Posts Tagged "writing"

Je Suis Charlie: The People want Peace

Posted by RZ on Jan 11, 2015

– Voltaire –

http://youtu.be/unirIkWPztY

PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN

“Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men”… the songs of Christmas were still fresh in the collective memory when two masked gunmen armed with AK-47s and other weapons attacked the Paris offices of the French Satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people and wounding eleven others.

Another gunman took hostages at a kosher supermarket in a related incident, with a total of 20 people killed, (including 3 terror suspects) and 21 others injured between the 7th and 9th of January 2015 in the deadliest terrorist attack in France in over 50 years.

Charlie Hebdo is a weekly newspaper that has irreverently satirised the extreme right, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, politics, and culture for years, no doubt offending plenty of people along the way. The killings of writers and artists and unarmed, innocent citizens raised many issues, some of them regarding freedom of expression – should it be allowed? Should people be allowed to silence the views of others with whom they disagree – either through repressive laws or by killing them?

JE SUIS CHARLIE

The immediate reaction from cartoonists around the world was the #Je Suis Charlie campaign on Twitter in with pencils and pens responding to weapons and terrorist threat in a thousand creatively thought-provoking ways was a vivid demonstration of how the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword. Those images will be speaking eloquently for a hundred years in a hundred languages.

Possibly the simplest response of all was from Christian Adams from London’s Telegraph where the title: EXTREMIST APPROVED CARTOON was set into the frame of a completely blank cartoon panel.

The violence was hate-fuelled, racist and motivated by a grotesquely distorted vision of religion. In a remarkable response over 1.5 million people took to the streets in Paris today in what has been called the “march against hatred”. People from all backgrounds, religions and colours joined  in the peaceful show of solidarity which, along with simultaneous marches across the country turned into the largest demonstration in the history of France.

The attacks raised other issues as well.

SUCCESS OF THE WAR ON TERROR

After 9/11 the USA declared its “War on Terror”
Today, when most public services are experiencing damaging cuts in the name of Austerity, the War on Terror is one budget which has been declared untouchable. It has already cost trillions of dollars and caused millions of deaths and unimaginable suffering.
The only apparent success of  the war on terror has been in creating a climate of political fear and enabling the US military establishment to award itself almost unlimited access to taxpayers money.

Tom Engelhardt  Professor of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley, in a an opinion piece in the Huffington Post, described the US’s response to the 9/11 bombings and its War on Terror as a total failure in reducing terrorism. He points out that in fact it transformed global jihadism from “a microscopic movement on this planet” to the number-one foreign policy concern.

WE WANT PEACE, THEY WANT WAR

The man in the street does not want violence or war, as the march in Paris today showed, and the marches around the world before the invasion of Iraq showed.. (and the examples go on and on…)

But war can prove extremely profitable to those dealing in weapons of death.

The top five countries profiting from the arms trade are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China.

 ARMS TRADE FIGURES FOR 2004-2011:

1. USA – 44% –  $220.608 Billion Dollars – mostly to Developing Countries
2. Russia – 17% – $83.323 Billion Dollars – mostly to Developing Countries
3. France – 8% – $41.96  Billion Dollars – mostly to Developing Countries
4. UK – 5% – $27.037 Billion Dollars – mostly to Developing Countries
5. China – 4% – 17.808 Billion Dollars – to Developing Countries

So as we sit back and contemplate the amazing scenes we witnessed in Paris today and all that they represented – a combined voice against hatred, a call for peace and tolerance, the choice of individuals to care for other human beings they have not even met, a unified vote to respect the values of  Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood…

Possibly at this time one of the questions we should be contemplating is whether these values are also the priorities of those who call themselves our leaders.
Or whether they have other priorities.

Joanne Harris: Changing The World One Story at a Time

Posted by RZ on Jul 12, 2014

— JOANNE HARRIS —
Blackberry Wine

Author Joanne Harris describes the Butterfly Effect of a story she once read in a dentist’s waiting room, which would help save lives decades later, half way across the world.

She  has always had a particular interest in the power of words, having been brought up with French as a first language among a Yorkshire family who spoke no French and a Breton family who spoke no English.  

She considers the inconsistencies in the ways we are taught to regard the power of words, and the power of story telling in our lives. She also shares shares the wisest thing she has ever been told.

Joanne achieved world wide recognition with her third novel, the award-winning Chocolat which translated into the hugely popular film starting Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. Since then, all her books have been best sellers in the UK.

Joanne Harris is a patron of the charities Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and Plan UK, and has travelled to Togo and to the Congo to report on their work. An account of her visit to the Congo was published in Writing on the Edge, a collection of essays by noted literary figures, with photographs by Tom Craig, in 2010. She has also donated short stories to a number of charity anthologies, notably Piggybank Kids, the Woodland Trust, the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition and Breast Cancer UK.

In 2013 she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk/ 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• The Evil Seed (1989)
• Sleep, Pale Sister (1993)
• Chocolat (1999)
• Blackberry Wine (2000)
• Five Quarters of the Orange (2001)
• The French Kitchen, A Cook Book (2002)
• Coastliners (2002)
• Holy Fools (2003)
• Jigs & Reels (2004)
• Gentlemen & Players (2005)
• The French Market (2005)
• The Lollipop Shoes (2007) (US title: The Girl With No Shadow, 8 April 2008)
• Runemarks (2007 in the UK, 2008 in the US)
• Blueeyedboy (1 April 2010 in the UK)
• Runelight (September 2011 in the UK)
• Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (May 2012) (US title: Peaches for Father Francis, October 2012)
• A Cat, a Hat and a Piece of String (October 2012)
• The Gospel of Loki (February 2014), as Joanne M. Harris

Stories featured in the following anthologies:

• Magic (2002)A collection of stories in aid of Piggybank Kids.
• Bosom Buddies (2003)A collection of stories in aid of Breast Cancer UK.
• Journey to the Sea (2005)A collection of stories in aid of Piggybank Kids.
• Mums – a Celebration of Motherhood (2006)A collection of stories in aid of Piggybank Kids.
• Dads – a Celebration of Fatherhood (2007)A collection in aid of Piggybank Kids.
• In Bed With… (2009)A collection of erotic stories by well-known female writers.
• Because I am A Girl (2010)Charity anthology in aid of Plan UK.
• Stories (2010) A collection of fantasy tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.
• Writing on the Edge (2010): A collection of eyewitness

Awards and Honours

Harris’ books are now published in over fifty countries and have won a number of UK and international awards, including:

• Chocolat: Creative Freedom Award (2000); Whittaker Gold Award (2001). Shortlisted: Whitbread Novel of the Year Award (2000), Scripter Award (2001); film version nominated for 8 BAFTAs and 5 Oscars.^[7] Whittaker Platinum Award(2012).
• Blackberry Wine: 2000 Winner of both the Foreign and International categories of the Salon du Livre Gourmand (France).
• Five Quarters of the Orange: Shortlisted: 2002 RNA Novel of the Year; Author of the Year 2002; WHSmith Award 2002 (UK).
• The French Kitchen: (a cookbook with Fran Warde): 2005 Winner of the Golden Ladle for Best Recipe Book (softcover) in the World Food Media Awards.^[8]
• Gentlemen & Players: Shortlisted for the Edgar Award, 2007 (USA)^[7] and the Grand Prix du Polar de Cognac (France).^[9]
• Flavours of Childhood: (a piece co-written for the Radio 4 series First Taste with poet Sean o’Brien) Winner of the Glenfiddich Award, 2006.^[10]

In 2004, she was a judge for the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa), and in 2005, was a judge for the Orange Prize.^[11]

In 2013 she was on the judging panel of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science ^[12] and chaired the Desmond Elliott Prize.^[13]

She is the holder of honorary doctorates in literature from the University of Huddersfield and the University of Sheffield, and is an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

She works from a shed in her back garden ^[15] and is active on Twitter, where she is known as @joannechocolat, and tumblr, ( http://joannechocolat.tumblr.com/ ) which she uses, along with her website’s message board, to answer questions from her fans. She is married, and lives in Yorkshire with her husband Kevin and daughter Anouchka.

Maya Angelou: The Song Bird Flies

Posted by RZ on May 28, 2014

— Maya Angelou —

Maya Angelou, a voice that inspired generations through powerful prose and poetry and the light of a fiery and shining soul, has died at the age of 86. 

Like thousands of others, I discovered the power of  Maya Angelou’s writing when I came across  the book “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” – seven words that I couldn’t get out of my head, and never left my heart. Why would someone put something as beautiful and free as a bird into a cage? And why would a caged bird choose to sing?

Three year old Maya and her brother Bailey Junior were sent  to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas after their parents divorce. Maya spent 10 years discovering what it was like to grow up in one of America’s poorest regions with all the prejudice and racial segregation of the Deep South (such as the white dentist who refused to treat Maya’s rotting teeth, even when reminded by her grandmother that she had lent him money during the Depression).

Maya was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St Louis, Missouri on 4 April 1928 and the name Maya originated from her brother’s way of saying “My-a sister”.

The Silent Voice
At the age of 7, when visiting her mother in St Louis, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. When she told her family what had happened, the man was arrested, tried and released, but was murdered shortly afterwards. For the next five years, Maya Angelou didn’t speak:

“When I heard about his murder, I thought my voice had killed a man and so it wasn’t safe to speak.
“After a while, I no longer knew why I didn’t speak, I simply didn’t speak.”

During her silence, she read incessantly and was eventually persuaded to speak again by Mrs. Bertha Flowers, “the aristocrat of Black Stamps” who encouraged her reading, and recognising her love of poetry told her that to be fully experienced, poetry had to be read aloud. “You will never love poetry until you actually feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.”

Maya Angelou went on to have an extraordinary career which she writes about in her books, including becoming San Francisco’s first female cable car conductor at 15, the experience of being a young mother at 16, time as a dancer, waitress, prostitute, actor and singer, travelling around Europe and Africa with the Opera Porgy and Bess, her involvement with the civil rights movement, working with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and experiencing the trauma of both their assassinations – King was killed on her birthday.

She writes of falling in love with South African civil rights activist Vusuma Make and moving to Cairo with him, practicing as a journalist in Egypt and later in Ghana during the time of decolonisation, her son’s car accident and the years after her return to the US in 1965 and her decision to start writing “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”.

Other autobiographical books that followed the Caged Bird include
“Gather Together in My Name “(1974),
“Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas” (1976),
“The Heart of a Woman” (1981),
“All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” (1986), 
“A Song Flung Up to Heaven” (2002), and
“Mom & Me & Mom” (2013, at the age of 85).

Ritual
Maya Angelou used the same “writing ritual” for many years and described her writing process as regimented.

The Ritual involved getting up at five in the morning and booking into a hotel room where the staff have been instructed to remove all pictures from the walls. She has a bottle of sherry, a deck of playing cards, a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible, and she writes on legal pads.

She places herself back in the time she is writing about, even when traumatic and plays solitaire she says to reach a place of enchantment and access her memories more effectively. “It may take an hour to get into it, but once I’m in it—ha! It’s so delicious!”. It is not the process which she finds cathartic but rather the relief that she finds in “telling the truth”.

“I try to get there around seven, and work until around two in the afternoon … Maybe after dinner I’ll read to [my husband, Paul du Feu] what I have written that day. He doesn’t comment. I don’t invite comments from anybody but my editor.”

Angelou has credited African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar along with Shakespeare for inspiring her “writing ambition” and the title of her first book comes from Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.”

— Paul Laurence Dunbar —

Judge Rules on Matrix Copyright

Posted by RZ on Apr 30, 2014

– Morpheus –

A judge has ruled that the Matrix film trilogy did not plagiarize the work of  Thomas Althouse.

Althouse claimed he had submitted a screenplay “The Immortals” to Warner Bros in 1993, and the Matrix Trilogy produced by the studio had infringed his copyright by incorporating ideas from his screenplay into the Matrix films.

He listed 118 alleged similarities in the Matrix to his own work.

Judge R Gary Klausner stated that the areas referred to were “too general for copyright protection.. or are commonly used, unoriginal ideas.”

The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowskis is a science fiction action film set in a dystopian future with a storyline in which computer hacker “Neo” (Keanu Reeves)  discovers the world experienced by most humans is a dream world of simulated reality – “the Matrix”, created by sentient machines in order to subdue the human race, while machines harness electrical energy and body heat from them as an energy source.

 Other humans who have been freed from the illusionary world are involved in a rebellion against machines  – a rebellion into which Neo finds himself drawn.

Althouse claimed that his screenplay, set in the year 2235, in which CIA agent attempts to stop  a cryogenically reanimated Adolf Hitler from destroying non-immortals, was the inspiration for the Matrix films.

Judge Klausner ruled:
 “the only similarity in plot [was] that both stories portray a protagonist attempting to prevent a dominant group from oppressing and annihilating a subservient group”.

“The basic premises of The Matrix Trilogy and The Immortals are so different that it would be unreasonable to find their plots substantially similar,”

“Examining the protectable details in the two works, no jury could reasonably conclude that The Immortals has substantially similar expressions of ideas to The Matrix Trilogy.”

Other projects by the Wachowskis (formerly the Wachowski Brothers) since the success of “The Matrix”,  have included writing and directing its two sequels -” The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” (2003),  “V for Vendetta” (adapted from the Alan Moore comic), “Speed Racer” a live adaptation of the Japanese anime series and “Cloud Atlas” based on the David Mitchell novel and co-directed by Tom Tykwer.

 The next Wachowski film “Jupiter Ascending” and their television series “Sense8” are both due for release in 2014.

The Girl With No Name

Posted by RZ on Apr 11, 2013

Marina Chapman is a British housewife living in Bradford in Yorkshire and is married to a church organist. This doesn’t sound  particularly unusual but her life story is anything but normal.

Chapman says that she was kidnapped in Columbia at the age of 5, presumably for ransom and later abandoned in a remote village and left for dead in the middle of the jungle.

She was adopted by a troupe of Capuchin monkeys who fed her and helped her to adjust to their lifestyle. She spotted the monkeys in the jungle and started eating their discarded fruit and nuts, eventually forgetting her parents and even her own name.

She spent about five years with the monkeys before being found by hunters and sold into human slavery to a brothel in Cucuta in exchange for a parrot

Her feral instincts helped her to escape from this and live as a street kid, before being adopted by a loving family in Bogota as a teenager and giving herself the name of Marina.

View the Book – UK
The Girl with No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

View the Book – USA
The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

Andrew Lounie, the book’s agent says:

“She was confronted by about twenty curious capuchin monkeys,”
By following them and copying what they ate and drank, their social activities, their language, Marina gradually became part of the family for five extraordinary years. They fought, played and shared tender and terrifying experiences. Marina developed extraordinary super-human abilities such as tree-climbing, stealth and animal communication.”

Once while living with the monkeys, she ate too many of a certain type of berry and became very ill with stomach cramps and nausea. She thought one of the monkeys was trying to kill her because it took her down to the river and kept pushing her head into the water.

She says she looked into the eyes of the monkey and knew it wasn’t a bad monkey. She then started drinking the water which helped her to vomit out the poison and flush out her system.

She made a trip to Britain in her mid-twenties with a family that employed her and while in Britain, met her husband John at a church in Bradford. They married and have two children.

“When we wanted food, we’d have to make noises for it,” her daughter said “All my school friends loved Mum as she was so unusual. She was childlike, too, in many ways.

Her daughters said the story made sense “When you are raised by her, you just find it normal.’

The daughters considered giving their mother a lie detector test, but instead they went to Colombia to try to verify her story. They say they tracked down locations and found people whom they claim corroborated their mother’s story outside the jungle.

“Mom seemed more excited about finding her monkey family,’’ Joanna Chapman explained. “She’s learned recently that monkeys can live up to 55 years, and she’s recently gone, ‘They might be alive, I might find the one.’”

“There’s no evidence she’s lying,’ according to Douglas Candland, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University specializing in feral children “What happens over time is of course the more you tell the story, some aspects of it get sharper, and some get forgotten.”

The Girl With No Name has been serialised in theMail on Sunday and The Sun. Numerous other papers and broadcasters have picked up on it including BBC Breakfast TV (10 April), Victoria Derbyshire, Radio 5 (10 April), Newsround, CBBC(10 April), This Morning, ITV (11 April), Saturday Live, Radio 4 (13 April) and first press interview The Guardian Weekend (13 April)