The anti-war bit was perhaps expected, given the occasion and the hullabaloo in his own country about accepting Israeli hospitality at a time of battle in Gaza. Murakami projects war as the product of the System, which victimises its very creators, us, fragile-as-egg individuals. Here’s a clip:

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong — and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

In all this, a writer’s job? To lay out the truth on a bed of magnificent lies – so it is visible to the world. To sound an alarm, thus, to the System. Quote:

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics.

And why should that be? Murakami’s answer:

…by telling skillful lies — which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true — the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

More:

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories — stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

Read the complete speech here.

So the present, for this prep school 90 minutes west of Boston, is a library without books.

Not one.

But there will be three large flat-screen TVs worth $42,000 to project data from the Internet, some $20,000 worth of special laptop-friendly study carrels (whatever those are) at the new learning centre in Cushing Academy. And there will be a $50,000 coffee shop, with — hold your breath – a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,” Dr James Tracy, the headmaster in question told The Boston Globe.

Wow.

Personally, I think Dr Tracy is a genius. Not for the idea – not sure what to make of it at this point, except go, once again, ‘wow’ – but because of his persuasive powers. The man took over just three years ago, but in that three years he has managed to get the administrators of a 144-year-old institution – yes, that’s correct, Cushing Academy is not your average here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of school – to actually act on a thought that can easily be described as radical. Now here is a man most CEOs can learn from.

Without further comments, let me pass you on to the full report here…

Image courtesy: clipartof.com

So very easy to miss out the ‘l’ in it, and, boy, are you in trouble. ‘Gordon Brown addresses pubic meeting’. How nice.

Looks like there is another we better start paying more attention to. ‘Finally’. Substitute an ‘a’ for the ‘f’ and ‘i’, and you get something quite, um, different.

Admittedly, that is a rather thick feat for any sub under normal circumstances, and quite unheard of till now, but someone did manage that at the Daily Express last week. Result, this headline:

‘Can Dec anally match Ant?’

Here’s the how and why of that story on MediaMonkey. Yep, definitely one for the scrapbook.

Gatward is in the news for waging a lone war against the – how shall I put it? – non-use of apostrophes. He does it with a paintbrush, by correcting street signs that are, well, lacking.

For instance, St Johns Close, which, as we all agree, can do with a bit of help. Gatward stepped up, and here is his philosophy as reported by the Times Online.

“I think one should stand up for things and language is worth standing up for. The trouble is that everything is dumbed down now … I’ve lived on St. John’s Close for 14 months and have had to look at those signs every day. I decided enough was enough.”

When he’s done with the signs, perhaps Gatward could come help us out at the university a bit?

PS: The man in the picture, that’s not Gatward.

Also see:
By Barry’s beard!
Punctuate the Mother!

Image courtesy: http://media.rd.com/rd/images/rdc/mag0903/righting-wrong-writing-af.jpg

Noticed here, on none less than the BBC, a classic tautological blooper, in this explanation of what RSS feed is:

There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications.

Many different versions – righto!

Incidentally, that second para of mine, the ‘tautological blooper’ bit, is that not tautology, I wonder? Does not ‘tautology’ imply a blooper, at least in contexts such?

Thoughts, anyone?

It is a long time since Wolfe has come out with any fresh non-fiction, so even an op-ed in the New York Times was much welcome (lengthy silences from someone pushing 78 is always worrisome).

It also helped that ‘One Giant Leap to Nowhere‘ is not your average feet-on-the-desk-smoke-a-cigar-and-pontificate column, but (near) vintage Wolfe — founded on original reportage from the days when he was working on Right Stuff, delivered in his trademark tone of breathless excitement, with hyphenations, ellipses and exclamations galore. Here’s a clip:

He was up for only five hours, compared to Titov’s 25, but he was our … Protector! Against all odds he had risked his very hide for … us! — protected us from our mortal enemy! — struck back in the duel in the heavens! — showed the world that we Americans were born fighting and would never give up! John Glenn made us whole again!

There were plenty of ka-booms! too, taking us back to the eccentric, ‘sound-effected’ prose Wolfe sired in ‘There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’, the 1964 Esquire piece that signalled his arrival on the literary journalism scene — a prose he explored further in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Radical chic & mau-mauing the flak-catchers, and … well, in almost everything he wrote thereafter. Here’s Wolfe again, circa 2009 :

They were already up there — right above us! They could now hurl thunderbolts down whenever and wherever they wanted. And what could we do about it? Nothing. Ka-boom! There goes Bangor … Ka-boom! There goes Boston … Ka-boom! There goes New York … Baltimore … Washington … St. Louis … Denver … San Jose — blown away! — just like that.

Students of literary journalism will be interested to note how NYT introduces Wolfe — as the ‘author of Right Stuff, an account of the Mercury Seven astronauts’. No mention of him being one of the Great American reporters, no mention of New Journalism.

Ditto, the Village Voice, which came out with a biting — and enjoyable — response to Wolfe’s “whine”, penned by editor-in-chief Tony Ortega. Here’s a taster:

By now, Wolfe figures he should be enjoying the sight of regular flights to Jupiter’s moons, and Silent Running-like interstellar space colonies taking the gifts of humanity to other arms of the galaxy.

But no. Turns out sending Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and a handful of others to the surface of the moon was the apogee of our space program, and everything has been cratering since then.

“Forty years!” Wolfe laments, wondering where all the time has gone and why we aren’t shooting astronauts all over hell and gone by now.

Yes, ONLY forty years, you sartorial douche. That might be a long time for a single human being, but it’s nothing in the time scale of our species or even on the scale of our previous efforts at discovery.

For more of Ortega’s no-punches-pulled piece, read the full version here. Enjoy.

And remember, Wolfe’s still around.

Illustration courtesy: storms.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/28/wolfe.jpg

THIS is about a 24-year-old girl who wanted to do a master’s in England with all her heart.

Late in the summer of 2005 she boarded a bus from a town on the edge of Russia, clutching a first-class undergraduate degree, £110 in borrowings, and a handful of English words she had picked up at school. Three days later she arrived in Bournemouth.

Over the next year she got herself a waitressing job and saved pennies. She learnt English.

Last October she visited the Bournemouth University main campus for an open day. Staff there enthusiastically tried to sell her postgraduate enrolments, pointing out the wonderful opportunities BU offered.

She knew which MA she wanted, she told them. But she wouldn’t have the whole course fee — as she was foreign, it was double what a European Union student paid, £8,000 — by February. Could she pay half the fees then and the rest six months later?

Oh yes, she was told. BU was always glad to help.

This meant she had to raise nearly £3,000 in the next four months somehow, but she went home happy. She was going to the university finally.

She renegotiated a deal for her matchbox accommodation. Got herself a tougher but better-paying job. Budgeted brutally. Begged extra shifts and killed herself working in the holidays. Borrowed. She also managed to pass the IELTS.

In December she got an unconditional offer from the university. By mid-January she had the money. She got together her certificates and application and went to enroll — and was told she would need to pay the rest of her fees not six months into the course, but a month later.

Sorry, they said. And now that you mention you don’t have enough money, we are not sure we can offer you this seat. We need to think about it.

She spent four days agonising as they thought. Then she was called for a second interview.

She said she had been assured on two separate occasions — explicitly — that she could pay her second half of the fees after summer. She pointed out the first installment was a fortune to her — enough to buy a small house back home — and she could not afford to lose it, so she would definitely, definitely not run away.

I earn £620 a month, she said, and I live on £300, so I save £320. That and the extra money I earn during the summer holidays will add up. Please don’t withdraw the offer.

Can’t wait six months, they said. But maybe we can treat you as a special case. You pay the first £4,000 now, then make monthly payments towards the other half. You say you save £320? Excellent, if you sign an undertaking to pay that every month till October, and £1,400 in August — you said you would earn more in the holidays, didn’t you, and you might be able to borrow some money? — then we can let you enroll. We don’t normally do this for anyone, mind.

She signed on the dotted line.

That week she put in an application for an international student scholarship. By the time her course started, she got a response: she had been awarded £1,000 in fee-waiver.

That was a big relief. And now that her ‘debt’ was reduced, perhaps they would adjust her monthly payments proportionately? She wrote in with a request: £50 less — £270 per month instead of £320 — would make all the difference to her, she said, and the university would still get its money by October as agreed.

Sorry, they said. Now that your situation has improved, we would like you to finish paying early. The original installment had stretched us well beyond what’s acceptable, so we will stick to it.

Two months have passed, with two touch-and-go payments. In the meantime, her first piece of course work — in a language alien to her just two years ago — was graded a first class and presented to her peers as a model essay. She’s pleased, she said, but very tense when it rains and her shifts are cancelled (she works at a restaurant on the beach) and customers leave miserly tips. What if she doesn’t make enough to cover payment? They were about to send her away once because she didn’t have the full amount.

It’s more worrying now than ever before, she said. When I came here, I didn’t have anything to lose. Now I do.

Sometimes in this era of commercialised education, in this era when a university degree is a product sold over the counter to those willing to pay, we forget how difficult it can be for someone like this girl.

We forget there’s something shylockian about squeezing the last drop of blood out of someone.

Sad.

TWAT.

You will understand why I find this of particular interest when I say it is part of the academic lingo — at least over here in sunny Bournemouth.

TWAT stands for Three Week Assessment Turnaround (elsewhere it also stands for The War Against Terror, but that’s not surprising if you consider who’s behind it). Goodness knows what the powers-be were thinking when they came up with this particular construction and not, say, Assessment Turnaround in Three Weeks, or Three Week Turnaround for Assessments.

Considering many lecturers welcomed the idea very, um, warmly, I look forward to the next staff meeting when the issue is bound to come up. Imagine solemnly sitting among venerable colleagues discussing Important issues, and someone says with a straight face: “Look, this TWAT is not working.”

Oh Lordy.

I ask because my university is in the throes of a titular makeover that involves a variety of deans. Recently we sprinkled holy water on our head of school and told him in no uncertain terms that henceforth he shall be called the dean. We also supplied him with two deputies, by another of those blessed acts.

Now I am told we are about to acquire two more deans, of the associate kind, and I am kind of worried.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like the idea of deans. I am in excellent shape and can take a few more without breaking into a sweat; besides, there’s a nice academic twang to the title, wouldn’t you agree?

But as something of a semantic simpleton, I find the ‘associate’, ‘deputy’ prefixes confusing, especially when they fall under the same chain of command — as it is about to happen in my school, where the associate dean will report to the deputy dean.

I had always thought ‘associate’ had a near-equal status whereas the deputy was, well, only a deputy. So I looked up the words.

An associate, the dictionary tells me, is a person “united” with another in an act of “enterprise”, or “joined with another or others and having equal or nearly equal status”, or “having partial status or privileges”.

A deputy, on the other hand, is only an agent, a representative, “authorised to act as substitute for another”.

A dean by any name would smell as sweet of course, but there’s something about the surrogate issuing orders to the near-original that makes me want to passionately cry out, O, be some other name!