An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Racism in the Mail

Some more from Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, this time him being particularly damning about the Mail:

Perhaps I have been unlucky, but hI have never come across a reporter from the Daily Mail who did not have some similar story, of black people being excluded from the paper because of their colour. A district reporter told me he would call up from Manchester to tell the news desk a story, 'and they would always ask: "Are they our kind of people?" i.e. "Are they white, middle class?" Or more often it would be: "Are they of the dusky hue?" And if they were of the dusky hue, then they didn't want the story.'
I mentioned this to another reporter, who has spent several decades on the Mail, and he immediately named the senior news executive who was most keen on the 'dusky hue' euphemism. And this is not a thing of the past. While I was writing this book, I spoke to a local news agency who had just had the Daily Mail news desk on the phone, checking out a murder on their patch and asking if the victim was white or black so that they could decide whether they wanted the story.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

My little town

Last month I mentioned Simon & Garfunkel's Richard Cory. Another Paul Simon song that I fell in love with around the same time, was My Little Town


This is another one where there is some beautifully underplayed anger behind the sweetness. Or so I imagined: looking back now, there's hardly anything to it:

And after it rains
Theres a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
Its not that the colors arent there
Its just imagin-ation they lack
...
I was just my fathers son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town