book on branding and the hoax perpetrated by branding. The Guardian's reviewer John Dugdale thinks so too. He says: "Klein's debut has been lazily treated as a manifesto, although it's primarily an exhilaratingly wide-ranging descriptive study. Only the concluding section looks directly (and not unsceptically) at the anti-corporate movement, with earlier chapters dealing with the developments that led to its emergence: the compulsion of global corporations to imprint their brand on every part of culture; their systematic suppression of diversity and dissidence; and their exploitation of Third World labour. Cogently structured, this counter-history of the 1990s is written with a winning mixture of academic synthetic intelligence and snarky journalistic pizzazz."
Saturday, November 09, 2002
Friday
We never remember the past, we only imagine it. --from Richard Ford's 'A Multitude of Sins.'
Remembering and Forgetting are such curious processes...It is impossible to remember everything--if you did there would be chaos--an inability to filter--my abnormal psychology textbook terms it schizophrenia. Yet you cannot forget everything -- how blank and how insipid to be devoid of memory and history. An illness called Fugue: An inability to recall some or all of one's past. People who leave a life halfway, completely forget about it and begin a new one elsewhere. I find that terrifying and fascinating.
I guess the rest of us are somewhere between shizophrenia and fugue.
I don't know who said this, but he/she said it very well.
"it is the possibility of forgetting that makes it possible to remember certain things and vice versa."
Why do I still remember the texture of the red sleeveless dress that I wore for my eleventh birthday? What are the memories that make it to the remembrance file in my brain and why?
Friday, November 08, 2002
Sunday Goa We have been here one day now. And it still hasn't sunk in. We had such good luck on our train journey here. Pretty much got the whole coupe to ourselves. There were some children in the coupe next to us, but they were well-behaved and entertaining. We saw great expanses of green interspersed with 92 tunnels. Our greatest joy throughout the journey came from saying "tullen" instead of tunnel each time we passed through one. Its steaming in this cyber cafe, so i'm going back out where its breezy and beautiful.
Sunday, November 03, 2002
