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The Chandra Levy series, on Page 1 for 13 days, has provoked these kinds of comments: Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time! And these: Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting!

- Washinton Post reader’s ombudsman Deborah Howell

I’ll stay out of the row over whether the 13-part epic was a wise or worthwhile move for the WaPo, largely because I can’t be bothered to trawl through the whole thing myself. But the description of the tone of the comments is instructive. From the comments on the piece itself, you’d think it was a disaster. But the comments on the reporter’s log were nicer, and those via email glowing.

The lesson? Knee-jerk comments are almost always nasty. Casual readers won’t generally bother to comment to say how much they liked a story or agreed with its view; only the enraged are engaged enough to click. Those who really like it are more likely to email in their praise. It’s sad, but most of us feel more comfortable slating something online - which makes us feel superior - than praising it, which feels a bit like weakness. If we have something nice to say, we prefer to say it in private.

Bloggers depressed at epic posts that generate nothing but sneering comments, take heart!

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- Paul Dacre, Editor in Chief, Daily Mail Group, 1999

Are electronic newspapers just a load of bullshit.com? - New Statesman, 1999

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Online sales of Domino’s pizza have surged ahead of its forecasts, as its half-year profits and sales were boosted by diners shunning restaurants in favour of eating at home…[CEO Chris Moore says] ”a lot of that is due to trading down. People are eating at home and eating out at restaurants is on the wane. Previously, this was a suspicion but there is [now] evidence that is happening.”

-Domino’s Pizza beats slowdown as diners choose to eat at home [Independent, today]

Is it time to get this “crisis” in perspective, perhaps? We’ve seen doom and gloom everywhere, we’ve seen entirely irony-free references to “austerity” and “a return to the postwar years”. And what form, exactly, does this take? People ordering Pizza instead of going out to eat. God forbid that people might get so destitute they might actually have to cook.

Astonishingly, we have to look to the Standard (of all papers) for some sense:

Going 15 years without a recession does have a downside - and one that is becoming ever more obvious.

People have forgotten, or never learned, that economic slowdowns are perfectly natural, that they are not necessarily to be feared and for the most part make very little real difference to most people’s lives.

- Recession? We’ll cope just as we did before [Anthony Hamilton, Evening Standard, yesterday]

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I’m not going to mock Norman Mailer by pretending I can write anything sufficiently meaningful, passionate or truthful to do him justice. Suffice to say that reading his books, I realised for the first time I could care as much about American literature as deeply as I did about American popular culture.

If you fancy a bit of bathos, you can read my cackhanded attempts to mimic the style of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago. But far better, I think, to enjoy a slice of the original. The below - scanned in, so apologies for any errors I’ve missed - comes from Mailer’s depiction of the astonishing events in and surrounding the Democratic Convention of 1968, when police employed what one Democratic delegate called “gestapo tactics” against anti-war protesters in the streets (Chicago’s mayor, corrupt Democratic machine politician par excellence - and the father of its current mayor - responded by loudly suggesting to said delegate, across the convention floor and visibly on television, that he should fuck himself). Here Mailer describes the last night of the convention.

*

Shortly after convening, the convention showed a movie thirty-two minutes long, entitled ‘Robert Kennedy Remembered’, and while it went on, through the hall, over the floor, and out across the country on television, a kind of unity came over everyone who was watching, at least for a little while. Idealism rarely moved politicians - it had too little to do with property. But emotion did. It was closer to the land. Somewhere between sorrow and the blind sword of patriotism was the fulcrum of reasonable politics, and as the film progressed, and one saw scene after scene of Bobby Kennedy growing older, a kind of happiness came back from the image, for something in his face grew young over the years - he looked more like a boy on the day of his death, a nice boy, nicer than the kid with the sharp rocky glint in his eye who had gone to work for Joe McCarthy in his early twenties, and had then known everything there was to know about getting ahead in politics. He had grown modest as he grew older, and his wit had grown with him - he had become a funny man as the picture took care to show, wry, simple for one instant, shy and off to the side on the next, but with a sort of marvelous boy’s wisdom, as if he knew the world was very bad and knew the intimate style of how it was bad, as only boys can sometimes know (for they feel it in their parents and their schoolteachers and their friends). Yet he had confidence he was going to fix it - the picture had this sweet simple view of him which no one could resent for somehow it was not untrue. Since his brother’s death, a subtle sadness had come to live in his tone of confidence, as though he were confident he would win - if he did not lose. That could also happen, and that could happen quickly. He had come into that world where people live with the recognition of tragedy, and so are often afraid of happiness, for they know that one is never in so much danger as when victorious and/or happy - that is when the devils seem to have their hour, and hawks seize something living from the gambol on the field.

The reporter met Bobby Kennedy just once. It was on an afternoon in May in New York just after his victory in the Indiana primary and it had not been a famous meeting, even if it began well. The Senator came in from a conference (for the reporter was being granted an audience) and said quickly with a grin, ‘Mr Mailer, you’re a mean man with a word.’ He had answered, ‘On the contrary, Senator, I like to think of myself as a gracious writer.’

‘Oh,’ said Senator Kennedy, with a wave of his hand, ‘that too, that too!’

So it had begun well enough, and the reporter had been taken with Kennedy’s appearance. He was slimmer even than one would have thought, not strong, not weak, somewhere between a blade of grass and a blade of steel, fine, finely drawn, finely honed, a fine flush of color in his cheeks, two very white front teeth, prominent as the two upper teeth of a rabbit, so his mouth had no hint of the cruelty or calculation of a politician who weighs counties, cities, and states, but was rather a mouth ready to nip at anything which attracted its contempt or endangered its ideas. Then there were his eyes. They were most unusual. His brother Teddy Kennedy spoke of those who ‘followed him, honored him, lived in his mild and magnificent eyes’, and that was fair description for he had very large blue eyes, the iris wide in diameter, near to twice the width of the average eye, and the blue was a milky blue like a marble so that his eyes, while prominent, did not show the separate steps and slopes of light some bright eyes show, but rather were gentle, indeed beautiful - one was tempted to speak of velvety eyes - their surface seemed made of velvet as if one could touch them, and the surface would not be repelled.

He was as attractive as a movie star. Not attractive like his brother had been, for Jack Kennedy had looked like the sort of vital leading man who would steal the girl from Ronald Reagan every time, no, Bobbie Kennedy had looked more like a phenomenon of a movie star - he could have filled some magical empty space between Mickey Rooney and James Dean, they would have cast him sooner or later in some remake of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, and everyone would have said, ‘Impossible casting! He’s too young.’ And he was too young. Too young for Senator, too young for President, it felt strange in his presence thinking of him as President, as if the country would be giddy, like the whirl of one’s stomach in the drop of an elevator or jokes about an adolescent falling in love, it was incredible to think of him as President, and yet marvelous, as if only a marvelous country would finally dare to have him.

That was the best of the meeting - meeting him! The reporter spent the rest of his valuable thirty minutes arguing with the Senator about Senator McCarthy. He begged him to arrange some sort of truce or liaison, but made a large mistake from the outset. He went on in a fatuous voice, sensing error too late to pull back, about how effective two Irish Catholics would be on the same ticket for if there were conservative Irishmen who could vote against one of them, where was the Irish Catholic in America who could vote against two? and Kennedy had looked at him with disgust, as if offended by the presumption in this calculation, his upper lip had come down severely over his two front white teeth, and he had snapped, ‘I don’t want those votes.’ How indeed did the reporter presume to tell him stories about the benightedness of such people when he knew them only too well. So the joke had been a lame joke and worse, and they got into a dull argument about McCarthy, Kennedy having little which was good to say, and the reporter arguing doggedly in the face of such remarks as: ‘He doesn’t even begin to campaign until twelve.’

They got nowhere. Kennedy’s mind was altogether political on this afternoon. It did not deal with ideas except insofar as ideas were attached to the name of bills, or speeches, or platforms, or specific debates in specific places, and the reporter, always hard put to remember such details, was forced therefore to hammer harder and harder on the virtues of McCarthy’s gamble in entering the New Hampshire primary until Kennedy said, ‘I wonder why you don’t support Senator McCarthy. He seems more like your sort of guy, Mr Mailer,’ and in answer, oddly moved, he had said in a husky voice, ‘No, I’m supporting you. I know it wasn’t easy for you to go in.’ And even began to mutter a few remarks about how he understood that powerful politicians would not have trusted Kennedy if he had moved too quickly, for his holding was large, and men with large holdings were not supportable if they leaped too soon. ‘I know that,’ he said looking into the Senator’s mild and magnificent eye, and Kennedy nodded, and in return a little later Kennedy sighed, and exhaled his breath, looked sad for an instant, and said, ‘Who knows? Who knows? perhaps I should have gone in earlier.’ A few minutes later they said good-bye, not unpleasantly. That was the last he saw of him.

The closest he was to come again was to stand in vigil for fifteen minutes as a member of the honor guard about his coffin in St Patrick’s. Lines filed by. People had waited in line for hours, five hours, six hours, more, inching forward through the day and through the police lines on the street in order to take one last look at the closed coffin.

The poorest part of the working class of New York had turned out, poor Negro men and women, Puerto Ricans, Irish washerwomen, old Jewish ladies who looked like they ran grubby little newsstands, children, adolescents, families, men with hands thick and lined and horny as oyster shells, calluses like barnacles, came filing by to bob a look at that coffin covered by a flag. Some women walked by praying, and knelt and touched the coffin with their fingertips as they passed, and after a time the flag would slip from the pressure of their fingers and an usher detailed for the purpose would readjust it. The straightest line between two points is the truth of an event, no matter how long it takes or far it winds, and if it had taken these poor people six hours of waiting in line to reach that coffin, then the truth was in the hours. A river of workingclass people came down to march past Kennedy’s coffin, and this endless line of people had really loved him, loved Bobby Kennedy like no political figure in years had been loved.

The organ played somewhere in the nave and the line moved forward under the vast - this day - tragic vaults of the cathedral so high overhead and he felt love for the figure in the coffin and tragedy for the nation in the years ahead, the future of the nature seemed as dark and tortured, as wrenched out of shape, as the contorted blood-spattered painted sculpture of that garish Christ one could find in every dark little Mexican church. The horror of dried blood was now part of the air, and became part Of the air of the funeral next day. That funeral was not nearly so beautiful; the poor people who had waited in line on Friday were now gone, and the mighty were in their place, the President and members of the Congress, and the Establishment, and the Secret Service, and the power of Wall Street; the inside of St Patrick’s for the length of the service was dank with the breath of the over-ambitious offering reverence - there is no gloom so deep unless it is the scent of the upholstery in a mortician’s limousine, or the smell of morning in a closed Pullman after executives have talked through the night.

The movie came to an end. Even dead, and on film, he was better and more moving than anything which had happened in their convention, and people were crying. An ovation began. Delegates came to their feet, and applauded an empty screen - it was as if the center of American life was now passing the age where it could still look forward; now people looked back into memory, into the past of the nation - was that possible? They applauded the presence of a memory. Bobby Kennedy had now become a beloved property of the party.

Minutes went by and the ovation continued. People stood on their chairs and clapped their hands. Cries broke out. Signs were lifted. Small hand-lettered signs which said, ‘Bobby, Be With Us’, and one enormous sign eight feet high, sorrowful as rue in the throat -’Bobby, We Miss You,’ it said.

Now the ovation had gone on long enough - for certain people. So signals went back and forth between floor and podium and phone, and Carl Albert stepped forward and banged the gavel for the ovation to end, and asked for order. The party which had come together for five minutes, after five days and five months and five years of festering discord, was now immediately divided again. The New York and California delegations began to sing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, and the floor heard, and delegations everywhere began to sing. Humphrey delegations as quick as the rest. In every convention there is a steamroller, and a moment when the flattened exhale their steam, and ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!’ was the cry of the oppressed at this convention, even those unwittingly oppressed in their mind, and not even knowing it in their heart until this instant, now they were defying the Chair, clapping their hands, singing, stamping their feet to mock the chairman’s gavel.

Carl Albert brought up Dorothy Bush to read an appreciation the convention would offer for the work of certain delegates. The convention did not wish to hear. Mrs Bush began to read in a thin mean voice, quivering with the hatreds of an occasion like this, and the crowd sang on, ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, his truth goes marching on,’ and they stamped their feet and clapped their hands, and were loose finally and having their day as they sang the song which once, originally, had commemorated a man who preached civil disorder, then mutiny, and attacked a fort in his madness and was killed, John Brown was also being celebrated here, and the Texas and Illinois delegations were now silent, clapping no longer, sitting on their seats, looking bored. Every delegate on the floor who had hated the Kennedys was now looking bored, and the ones who had loved them were now noisier than ever. Once again the party was polarized. Signs waved all over the floor, ‘Bobby, We’ll Remember you’, ‘Bobby, We’ll Seek Your Newer World’, and the ever-present, ‘Bobby, We Miss You’. Yes they did, missed him as the loving spirit, the tender germ in the living plasma of the party. Nothing was going to make them stop; this offering of applause in the oratorical vitamin pills Hubert would yet be there to offer. The demonstration went on for twenty minutes and gave no sign of stopping at all. Dorothy Bush had long ago given up. Carl Albert, even smaller than Georgie Wallace, was now as furious as only a tiny man can be when his hard earned authority has turned to wax -he glared across the floor at the New York delegation like a little boy who smells something bad.

However did they stop the demonstration? Well, convention mechanics can be as perfect as the muscle in a good play when professionals have worked their football for a season. Mayor Daley, old lover of the Kennedys, and politically still enough of an enigma six months ago for Bobby to have said in his bloodwise political wisdom, ‘Daley is the ballgame,’ Mayor Daley, still (lining with the Kennedys these last three days in his desire for Teddy as Vice President, now had come to the end of his political string, and like a good politician he pulled it. He gave the signal. The gallery began to chant, ‘We love Daley.’ All his goons and clerks and beef-eaters and healthy parochial school students began to yell and scream and clap, ‘We love Daley’, and the power of their lungs, the power of the freshest and the largest force in this Amphitheatre soon drowned out the Kennedy demonstrators, stuffed their larynxes with larger sound. The Daley demonstration was bona fide too - his people had suffered with their Mayor, so they screamed for him now and clapped their hands, and Mayor Daley clapped his hands too for he also loved Mayor Daley. Simple narcissism gives the power of beasts to politicians, professional wrestlers and female movie stars.

At the height of the Daley demonstration, it was abruptly cut off. By a signal. ‘Shut your yaps’ was an old button, no matter how the signal came. In the momentary silence, Carl Albert got his tongue in, and put Ralph Metcalfe (Daley’s Black man) who was up on the podium already, into voice on the mike, and Metcalfe announced five minutes of silence for the memory of Martin Luther King. So New York and California were naturally obliged to be silent with the rest, the floor was silent, the gallery was silent, and before those minutes began to be up, Carl Albert had slipped Dorothy Rush in again, and she was reading the appreciation of the convention for certain delegates. Business had been resumed. The last night proceeded.

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1. The Doha round has been suspended
2. The Doha round has been abandoned
3. The collapse of the Doha round is a disaster
4. The collapse of the Doha round is the best outcome for the world’s poor
5. Abolishing agricultural subsidies in the global North is the answer to development
6. Northern agricultural subsidies make little difference to developing countries
7. It was all the US’ fault
8. It was all the EU’s fault

And so on.

Now, I do understand that the point of comment is that you add up and compare the opposing views. But is it really possible to make a comparison between these two comments?

Liz Stuart: “The Doha talks were going to be different from previous rounds… developed countries signed up to slash the billions of dollars in subsidies they pay their farmers, resulting in the dumping of prodcuts… on world markets, driving down prices and putting poor country farmers out of business.”

Daniel Davies: “Cutting EU subsidies is more or less irrelevant to most of the developing world because 95% of EU subsidies are classed a [sic] non-distorting anyway.”

There are, no doubt, naunces which bring these two views together. Probably, it’s about the difference between preventing Northern subsidies being dumped on Africa, which pretty much everyone seems to agree is a bad thing, and actually trying to set up agricultural exports into Europe from Africa, which by no means everyone agrees is a good thing. But the point is, who could possibly know from those two, seemingly irreconcilable statements?

Once again, a real conversation between viewpoints, with facts established, principles clearly outlined, assertions interrogated, is completely absent from the media coverage of this none-more-complex issue. The newspapers and TV simply haven’t got to grips with the complexity and long-term nature of the issues young people are interested in. They’ll tell you the precise order of events on the day the talks collapsed, and report, parrot-like, the succession of official statements where everyone blames everyone else. But a real, detailed discussion of the issues? No chance. The ever-growing litany of named columnists - a tiny handful of whom are any kind of expert - all weigh in, generating more heat than light. Website comment-placers repeat the same barrage of rash and often irrelevant pronouncements: “this just shows that Peter Mandelson is corrupt!” “There were no WMD!” Every site claiming to offer debate and news on the issue has an agenda.

We desperately need a new approach to complex issues like that of world trade. An interrogatory, analytical approach which will provide people with the tools to make informed decisions on the big matters. Factual assertions checked. Evidence required. Statements of principle identified and interrogated.

For the next few months I’m going to be working on Brass Tacks: Africa (working title) - an attempt to set a standard for this kind of journalism. I’ll need help, so send me any useful articles or links you have, and so on.

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10.31am. Surprising success at reading without breakfast. Am angered, though, by article in Prospect by Robert Jackson about higher education funding (read my response).

11. 21am. Philip Oltermann provides an excellent commentary on the explosive popularity of the group biography, as in The Metaphysical Club, A Night at the Majestic, etc. He argues, convincingly, that the fascination with the foundations of the soul that informed the growth of the biography have been replaced with an interest in the formation of networks, and the skill - or otherwise - of our heroes at creating them. Certainly, everything from Friends to Big Brother speaks to our obsession with the making and breaking of friendships. One popular British TV show, the recent series of Shipwrecked: Battle of the Islands, made the whole basis of the competition the ability of the two teams to make, and retain, friends.

There are plenty of reasons why this should happen now. The much-commented-on breakdown of traditional communities of geography and workplace over the last fifty years, combined with the class breakdown now always referred to as “the end of deference,” means that the atificial, wordly barriers that cemented groups are also gone. Previously, sitcoms were based around a street, a bar, a family. Now, they’re based around the most arbitrary of things - a group of friends. The idea of high-minded intellectuals coming together over a mutual love of philosophy or art seemed frivolous when we were all stuck in friendships with our neighbours. Now people all over the world can come together over shared interests, or simple gelling, those networks seem like a primer on how to do it, and how not to.

And yet, there’s something emphatically not new here. Often, the things which culture deems interesting about ordinary people and intellectuals are those it deemed interesting about film stars years before. In the frenzied comtemporary press coverage of the Bloomsbury Group, the Fitzgerald/Dorothy Parker set, the Rat
Pack, or even the Brat Pack, we’ve always found celebrity friendships a source of fascination. Why? For the same reasons we’re fascinated by their romances: we like to imagine ourselves there. Men imagine being Brad Pitt to imagine being with Angelina Jolie, and women - and gay men - imagine being Angelina for the same reason (I never speak for lesbians). We watched Friends with such fondness because we imagined being one of the gang, and some of us, misguided as we are, even obsessed about Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s falling-out so we could imagine drying Paris’ tears and having her buy us cocktails. Group biography is no more than a hifalutin version of the same response - biography gave birth to celebrity culture, and now the influence has gone into reverse. A Night at the Majestic, by the marvellously-named Richard Davenport-Hines, takes as its starting-point a performance of Stravinsky’s Le Renard at the opulent Paris hotel in 1922, at which the composer was joined by James Joyce, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Proust. Who, reading that for the first time, doesn’t feel a twang of jealousy, a sense of I-should-have-been-there - as if, by proximity to a whole generation of genius, we might somehow gain a little by osmosis?

We are all scrambling around in the dark, looking for reflected light with which to illuminate ourselves. It’s just that different people take their light in different places. Group biography is an Oxbridge version of Heat magazine, but it’s none the worse for that.

11.51am. I’m itching to see Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s 4, a lauded but highly controversial cinematic tour through the horrors of modern-day rural Russia. Its opening sequence gives me an idea:

Under grey skies, past industrial detritus, through broken fences and mud, a prostitute traipses from a rural railway station to the funeral of a friend. The toothless old women of the town - the men, we presume, are dead - drink, curse and begin a bizarre orgy. They undress and juggle flaccid breasts. Febrile dogs chase shadows. A young man commits suicide in despair.

Doesn’t it sound great?

12.25pm. Charming, but wrongheaded, article by the wonderful Art Spiegelman in Harper’s about The Danish Cartoons (how long before that’s the name of a band?) Spiegelman’s support for the newspaper that published the cartoons is disappointing, but not surprising. More of a shock was that, without any advance warning, the article published the cartoons. I’d been studiously avoiding seeing them, on the basis that I had nothing to learn or gain from seeing racist, right-wing propaganda. I was wrong, of course. The cartoons are a mixed bag, and the oft-commented on one with a bomb-turbanned Mohammed is a subtle as a brick in the face - though not as offensive as the much subtler one portraying him with devil’s horns. But others are remarkably bland, and one cartoonist even refused the assignment altogether, instead calling the editors of the paper “reactionary provocateurs” (come to think of it, also a fabulous band name). Not that any of this negates the serious issues raised by a wilful trampling on the sensibilities of a victimised minority, but it does put a clearer light on the whole thing. I still feel Harper’s shouldn’t have published the cartoons, but perhaps a link to a location of them on the web wouldn’t have hurt. So, in the interest of debate, here they are.

1.32pm. Wonderful article about the Super Bowl, complete with an incredibly vivid portrait of Stevie Wonder:

There is something about the secondary manifestations of his blindness, the exagerrated way he lets his head flop from side to side, that suggests he has recently arrived from a distant planet, a playful, gigantic black baby who has absorbed all terrestrial sounds and language in a single gulp.

Isn’t this a wonderful idea? An enormous DeLillo-style cosmic culture-recycling machine. Maybe Stevie Wonder’s genius is that, having tapped and sang for white audiences as a childish update of the grinning negro, he turned the tables by using black music to capture and reflect the suburban white society he captivated. On the other hand, maybe not.

15.43pm. Distracted by friend invasion in uncanny echo of last time. OMG! They knocked down the old headquarters of Motown Records to make extra parking for the Super Bowl.

15.48pm. A barrage of revelations. Stevie Wonder gave Smokey Robinson “Tears of a Clown” as a Christmas present! And, the turf in the Super Bowl is artificial!

16.03pm. Nothing in the almighty brouhaha of Super Bowl XL

can match the sight of Aretha Franklin in the flesh. Rolls of fat begin just below her eyeballs and cascade down in waves to her chin, then to her neck, and down to her enormous bosom. A 300-pound mountain of congealed hurt.

16.08pm. David Samuels is fantastic. America, he contends, is not in fact a country but “a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality.”

And that’s it. It’s over. My magazine drawer is bare, my subscriptions have lasped. What, in the end, have we learned? Well, I’ve learned that, no matter how much they may purport to educate, magazines are, in the end, just entertainment - whether Harper’s or Heat, they simply can’t delve in the level of sustained detail to analyse an issue properly, to present multiple voices in a full debate. Only the capacity of a book can do that; while for the daily conversation that keeps us ticking over, newspapers and blogs are much more effective. Perhaps the rise of the lad mag and the “lifestyle” magazine marks the peak of the magazine’s role. There’s always been something contrived about the idea of a carefully selected range of stories, photoshoots and articles. In the age of consumer as king, when we wish to construct our own portfolio of interests, the magazine seems archaic.

However, I’m not sure I want to see them die. There is a certain kind of writing - rambling, slightly frivolous in its languid longwindedness, but thorough in its discussion of the issues - that suits the format, and which simply doesn’t work on the internet, where you want fast, accurate information. Of course, people still print, and a PDF-led model of distribution over the internet for reading on paper might work.

Either way, for now, my personal love affair with the magazine is over. They’re just not as stimulating, as fulfilling as books. I’m going to read a book right now.

Well, maybe I’ll just see what’s on TV…

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22:11pm. A writer from Harper’s “would like to hunt down George W. Bush and kill him with my bare hands.” Or possibly not, it’s a little ambiguous. Apparently Jose Maria Aznar’s government was toppled by a flash mob.

22:45pm. Marvellous story about a Mexican death race. One driver swerved to avoid a child in the road and flew, almost heroically, off the road into an 80-metre gully below. Unfortunately, at the bottom, he hit the crowd of people who had rushed into the road to look at the car in front of him, which had just flown into the next gully down.

23:11pm. Timothy Leary was sprung from jail by the Weather Underground, and hidden in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver. Now that has movie written all over it. Nic Cage and Samuel L Jackson. Or something.

And, time for bed again. Sunday will see the end of this godforsaken odyssey, finally freeing me to Do Better Things. Mark my words.

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21:48pm. Apparently most presidents become mentally ill in the White House, and Wal-Mart is the biggest private employer in the history of the world.

22:11pm. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade would apparently lead to thirty years’ Democratic hegemony, abortions for everybody, and fivers growing on trees. Apparently.

22:32pm. Blood hell! They can make broadband come out of power sockets!

23:36pm. One in five American grocery transactions takes place in a Wal-Mart. Good grief.

And it’s time for sleep - and then, groan, work - again. Only one Atlantic and half a Harper’s tackled. Tomorrow, the hill of ignorance will be conquered once and for all.

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Well, enough is enough. It’s Sunday, and I’ve put the entire day aside to clear out my magazine drawer before it gets any more overfull. And you, dear reader, can share the journey with me, in stream-of-consciousness style.

The titles list: Prospect, February, March, April 2006 editions; Colloquy, Winter and Spring 2006 editions; Jungle Drums, June 2006 edition; Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus Newsletter, Winter 2006 edition; The Pink Paper, 29 June 2006 edition; CreativeWeek, June 2006 (?) edition; Harvard Magazine, March-April 2006 edition; Harper’s, June & July 2006 editions; The Atlantic Monthly, June and July-August 2006 editions; Harvard Public Health Review, Spring 2006 edition; Gay Times, June 2006 edition.

10.30am. 20 min in. Already i have a headache. I now know that young members of Fatah and Hamas have a lot in common, and have been told (but not convinced) that, contrary to the widely-accepted theory, Britain was well-armed in the 1930’s. And now I’m off to buy some Diet Coke.

11.25am. Sentences are already starting to blur into one another. Apparently, Indian philosophy has more in common with the Western tradition than with the Chinese! Starting with Prospect may have been a mistake.

11.44am. More detail about the seemingly ever-growing list of mistakes and stupidities made by the US in Iraq. There’s a compelling drama of State/Pentagon relations in there somewhere; not just Powell as talisman, as has been done in Stuff Happens, but on an institutional level.

12.48pm. This is slow going. Electoral reform and the need for government direction of digital development, check.

12.59pm. Apparently the average “cut rate” of Hollywood films increased in the 1980’s from one every ten seconds to one every six seconds, and has stayed there since.

13.21pm. Oh my God! Ringo Starr slept with George Harrison’s wife!

16.01pm. Laptop has been monopolised by friend, prompting distraction into long Wikipedia-fest. Learnt: French people may not really exist; the song “Guantanamera,” which I always thought was Brazilian, is in fact Cuban; the British seat of Government used to be Winchesster; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Harvard students were required to learn how to make a sundial. Oh, and Greater London covers 609 sq miles. Have long way to go. Have added vodka to Diet Coke.

16.28pm. Long article about the long battle to alert Americans to the dangers of Trans Fats. I recall at Harvard there were signs everywhere noting that the food served in the H-Bomb’s many canteens was trans-fat free. The article waxes about the dangers of the fats, one of the four main types, the others being the better-known saturated, unsaturated and monounsaturated. The American authorities are now warning against trans fat consumption, which appears to have no positive effects whatsoever and substantially increase heart disease risks (apparently, while both saturated and trans fats increase “bad” cholesterol, trans fats also reduce “good” cholesterol). And yet for some reason, I’ve never heard anything about it over here. Is Europe oblivious to this threat? Or does our food contain fewer trans fats anyway? Given Harvard’s neverending boasting about its Global University status, it’s a bit of a damning
indictment of the article that it doesn’t mention the situation elsewhere.

16.35pm. Bloody hell: more people die each year in the US of suicide than of murder.

17.36pm. John Maynard Keynes was gay!

18.14pm. Finished Gay Times. Learnt nothing of interest, besides the above.

19.09pm. Apparently containment can work with Iran, and the interior western US might turn Democrat.

20.16pm. I really need to stop and call my mother; 2 Harper’s and 2 Prospects to go! In other news, apparently information management is going to be transformed by a new open-source program called Chandler. But not yet, and besides, it kind of looks like Outlook to me.

20.44pm I give up. I’ve just found another Atlantic I hadn’t noticed; so I now have more to read than I did an hour ago. It’s no good. There’s at least another day’s worth of reading to go.

How do people do this? Somebody reads these bloody things, and it’s not normally the unemployed. And I’ve gained nothing. Granted, I’ve learnt a lot of factoids and been exposed to some interesting ideas, but not one has been exhaustively explored in the way that could allow me to form an actual opinion of my own. I know, it’s supposed to be a “jumping-off point for further research.” But if there’s barely time to read the articles themselves, how the hell are you supposed to make time for advanced googling?

I guess the problem stems from my hedging my bets. Pick a mag and stick to it, I guess that’s the lesson. There are Economist people and LRB people, and then there are those people for whom the Saturday Guardian provides a week’s stimulation. I need to face facts and become one of these. But which one? Suggestions welcome….

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I still think it’s very wierd that the world’s second-most popular online newspaper lets any user place unmoderated comments straight on the webpage of its leader articles, but it’s kind of fun, too…

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