08/4/12

Welcome

Welcome to my website. On these pages you can find some of my writing and photography. My writing and intellectual interests span a range of issues in the social world, especially political economy, arts and culture, including photography and media. Over the past year or so, at least since the northern summer of 2010, I have developed an interest in memory and photography. If I have the time I will explore this interest further and post some of my ideas and impressions on this space.

The views expressed on these pages are not those of my employers. Unless otherwise indicated (by direct reference or links), all photographs that appear on these pages were taken by me. My photographs may be used for non-profit purposes only, with full accreditation and/or sourcing. Unless specifically stated, all photographs on this site, including those in the banner, were taken by Ismail Lagardien. Comments are welcome. I do, however, moderate all comments so as to avoid offensive language or personal and off-topic statements and claims.

Please note that some of the posts on this blog are private (not accessible) because they may be under development, or because I share them only with a small group of people.

10/29/13

The Children of Wupperthal: A Work in Progress

By Ismail Lagardien

The Wupperthal project is going to take much longer than I anticipated…. Very soon I will need the advice of a publisher, or someone who knows about publishing. I have received some recommendations, and will work on that. The last time I tried to speak to a publisher, Tafelberg, they were terribly rude and dismissive. I will look elsewhere, this time. I should provide some introductory points about the project.

Pak Huis Pass. The road from Clanwilliam to Wupperthal over the Cederberg Mountains

Pak Huis Pass. The road from Clanwilliam to Wupperthal over the Cederberg Mountains (Copyright – ilagardien©l’engagé)

Late in the Southern winter of 1987, I travelled to Wupperthal, a village that lies deep in a valley of the Cederberg and stayed there for several weeks. When I do get the book done, the journey and the visit will be situated more fully in its social and historical contexts. It suffices, for now, to say that I was a journalist at the time, and South Africa had entered a very dark period; a national state of emergency had been declared and media regulations were especially repressive…. Nonetheless, Wupperthal lies about 25 kilometres (as the crow flies) from Clanwilliam – which is a straight drive up along the West Coast of South Africa for a couple of hours – but getting to the village is a difficult 75km trek across two mountain passes, much of which is along dirt roads, over the Cederberg Mountains and down into the valley where the Tra Tra River gently flows besides the fields worked by villagers.

The dirt road into Wupperthal winds down the slopes of the Cederberg and into the valley where the Tra-Tra River flows (Copyright - ilagardien©l’engagé)

The dirt road into Wupperthal winds down the slopes of the Cederberg and into the valley where the Tra-Tra River flows (Copyright – ilagardien©l’engagé)

The village is home to people whom the state had (first since the mid 1950s) classified as ‘coloured’, which relegated them to somewhat lesser beings than those classified ‘white’ and afterward (after 1994) as second class citizens with restricted social and economic opportunities when compared to people the current state has classified ‘African’. While I have not taken the literature seriously enough, South Africa’s ‘coloured’ people have been described as having been ‘not white enough’ during apartheid and ‘not black enough’ in the contemporary period. One research paper concluded that the coloured community has assumed a type of ‘in-between’ status located between those wielding power and those with none. I am not quite sure how that works, other than the fact that, for instance, those classified coloured are increasingly under pressure to surrender any positions of leadership or authority over people classified African. It’s all terribly confusing sometimes, and always infuriating, but there has been a morality shift that we have to accept….

The problem is that I never actually engaged in coloured politics, as I assumed a black political identity  from a young age and associated myself with the Black Consciousness Movement, so I am insufficiently equipped to provide any clear position on coloured identity in South Africa. And anyway there very many people who serve as identity brokers, as it were, in the sense that they seem to derive great pleasure and build their credibility on telling others what race they are, where these others belong in the ordering of society – and what they may or may not say. I am reminded of a passage in Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay, ‘Can the Sub-Altern Speak’, and which I will mangle in paraphrasing: In some cruel twist of fate, in the context of settler colonial production, the subaltern could not speak until 1994, after which the coloured community, once part of the (subaltern), but now not African, slipped deep into the shadows of discourse, place and community in South Africa, and now remain silent – simply because they are considered to be ‘non-African’. As the story goes, where they were not white enough under apartheid, they are, indeed, not black enough under the current regime. Or, as a friend told me: ‘You coloureds are double-fucked’.

Children in Wupperthal. A generation after my first visit in 1987. (Copyright -ilagardien©l’engagé)

Children in Wupperthal. A generation after my first visit in 1987. (Copyright -ilagardien©l’engagé)

The book will certainly deal with the issue of colouredness, but not directly or on my terms. I don’t care much for it, but, as with race – where it may be true that there really is no such thing as race, but it does not mean there are not racists – because I don’t believe in colouredness does not mean that there are not people who believe themselves or others to be ‘coloured’ and base their social relationships on this given/adopted identity. The issue will be carried mainly on the voices of the people I photographed 25 years ago, (and whom I will photograph again) and the interviews I will conduct with them over the coming months.

The project, for convenience let us call it The Children of Wupperthal, began somewhat fortuitously. In the Northern winter of 2007/08, I came across some old negatives and pictures that I had kept stored in a box. I began to digitise the pictures and negatives slowly over the next two years. Among them were a set of images I made in Wupperthal; the pictures were mainly of women and children. When I scanned the images, memories of the time they were made flooded my mind. It was a difficult period of my life. I had sought refuge in the village after a few months of difficulty with the security forces who persecuted journalists. There was nothing too dramatic or serious about the problems I had with them; many people lost their lives at the time, so I am wary of sensationalising my own situation…. As I unpacked and digitized the images, I began to wonder what had happened to all the children I had photographed, and how their lives had changed since I first visited the village.

When I first came back to South Africa in the winter of 2011, I began to make enquiries…. which resulted in my first visit to Wupperthal on 11 October – almost exactly 25 years after first visiting the place. I have managed to locate two of the young girls I photographed – both are now adults with their own children – spent some time in the village meeting some of the elders, and made a few photographs.

As we found during our first visit (I was accompanied by AGRB, a fellow journalist and close friend), the village had a very deep sense of itself. The people were at home. Much like then, they fear that the village may die someday, ‘because the young people don’t want to stay’ in a village that has two SABC TV channels, no 3G signal and which has limited resources, in general. But that, ironically, was what I was told in 1987.

‘Die dorp gaan vrek,’ one of the elders told me then, for the same reasons.

One big thing that has not changed is this: When I first visited Wupperthal in 1987, the villagers through I was a ‘white man’. When I reminded one of the young women whom I photograph of that we had a laugh, after she asked, in all seriousness: ‘If you’re not white, then what are you.’

On the steps of the only store in Wupperthal. October 2013.

On the steps of the only store in Wupperthal. October 2013.

A generation later, Wupperthal is still alive; it’s people still battling on in a village owned, as it were, by the church, and where, in the lexicon of the state, there are no ‘Africans’ and no ‘whites’ just the in-between people…. All of that will be explored and explained in the book. SSK∞

06/24/13

Predators in a land of hope and fear…

Waiting outside Pollsmoor Prison for Nelson Mandela's release.

Waiting outside Pollsmoor Prison for Nelson Mandela’s release. The press as predator, the public in hope. Copyright Ismail Lagardien. Please do not use without permission or linking back to original.

It seems like a lifetime ago that we waited; some of us like predators, others in hope, some, it should be said, in fear…. The predators are waiting, again. Hope, it seems, has walked away, its head bowed in shame, disgust, horror and defeat. Fear lingers. Whatever happens next is anyone’s guess. – Picture and text by Ismail Lagardien. 24 June 2013

For a longer version of this post, follow this link.

02/6/13

Photographs for Exhibition-Lecture Have Arrived

Shooting from the Hip from i lagardien on Vimeo.

By Ismail Lagardien

I have received the prints for the first lecture on photography and memory, focusing on a very specific time and space; the first weeks and months of the state of emergency in 1985 – 86. I am in discussion with a few people in departments of journalism, of visual studies, at least one research institution and an art and culture space about presenting a lecture and exhibition. It will be more of colloquim, as the lecture will be based on a paper that I started writing a while back….

The prints cost a small fortune, but it is well worth the price. They were hand printed by Denis da Silva at Silvertone International. I visited Silvertone’s darkrooms last week and felt like I had been transported back to the time when I worked as a news photographer – only it is much cooler and the technology is state of the art. It felt good to be back in a darkroom.

Anyway, I now need to have the pictures framed, and arrange a venue for the exhibit and lecture. The project is, actually, long-term. I may produce an essay, if I can get enough feedback. The lecture is not so much what is in the pictures – although it is important – as it is about the time when the pictures were taken. I explained my motivations in a previous post. The video, above, is a compilation of the prints that will be used in the exhibition-lecture.

01/20/13

It’s books, actual books, over e-readers (especially the iPad); anytime and every time.

Books

By Ismail Lagardien

I have just finished reading a book on my iPad. It was the first book I have read in its entirety on the device; I have mainly pdf documents on the iPad reader. I am not happy with the device. The iPad is bulky, not in a way that, say War and Peace is bulky. You can, at least, throw War and Peace in the back of the car without worrying that you will break it. The iPad is bulky, socially and technologically frustrating and just really useless as a device for reading and writing. Plus, once you buy one, you belong to Apple, as it were.

If we set aside our fascination with the gimmick; the novelty of a little tablet computer that can bring the world into our hands, virtually; a device that makes images look all shiny, colourful and bright; a corporate identity – walk into any store and you will easily recognise the brand – that makes us all, some of us, at least, feel as if we, ‘belong’ to a type of cult, or an exclusive club (neither of my Apple devices will ‘speak’ to my non-Apple devices), that is expensive and an acquiesced monopoly, to boot….

At least where books are concerned, the iPad is a type of techno cultural disease that threatens an important part of my life; reading, books, bookshops, borrowing and lending of books, annotations and aesthetic comfort and habitat. I should explain the later. I love being in a room filled with books. I love bookshelves; in the kitchen, the toilet (yes) in my car, in corridors, in corners of rooms, on top of shelves, in stacks next to chairs, with circular coffee stains on the cover – I hate when that happens, it hurts, but it after a while, I smile…. Books are to be used, they are meant to be read, over and again. There have been times when I have been woken, in the middle of the night, by bulky books in my bed, under the covers. I love being surrounded by books. I love people who read books and, yeah, if someone does not read books, chances are I will not spend much time with them. During one year, a decade ago, I spent time with a family, and enjoyed reading to their son before bedtime every night.

Back to the iPad. It is heavy and delicate. A heavy book can be plonked down almost everywhere; a heavy iPad, not so much. It has to be a dry, stable surface or GUDUCRASHHHHHH! A book I can read in the bathtub. An iPad not. A book I can read in a coffee shop, or restaurant, or down the pub. If I did that with an iPad I would feel like a Berkshire Hunt. I don’t have to recharge a book. I can leave delightful little post-it notes in books. Make annotations, not just ‘notes’ in the margins. Once, someone gave me a jasmine blossom; in a most memorable gesture she stuck it in a button hole of my jacket. I kept it in one of my books for more than 15 years…

I have several pdf papers loaded on the iPad. Perhaps ten or twenty times more than I do, books, but I cannot make notes or highlights on the documents. I also cannot organise them into categories or reading lists, the way I could on the first Kindle device I owned.  While all of this is frustrating, perhaps the worst thing about the iPad is that it is part of the acquiesced monopoly that Apple products represent.

If you want to buy music, you need to do it through iTunes. If you want to buy movies – iTunes. Applications, iTunes. If you want to download photographs from your DSLR, you need to buy adapters from Apple. Oh, and don’t travel to Western Asia, South East Asia, Istanbul and Central Europe (as I have over the past six months) if you have a device registered in South Africa. I have an iTunes account registered in the US, an email address that was first created in the UK. Sometimes I receive messages that apps I want to buy are not available in ‘the South African store’. The delivery address and the billing address in my US account are different, plus the account is linked to a credit card, which means delivery to where I live, in South Africa is almost impossible…. 

The frustration never ceases. Apple forces you into an envelope. They want your life to be ordered and structured according to their preferences and dictates. Your email address, billing address, residential address and physical presence have to be aligned. It gets worse. If you actually own an iPad, just using it is a pain in the bottom behind. If you want to transfer files between devices; both have to be Apple. The key board is too small, and if you have worked on a ‘normal’ key board for most of your life, it is enormously frustrating. Sure, some might say you can buy a wireless keyboard. Well this just turns the iPad into a laptop – in several pieces. I love my Toshiba laptop much more than I do, the iPad. Non-Apple devices have USB ports – transfer, download, connect way! And they are cheaper. I don’t think I will buy another book for my iPad. As a way of checking email, wasting time on social networks, the iPad is fine, beyond that, it’s just a lovely gimmick and a device for making you look socially cool. That’s not a good reason to buy Apple!

12/20/12

A Glimpse of What Journalism’s Future May Look Like

A glimpse of a more complete skills-set for early 21st Century journalism

A glimpse of a more complete skills-set for early 21st entury journalism

By Ismail Lagardien

I have often been asked by students what I thought about the future of journalism. My response was almost always the same. It went something like this (I copied the following passage from an email message I sent to one of my students in 2009):

“We are in the midst of significant social, technical and historical change. I don’t know what news gathering and reporting will look like in 15 – 20 years from now, or whether the very idea and practice of the actual craft will change; whether it will become something completely different from what it has been for most of the 20th century…. What I will advise you, is to come to grips with the technology and with the ethics of the current revolution in the media. Journalism has always been technology-based, it has become even more so, now.”

My views have not changed much over the past few years. In fact, the uncertainty about the craft – especially its ethics, standards and the very ideational basis of journalism – as we have known it for most of the past 100 years, has deepened, significantly. What I will say, now, is that more than ever, the craft will be shaped by its technology. The successful journalists, not necessarily the highly rewarded ones (Hell, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is well paid and, yet, he is the cynosure of what is wrong with celebrity journalism – and anyway he is simply an odious person) will be the ones, who successfully integrate their storytelling (text and image) with new technologies. I have, also, discovered what I think the future journalist may well look like.

She has initiative, is highly motivated, courageous, versatile, creative and engaged; she has taken all the relevant knowledge that is available and immersed herself into it, and built a profile that gives significant insights into what the future of the craft may look like. Her name is Heather Billings. (See her website).

I am sure she is one of very, very many, but as an exemplar, Billings seems to have situated herself at the cusp of where I think the future of journalism lies. Now, this does not mean that everyone who wants to be a successful journalist should acquire all the skills that she has; there was no need, for instance, for reporters (historically) to be good photographers or sub-editors or headline artists. For instance, if you were a good writer, that was considered to be sufficient. Newspapers and magazines have always been put together by groups of people each with different (sometimes vastly differing skills). A sub-editor may not have a sense of what makes news, but have impeccable grammar and know what may (legally) be published. A photographer may make a picture which s/he thinks is aesthetically and technically brilliant, but an editor might need something that would look better, or that may sell the story.

In all my time as a journalist, I was average in all categories and remained average, while some of my peers excelled at one or the other, and went on to do rather well as writers or photographers. Nonetheless, I suspect that in the future, the broader skill-set you have may more directly influence overall accomplishment(s). Ms Billings’s portfolio may well point to where the future of journalism lies – at least in terms of its practicalities. The social, including ethical, and historical dimensions are a much more difficult discussion.

12/9/12

Memory and Photography

Digitised from an old black and white negative. Blouberg Strand Beach, Cape Town.

By Ismail Lagardien

I think I have finally (and fully) embraced digital photography. This does not mean that I have accepted it as ‘better than’ film. It simply means that I have stopped hankering for the time when we used film. In fact, one of the very  few conservative tendencies I do have is that I prefer black and white photography; of course, digital technology provides for this….

Anyway, it has been exceptionally difficult to shed my love of film. Over the three or four years since I sold my last film camera, the sturdy and reliable Nikon F5, the transition has been difficult. At times I have felt like a luddite, other times I have felt helpless; increasingly I have come to accept digital photography as presenting enhanced opportunities for expression through photography. With increased use of phone apps, especially Instagram, I have, now, engaged this helplessness. There has also been a contiguous transition. I have become increasingly interested in the philosophy of  photography, and the contribution of photography to visual sociology - the use of photographs, film, and video to study society and the study of visual artifacts of a society. I have also become interested in the interplay between photography and memory. These interests started when I began to digitise hundreds of negatives that I had held in storage for many years; most of which I placed on my photography blog.

One particular set of pictures (see this link) inspired the idea to write a book-length photo essay on the lives of women and children, captured in the images. Through a rather fortuitous set of circumstances and events – not quite meaningful coincidences – I read a newspaper report about a picture I made in August 1985, in which an activist was beaten by the police. In the report, published more than two decades later, the activist, now a respected member of the ruling elite in South Africa, recalled the events and seemed, to me at least, to have a different set of recollections from my own. (See picture, below)

When reading the report, I recalled the time when the picture was made, and the months that followed the event. At about the same time, I was digitising a series of pictures that I made in Wuppertal, an old missionary station in the foothills of the Cederberg Mountains (my favourite part of South Africa), and started writing down my own recollections of the period – using the pictures as mnemonic devices. What I hope to emerge from these recollections is the journey that took me to Wuppertal, the people I photographed – especially the women and children – and photograph them again, now more than two decades later, and tell their stories of how their lives have changed. (Any publishers willing? Tafelberg?)

Work pressures and other projects make it difficult to get away any time soon. I will, nonetheless, turn to the project in 2013, and try to locate the people whom I photographed in the mid-1980s. As it goes, the brother of one of the young girls captured in the Wuppertal series came across the pictures and has placed me in touch with his sister, who is now, herself, a mother.

In the meantime I continue to explore the relationship between memory and photography – to the extent that I would like to establish an institution for the study of photography and memory. South Africa has a very large and very vibrant media community. I suspect I will not have much difficulty attracting people to display, exhibit and discuss their work and, perhaps, teach. Memory Studies is a growing interdisciplinary academic subject with at least one specialised academic journal. See, also, the New School’s webpage on Memory Studies. All of that is, however, for another time. In four days’ time I leave for Istanbul where I will attempt to capture aspects of the city on film. Well, on digital media. At the moment I am trying to figure out what, exactly to focus on over the week that I will be in Istanbul. I am particularly interested in the idea of intentional hybridity – the conscious fusion of different languages and styles set against each other dialogically. Just how to capture that in a photograph remains hard to figure out. Maybe I will simply write about how Istanbul differs from Dubai, which I visited a few months ago and wrote about, here.

Some references and readings 

Parker, Faranaaz, 2010. “Politics chose us”. The Mail & Guardian. 6 August. Available at http://mg.co.za/article/2010-08-06-politics-chose-us. Accessed on 9 December 2012.

Canepa, Matthew (ed), 2010 ‘Theorizing Cross-Cultural Interaction among the Ancient and Early Medieval Mediterranean, Near East and Asia’  ars orientalis volume 38. Full journal can be downloaded from Academia.edu

See, the book, Globalisation and Culture: Global Mélange, by Jan Nederveen Pieterse. This is a blurb for the book:

This seminal text asks if there is cultural life after the ‘clash of civilizations’ and global McDonaldization. Internationally award-winning author Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues that what is taking place is the formation of a global melange, a culture of hybridization. From this perspective on globalization, conflict may be mitigated and identity preserved, albeit transformed. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of hybridization through a series of innovative conceptual tables that are bolstered by textual analysis and compelling examples from around the world. In a new chapter, the author explores East-West hybridities – the idea that globalization is a process of braiding rather than simply a diffusion from developed to developing countries. This historically deep and geographically wide approach to globalization is essential reading as we face the increasing spread of conflicts bred by cultural misunderstanding.
12/8/12

Plan for a better future needs backing to succeed

By Ismail Lagardien

It is often easy to become pessimistic, or even fatalistic, about South Africa. It is also hard to escape the fact that there are, sometimes, valid reasons for such pessimism and fatalism… What seems exceedingly difficult is to plan for and (actually) establish a better, more prosperous and stable country in which there is a high level of trust among citizens. The National Planning Commission (NPC) report is the latest, the most ambitious and, arguably, the most coherent and widely accepted strategy to help establish such a country. (Read Further)

11/25/12

Technology, Language and Culture – Some Very Simple Thoughts at the 20th Anniversary of the Text Message

The first text message, saying ‘Happy Christmas’, was sent by Neil Papworth on 3 December 1992. It took another three years before text messaging took off; by 1995, people were sending an average of one message a month. In 2012, by one estimate, 4.1 billion text messages are sent every day. So pervasive, and culturally assimilated have ‘texting’ become that in some countries people with phones can contact emergency services by text message, and emergency warnings can be relayed to cellphones. How has this changed our lives and how we understand our world? Some not so deep thoughts.

 By Ismail Lagardien

25 November 2012. Most people who have computers and mobile phones, especially those of us who have dedicated our lives to some form of communication through texts or images, go through some pain each time there is a new technological advance with the instruments we use in our craft(s) or that aid our means of expression. It is difficult to avoid the seduction of new technologies…. Progressively, over, time as we acquire new technologies, we leave behind routines and practices and adopt new ways of communicating. And so we have moved, over the centuries, from carving messages on clay, stone, papyrus, wax or paper, relaying messages by telegraph, radio, television and, today, on or through computers. In this process of change and technological progress, we may be losing something….

Throughout this process, from representing our life stories orally to writing them down, there has been a great flourishing of cultures and knowledge production. In ancient civilisations, from around 30 000 BCE, across the world, knowledge and information became increasingly available and, in various permutations, most people learned how to communicate by the most widely use means. We may have reached a point in this late capitalist period, howver, where the pervasiveness of computer technology – and the attendant culture of ‘present-mindedness’ and, the spurious claim that, ‘if you’re not online, you’re irrelevant’ and unhitched, therefore, from contemporary knowledge production and cultural reproduction – has stripped us of the ability to record, reconsider and reflect upon our lives, our beliefs and values, without having to ‘plug in’, ‘log on’, ‘enter’ or ‘register’ a ‘’user name’, submit credit card details, etc

While this idea that ‘if you’re not online, you’re irrelevant’ is, of course, terribly narrow-minded and self-serving, it certainly is true that more and more people in the world are learning about the world (and about themselves!) through computer technology; on PCs, tablets and mobile phones. I have no doubt, and fully understand, that technical advances alter the way we perceive the world and very means and manner in which we communicate with one another and the world. There are, however, two issues that I have wrestled with: One has become somewhat of an obsession, the increasing exclusivity of computer technology, and the other – the process of digitisation and how it transforms traditional human skills, sensibilities and even our anatomy….

In terms of the former, for most of the past thirty years, or so, personal computing devices have allowed us to store information at hand; on ‘storage drives’ in our homes, places of work or in libraries. Cloud technology, surely a new device to draw rents from users, may render ‘hard-drives’ or ‘storage drives’ out of our personal space. Knowledge will be ‘out there’ – exactly where, the end user may not know, but one thing seems clear, it is becoming increasingly impossible for this knowledge to be universally accessible. We can’t trade books as freely as before; you need a device. You can’t write AND make new knowledge available to the public; you need a device and access to the internet and a place to store the knowledge and whoever wants to gain access to the knowledge needs a device, access to the internet and, possibly an ‘account’ that provides access to the knowledge…. All of this costs money.

There was a time – and we should not be too nostalgic, hysterical or alarmist about this – when almost anyone could go to a village square to listen to a village elder or an oracle; read or write scripts by hand and send or receive notes and messages. Increasingly, however, we need computers and computer technology – all of which costs money. If you’re an Apple user, chances are you’ve acquiesced to the company to monopolise an important part of your life. This acquiesced monopoly may mean that everything you do on a computer or online has to go through Apple, or iTunes….

Anyway, the second issue that has bothered me has less to do with computers per se, and everything to do with technological change. About six or seven years ago, I asked a teenager to read and tell me the time on my wristwatch – which was lying on the desk where he was doing his homework. He couldn’t, he said. This kid was/is bright. He is the youngest son of my dearest of friends who gave their children a fantastically liberated upbringing. Yet, the kid could not read an analogue clock. His world was digital… Much earlier, I took a set of exams (statistics, econometrix or mathematics – can’t remember which one it was), and did everything on computer. At one point, I think it was during a statistics class, I reached for a pen and paper and decided to work out a problem ‘by hand’. Even earlier, I took a final exam for my Master’s degree, and wished I could do it on a computer.

You see, I learned to use a computer for writing quite early. Although I spent most of my childhood in relative poverty – without electricity sometimes and sometimes without indoor plumbing – I entered journalism in my early twenties and wrote my stories on an old ‘mainframe’ computer (I still don’t know what that means). By the time I returned to graduate school, I had the ability to type fast and move paragraphs around without using a mouse…. Writing a long essay on critical political economy by hand is hell; if you change your mind or try to re-arrange your thoughts you’re screwed. Kind of.

Then this week, something came across my ‘desk’ (though one of my feeds) about the ‘dying of cursive’. More and more kids, these days, are unable to write by hand, to the extent that there is a movement to preserve cursive writing skills among children in the United States. Is this a bad thing, that our kids cannot write by hand? I don’t quite know. As one associate said: He couldn’t be bothered; it’s like hankering for the horse and carriage or an abacus! Another associate said he continued to rely on his note books and pens. A third wrote the following passages:

“I remember learning cursive. Definitely horse and carriage stuff. In Romania, in 1961, when I started 1st grade, we started by learning cursive. There were no ball point pens; but there was an inkwell shared by every two students and a metal nib pen that you had to dip in the inkwell every other word. Using these implements, we had to learn more than cursive: we had to learn calligraphy. Every upstroke was thin; every downstroke was thick. There was to writing a rhythm and a flow. It was not just a matter of learning to write; it was a matter of learning to write beautifully. 

So there is this about learning to write cursive: it imprints upon the mind and the body the notion that beauty matters and that it is part and parcel of writing. Long before one is able to write anything interesting or beautiful, when one is barely stuttering writing-wise, it is possible to put some form of beauty in writing. This is very important. 

The question of efficiency is more complicated. I have earned my living as a professional writer for all of my adult life, and I grant that being able to write on the computer, unconcerned with mistakes, is liberating. It was wonderful to write the final draft of my dissertation (especially footnotes) on a computer; it is also wonderful to write programming books and technical manuals on a computer because they require hundreds of revisions, and having to do that on a typewriter, or by hand, would be utter hell. On the other hand, both for my dissertation and for writing conceptual material that has to be pellucid and flowing, it was best to do the first draft long hand, because it is the easiest way to slow down and give my writing the voice that makes the reader trust me. 

Losing the fear of making a mistake is a great thing when writing is a chore; but not such a good thing when the matter of writing needs to percolate and steep and get to the point where the voice in your head starts dictating the words you need to take down. When you know that mistakes matter, or rather when you know that the stakes are high, you don’t start before you’re ready. Of course, even then, there will be revisions, but they will be revisions of something that is whole. 

I have on my bathroom wall a copy of a manuscript page from Tolstoy’s “Resurrection,” his last book. Every single line is crossed out and rewritten. I keep it there to remind myself how much work writing is, even for Tolstoy, even on his last book. Some time from now, when writers are all churning out stuff on the computer, there will be no more manuscript pages like that. Oh, I know that there are programs that let you see deletions and updates and edits, but it won’t be the same. Scholars might care, assuming the electronic evidence remains, but no one will be framing those pages and putting them up on a wall.”

But we are all adults. How many children, especially in the highly developed countries, are learning to write by hand, today?

Some people think that writing in cursive is good for brain function, co-ordination and motor skills; that it ‘connects’ people to the past and that it is ‘a symbol of personality, even more so in an era of uniform emails and texting’. Early in my brief academic career, I had to warn students not to use text language in (typed) essays and (hand-written) exams, after finding that their grammar, syntax and diction was really poor. I, too, am guilty of shortcuts and ghastly bad grammar and spelling when I send email or post notes on social networks; hell, I have never appreciated the work of sub-editors more than today, when I write things for my blogs and ‘stuff’ creep in….

Nonetheless, it is text messaging, I believe, that is ripping language up. Here I have to slip in something that may seem contradictory! I love language. The language I speak and write most fluently is English. Because it is my second language, I try, everyday, to improve. But, and this is an important ‘but’… I also believe that language is and should be dynamic; it can and should be appropriated and then redeployed in any way that people around the world would like to…. Text messaging is, however, my biggest nightmare. I would estimate that 90 % of my daily telephonic communication is by text messaging. The conspiracy of predictive text to destroy friendships aside, I try to always avoid crude abbreviations, like ‘GR8′. I use the popular ‘lol’ but I am always concerned that someone would think I mean ‘lots of love’ instead of ‘laugh out loud’…. but all of this is besides the point!

The point I am trying to make, albeit with great difficulty because I love computers and cameras, is that we are losing what I think are important (writing and language) skills; intimacy (I no longer call a friend to ask how his children are, I simply check out his Facebook page. We no longer discuss football, we have a fantasy football league, and if I want to know something about a player I go to Wikipedia!). In general, we are increasingly placing access to knowledge out of the reach of people on computers behind pay walls and firewalls, and in ‘clouds’.

Computers are also changing us anatomically. The positions of our heads, and strain on our necks from reading books are different from when we read computer screens. But this is way to complicated for me ….

Alas, I need an upgrade, and that new Nikon is a killer! I don’t need it. I do. I don’t need it. I do. I want it. I do.

10/29/12

International travel is not all it’s cracked up to be….

Note: I wrote this piece a while back. An edited version was published by Travelwrite, an online South African travel writing magazine a year ago. This is the extended version.

Two Emirates Airline planes on separate runways at Dubai international airport. (Picture with Instagram)

By Ismail Lagardien

I hate flying. I have read all the statistics about the probabilities of being killed in a car crash as opposed to a plane crash. I have read bumper-sticker psychologies about having “control issues” and about my “fear of dying”, and after all these years of flying I have learned some “tricks” about where to sit on a plane to avoid or minimise turbulence, what not to eat or drink in order to “make the flight more enjoyable”….

I hate flying. The pedant may say that it is not really rational, that it is a phobia, because flying cannot kill you. My response is this: I hate being in flight. Every time the plan engine splutters I think I am dying. Every time I hear an unfamiliar sound, or a slight jerk or shudder (it has been more than 30 years since I first flew across the Atlantic, I think I know what a smooth flight sounds or feels like) I think I am dying. So, I hate flying. None of the advice helps. Every time I fly, I tremble, sweat and curse in stoic silence.

Maybe there is some validity in the charge that I have “control issues”. Yes. I do have a huge problem with being strapped down, sealed in a tin can flung into the air and told everything will be alright. If planes are so safe why do they go through the routine – before every take-off – of telling us what to do in the case of “an emergency landing”. Maybe I am afraid of dying. Yes. I haven’t had a novel rejected yet, so I’m not ready to die. Besides, death is fine, but I don’t want to have someone dig through the collection of dirty pictures on my computer storage drives.

I’ve heard or read all the advice. Turbulence, forget about it, I have been told, it happens. Learn to deal with it. The best place to sit for a smoother ride, I am told, is over the wings (but that’s where most of the fuel is stored!); the safest place to sit is at the back, because that part more readly remains intact in the case of a collision with a mountain face, but it’s the worst place to sit because you feel every bump, and that’s where the toilets and kitchens are! I wouldn’t take a table in a restaurant next to the toilets or the kitchen; why would I do it in a cramp space where the crapper is next to the kitchen?). The front of the plane tends to be the most stable. Well, here’s the problem. That’s where the pilots sit. That’s where First Class is. I am not allowed to sit there. Oh, yeah, the cockpit and first class are also the first to hit the mountain. Someone once told me that a seat over the wings comes with a terrible view. Really? When I am strapped down in a seat, flung into the air, with a mouth-breathing travelling salesman sitting beside me telling me his life story, I am hardly concerned with beautiful sunsets or puffy clouds. I am thinking about throttling the travelling salesman. I’m thinking about dying! There is, of course, also, the “pre-flight” horror; an ordeal of epic proportions, which, in the grand scheme, is superseded only by the terror of the suburbs – if you know what I mean

From the minute I make the reservation to a week after flying, I go through an ordeal of fear, irritability, insomnia and sometimes very serious constipation. I am, at best, an irritable, irascible, snob (not the wealthy elitist kind) who hates people – I prefer ideas. I hate carrying heavy bags. I hate people wanting to help me carry my bags, and then hover around for a tip after they have just crushed my books or my laptop or, heaven forbid, my cameras. There is little glamourous or even exciting, to me at least, about international travel.

There is even less thrill in having to sit beside someone who, wearing a loud patterned shirt tucked into blue jeans with matching belt and shoes, a cell phone clipped into his belt (all very earnestly) telling you his life story and showing you pictures of his wife and children. Everyone always looks so happy in those pictures. Perfect, almost. They’re usually dressed in matching clothes with white sock and running shoes. Once, on a flight from Reykjavik to Minneapolis, I sat though a travelling salesman’s story of how much “bonus” he was expecting to “make” that year because he worked so hard. He explained that he was away from home “on average, I’d say, six days a week”, but had a week off “over fourth of July week and a week over Christmas”. His voice trailed off into the drone of jet engines. I caught up, again to hear the technical details of a new pressure hose he had bought to clean his “deck and drive”… that he wanted to buy a pontoon boat… that he made “the best bulgogi in the world”… [something about] “the good lord” and being ‘blessed”. He was a nice man. Nice people are why I wear dark glasses on long-distance flights. So I can either pretend to be asleep, or pretend that I am listening, or pretend to not notice when they give me a look that says: “Hey, we’re going to be sitting next to each other for seven hours, let’s be friends”. Headphones and sunglasses on flights are clear warning signs that say: “Don’t talk to me. Don’t even as ask how my day is going.” If the words “fuck off” mean anything to you, you will leave me the fuck alone – before I let it rip.

I can’t bear people constantly fidgeting and tugging at their clothes or their hair. I hate it when they imagine that being squashed together in a tin craft that is sent into the air is enough reason to tell me their life stories. The grating sensations start before check-in, when you have to lug heavy bags up and down stairs across platforms, in and out of elevators through revolving doors, up and down curbs. When your life revolves around books, your bags tend to be heavy. By the time you get to the check-in line you’re filled with bile. I can’t bear the tedium of standing in lines. I feel captive and exposed moving step-by-step, through the maze of ribbon that guides you this way, then that way, then back this way towards the person at check-in who, you always wish, had discretionary powers or sympathy. Standing in line, shuffling forward and backward, then sideways in the maze, there is always a woman wearing a floral shirt and very tight-fitting denim shorts (or a man wearing a Harley Davidson T-shirt with the words “the bitch fell off” written on the back) with running shoes and white socks (it’s always white socks) who imagines some solidarity in suffering from standing in line for what can take hours, and who would insist on telling you how funny it was that you always end up meeting, again, as the line ambles through the maze towards check-in. I say a silent prayer, each time I stand in the maze: Please god of the skies, don’t let this person be seated next to me. S/he would just try to consolidate to the imaginary solidarities we share….

Once you get to the front of the line there is trepidation, angst … you feel guilty for something you know you have not done; you don’t quite know what it is that you have not done, but you feel accused. The person at the check-in desk has been standing on his or her feet all day. Their haemorrhoids have been blazing and itching, in-grown toenails and fungi have been fucking with their feet, and through it all they have had to smile. They have had to take a toilet break to scratch the itches and dab their haemorrhoids, gently, with moistened toilet tissue, and apply shark oil. Back at the check-in desk, they take your passport. Look at the picture. Look at you. Then back at the picture. Standing before them, at their mercy, you feel guilty . You know your bags are too heavy. You know they’re going to charge you for excess baggage. You know they’re going to ask the size of the bag you’re carrying on. (Who keeps those kind of details around, anyway?)

Hate is a strong word, but I really do hate everything to do with international travel. I never fly when I can travel by surface. There really is nothing as stable, predictable and straightforward as a train ride. I have flown into airports in the remotest parts of the Africa; where the wrecks of previous attempted landings a reminders of what can go wrong. Competing with cows, dogs and people, I have bounced onto landing strips in Great Amazonia, after a fly-by of Angel Falls. I passed out from fear when our plane was fired at with SAM missiles over Angola. I passed out when a small plane landed in the sea at Santos Dumont Airport, while we were taxiing before take-off for New York City. Once, while flying over the Midwest of the US, I called my dear friend AGRB in South Africa and told him: “I am about to take a shit on this flight. Please, when they find my body with a toilet seat wrapped around my head, don’t tell them I died doing what I enjoyed most.” I really hate everything to do with flying.

Having said all that, travelling from South Africa by land or sea to hear the din of La Vucciria, catch the Arsenal at home or take a walk along the Arbat might take a while….