Voices From the Blue Nile

To start off a new regime of regular blogging, I am plugging the new website, Voices From the Blue Nile. A fascinating audiovisual archive of a people and culture which have undergone extraordinary and terrible changes, the site accompanies the new book by Professor Wendy James, sterling anthropologist and mother. In her own words:

In the 1960s, I was teaching social anthropology in the University of Khartoum, Sudan. I had the opportunity to study the languages and ways of life of a number of minority peoples living close to the Ethiopian border. In particular, I lived for a total of about 18 months among the Uduk people of the Kurmuk District of the Blue Nile Province.

The Uduk, and some of their neighbours, already poised on the frontier with Ethiopia, found themselves caught between ‘north’ and ‘south’ of the Sudan during the internal struggles of that country, especially the civil war stemming from the south which resumed in 1983. Some people I knew were drawn into the defence of their country, and some into supporting the armed opposition of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The civilian majority were displaced from their homeland near Chali, and nearly all their villages burned by Sudanese army and militias, in 1987. After years of trekking this way and that, they eventually found a ‘safe haven’ in 1993 at the Bonga refugee scheme in Ethiopia. After the peace agreement of 2005 between Khartoum and the SPLA (though the war in the western region of Darfur continues), repatriation of Sudanese refugees from Ethiopia began in 2006 and is planned to continue through 2007-8.

Over the years I have had several chances to make contact again with the Uduk people in various places of exile. Despite great suffering on their long treks, I have been struck by the way that they have shown resilience and been able to re-create something of their material practices, their music and their song, in the refugee settlement.

This website does not examine the wars or causes of wars in the region, nor the details of the refugees’ experiences over the six years of repeated displacement. It focuses, rather, on their resilience and optimism.

Bad Science

Ben Goldacre writes an excellent piece on homeopathy, its frauds, its dangers and its successes. Along with the antics of the goblin charlatan, "Dr." Gillian McKeith, Goldacre has been writing about homeopathy for as long as I have been reading him, and has apparently made some enemies in the process. I look forward to the documentary he mentions in the article.

It's frustrated and sometimes patronising, but it's a careful and precise description of one of the many collapses of sense that afflict us, and that are pursued all too happily by our media. I often appreciate harmless absurdity, and Goldacre is impressive in that he is willing to give the practice its dues in terms of the remarkable human healing capabilities it prompts and reveals. However, it is not harmless, and it is not honest, it endangers patients and it undermines society's confidence in it's own strengths.

God Save the Queen

Guy Fawke's night and Elizabeth: The Golden Age have me in a whirl of anti-Catholic fervour. They're always trying to assassinate our monarchs and I for one am sick of it.

Not really, of course. The fireworks are irritating me a bit, but not to the point of religious intolerance, and while there was plenty of outrageous papist villainy in the movie, that really just inflamed my hatred of the Spaniards, not Catholics in general. I was quite fond of Mary Stuart, for example.

The film is great; it could have been a bit more consistently paced, but the themes hold it together, and where the plot occasionally fails to engage, you can always look at Cate Blanchett's dress, or the architecture. It's visually brilliant, and completely unabashed in it dramatic composition of each scene. Lots of absurdly high shots of vast palace hallways, and painstakingly delicate positioning of the cast, so that some scenes almost resemble tableaux. Particular long-held shots of Elizabeth are clearly intended to recall the austere, splendid portraits that we are so familiar with - and the execution of Mary scene really reminded me of a painting I once saw, but I can't seem to find it on the net, so I may have just imagined a resemblance to an imaginary painting.

I've always liked Elizabeth, she reminds me of an English Athena: wise and beautiful, chaste and ferocious. Golden Age matched this view, where by the end, after overcoming the earthly temptations of Clive Owen, she came across as positively Godlike. Standing alone on the shores in exquisite armour, she seems bring about the storm that destroys the armada with her own divine, elemental will - possibly with the aid of her Merlin-esque confidant, Dr. John Dee. Phillip II of Spain, meanwhile, is a bowlegged impish fiend, his darkness put out by the light of the English Queen.

One other small aspect I enjoyed was Walter Raleigh's description of his ambitious vision for his colony in the new land of Virginia: "a Shining City." This is borrowed from John Winthrop who sixty years later used the biblical image of "the City on a Hill" to describe his hopes for his fledgling Massachusetts, and from Ronald Reagan who revived and personalised the phrase four hundred years later to envisage his own America - "the Shining City on a Hill." So there you have it, this film is about Ronald Reagan, saving us from the forces of totalitarian fundamentalism.

A Scene From Elizabeth: The Golden Age

The South

The results of the latest poll are in, and you have chosen the South as your favourite direction/imagined cultural space, giving it twice as many votes as its nearest rivals. And quite right too; the North is just dull, the East is weird and frightening - even to an enlightened liberal relativist such as myself - and the West is already a bit overrepresented on this blog. This post, then, is dedicated to the South.

By the South, I of course mean Dixie, so sorry to anyone who hoped for something about Clapham or Antarctica or what-have-you. I've enjoyed rummaging Youtube for something suitable to show, and have unsurprisingly been overwhelmed by possibilities. There is too much to see and hear, too much to get across, and too much to find out. Some choices were too obvious - Lynard Skynard trashing Neil Young, Scarlett O'Hara shooting a Yankee plunderer. I considered Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit laughing it up in Disney's unfortunate Song of the South, George Wallace running for president in '68, Paul Robeson belting out 'Old Man River'. More music suggested itself - Earl Scruggs, Satchmo, Leadbelly - but I could not choose. I even considered a bit of Klan action from Birth of a Nation, but that's a bit wrong, and not nearly as exciting as it was in 1915. Anyway, while looking for the full scene of Pickett's Charge in Gettysburg, I was reminded I haven't yet seen its prequel, Gods and Generals. From this scene, it looks to be equally schmaltzy, but Stonewall Jackson is my favourite Confederate General (though I always imagine him more raggedy than this) and the First Bull Run is my favourite Civil War battle. So here's to Old Virginia and the Lost Cause!

A Madman With a Razor

This week President Putin employed the tried, tested and thoroughly enjoyable debating tactic of casting doubts on one opponent's sanity. "It's not the best way to resolve the situation by running around like a madman with a razor blade in his hand," he offered sagely, referring to US plans for new sanctions on Iran. Constructive criticism, of course, which will no doubt lead to Bush, Cheney and Rice calmly collecting themselves, wiping the saliva from their chins, returning their carving knives to the kitchen drawer, and immediately checking into the nearest asylum. A lovely image too, which called to mind the wonderful Johnny, the Homicidal Maniac (above). I have a feeling, though, that it is not entirely fair to all those world leaders who have devoted their careers to refining and expressing their lunacy. Gaddafi (the original "Mad Dog of the Middle East"), the late Niyazov of Turkmenistan and Hugo Chavez, for example, delight us with their eccentric pronouncements and confusing behaviour while distracting us from their entirely serious breaches of decency. The Bush Administration, however, pursues danger and decline with a depressing sobriety.

Goodbye, Ming

How's that for coincidence? I resolve to finally send back my party membership form tomorrow (thanks, in part, to the guidance of Dunce readers), and then the leader goes and resigns! Oh well, at least this means I'll get to vote on something this year. Genuinely sorry to see him go.

Graphic Reagan

Apologies to all for the inexcusable lapse in posting.




The above is from Ten Nights of the Beast, a perestroika era Batman story in which the KGBeast goes rogue and attempts to shut SDI research down forever - a dastardly scheme which will ruin the USA and involves the murder of its chief visionary, Ronald Reagan. It is not Reagan's first appearance in a Gotham City tale. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns we see his colourful caricature bumble and ramble and reassure Americans as disaster approaches, from the safety of a TV screen and later, a radiation suit. No doubt he pops up elsewhere in the world of graphic literature. I seem to remember his distorted, ghastly visage appear in Alan Moore's ghostly and paranoid Brought to Light - any other examples will be gratefully received.

All this is preamble to the news that Reagan has finally got his own comic book. Ronald Reagan: The Graphic Biography was published last month and has been serialised here at Slate. As some of you may imagine, news of this (which first reached me via the Good Liberal) had me giggling and twirling with gleeful anticipation. It would be a wonderful merging of my interests, something that I had imagined myself on occasion. I had even more than once promised a strangely unenthusiastic Little Red Bull a script for him to draw, encountering Reagan at various stages of his life (this never got off the ground).

It is perhaps unsurprising then that when the book finally made it through the striking postmen and into my hands, I was a bit disappointed. First off, it is too small. It need not be a 300 style monument, but the tiny A5 pages make for a cramped and jerky narrative, and the story definitely deserves some panoramic images. The other problems indicate the difficulty not of incorporating Reagan's life into a visual narrative, but of making that narrative a "serious" biography (the publishing branch behind this is embarrassingly called "serious comics"). It becomes far to text heavy, driven by the captions rather than the panels. We are presented with a necessarily undetailed text, accompanied by illustrations in which the dialogue is almost only taken from actual quotes. This is done out of the understandable desire to keep the book factual, but it means that its medium loses its strengths. There is no fluidity, no action, no drama. The panels often represent scenes days or months apart, only linked by chronology and the explanations in the captions. Occasionally the authors are reduced to the crude iconography of editorial cartoons to represent an event, or a point, which reduces the weight and the innovation of the idea.

The problem is clear - to fully exploit the medium the narrative would be dramatised, and thus fictionalised, or it would have to become a lot more abstract. I'd be happy with either direction, but the purpose here is to write biography, not theatre or art. Kudos anyway to Helfer, Buccaletto and Staton - all experienced comics writers - for the idea and the attempt. Opening up new avenues for the medium to explore is always worth the effort, especially if they are historical, and even more especially if they are Reagan-themed. The next "Serious Comic" to be published will be about J. Edgar Hoover, apparently - hopefully they will have found some solutions to the problems they met with Reagan.