The Daily Novel

In the pursuit of research for a blog I will write in a few days, I spent several hours tonight reading the auto-biography of a woman who has suffered from anorexia. I went on reading, not because I have a consuming interest in the subject, but because of her compelling honesty. And because she was telling me about a world I could not easily inhabit. Foreign territory.

Because I am, thanks to my genes, a rather thin person. So I will never become fat, however much I patronise the fish and chip shops of my youth, or the burger bars of the present.

But in reading what she had to say, I was jolted into an awareness of how much her problems were the result of politics. Nothng to do with her genetics.

But quite simply to do with the dominant culture, which suggests that women will not get a man if they are ‘fat’. This myth pervades our culture, including the only serious left-wing publication in Britain - the Guardian/Observer, whose models on the style pages are not at all anorexic. But they are never, repeat never, fat.

Anorexics, who are nearly all women, have problems, because they can only be ‘not fat’ if they deny their own being. They want to eat and enjoy all the good things in life, which makes American consumer capitalism so popular.

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American consumer capitalism is male-dominated. And males, as the Greeks told us, are nervous af big women who swallow them.

It is the male fear of the big female, which dominates.

So the current fashion is for females so thin that they do not have any physical characteristics, which are threatening to the male.

They do not have breasts the size of those of Marilynn Monroe. And they have hips so slim that they would crack upon any vigorous interchange.

The rain that blighted much of Britain’s Bank Holiday left Lyme Bay alone during daylight hours. The sun broke through the cloud to lighten the riverside walk at Dartmouth yesterday afternoon. The beach at Charmouth has been crowded all day, and there were still a few enjoying the late evening sunshine when I took the picture below just now. Those who stayed home after listening to the weather forecast missed out.

The 17 per cent swing against the Labour Party in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election on Thursday is most definitely a slap in the face for Gordon Brown’s tottering premiership and possibly sounds the death knell of the New Labour personified by the rule of Tony Blair and Brown since 1997. The result is also a huge disappointment for the Liberal Democrats, with their brand new young leader, Nick Clegg. They came a poor third in the poll yesterday. As they did in the election for London mayor on May Day, when Boris Johnson, one of the inner core of David Cameron’s New Conservatism, ousted Ken Livingstone, who had the support of New Labour cabinet ministers in his attempt to get re-elected.

But the result yesterday, and those on May Day, do not amount to a clear signal that the country is ready to vote in a Cameron government in two years time. They don’t want to vote for a Labour Party led by Brown, they don’t think the Liberal Democrats are serious contenders. The negatives are clear. But Cameron is still a long way short of generating enthusiastic national support for his policies and for his new band of Young Conservatives.

First to reprise on May Day. Livingstone, despite the vicious campaign mounted daily against him by the London Evening Standard , did better on May Day then most Labour candidates, and only lost London by a small margin. Livingstone is not in any sense a stalwart of New Labour. In the first election for Mayor of London New Labour put up their own candidate, Frank Dobson, to try and stop him winning. They failed. Londoners remembered with gratitude some of the things Livingstone did while running the Greater London Council, before it was abolished by Margaret Thatcher. Like free travel on the buses. Subsidies like this have no part in New Labour and do not fit in with Brown’s focus on balancing the national budget.

Livingstone did make friends with big business in his two terms as London mayor, when he concentrated on London’s pragmatic needs, and devoted fewer of his speeches to his hobby horses, like support for the republican cause in Northern Ireland. He formed an uneasy alliance with the Blair/Brown government, but he remains a maverick, who does not have sufficient support in the Labour Party to mount a bid to oust Brown as leader.

There is, as yet, no sign of anyone prepared to put his, or her, head above the ramparts to challenge Brown for the leadership. But several leading Labour cabinet ministers have been telling political journalists over the last few days, that they think Brown should not lead Labour into the next election. Off the record, of course.

If the country voted as did the people of Crewe, David Cameron would win the next election with a thumping majority. But such huge majorities in by-elections, when one party has been in power as long as eleven years, are notoriously unreliable predictors. Analysis of the demographics of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election suggest that the result is not nearly as bleak for the Labour Party as the headlines of the last few days have been suggesting.

Labour has not been defeated in one of its heartlands. Crewe and Nantwich is a new parliamentary constituency, which has been Labour since it was created in 1983, but twice, Labour has held on to it by the narrowest of majorities. The present constituency is a merger of two former contituencies.

Crewe was, and is, a Labour heartland, with electors who worked on the nationalised railways and in one of the largest Rolls Royce factories in the country. But Nantwich was solid Conservative, situated in the posh part of Cheshire, with voters similar to those who voted in the Conservative Neil Hamilton, and his wife Christine.

Two of the Sunday newspapers are already speculating as to who will be the next Labour leader.

According to
The Sunday Times , David Milliband, the Foreign Secretary, has told ‘friends’ that he will bid for the job if a critical mass of Labour declares it wants Brown to go. He is certainly highly favoured, but other ‘friends’ of his, have been telling journalists that he remains loyal to Brown.

The Observer has a story,
based on off-the-record talks with several senior ministers, suggesting that Brown should appoint a new deputy prime minister as a leader-in-waiting. They suggest Jack Straw, the justice minister, is the most likely man for the job.

The Daily Novel is sitting on the fence. Because there are several cabinet ministers with the experience who might emerge as contenders over the next few weeks if the Labour Party keeps its nerve and concentrates on developing a version of New Labour capable of winning the support of the country in 2010. In including not a few women, who have not been gossiping to the political journalists as much as some of the men.

Jack Straw photo: Johnny Green/PA

This is a test using Microsoft Word macros to enable me to write in the lastest version of WordPress the blogs that I wrote with the old version, which is different.

I want to have some words in Bold and others in italics italics.

I also want to put in ilinks to other articles

links to other articles

This is a test using Microsoft Word macros to enable me to write in the lastest version of WordPress the blogs that I wrote with the old version, which is different.

I want to have some words in Bold and others in italics italics.

I also want to put in ilinks to other articles

Martin Kettle of The Guardian has been trying for 24 years to get an interview with Cherie Blair. At last he has been successful and the result is in today’s Guardian, where his is given a full page. He has laboured hard in searching the book she has just written and posing questions at the interview. But the best he can do to give his headline writers a chance is the news that she is a Socialist.

Not only that, she insists her husband is also a Socialist. Kettle’s interview contains this revealing nugget about that.

And your husband? (Kettle asked her) “I’m probably the only person in the country who insists my husband is a socialist.” What does he say to that? “He does his usual thing. He smiles and rolls his eyes and knows exactly what I mean.”

That quote says it all. And perhaps it was worth waiting 24 years for.

Apologies to Hemingway for the headline, but making this small change to the header of The Daily Novel has taken hours in the past week, but days and weeks and months if I am brutally honest. Even though readers may think that this means I am either demented or stupid or a terribly slow learner. Because I first tried to use one of my own photographs at the top of the opening screen a month or two after I begain this blog in August, 2008. I then followed all the instructions on the WordPress help pages, and even bought a book on HTML to help me understand what was happening.

In this latest saga I began by downloading an alternative design from the band of WordPress developers, who offer help to bloggers. This particular design already had a photo in it and it also had several other features, which I wanted, like a four column format. I did manage to get my own photograph in, but the design made my blog much more difficult to read. And this affected all the blogs in the archives, as well as the new entries.

I tried to get in touch with the author, but his web page gave an error message as did his email address. Maybe he has been driven mad by writing all this computer code and has taken early retirement and has started a second career instructing Cailifornians how to surf the waves. Which must be a much healthier lifestyle than trying to help them surf the net.

So I decided to stick with the default design for WordPress called Kubrick,which was written by a 29-year-old Dane, Michael Heilemann. It is so called because Heilemann is a fan of Clockwork Orange. You can read about this in his blog.

Armed with the Visual Quickstart Guide to WordPress 2, I set about adapting the Kubrick design to my needs. I followed the instructions to the letter, and checked, and checked again. But nothing was changed.

So I went back to trial and error. In the header.php file I renamed the image for Kubrick, KubrickOld. Then I changed the name to my image to kubrickheader.jpg.

Movement at last. I could see the edges of my photo around the slab of green colour. I tried several ways of getting rid of it without success. But I thought I could make it transparent that would achieve my aim. More reading of the book and the help pages to find the right code to replace the 33CC33 code for the green slab. I could not find any code for transparency, but I did establish that 000000 produced the deepest black. So I keyed in 999999. And it worked as you can see.

There is much else that I want to change. But on this experience it seems to me that the problem for bloggers is not the shortage of help but the abundance of it. It is finding the crucial thing you need, using the book index and scanning (because not everything is in the best index) and going interminably from page to page on the WordPress Codex help pages.

Photo courtesy Washington Post.

Despite Hillary Clinton’s resounding victory in the West Virginia primary, Barack Obama has now built up an un-beatable lead amongst the pledged delegates voted for in the primaries. And the super-delegates, who were mostly behind Hillary Clinton when the campaign started, have been shifting towards Obama, day by day.

And yesterday John Edwards, threw enthusiastic support behind Obama by appearing on the platform with him in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Said Edwards:

‘”The reason I am here tonight is the voters have made their choice, and so have I.”

Edwards, who was a strong contender himself in this, and the previous two US presidential elections, has strong support amongst those in the Democratic Party most concerned to do something about the lot of the large body of America’s poor, both black and white. Since he dropped out of this year’s Presidential campaign he has torn between his support for Hillary Clinton and his liking for the personality and policies of the newcomer in the contest, Barack Obama.

Yesterday he came off the fence. And his support may prove a great help to Obama is reaching out to the white working class vote, which is where the Clinton’s are strongest.

And yesterday also the Republicans lost a by-election in western Mississipi. It was their worst result in the last three by-elections. The seat gave Bush’s Republicans 60 of their votes in 2004. Yesterday they handed the Democrats an 8 per cent majority.

This was despite a campaign which strongly promoted a new look Republican Party under the new leadership of John McCain. The result demonstrates that McCain is going to have a tough job in convincing the electorate that they should vote for a third Republican President in a row.

The problem of being a blogger, like the problems of being a daily newspaper journalist, is that quite often when you read what you wrote yesterday you don’t always agree with yourself. That has been my experience today. I don’t want to withdraw anything I said about the Tower of Babel, because computing has become so specialised that computer experts do not know and understand the language that other computer experts are using. And for the billions of non-computer experts computer code is even more difficult to understand than Chinese.

Nevertheless the collective inventativeness of computer experts has made the world wide web possible. And the web is the most important invention in the history of communications since Caxton invented the printing press, way back in 1494. The implications of the web are much greater than the later inventions of the telephone, radio and television and the mobile telephone. The printing press, radio and television made one to many communications possible. The telephone made one to one communications possible, From deepest Dorset I can talk daily to my children in London and Colchester and relatives in New Zealand. I can even talk to George Bush in the White House, if I can persuade his Press Secretary’s secretary, that he might be able to stem the decline in his poll ratings by giving an interview to The Daily Novel.

But the web is the first human invention which is equally good for one to many and one to one communications. Millions of people have set up web sites for family groups, friendship groups, special interest groups of many kinds. The web is equally good for making it possible for anyone who sets up a web site to communicate to the many. As examples like the Drudge Report and the Baghdad Blogger demonstrate, it is possible for one person to get a readership all around the world that is greater than that of Britain’s most successful down market tabloids.

(Such examples are the exceptions rather than the rule. And as I have argued in previous blogs the web is increasingly dominated by the mass media groups, telling us the news they want us to hear, and the giant companies, selling us the products that they want us to buy. But nevertheless it is now possible, which it was not before, for any ordinary citizen to get heard by a mass audience, and without relying on a newspaper, radio or television station to filter his comments.)

How best to characterise this new phonomenon? The Global Village is not the right metaphor. The village metaphor implies that everyone in this community knows each other, which is clearly not true of the web.

A much more appropriate metaphor is the Global City. If you key Global City into Google you will find that Global Cities are those big cities of the world which are international, including the two I know best, London and New York. They are places where millions of people live in close proximity. They could not be more different from the villages, which are small communities which are geographically separate.p>

But human beings maintain their sanity in these huge cities, by making their neighbourhoods, like Greenwich Village in New York and Gospel Oak in London into ‘villages’, where they know their neighbours.

These neighbourhoods have no political reality. Although there is a ward, Gospel Oak, which votes for councillors in local government elections, this includes part of the neighbourhood, ‘Gospel Oak’.
And some parts of the Gospel Oak ward would not identify with the neighbourhood, ‘Gospel Oak’.

The political power over Gospel Oak is rooted in three hierarchies. At the local government level it is exercised by Camden Council, itself a merger of three very different areas, which includes the posh folks of Hampstead as well as the mainly working class folk of Camden and Kentish Town. The next level up, is London, where the reins of political power have just been transferred from a rather left wing Labour leader, Ken Livingston, into the hands of one of the Conservative Party’s new Old Etonian leaders, Boris Johnson. And by a vote ol all the councils of London.

But, of course, many of the decisions which crucially affect the lives of Gospel Oakers are made at the top level, the national government.

Metaphors are useful in jolting the thought patterns. And the Global Village metaphor has been useful in alerting us to radical changes in communication patterns. But it is time to move on

So let’s say instead the web is a Global City. And it gives human beings the opportunity of creating virtual neighbourhoods, with other human beings on the other side of the earth. But this has no political reality.

Citizen journalists and bloggers, thanks to the web, can establish virtual neighbourhoods, and a good thing too. But it does not change the political reality.

Who holds the power in the Global City?

First, comes the big companies, who have the economic power and the techincal expertise to dominate the web.

Second, comes Governments, some of whom are democratic, but many of whom, are not. Who have powerr to limit and regulate the power of the big companies.

Next, come the professionals. Including the journalists, who transmit news from one part of the world to another, and the computer experts, who write the many languages which get the information from the biggest power holders (big companies and governments) onto the computers owned by the multitude.

Citizen journalists and bloggers can publish much more easily than the Poor Peope’s Press and the pamphleteers and story tellers of previous centuries. But the political and economic realities have not changed that much. The Sun, The Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail still sell millions more copies than The Times, The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. And although the web circulations of the posh papers are much greater, the brute economic reality is that money to pay the journalists is made by the print sales and print advertisements.

I wrote the headline before I did my research for the article. But since I am a reasonably honest and well trained journalist, I am letting the readers into the secret of what is going on in my mind, as I write the article. So I start at the end.

The age is which we are living is the Age of Babel. The OED is still in the shed, while we get our bookshelvelves made. But I have at hand the Reader’s Digest Dictionery, which is one of the better products of American consumer capitalism.

It tells me that Babel was a city punished by God, (a bloke who both Tony Blair, his arch enemy, Gordon Brown, George W Bush, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say they believe in). God, who in those days went under the name of Jehovah, got very angry when mere human beings tried to buiild a tower to reach the heavens. So Jehovah punished them for their arrogance. He punished his children by waving his magic wand and making it impossible for the builders of Tower to undertand each other’s language.

Game, set, point to God.

But the reality of the world in which we now live in 2008 is that the majority cannot understand a word of what computer people are saying; be they techies, or nerds or distingished computer scientists.

But what the majority do not know, is the the huge and growing numbers who know the language of computing, are not telling them the whole truth, because they have to pay their mortgages, etc.

The reality is that they have been so busy building their Towers to the heavens (or towards lots ol lolly on earth) that they cannot communicate with their fellow computer wizards, who have developed other languages.

So the ’secret’ which computer wizards rarely tell the world, is that they are as almost as helpless, in speaking the language of their rival’s computing, as those who know nothing of computing at all.
So a computer man who speaks Windows can’t communicate with a chap who speaks AppleMac. As he can’t speak Chines or even French.

In the last few weeks I have had two quite different, but very serious problems. In seeking to solve them I dashed off a series of emails to people I knew, who, surprise, surprise were mostly men.

Of the very few who replied, none of them addressed the questions I was asking.

In both instances I managed to get The Daily Novel back on the newstands. But with the help of two women, neither of whom I knew, and whose expertise is quite different in terms of computer languages. But both of them were not consumed by male arrogance. They actuarlly read what I wrote and made helpful suggestions.

They have a difficult time themselves, because the world of computing is male dominated. And the men who rule it, are concerned to rise to the top of their particular villages of computing.

Such as Microsoft, AppleMac, WordPress, Google, Adobe Fhotoshop, MySpace, etc, etc.

This means nothing to my non-computer literate readers. But it is dominating their world.

The non-computer literate are told that if they have problems, they should call in a computer expert.

But the reality is that there now many highly developed computer languages.

So if students are going to learn the language of computing, they need to spend as much effort learnig each one of them as they needed to learn to speak just one foreign language.

You don’t learn Chinese, in ten easy lessons. And, you don’t learn WordPress in ten easy lessons. Or Miccrosot Word.

To conclude this post, I come back to Marshall McCluhan. Follow this link in Wikipeda, because this man who was being slaughtered by most of the distingiuished academics in the field, when I arrived at City Uninersity, London in 1979, had something important to say.

Those who criticised him, were mostly pygmies. And he died in 1980, long before the Global Village of the internet became a reality.

But he was right. And his many cricics were wrong.

The global village has arrived. But not the global village of his dreams.

It looks more like the Tower of Babel,.

But hen he was an over-optimistic American. Newertheless, today’s students should read his books. He was raising the important issues lond before most. And his world has now arrived, over twenty years late, and not quite as he envisaged it.

But McLuhan concentrated on matters computing.

Perhaps the problem is in another sphere. If the Bible had been written by a woman, perhaps she would not have focussed on ‘the forbidden fruit’. Perhaps she would have been more concerned that Adam listen to what she had to say.

Hillary Clinton is not going to win the US Presidential race. Not because she is a woman. But because she is a woman who has made her way in life by showing that she can be as macho as the men.

Women of the world unite.

You have nothing to lose buy your present positions on the doormats of history, which you are desparately trying to keep clean, after the men have walked in witth their muddied boots.

You have minds of your own. But only a few of the males of the species are listening to what you have to say.

Bored with all these technical problems, I picked up my camera and went on to the terrace. Below is the view of the beach. It is a sultry early summer day and the heat haze obscures the view to Portland Bill, but otherwise I cannot complain.

The aged beech tree in my garden, which I feared was dead, has finally greened.

The geraniums are not yet past their best.

And the early evening sun shining through the trees makes this picture a little less boring than most pictures of washing on the line. And at least it shows we are doing our bit against global warming by not using the tumble drier.