I’ve written an email to Salam Pax.
He’s the “Baghdad Blogger” – the guy who wrote the weblog which became a book about the War in Iraq. I was given a copy of the book to review for XTRA, and I was pretty taken by it.
Here’s the email I sent:
Salam,
Here in New Zealand, I feel about as far away from Iraq as it is possible to get.
I spent the past six months following events via our own NZ News programmes, CNN, BBC and online sources like The Independent and The Guardian. American news was somewhat unsettling – in fact, CNN came to resemble scenes from Schwarzenegger’s ‘The Running Man’ and their descriptions of military hardware looked like high-tech collector cards.
Absurd, but it goes to support my theory that the over-riding cultural project of the 21st century is to make reality resemble science fiction as closely as possible. Bush will get himself a Star Trek holodeck, and Baghdad will look more and more like the desolate post-apocalypse badlands of Mad Max. I’m still waiting for my silver jumpsuit, jetpack and meals-in-a-pill.
The reason I’m writing is that I was asked to review your book for the local Microsoft/Telecom-owned website XTRA. I finished reading it today, and then went on to read all of the posts you’ve written since the last one included in print. I’ll write the actual review over the next couple of days.
The reason for this email is that I just wanted to say thanks for putting a human face on something that would otherwise have remained a complete abstraction. Empathy, yes – disgust, of course – but no real connection with the events and how they might have played out in the eyes of someone – an ‘ordinary’ person – at the centre of them.
I was actually put onto your blog some months back by another blogger, Russell Brown (you can read his Hard News weblog here). In fact, you’re mentioned in his latest post:
I’m reading Salam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog, and will be reviewing it for The Listener (it’ll be in the shops here in a couple of weeks). It’s just a cut-and-paste from the blog since it launched in September last year, but it’s a splendidly human book – war-quickies don’t come any better. We tried to get an interview via bFM, but we missed out. Stern got one, and it even has a photograph – he’s not the lardass you’d think from the way he describes himself!
My own weblog, should you be the slightest bit interested in media – particularly radio – in New Zealand is http://dubbernews.blogspot.com – but I’m almost ashamed to direct you to it. You may enjoy it as evidence that utterly inane normality is going on in a land where the most interesting thing someone can think to write about is the new Dexys Midnight Runners ‘best of’ compilation. Nothing much blowing up down this end of the planet… and thankfully so – but it does make our public journalism seem a bit lightweight by comparison.
Anyway – I know that thousands of people will have said this to you already, but I want you to know that what you write is appreciated.
Hang onto that copy of ‘Hatful of Hollow’. Listening to the Smiths at uncomfortable volume levels is a powerful coping mechanism.
Good on you.
Cheers,
Andrew Dubber
The project to convert my entire CD collection to mp3 is well underway. 70 discs so far have made it to my hard drive, and with CDDB helpfully adding track and album names to it, it’s turned my PC into a “songfind” database. Lots of tracks on compilations that I would have forgotten I had are now given equal priority to the new remastered version of Talk Talk’s ‘The Colour of Spring’.
In the physical realm, the Talk Talk has fabulous packaging, whereas some of my older CDs are pretty beat up. Jewel cases are rubbish. Who needs that much packaging? If CDs came in cardboard sleeves like records, I’d happily keep them. They’d be easier to store too…
Still, as much as it’s a drag to sit and load in disc after disc, for travel purposes, it’s going to be a real help. I’ll put my CDs in storage and yet still be able to play them when I’m on the other side of the planet next year.
With a bit of luck, legislators will read this, come to their senses about medium transfer for private use, and I won’t end up in jail or $50,000 poorer for having my own CD collection in two places at once. We almost made the law change in NZ at one point recently – but sadly, it didn’t get much further than a bill.
So I hereby confess to being a criminal… but it’s only piracy ’cause the law is wrong.
PLEASE argue with me on this. :)
