J'accuse: Men of Letters

This article and accompanying Bertoon (click image to enlarge) appear in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.

This week we start with the plaudits. Antoine Cassar, former blogger and current poet has won the Grand Prize in the United Planet Writing Contest 2009. It’s a great achievement for the man who I got to know through his blog during the first phases of the Maltese blogosphere. Antoine’s blog posts on “il-Maqluba” (a nod to his origins in Qrendi and thereabouts) were always a breath of alternative fresh air at the time when blogging was still an adventure, comments were spontaneous respectful exchanges and we could still talk of a blogging community.

Antoine specializes in what he called “muzajks” – multilingual poems that manage to fuse together many tongues into one single expression. His work is the work of a son of the earth that knows no boundaries and who is constantly trying to feel the pulse of the lands he explores by harnessing the word. His exploration involves identifying the common expression, understanding the power of the word that has always thrilled generation upon generation ever since homo sapiens harnessed it in writing. And it works.

Antoine experimented with his novel form of poetry by alternating lines of Maltese, English, Italian, French and Spanish on us, the pioneers of exchanges in the form of posts. We liked what we saw and since then Antoine has all but abandoned the claustrophobic blogging world and dedicated most of his time to the publication and development of his preferred medium – inspired verse. To Cassar, Babel is not a curse but a challenge and a thrilling continuous experiment… and even the most detached listener or reader will find that sharing this thrill provided by an endekasyllabic verse, even for a fleeting moment, is pure entertainment.

Inspiration

Congratulations then to Antoine, who you can meet at next month’s Notte Bianca, or sample his works on www.muzajk.wordpress.com before buying his book published by Skarta. Twanny, as I got to call him after his blogging days, is not the kind to bask in attention but I am sure he will forgive me for borrowing his vitality and curiosity as an example of that dying breed of young persons whose love of learning is as tangible as it is contagious. I like to imagine a word full of such people, intent on breaking new barriers and discovering new frontiers – constantly humbled by the understanding of their ignorance in the most Socratic of appreciations of the world around them.

I apologise for what might sound like some pedantic description of literary kerfuffle but Antoine’s winning of the prize came bang in the middle of a week when I was beginning to despair about the low standards with which we are constantly burdened in our little cosmos that is Malta. This was the week when Obama – the hero of the twittering and blogging generation – launched a veiled attack at the world of blogging, thus re-igniting the flame of Blogging vs MSM. Obama was actually targeting the ginormous blogging community that thrives in the US – they are accused of transforming journalism into one big morass of opinionated jousting without as much as an ounce of respect for the traditional standards of journalism.

Hollywood has begun to tackle this Main Stream Media versus Blogging debate and the latest Kevin MacDonald movie “State of Play” (featuring a brilliant Russel Crowe performance) is just the ticket if you want to understand the moral and ethical dilemmas that are at play from the viewpoint of an old-style journalist. The story is the same all over – whether we are speaking of San Francisco or Valletta: is blogging a challenging adversary to the traditional media or is it a welcome complementary medium that fills in the lacunae?

The more the debate rages it becomes all the more evident that, just as in any other similar situation, it is all about whoever is using the tool. Blogging may have made public expression more widespread but that only means a higher possibility of the spread of bad taste, low standards and, pardon the expression, utter crap. Once again we meet that fine line between having an opinion and being able to defend it reasonably. Blogs can quickly become the latest refuge of scoundrels intent on smearing or spreading false rumours. Whether it is a blog or a newspaper article, the standard and quality depends on whether the user (writer or journalist) respects his own work.

Perspiration

The danger of a dilution in quality is there however, blogs or no blogs. Newspapers seem to scramble to fill their pages with a multiplicity of subjects and sources of information nowadays. Witness the Sunday papers that attempt to cover every topic under the sun. In this day and age, whipping a few words together to write an original, creative and informative article is no laughing matter. Believe me when I tell you that the 2000 odd words every week can be quite a burden. You sit there staring at the screen hoping to remember all the little mental notes you made during the week between one job and another and try to string an article together that might be interesting to your readers.

Other columnists might have a vested interest in the exposure afforded them by their seeming words of wisdom in Malta’s most popular papers. First among these aspirant soap boxers are politicians who deign to present us with their words of wisdom on any paper that obliges them with space. Frankly I have long given up on the possibility of reading an intelligible piece penned by a product of our political fraternity. As I have long complained, the idea of values or debating political thoughts has long left our political class and the written word is to them simply a dazzling extension of the plethora of marketing possibilities. In short, your average politician will put a tombola party, a disco night with constituents and an article in your favourite newspaper on the same level.

I should be somewhat apologetic for my unkind treatment of the politocracy but quite frankly I cannot bring myself to apologise. It has gone on for too long, this taking the readership for a ride and those who follow J’accuse the blog and its daily reports will have witnessed our latest uncovering of one of the main culprits of the watering down of the politician’s column. In the week when Gordon Brown decided to emulate Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats with the people (on radio – so people would have no idea if he really was sitting by the fireside) one of our MEPs in Brussels was caught by yours truly committing one of the ugliest of publishing sins.

Cut & Paste

Readers are invited to visit the blog (address below) to see the intricate details of how your elected representative “wrote” an article in a daily newspaper by cutting and pasting his way through an article in The Guardian and Mr Barroso’s web pages. Two days later, the unrepentant Nationalist hero had another article published in a rival paper that also displayed severe attacks of unattributed borrowing of third party texts. The MEP’s sin is aggravated by both his betrayal of trust with the newspapers that gladly hosted his contribution, as well as with his low level of respect for the readers.

It would be unfair to single out the MEP since cutting and pasting has become de rigeur in many an article and magazine in Malta. From your recipes copied unabashedly from Australian cookbooks to supposed researched articles by specialist professionals, the printed word is ripe with cloning experiments that all too often are lucky enough to escape the untrained eyes. Nowadays all an article “writer” has to do is copy and paste most of a wikipedia entry and add a few photos and hey presto… an article is born!

It is little wonder then that most of the magazines churned out by our local papers are nothing more than excuses for glorified advertising. As in politics however, we only have ourselves to blame. There is little or no excuse for complaining when we go on voting for, and choosing the trash we are fed. It does not even stop with newspapers – our music, our “art” and our general cultural appreciation is slowly withering away. Which is why the Antoine Cassars of this island are so few and far between.

Yes, this disgruntled, long-winded columnist is in the mood to dish out the goods to everyone from faux columnists to renegade bloggers to wannabe food critics. We are all collectively guilty for allowing this to happen to ourselves. The potential has always been there but we prefer the easy way out of cut and paste relativism and conceited ideas of grandeur. More often than not the collective big-headedness of our reasoning is best exposed in the degeneration of the comment boxes and letters to the editor. I am beginning to curse the day everybody under the sun was given a free hand at shooting comments off the cuff. Really.

Olympia

Elsewhere in the real world of uncloned activity, some sly robbers stole a Magritte painting from a Belgian museum. An as yet unknown British museum will be culturally enriched in the coming months when it buys the veritable treasure-trove of Anglo-Saxon relics in gold and silver that were found in a field in Mercia by an unemployed field-comber. He will share the spoils of the sale with the landowner – the spoils are expected to run into millions as this find is being compared to the famous discovery at Sutton Hoo in 1939.

The big men and women of the world voted unanimously in the UN Security Council to continue along the path of general nuclear disarmament. It will be hard to explain this to Mr Ahmadinejad (my look-alike on a bad hair day) who insists on pursuing his separate road of nuclear exploration. Meanwhile, Benjy Netanyahu of Israel was still having a hard time trying to convince Mr Ahmadinejad that his Holocaust denial cannot really hold water. Water is what the Indian space agency has discovered on the moon – traces of it were seen by an American telescope placed on an Indian satellite.

An apt letter to the editor to the UK Times asked how come India is still the recipient of huge chunks of British aid aimed at getting water to the drier and poorer regions of the country when the Asian sub-continent can afford billions of dollars to stare at the water on the moon through a telescope. You have to admit it is strange. Water is what immigrants tend to have to tackle when they pursue the land of their dreams. This week a huge camp of immigrants in the north of France was evacuated by the military and police. Most of the immigrants did not really want to stay in France but would have loved to move to the UK – instead they find themselves displaced in Paris. Most people speculate that the majority of the evacuated persons will find their way back to the north of France before long.

Ours too is a land of temporary disappointment for a “disproportionate” number of immigrants. This week we heard the news that six European states would accept to share the burden of these immigrants only to hear later on that this magnanimous effort would mean that 100 immigrants in all would be leaving our shores, which does not say much for burden sharing programmes in the future.

That is all for now. This grumpy blogger is proud to present you with another 2000 words or so of original thought. All mistakes and presumptuous statements in this article are mine and mine alone. If you have appreciated this article do drop me a line on the blog. If you disliked it you are still welcome to criticise constructively. In any case, enjoy a moderate use of the word – it’s part of you and it would be a pity if you were to use it unwisely.

May the word be with you.

Jacques has been risking the wrath of elected representatives and their minions on http://www.akkuza.com. It’s all done in the name of the people… no matter how ignorant (of the truth) they choose to be.