Last week, I was interviewed by Peter Spafford for East Leeds FM. He asked about the work of English PEN and the free speech campaigns we are running.
You can listen to the interview here. My five minutes of fame comes at exactly 61 minutes into the show. There’s a funny point in my monologue where Peter takes a breath to ask another question, but I carry on talking. I should learn to speak in shorter sentences.
Later in the same show, my English PEN colleague Irene Garrow talks about her experience as a writer-in-residence in the prison system, and the reading and writing workshops she organizes with prisoners. Her slot starts at about 105 minutes.
Category: Diary (Page 123 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Earlier this week I uploaded this short clip of a train pulling in to Farringdon Station, as filmed by the eight platform cameras and piped to the array of monitors near the top of the platform.
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I am sure I have made this point somewhere before on this blog, but a quick search through my archives doesn’t reveal it, so…
All this business about bankers and CEO bonuses makes me uneasy. The pattern is now very familiar: it transpires that some despised ‘fat cat’ – a banker or the head of a quango, say – is due to be given a huge bonus on top of their already huge monthy remuneration. Outrage ensues. The aforementioned ‘fat cat’ is chased by the press and slandered by politicians and interest groups. The ‘Fat cat’ eventually issues a statement saying he will give back the money.
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I went to a Blue State Digital event earlier in the week and assembled my tweeted aide memoirs on Storify: Blue State Digital THINKS. We discussed digital trends that are now mainstream.
Its a rather long Storify, so I won’t embed it here, but its worth pasting in the philosophical bit about mobile phone’s as an extension of one’s brain:
A mobile phone is not an implant, but it functions a bit like the bionic enhancements of science fiction lore. Crucially, it should make us more productive, because of the time we save and the time we find (for example, when we sitting down on our commute, or sitting down doing our ablutions).
Photo by Jeen Na
It is hard to overstate the influence of Disney cartoons on our folklore. The stories of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty et al have been around for centuries, but the versions presented by Walt Disney and his studios have become the definitive, almost canonical representations of the characters. Many people have a huge problem with this, because the studio’s versions tend to overlay its particular moral prism over the stories, which can be partriarchial – or just very saccarine – and much of the ambiguity and darkness is lost in the retelling. For example, Disney’s relentlessly upbeat The Little Mermaid has a very different fate to Hans Christian Andersen’s Den Lille Havfrue. The former gives up her entire heritage and identity for the love of a man; the latter tries and fails to stab him, and then finds herself consigned to a purgatory in the spirit world.
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