Niece in Africa

I have a charming niece named Katja Boye. She and her family are currently traveling, working and studying in various parts of West Africa. Katja recently sent my family some of her digital images; I really enjoyed the many scenes and textures and colors of Africa. I also enjoyed the contrast of seeing images of my very light-skinned relatives (they are Norwegian, with their permanent home in Norway) mingling with the many dark-skinned Africans. katja-in-class I asked Katja if she would grant me permission to share some of her photos on this website and she gave the go-ahead. I don't actually know these specific locations within West Africa yet - - perhaps Katja will write a comment and provide some further information. Katja (she stands out in the photo to the right) is the daughter of Alida Jay Boye (my wife's sister), who you can see at the left side of the sand dune photo below. Alida is the co-author of a beautifully written and photographed book describing the people and the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu, located in the African country of Mali. Yes, Timbuktu is a real place, it is surrounded by sand dunes, and here is an aerial shot of of the city. The title Alida's book is The Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu: Rediscovering Africa's Literary Culture. For many years, Alida has been "commuting" from Norway to Mali work on these manuscripts under the auspices of the United Nations. Here's more information about Alida's work. alida-and-familyI don't claim to be able to read any of these manuscripts, but I do enjoy their physical beauty, which you can see here. Those who can read the manuscripts recognize them to be a vast literary treasure created by Africans and collected by various people and institutions in Timbuktu, which for centuries served as a commercial crossroads in Africa. For more on Timbuktu and its famous manuscripts, consider this informative video. Katja's father Thorvaldt (who works in a diplomatic capacity for the Norwegian government regarding several west African countries) and her sister Ebba (a student) have also spent considerable time working and studying in various parts of Africa. As you can see, the members of this family are quite comfortable traveling far from their cold homeland of Norway to warm Africa. Click on the title to this post for the permalink version, which will allow you to see all 18 images. Katja - thanks for letting me share these photos!

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Few privacy concerns regarding photographs of the Haitian dead

The United States has fiercely resisted allowing photographs of dead U.S. soldiers, allegedly because of "privacy concerns" regarding the families of the deceased. In February, 2009, the military finally lifted an 18-year old ban on taking photos of only the coffins of deceased U.S. soldiers. In October, 2009, The U.S. military banned photos of troops killed in action in Afghanistan. Amy Goodman has argued (correctly, in my opinion), that the Middle Eastern wars currently being fought by the U.S. would quickly be ended if only the public were allowed to see the devastating effects of these wars on U.S. troops and on the civilian populations. How believable is the excuse given by the U.S. and by many members of the U.S. media for severely limiting photos of our dead soldiers? Is it really out of respect for the grieving families? Are "privacy" concerns the real the reason the media acquiesces in this policy of showing only a highly sterilized version of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I don't believe so. Why are the U.S. media so willing to freely discuss the horror of the Haitian deaths and to show graphic photos of Haitian people who have been severely injured or killed in the Haitian Earthquakes? And see here and here and here. There doesn't seem to be much concern about the "privacy" of the Haitian victims and their families. It seems that the decision to show (or not show) photos of injured and dead people has much more to do with politics than with privacy.

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Avatar

Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore). I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying. Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored. Visually, this is a stunning achievement. But that’s what everyone is saying. It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen. Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high. This was neither. And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements. Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized. Cool stuff. Real gosh wow. The biology is problematic. You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth. Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger. It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much. Dinosaur analogs. Most of them apparently four-legged. But the “horses” the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats. How does that play out in evolutionary terms? Well, maybe that’s a quibble. How then do you evolve humanoids out of this? Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too. This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this. Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched. [more . . . ]

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Tortucans and the Problem of Truthful Perception

The actor Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on the old television show Bonanza, suffered through an incident once that is by turns charming and chilling. He was at a public event, signing autographs, when an older lady came up to him and started complaining that the cook on the Ponderosa, Hop Sing, wasn’t feeding them right. “When you get back there,” she insisted, “you tell you pa that you need to get someone who knows how to cook good American food, feed you all properly.” Blocker, who by all accounts was the epitome of a gentleman, explained to her after a couple of minutes of this that there was no Ponderosa, that Bonanza was a tv show—fiction—and that he was just an actor playing a part. “Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “I know that. But really you must tell Ben to fire that Chinaman and get a real cook before all you boys dry up and blow away.” She was absolutely convinced of the reality of the Cartwrights, the “fact” of the Ponderosa, and the need to be concerned on their behalf, as if the events on the show were somehow as real as anything she encountered in her daily life. Charming, yes, but chilling in the respect of encountering a rock hard, immovable assertion of the reality of something fabricated. Made up. One can dance around this in a variety of ways, philosophically speaking. As a writer of fiction I object when critics assert that what I do is tell lies for a living. “What you create is not true.” In one sense, I must agree completely. The events I depict in my stories have never, nor will likely ever, “happen” in so-called “real life.” But there is another level in which the “fact” of the story is itself a reality—the story exists, the events depicted have an effect in the reader’s imagination, there is no contravention of consensual reality in the sense that the story replaces the actual world, and yet there is a substance to them (if I’ve done my job well enough) that is not so easily dismissed as a lie. On yet another level, the question of truth comes into it in regards to the felicity of the essence of the story to what we might recognize as truthful observations, mainly about the human condition. A piece of fiction can tell a truth—in fact, good fiction does exactly this by examining human nature under conditions where a revelation about how people are takes place. We find ourselves responding to characters, in the course of reading fiction, as if they were, in some sense, real. This is what Art does. It reveals truth. [more, including several videos . . . ]

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