The Fight Over Assange

Here’s what I think of when I explore the debate over WikiLeaks and the sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been an occasional visitor to a left-leaning blog that focuses on news, politics and pop culture. Members of this online community post articles and videos and use the comments section to have discussions about them. They are smart, snarky and opinionated, and their debates on a single topic can last for days.

If I’ve learned one thing from my time there, it’s that if you want to make this blog burst into a flame war of epic proportions, a foolproof way is to pick a fight about gender and/or sexuality. First, you post a provocative article about some complex but extremely personal subject – sexual assault, feminism, maybe transgenderism if you’re feeling adventurous. Then, when someone responds to the post with annoyance or discomfort, you answer them in a patronising way that implies they’re being “hysterical”.

After that, all you have to do is stir things up as necessary and enjoy the show.

Pohutukawa

New Zealand's Christmas tree, blooming right on schedule.

Interview: Adrian Wooldridge

Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor of The Economist and author of God is Back, discusses the global resurgence of evangelical religion. Original post at The Lumière Reader.

Former Evangelical Christians are usually difficult to spot. Many of us have had years to adjust since we put our days of Christian rock and Bible study groups behind us, and aside from a few telltale signs like a weird over-enthusiasm for the Theory of Evolution, we manage to blend in with the secular world pretty well.

But every so often something puts Evangelicals in the headlines – a movie like Jesus Camp comes out, or Sarah Palin starts talking about, well, anything really – and suddenly there we are plain as day, wincing in recognition, smiling tightly at the inevitable jokes. As much as we try to ignore it, this part of our culture isn’t going anywhere; and lately it’s been demanding more and more of our attention.

As someone who recently joined the ranks of “spiritual-not-religious” critics of the church, I found God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World to be an eye-opening but uncomfortable read. Co-authors Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, writers for The Economist, make the case that instead of fading out in the face of modernity, religion – the American Evangelical brand in particular – is flourishing.

Spring

And, incidentally, my 30th birthday.

What Good are the Arts?

Original post at The Lumiere Reader.

Anyone who’s had an argument about art knows that it can be as bad as politics or religion for getting our egos riled up. I myself have experienced something close to homicidal rage when a relative of mine declared his love of classical music to be wiser, more sophisticated and closer to God than my love of literature.

So when I attended What Good are the Arts?, a highlight of this year’s Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, I confess that I was gleefully hoping for a fight. The topic was a book of the same name by John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford and book critic for the London Sunday Times, who argues that not only is it foolish to say that music is inherently more valuable than literature, but it’s impossible to prove that art benefits society or makes us better people. He was joined by Denis Dutton, a philosopher at the University of Canterbury, and Sarah Thornton, chief writer on contemporary art for The Economist.

Interview: Bryan Bruce

Investigator Bryan Bruce’s new book re-opens the 2000-year-old case file on Jesus of Nazareth’s death. Original post at The Lumiere Reader.

It’s an image that sticks with you. Bryan Bruce, New Zealand documentary filmmaker, is in Israel with his camera crew, on his way to the River Jordan to film a scene at the spot where Jesus of Nazareth was baptised by John.

“I have to be taken under armed escort by the Israeli army,” he tells me over the phone, “with a tank behind me and an armoured personnel carrier in front of me, through a minefield, to get to the River Jordan. I get to the river on this spot, and on the other side are Jordanian tanks and armoured personnel carriers. And the Israelis shout across to the Jordanians, ‘If you don’t want to have your tanks filmed, you might want to move them slightly to the left.’”

This jarring contrast between Biblical mythology and political reality is the challenge of Jesus: The Cold Case, Bruce’s third book and its accompanying documentary. Drawing on his experience as a true crime investigator, Bruce takes on the New Testament narrative of Jesus’ death and comes to a grim conclusion about the role it has played in the religious and ethnic conflicts of the last 2,000 years.

What Not To Do at a Q&A Session

Last month I attended the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, and one of the sessions I went to featured Adrian Wooldridge from The Economist (who I interviewed later that day, but that's for a different post). After Mr. Wooldridge finished his talk about American exceptionalism and evangelical religion and the current state of the Republican Party, the moderator opened it up to the audience for questions.

And you know that one guy (or girl, but it's usually a guy) who always seems to get his hands on the microphone at these things, the one who doesn't really want to ask a question as much as he wants to impress everybody with his super awesome rambly argument for five minutes? That Guy?

Yeah, so this time That Guy was an American (go team!) and he stood up and announced to the auditorium, "Well, of course, as you know, we are finally beginning to realise that despite all his soaring rhetoric Obama is just as bad as Bush. With his continuation of the imperialist war in Afghanistan and his use of secret CIA prisons, it's clear that the military-industrial complex has..."

And it was just about here that a perfectly sweet-looking older lady at the back of the room rolled her eyes and yelled, "This isn't a question!" To which half the audience muttered, "Seriously!"

For a moment he stood there chuckling and trying to pull his dignity together, and then, bless his heart, he actually tried to pick up where he left off and ramble on some more. This time everyone slumped in their chairs and groaned out loud, and Mr. Wooldridge started laughing and waving his hands, and the moderator asked if the gentleman could please get to the point already, until That Guy mumbled "So, uh, had you considered that?" and sat back down.

And that is why I love New Zealanders.

Life is Long

"I would caution against believing the 'life is short' advice that you should live every day as if it is your last - as if you're only ever going to be roughly the age you are now.... Hopefully, life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come.

"The best way to guess what is going to work out in the future, to figure out what you will be glad to have played a role in, is to get smart and get smart fast. To take the opportunities that you've got very seriously. To continue your education ... in a lifelong way. Be intellectually and morally rigorous in your own decision making and expect that the important people in your life do the same, if they want to stay important to you.

"Gunning not just for personal triumph for yourself but durable achievement you will be proud of for life is the difference between winning things and leadership.... When given the choice between fame and glory, take glory. Glory has a way of sneaking up on fame and stealing its lunch money anyway."

-- Rachel Maddow, Smith College Commencement Address, 16 May 2010

Graffiti

We have a lot of taggers in Wellington. Generally they annoy me, but sometimes they take me by surprise, like this one at an Island Bay bus stop. It was painted over by the end of the week.

Interview: Michael Otterman

This month I interviewed Michael Otterman, an American writer and human rights consultant, in preparation for his appearance at the 2010 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. The original post can be found at The Lumiere Reader.


In the lead-up to Iraq’s parliamentary elections in March, much of the Western media was optimistic, even congratulatory. Newsweek magazine went so far as to declare “Victory at Last”, heralding the rise of a new democracy in the Middle East. The cover shot was from President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which took place seven years ago this month.

For Michael Otterman, a writer and human rights consultant, the view of Iraq is shockingly different. “There are children in Iraq who were born seven years ago who have known war their entire lives,” he told me over the phone from New York. “It’s been horrendous. By some estimates there have been 600,000 deaths, and displacement which is unparalleled in the Middle East.”

This is the grim focus of his second book, Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage. Co-authored by Richard Hil with input from Paul Wilson, it examines the devastating effects of the war on Iraqi citizens, who have been largely ignored by Western governments and the mainstream press. The book includes first-hand experiences from people of all backgrounds, collected from blogs, diaries, and personal interviews.

Interview: Elizabeth Knox

I'm stealing my second major book review and interview from the old site of The Lumière Reader - which isn't done with me yet, it seems. More to come later.

Last year, after reviewing The Love School by Elizabeth Knox - and eagerly reading most of her previous books while I was at it - I got the chance to interview her about the sequel to her most successful book, The Vintner's Luck. Her story about a homosexual angel who falls in love with a French winemaker gained so much international acclaim that New Zealand director Niki Caro turned it into a film. The premiere at the Toronto Film Festival was a few weeks away when I went to Knox's house for the interview.

As it turned out, the film got panned by critics and created an upsetting local controversy in New Zealand. But Knox was friendly and optimistic when I met her, and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to her. We did the interview in her kitchen over coffee, while her three cats took turns sitting on my notebook.

* * *

TEN YEARS after its publication the last pages of The Vintner’s Luck can still break your heart. Sobran Jodeau has died, the years have passed and the fallen angel Xas wanders the Earth, hiding the scars where his wings used to be and grieving for his lost love. It feels satisfying and complete but for Elizabeth Knox the story is just getting started.

“I was always going to write a sequel,” she told me. “But I didn’t get around to it for years, because Vintner was a success and I got stage fright.”

‘A success’ was putting it mildly. There on the table was a colour proof of a new paperback cover promoting Niki Caro’s film adaptation. Earlier, Knox had turned the sheets over to show me publicity stills of Jérémie Renier and Keisha Castle-Hughes, and even one of herself in a cameo appearance on location in the idyllic countryside of Burgundy, France.

The Love School

[The Lumière Reader, the online NZ arts journal that took me on as a book reviewer, is scrapping most of its books section to become a film-centric publication. I'm yoinking my first major review from their old site before it gets banished to archivedom. Later I'll write about how I ended up meeting and interviewing this particular author in Wellington.]


For me, reading New Zealand literature is as much a therapy for culture shock as anything else. I moved here from America three years ago, and since then I’ve been looking for local writers – particularly women writers – who can help me figure out what I’ve signed up for. My first project, predictably, was Katherine Mansfield. Last summer it was Elizabeth Knox.

Knox’s latest book, The Love School, was an interesting place to start. It’s a collection of essays, talks, and other non-fictional writing that spans twenty years of her life and career. Reading the book is like having a good long rummage through her notebooks, letters, and snapshots, discovering the memories and experiences that go into novels like After Z-Hour and Dreamhunter. There’s a lot of things to explore here – not just for long-time fans of her work, but for anyone with an interest in writing and New Zealand perspectives.

Yank Abroad

“Don’t you ever read the front page?” a colleague asked me recently.

We were in the office kitchen, and I’d just pounced on the “World” section of the newspaper so I could read about Afghanistan and the American healthcare debate during morning tea. And she’s right, I usually skip the front page – you know, the news from New Zealand, which is where I live and all.

Bright-Sided

In her latest book, Barbara Ehrenreich explains how that motivational poster in your office can lead to detachment from reality, victim blaming, and complete economic collapse.

First, may I just say how much I love smart sarcastic liberal women. I wish they had their own baseball cards so that I could collect them all and trade them with my friends. Which, come on guys: totally marketable idea.

Ehrenreich is the author of Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. (Here she is discussing the book on The Daily Show.) This is the first book of hers that I’ve read, and I hear from some guy on the bus that Nickel & Dimed is worth a look too.

Bright-Sided was a good chaser to the preachy fantasy story I was moaning about before, and a breath of fresh air after all the political and economic nonsense that’s been going on lately. In a tone that is a combination of seasoned journalist and trusted friend talking for hours over coffee, Ehrenreich tackles the obsessive “positive thinking” culture that often blinds us to our problems instead of helping us fix them.

St. Paul's Chapel

ABC News has obtained newly-released photos of the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. There's not much I can say.

I went to New York City for the first time last October. On my second day there, I went downtown and saw Ground Zero for myself. I also stopped for a while in St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest church in Manhattan. It survived the attack and later served as a sanctuary for rescue workers and volunteers.


If you ever have the chance to go to this church, go. It's an amazing place. Love, grief and hope linger in the air and sink deep into you the moment you step inside.

On the postcard I picked up at the door as I left, there's a poem that describes it pretty well:

St. Paul’s Chapel
by J. Chester Johnson

It stood. Not a window broken. Not a stone dislodged.
It stood when nothing else did.
It stood when terrorists brought September down.
It stood among myths. It stood among ruins.

To stand was its purpose, long lines prove that.
It stands, and around it now, a shrine of letters,
poems, acrostics, litter of the heart.
It is the standing people want:
To grieve, serve and tend
celebrate the lasting stone of St. Paul’s Chapel.

And deep into its thick breath, the largest banner
fittingly from Oklahoma climbs heavenward
with hands as stars, hands as stripes, hands as a flag;
and a rescuer reaches for a stuffed toy
to collect a touch;
and George Washington’s pew doesn’t go unused.

Charity fills a hole or two.

It stood in place of other sorts.
It stood when nothing else could.
The great had fallen, as the brute hardware came down.

It stood.

ScienceGate

Okay, this? Is driving me up the wall.

Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports. [...]

[T]hough they say each revelation itself is small, they worry that the continuing string of them is damaging the IPCC's credibility—not just with experts who question the premise of human-induced climate change, but with the public at large.

I’m definitely angry with the scientists at the IPCC. I’m counting on them to be the rational reliable people in this debate and it does nobody any good when they cut corners and don’t own up to mistakes.

But what really gets me is that every time scientists do admit to a mistake, no matter how minor it ultimately is, the anti-science crowd start screeching at the top of their lungs. This disproves the entire theory! It’s all a conspiracy! Environmentalism is nothing but a cult!

Of course this makes massive headlines, which is all the deniers really want to do – not address the evidence or improve our understanding, but simply shout the whole thing down. And in the meantime scientists have to run around trying to convince the public that they're not evil, instead of focusing on scientific issues that really do need scrutiny and debate.

For the last time, nutjobs – true science is not a religion. It does not attempt to define the great cosmic Truth of the Universe. Science is about gathering evidence and creating, as best we can, a series of models that explain how the world works. If you find a mistake, you fix it. If you want to scrap an entire model, you come up with a better one. Those are the rules. If you’d paid attention in high school Chemistry class, you’d know that.

Gawd.

10 Reasons Sarah Palin Exasperates Me

I’m too lazy to actually write this evening, so here’s another silly list to tide me over. I went all fangirly over Rachel Maddow earlier, so I figure why not get both extremes out of the way.

I think the best place to start would be:

1. This stupid Runner’s World photo, which sums her up perfectly. I’m a runner too, lady. We don’t lounge about in our living rooms in full makeup with perfect hair. And the American flag draped over the chair is tacky and disrespectful, and the two Blackberrys? Why exactly?
2. She single-handedly reinforces the stereotype that women are silly, manipulative bitches who aren’t qualified for positions of power.
3. She makes me feel like a bad feminist. I know I should always speak out against sexism, but when Palin blatantly uses her sex appeal to control people I get so angry that I come dangerously close to thinking she deserves whatever she gets.
4. She gives a fresh new face to intolerance and ignorance, ensuring their survival for at least another generation.
5. She makes headlines in New Zealand all the time, forcing me to explain, over and over again, that not all Americans are like that. I thought that chore was over once Bush left office, but oh no!
6. The winking. And the “you betchas” and the “doggone its” and the doin' the bad sentence structure also.
7. She won’t shut up, and the media won’t stop falling all over themselves covering every word she says, and I’m hopelessly addicted to all of it.
8. Her new gig at Fox News. Actually I’m kind of grateful for that because it’s the one thing she’s done that makes perfect sense.
9. One of these days she’s going to make Andrew Sullivan lose his damn mind, and then whose blog will I read with my morning coffee every day?
10. During the infamous Katie Couric interview, Palin was asked why she didn’t get a passport until the year before the election. She answered, “I’m not one of those [...] who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. Nooo, I worked all my life.” Seriously, bite me.

And look, I know, I know I’m only feeding the media frenzy and that’s exactly what she wants, but I honestly can’t help it. If Rachel Maddow represents my newly discovered progressive ideals, Sarah Palin is a funhouse-mirror version of my former Bible-thumping, flute-playing, distance-running Republican self. It’s like my subconscious invented her and now she’s burst forth into the world to torment me.

In which case, um, sorry guys.

Wellington, NZ

by Dinah Hawken

In the world of
possibilities why
am I here?

This view has an island
and half a heavenly
harbour in it

If I'm here to give
an inkling
of it with the sky
so finely featured
by mute explosions
of feathers and flowers
I think I'll settle under them
for no reason

I'll fling open my home
to any type of joke
or blessing, to any
random selection of the changeable
and simultaneously
occurring cavalcade
of supra-worldly
worldly
and under-worldly events

that exhibit here

Kia ora Aotearoa

Today is Waitangi Day. It is also the three-year anniversary of me arriving in New Zealand. I can't describe how much this country is leaving its mark on me. Thanks for everything, Aotearoa.

Paulo Coelho Says “Follow Your Heart”, Pisses Me Off

I should know by now to distrust a novel that declares it will “CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER” and has discussion questions at the back.

At first glance The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho seems like a story I would like. A young shepherd in Spain has a vision and sets off on a journey to Egypt to find a mysterious treasure that awaits him, learning along the way that his goals are possible even if everyone around him says they aren’t. I’ve done my share of dream-chasing and I love a good quest story, so I should have eaten this up.

But while I did read the whole thing in one evening, Coelho only managed to annoy me. First of all, he’s so determined to shoehorn a lesson into every scene that I can’t immerse myself in the journey. It also makes it seem like Coelho isn’t sure what his point is. Should the shepherd trust strangers or shouldn’t he? Does the crystal merchant need to take that pilgrimage to Mecca or not? And why is each nugget of wisdom explained to me like I’m an eight-year-old no matter which character is talking?

Official Spokesbird

Okay, name me another country that would take a joke like "shagged by a rare parrot" and embrace it so completely that the FREAKING PRIME MINISTER gets in on it. Hint: You can't.



Rachel Maddow has been all over this story today, so I have to tell you, it's a proud day for all New Zealanders.

More information about Sirocco, our Official Spokesbird for Conservation, can be found at www.spokesbird.com.

Pretty Much Sums It Up

Bad cyclist, bad.

From the "Oh Geez, I Actually Wrote That" File

May as well be up front about it, really.

When I was in college, I was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings. I mean like "watched Fellowship of the Ring twelve times at the cinema" obsessed. Embarrassing to admit, but I was studying computer science at the time and the LOTR films came out right in the middle of Finals Week and I NEEDED ESCAPISM OKAY.

So I was idly reminiscing about it today and I remembered this:

The Story of Legolas and Enoreth

That right there is a complete, novel-length LOTR fanfiction story about Legolas Greenleaf, written by me. And a satire, no less. Fanfic about fanfic, how meta.

I'm blushing just looking at it, but you know, the story has its moments. The bit with the talking raccoon still makes me laugh. Poor Legolas, the Mary Sues will be the death of you.

I once wrote Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fanfiction too, but damned if I'm going to show you where that is.

The Art of Travel

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel:

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

New Year's Resolution

This year, I will stop creating blogs and then abandoning them to starve to death. Poor blog. *pets*