Just finished China Miéville’s Embassytown - and I am simultaneously baffled and intrigued. I love the ideas in the novel (it’s about language, humanity, society and power) - but I’m not quite sure he entirely pulls it off in a novel.

I was trying to work it out as I was finishing it last night: is this not working for me because I’m not getting it, or is it just not working? I think the problem is, because it’s a story about language, it involves an awful lot of telling and much less showing - and that doesn’t make for the greatest fiction.

p.s. spoilers for the novel ahead

At the same time, any novel that includes the comment, ‘“We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal,” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing,”’ (p.297) and sends me off to research stories of Gog and Magog for half an hour to try and work out what the author is doing with the reference, before going back to the book wins gold stars from me. I’m still not sure, on the Gog and Magog thing, btw. I assume it relates to the the idea that ‘they’ are rallied by Satan at the time of the apocalypse in Revelation - but I wouldn’t put it past Miéville to be sneaking in a sarcastic reference to the fact that the figures are carried by the Mayor of London in the Lord Mayor’s show, as guardians of the city.

“if they can’t speak, can they think? Language for Ariekei was speech and thought at once. Wasn’t it?” (p.316).

The most intriguing idea of the novel, for me, is that one of the key qualities of humanity is the ability to lie. I love the exploration of the fact that you can’t lie if you only use langugage to ‘refer’ rather than ‘signify’ (everybody, off you go to read your Saussure now). As the Ariekei grow and change (and the ambiguity of that on the good/bad scale is one of the things that doesn’t quite break through in the novel, because Avice is our point of entry and holds our sympathy, while Scile doesn’t; and while you get the pain of what happens for the Ariekei to change, you don’t always get a sense that it’s really problematic…) they learn to move from simile to metaphor. A simile is honest about being not-true (the like is key), while a metaphor has to be understood by the hearer as something that is not-true, otherwise it is just a lie.

If it’s true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, that, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” then all humans have some genius in them - because you have to hold the truth and the lie together in your brain at once. The Ariekei can’t do that, because to speak is to think - there is no way to think something different to what they’re saying. And the dual minds of the Ambassadors reflect the break that must take place in the human mind in order for us to lie.

I feel like even if the novel doesn’t quite work as a really great novel (in the way that The City and The City just is a really great novel), then the way that Embassytown makes your brain spin off into different ideas and reference makes it a great flawed novel. Its idea that language is inherently contradictory, the means of cooperation and coercion (and that we learn it by both means), sends me one way (towards the political), while the idea that once you learn to use metaphor, to lie, you can learn to write, to create script, sends me another. It sends me off to Derrida, to ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, and the wonderful critique of the Phaedrus (in which Plato claims that spoken lanugage is superior to written language) which says, effectively, “But this argument has survived in the words it has because someone wrote it down, dummy” - and I’m sure that Miéville must be doing something with the pharmakós and Derrida’s arguments about pharmakeia-pharmakon-pharmakeus, given the drug addiction element of the story, and why is my copy of Dissemination in Cornwall, goshdarnit, I want to play with this further.

I’m in a reading phase at the moment (as opposed to a watching-things phase) - and Embassytown has sent me on not to more fiction, or even sci-fi (and I do have some William Gibson in the to-read pile), but to non-fiction, to Nick Harkaway’s new book, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. I’ve just started, but already it’s pointed out that we read hypertext differently to the way we read plain text (pp. 9 & 47), and asks the question: “[since] the reading brain and the habits of thought that go with it are central to our preset human identity, the question of how this affects us is an important one: if our reading habits change - the written and read word being arguably a defining aspect of our cultural evolution and the formation of each of us as individuals - what change will be wrought on us and our world?” (p.10). Embassytown and Arieka change, dramatically - Miéville seems to suggest for the better - but at what cost, known and unknown? And if we don’t think about it, how do we decide whether this is what we want for our lives and our societies?

I subscribe to the emails Melvyn Bragg (or, Lord Melvyn of Bragg, as he is known in my family) sends out after each week’s In Our Time.* 

Often it’s just a footnote in my Thursdays, an email I skim through and delete, sometimes it makes me smile, sometimes I barely have time enough to care. And sometimes it strikes a little chord.

He often writes about what he does after the show has been recorded, and today he went off to the House of Lords:

So over to the Palace of Westminster where many of the chief bogeymen and boys of Britain now tell us all what to do with - perhaps one may be allowed to say - a passionate intensity which, as you know, W B Yeats referred to in his famous poem in the lines:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Is that a cruel thing to say?

I don’t know Yeats very well (beyond that he wrote the Innisfree poem, which I’ve always liked, it soothes - dropping slow, as the line goes), but I like the sentiment.

I find as I get older (I’m 30 now, I’m constitutionally obligated to use that phrase) that I get less and less certain about things. There’s a lot of stuff that other people seem to be very certain about - especially other Christians a lot of the time - and I am just not. I’m pretty certain about my own life and actions some of the time, but not much beyond that. So why get all bullish about what other people should do and how they’re Bad and Wrong if they don’t? That’s not how you have a disagreement that ends anywhere other than in learning to build a drystone wall.

Melvyn ends with a postscript:

"I went into the Chamber where the Lords were debating on the Queen’s Speech. Lord Cameron of Dillington was discussing, in expert detail, the most effective way to help African farming which he saw as the great growth area for Africa. The Bishop of Wakefield followed and talked first of all about his great sorrow for the loss of men from the Yorkshire Regiment recently in Afghanistan, and then discussed the possibilities facing the British forces in that arena of war.

This was far, far away from the ‘passionate intensity’ that I mentioned above. I suppose that mainly refers to my reaction to the Question Time sessions I hear on Radio 4. Am I the only one who finds their affected, fabricated, artificial, play-acting, overloud yelling not only raucous, but sadly and wearisomely tedious and way past its sell-by date? I hope not."

You’re not, Lord Melvyn, you’re really not And you’ve just summed up what I don’t much care for about the House of Commons, what I think makes our politics dysfunctional, and what I’m worried about losing in any House of Lords reform.*

* Sidenote: by the way, if you don’t listen to or podcast that show, you’re missing out
* Sidenote #2: I do want reform, just not a totally elected second chamber. Apart from any other considerations, have you seen the US Senate lately?

It’s just under 10 hours since that phrase came to mind. It feels too late to be writing this now - like my brain has lost the momentum it had at the time - but also too soon. Though if I waited till I could get my head around things, I’d never write anything - as I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to get my head around them. And I’m not sure that I want to. Getting my head round what I saw yesterday kind of implies that I’ve learned to live with it, and I don’t want to learn to live with it.  I don’t think I should.

Today I was taken to visit an organisation working in the red light district of Mumbai - who run various projects working with the women and children, and also the men, who live and work in the area. M, who works with the women, took me to visit one of the brothels early in the afternoon - when the women were getting up and ready to start their ‘day’.

I’ve heard the stats: 2 children are sold every minute, traffiking is an multi-billion dollar economy, and so on and so forth. I knew it was big, and I knew it mattered, and I knew it mattered that it should matter - that this is an issue worth getting engaged with and angry about. But that’s all it was - knowledge. I’ve always been pretty good at knowledge in the brain-region.  Not so much at the emotion-region. I mean, I’m ok at thinking about having ~feelings~. But actually having the ~feelings~ themselves? That’s just uncomfortable.

And that’s a big part of the problem, isn’t it - we’re just too darn fond of being comfortable?

Today’s stat was given to me as we left the project offices and headed out on to the street of this district that is, in square footage, pretty small. And I had to double check it, because I couldn’t quite believe I’d heard it right. There are 15 brothels in this area, and they’re home to 75,000 women. 75,000. It’s a large number, but it suddenly becomes a lot larger and a lot scarier when you can see the size of the area they’re living in, and the kind of housing it is. It doesn’t look like it should be physically possible to fit that many human beings in that space. And yet.

Turning out of the bright glare of the early afternoon, M led me up a fight of dark, grimy, condom-wrapper papered flight of stairs to the first floor of the brothel. And that’s when I properly became aware of the hole in the world.

Three floors of a building built around a central hole (let’s not kid ourselves and call it a courtyard) that lets in the bare minimum of light. It is the very definition of dank. Rats scurry around in the corners. The smells are rotten. There’s one narrow corridor, barely more than a person wide, with rooms and rooms, and rooms (so many rooms) opening off it - with smaller, cramped ‘bedrooms’ off those. Each of them home, if you want to call it that (and I really really don’t), to several men, women and children, who were either asleep, or starting to get themselves up after the night before. All of them somewhat hollow around the eyes, looking - even those who were happy to greet us, because they know M, and chatted and laughed - looking less than inches away from tears. Or maybe that was just me, as I tried not to wrap my arms around myself and hug the hole, which seemed to be going right through my gut as well as the world, away.

M and her colleagues visit and meet with these women every day, building friendships with them. After talking to S, a beautiful, chatty 24-year old, I don’t really know how they do it. S wanted to know about me - “Are you married?” / “No,but my mother wishes…” and take some photos with me on her phone. And the comes the time to ask questions in return. “Not that one,” whispered M, as I asked how long S had been here (two years, incidentally) - but then, I have no idea what else to ask, what to talk about, how to communicate with someone who lives in a world I could barely begin to imagine when I just knew about it and didn’t really want to believe in when I was standing in it.  99% of my brain was just screaming, “HOW DOES THIS EVEN HAPPEN? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, WORLD?” and the other 1% was trying not to burst into completely helpless tears. How do you even begin to build a relationship when the gulf between your lives is so ridiculously vast? M told me that their projects help around 25 women a year to leave prostitution, and build relationships with a few hundred more. 25. To me right now that feels like it’s smaller than the smallest drop you could possibly drop into the ocean. A lot of me doesn’t get how M doesn’t give up, let alone how the women she works with survive.

On the next floor up we met L, an older lady, who invited us in to share her food and wouldn't take no for an answer.  These women, by the way, make about 30 rupees per client after various cuts have been taken off and they’ve paid for the sheets and condoms they use.  That’s not even 50p at the current exchange rate - and then they have to buy all their clothes and make-up, oh and their food. But still, nothing would satisfy L but that we come and share her fish curry and rice, while she sent someone to get soda for us, and laugh and try and talk to me through the universal language of pointing and making the ‘OK’ sign with finger and thumb.

As we left, M said, “They’re so loving, and so giving.” She feels that you effectively have to think, if you’re in their situation: ‘OK,this thing has happened to me, I’ve been trafficked, and this is my life now, and I have to live it as best I can.“ And she’s there to help them do it, by standing alongside them and loving them.  So I guess this is how you start trying to get beyond either falling down the hole, which is hopeless, or running away from the hole, which is helpless - you have to start trying to fill the hole, 25 women by 25 women. By sharing with them: your energy and your love, and their impossible generosity and spirit in the ugliest of situations.  And sure, sometimes, it might feel it’s a small, impossible fight in the face of a vast problem, but each of those 25 are people who are worth that fight.

Even so, that on it’s own doesn’t fix the hole in the world. And of course, this is where we start moving from talking about ~feelings~ to talking about faith - something I find even more awkward and uncomfortable to do. M and her colleagues don’t get their energy and their loving to do what they do just from themselves, but from something deeper, a faith and a love that they just want to share with the people they work with. And that’s what makes the work they do and the relationships they build  more than just plastering over the hole. It gives them a chance of plugging the hole, of starting to fill it and mend it, and ultimately move beyond those 25 people a year - because 75,000 people is too big a problem for a few midgety humans to fix on their own.

I don’t know if or when the hole will ever be fully fixed (I have ideas, but let’s not get into that theological minefield) - but until it does, it will continue to itch. It’s like when you have stitches and you’re constantly aware of them and you’re just want to get past that stage and on to being properly healed and well - and whole. But that continual itch is good - it shows that the healing is underway and that something is happening, but keeps you aware that you still have to take care of the problem or it will never fully heal.  And I don’t know how God will make it so that 25 a year becomes 50 a year, becomes a number that really starts to make a dent in the problem - but I’m not sure you can hang on to anything else to combat the pain of the fact that there’s a hole in the world, which is deep and dark and scary and sometimes seems almost unfillable.  M and her colleagues have got beyond hanging on, though, to proper, serious faith that it will (not just can will) happen. And I want some of that.

(title quotation from the Angel episode, 'A Hole in the World', written by Joss Whedon)

Today I saw a slum and a Bollywood film set all in the same 60 second period.  And my brain sort-of broke a bit. 

This morning we had the meeting that was the main reason for me coming out to Mumbai, and then I was taken by one of the of the pastors at the meeting to see one of his church's projects. It was in a slum that runs into the forest at the edge of the national park that is a part of city (you get there down a road that's closed at night because leopards come out of the forest and munch things).  And after a weekend of meetings and visiting places, I really wanted to see somewhere that some of the work that's going on in Mumbai dealing with urban poverty - it's all well and good coming out and making progress on organising an event, and that's my job and all, but it has a tendency to get a bit disconnected from what really matters - and what the event is actually trying to engage with and share - as you get into venues and costs and who is and isn't being realistic about what's possible. So it was good to get the chance to go outside that bubble. 

The project in question is a 'bridge' project - bringing kids into a pre-school environment and then connecting them into the education system. They also have support classes that keep up with the kids as they go into school, encouraging them to stay in education and encouraging their families to keep them there and not take them out to work. We went to see the place where the the pre-school meets (and is a church where about 20 families worship on Sundays), and then I was taken through the slum to visit a few people who work with the project and see some of the kids who are and have been helped by it. There will be photos to go with this once I get home - which will probably do more, descriptively, than I can manage with any words. 

The pre-school is the size of a container (you know, those shipping containers, always seem to say 'Maersk' on them?). In fact it might actually be one - it's certainly toasty enough inside. It's smaller than any bedroom I've ever had, including the box-room I had when I first moved to London. And it fits 20 families in it for church on a Sunday. It has a small fan, which I guess might make it feel less like an oven, but not a whole lot.  In some parts of the  slum I was taller than the edge of the roofs (you know, where the guttering would be if there were guttering) - and I'm pretty short. Throughout most of it more than one room (thus allowing you to not have to sleep in your kitchen) was a luxury - and yet the use of space was more imaginative than any hipster modernist has ever dreamed (the day hipsters start going for corrugated iron roofs that they can use as umbrella racks is the day I despair of the western hemisphere...). And on the edge of the slum, out by the gently smoking rubbish dumps, a set was being built for a Bollywood movie. Of a slum. 'Cos the slum it was next too was just too darn slummy, I can only think, because it was a whole lot cleaner and tidier than the actual slum, with a clear dirt path running neatly through the middle.  I don't know - perhaps that's where the singing and dancing will happen. It was just - on my right hand side, actual slum with actual people living in it; on my left, fake,sanitised slum, plus air-conditioned coach for the crew to hang out in during the heat of the day.  Sometimes I am just *baffled* by the world. 

I'm still baffled and bemused and how-do-you-fix-it-y in my head. Clearly wiping out Bollywood isn't a plan. And clearly the huge success of Slumdog Millionaire hasn't led to the rapid change of the kind of lives it was about. There are projects like the one I saw today - they reckon their bridge projects across the city are helping around 3500 kids, and you think, you know what, that's fabulous - until you realise that there are 20 million people in this crazy city and half of them live in the slums. And that's just 3500. You can probably do the maths on the percentages. But then, you carry on thinking like that and you probably do just retreat to your air-conditioned bus equivalent and hide out away from the reality, because that's just easier, right? Only then nothing ever changes, and that 3500 doesn't become a bigger number - and the only thing I do remember from mathematics is that when you're counting, you have to go through all the little numbers until you get to the really big ones. 

Today I got out of preaching in church. I did this by laughing at the idea like it was the daftest idea I'd ever heard (which it is) and declaring that I didn't do preaching. I also had to agree to do a short testimony in its place (which I am practiced at getting by in). I didn't mention that it probably wasn't a good idea, in case I turned out to have ideas that they might consider heretical (well you never know, and this was about five minutes before I found myself having to slide my way out of a potentially deeply awkward conversation about creationism in the middle of the prehistoric Indus valley exhibit in the Mumbai museum).

This all seems to be a part of learning to negotiate the working trip that isn't ever actually a holiday even though it occasionally masquerades as one while you're on a boat trip to Elephanta Island, or admiring miniatures in the museum. You're always potentially seconds away from a useful discussion about the event you're actually here to sort out - or possible heresy revealing conversations about creationism / the 'goodness' of Christian politicians in the UK / the existence of heaven and hell.

In other news, today I saw people playing cricket on the dusty Oval Maidan in the late evening light and I'm trying not to be cross about not having got a photo of it because we were driving past having one of those no-Hannah-not-on-holiday conversions. Also because I have the image locked in my head, and that should be good enough. It was one of the most beautiful sights ever though - promise.

I am beginning to process - if only because people I meet keep asking me what my impressions of the city are. But it's a hard question to answer, because all the words that are in my vocabulary to describe my initial impressions are words which, in the UK, are negative words - and my initial thoughts *aren't* negative. English fail.

So, Mumbai is... Messy, chaotic, noisy (ohmyGOSH the car horn tuneage is positively symphonic), humid, a bit grubby, full of smells (occasionally nice scents, but more often a waft of something that makes you wish you could turn your nostrils off), quite *insanely* full of people, always moving and never on time. It feels a lot like the city sort of grew up in the jungle, but the jungle never actually went away. I've not actually read The Jungle Book - though I listened to the audiobook all the time as a kid - and it's completely weird how at times I feel a bit like I've fallen into it (where Kaa lives in the ruined city in the jungle). Plus it's full of amazing food (seriously, never getting tired of eating curry for all of the meals) and every other spare patch of ground features people playing cricket.

And yet it's also simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating , draining and refreshing. All the things that seem to matter so damn much in my life at at home - getting to a point where you live in, possibly (miraculously) even own a nice house, have a decent job you enjoy, get your life relatively organised, be beholden to no one and be the centre of your own little universe (oh,and football) pretty much seem to go out of the window.

My day today has featured big streets, narrow streets, the Gateway of India, museums and miniatures, the Chhatrapati Sivaji train station (where they did all the singing and dancing at the end of Slumdog Millionaire), the bullet holes on the walls of the Cafe Leopold from 2008, and ended up in a short trip through one of the slums for a few minutes at a church service for women living in the red light district. I know that, 'from the sublime to the ridiculous' is a horrible cliche, but here they literally coexist side-by-side, hanging gardens-by-slum.

So basically this city, like my brain right now, is a hot mess (but it kinda has something cool going on inside, promise).

Well, I did promise.

I'm sort of not actually processing my thoughts yet - beyond my thoughts related to work. Work-brain processes are firing, but taking up all the post-flight, in an even madder city than London, remaining energy. I keep catching myself waking up and thinking, 'Wait, what, I'm where?' (also, still not grown up enough for this malarkey... also, very definitely an introvert, if there were any doubt, I think I might need to go on retreat when I get home...)

Still, the work stuff is, well, working. More stuff to do tomorrow. (toldja I wasn't really processing yet)

I'm drafting this sitting on a train. On the way to the airport. On my way to get a plane to go to Mumbai. Which is in India, where I've never been. For work, which is also a new thing ('cos, let's be honest, going to academic conferences overseas - even when you're giving papers - feel a bunch less like work than they do an excuse to catch up with people you've not seen for a while, hopefully somewhere nice: at least, they do if you've done the actual work of writing the paper before you get on the plane).

At first the idea of being being packed off to Mumbai to sit down with a group of people to organise a conference next year was a nice kind of fairytale. Then it became a real tale of booking tickets and organising visas and planning itineraries (and appropriating old iPads and loading them up with fun stuff to take with you). And suddenly, about 45 minute ago, it became really really real, in the breath-stopping, trying not to freak out, I'm-so-not-grown-up-enough-for-this-kind-of-thing.

Yesterday I was making lists of all the people my parents would have to call if I fell out of the plane and joking with my boss about how I was being sent away as a punishment for not having any food more exciting than an apple for him to steal. Now I'm having all the omigosh-am-I-going-to-the-right-airport and do I have my passport moments it's possible to have (yes and yes - though I did just realise that I'm flying back to Heathrow and not Gatwick, which is a pain).

So. I'm excited. And terrified. Because actually, India was not too near the top of my travel hotlist so I have very few expectations or 'things I must do' on my list. But mostly I'm the excited kind of terrified, because it is clearly going to be ace and honestly I can do venues and budgets and meeting people and play nicely with others in the conference organising sandpit. And in about 24 hours I'll be back on the blog going, 'HAI, MUMBAI, I AM IN YOU,' to tell you all about it.

Having been on holiday for a couple of weeks, I feel a bit behind-hand (but not particularly guilty about it, so there, internet).  Checking email and tweeting on a phone is one thing. Writing blog posts that are attempting to be deep and meaningful is quite another.  

However, I was reading some more of Consumer Detox while I was away (I've still got one more week of it to do, as I've not done the Easter week set yet!) and having a few of musings on the 'shallow and the deep' from chapter nine. Powley's argument is that living with real depth, being rooted in a way of life and developing a character and relationships takes effort and practice, and requires us to get outside of ourselves.  

He likens it to 'proper' cooking - the process of planning and preparing, chopping and stirring, rather than unwrapping and reheating.  I've always enjoyed cooking (well, I like good food), and I find the process of preparing a meal relaxes me after a day at work, and I like cooking for others, partly because it gives me an excuse to try new things, and gives me someone to have wooden spoon swordfights with in the kitchen.  Also, I like my people.  And as a metaphor for doing life, for me it's interesting, because actually, how comfortable I am in 'my' kitchen is something of a marker of how comfortable I am in the place where I'm living out my life - and that matters to me, because having that place to come back to is the thing that roots me as I go out and work and play, and try different things.  If I don't have that rhythm of wanting to come home and spend time there, and cook there, and invite people into that space, then everything else feels unsettled. Home is where I open up, and where I let people in.  And if I dont' have it, then all my running around and doing feels a whole lot shallower.  So I need to find that place. 

That was my first musing. 

The second was more wandering.  Powley's writing about 'The Shallow' got me thinking about Iain M Banks' Culture novels. If you've not read any Iain M Banks, you should: he has an amzing imagination and is a fabulous writer.  But I can't escape the idea that living in the Culture wouldn't be all it's cracked up to be. It's kind of this amazing end point, where we stop worry about money and economics and work, and just all get to be ourselves (humans and 'aliens') and explore and experiment and enjoy life without worrying about everything, and everyone does their own thing and no-one else gets offended by it.  I love the books - but the Culture just feels shallow to me, because everything is so easy, and no one has to work (except for Special Circumstances...).  It feels like the Culture has been posited as a kind of utopian end point where we should all be really wanting to get to  - I can't recall, but I have a feeling that Banks has been explicit about that in an interview somewhere - but I'm not sure that we should.  I don't think I do. Not for all the openness and lack of prejudice and economic worrying - I could live without economic worrying very happily! But for the lack of work. Rest and relaxation and playing are great - but if you don't work they lose all meaning, right? And we weren't built for that all the time - we actually need the habits of work and the bits of life we don't love all of the time (and however much you love your work, there will be the bits you don't love - the admin, or the tax returns if you're freelance, or one specific responsiblity, or whatever).  The ultimate example of how we weren't built for eternal 'playtime', of course, is Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged in Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe, And Everything, who gets so sick of being made immortal that he decides to go through time and space and insult the population of the history of the universe in alphabetical order.  Which is basically him going mad. 

The third musing was a long-winded metaphor, as I was kayaking around the Langebaan lagoon with my uncle.  It was a lot of fun - and a great way of clearing your head.  I like it as a relaxing activity in the way that I like skiing - you just get to a point where you subconsciously focus on the rhythm of the activity as you do it (in this case 'paddle, paddle, paddle') and the rest of your brain is free to wander.  And the rhythm stays the same, regardless of the conditions around you.  While we were kayaking there were times when the wind was behind us and times when it was in our faces.  There were times when the water was choppy and we got splashed, and times when it wasn't. There were times when the sun was just too hot and I got burnt. Sometimes the paddling was hard work and you could feel your muscles keeping the rhythm going, and other times the wind blowing us forward was actually making it harder to keep the rhythm, because it felt like we needed to paddle faster to keep up with it. , and sometimes it was just completely natural and you could enjoy watching the cormorants diving for fish, the sunlight sparkle off the lagoon, and the world going on around you.   And that's just how life is.

A while ago I listened to a This American Life podcast. This is not unusual - it's one of my favourite podcasts, I would run off with Ira Glass' voice, given half a chance. But this one was a really strong, engaging episode - it was Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory, and it had a lot to say about the practices that lie behind the technology that we in the west love so well (whether it's Apple or anything else).   It struck a chord with me. It worked, particuarly, because it was about Apple, who do project an aura of superiority, and because it was about and by a 'normal' guy discovering something he didn't much like about a company he really did like.   It was very good storytelling. 

This American Life have now retracted the episode - and their next episode is going to explore why. In short, it's been retracted because there are so many sizable errors and falsehoods in it that they can't vouch for it.  Beyond being annoyed with Mike Daisey for selling something that wasn't journalism as journalism, and being impressed at the way This American Life are handling themselves, there's a more interesting set of things to consider - about genre, and journalism - and about what kind of show This American Life is. 

I mean - This American Life isn't just about journalism.  It is, famously, the place where David Sedaris made his name, and while David Sedaris makes me laugh fit to ache, anyone who thinks his stories are 'true' as in factual needs to rethink. There are, of course, differences - for a start Sedaris is pretty open about his merging of fact and fiction (which takes me back to these thoughts, on creativity and plagiarism).  He's also, honestly, writing with a different approach - his work doesn't mask as investigative journalism, nor is he trying to make people take action and change the world - he's trying to make people laugh (and, possible, give a little insight into the more bonkers side of humanity).  Mike Daisey has argued that he was doing theatre, not journalism, and that his only regret is that he sold his story to TAL as a journalistic enterprise - but the subject matter means that it really doesn't quite wash - it's linked to a campaign to get Apple to change its practices, so it really does require factual accuracy.  

I'm sure there is a coherent discussion somewhere about the sliding scale of when it's ok to play with fact-fiction boundaries and when it's a good idea not to.  The nature of truth is a huge topic, and I am neither a philosopher, not planning on becoming one for the sake of writing this blog...  Stephen Colbert coined the term 'truthiness' - which has a worrying overlap with this whole situation. Truthiness works because it has an element of well, truth. We truthily understand the truth of truthiness, because we make judgement calls about true and false all the time - and the vast majority of us probably have an instinctual awareness of why TAL had to retract the episode.

Perhaps the most annoying thing, for me, is that there is a truth underneath Mike Daisey's story. There are problems with the way technology is created - if you care at all about social justice.   Other people have written about Apple (see, for example, this NYT article) - and it's not just Apple, of course.  But by fictionalising bits of it, Daisey makes it that much harder for anyone who seriously wants to see changes in the production of fabulous and shiny gadgets to get listened to.