Words and music
Topic: Odds and ends
Ampersand Duck writes: "I don't know why critics say that we've all lost touch with poetry, because isn't good songwriting poetry? Anyone who pays attention to good lyrics is interacting with poetry. There's no real difference."

I'm always happy to find someone else who pays attention to lyrics. I really find it odd that more people don't. Especially people who can sing along to a song, get the words right, and still not pay attention to what they're singing. I mean, I like the occasional song that's just dumb and fun, and can occasionally overlook stupid lyrics for music that's really good or a singer who has an outstanding voice. But the music that I listen to over and over, and the artists whose careers I follow, are usually strong lyricists, whether their approach is generally fairly straightforward (Ani Difranco, Ben Folds, Suzanne Vega, Ms Dynamite) or more personally symbolic and evocative (Tori Amos, Nirvana) or falls somewhere in the middle (Mike Doughty/Soul Coughing, Eels). But I was realizing, as I was trawling the web looking for sample lyrics, that even for a lot of these artists, it isn't particularly easy to find lyrics that stand alone on the strength of the words and the way they're put together (such as "Everest" by Ani Difranco and "Down on the River by the Sugar Plant" by Mike Doughty). The music is a really important part of the whole experience of the song, in terms of creating the context and atmosphere that help with the interpretation of the lyrics.

So I don't know that I necessarily agree that there's "no real difference" between poetry and well-written lyrics. I think its important to keep in mind that a really good song is about the interaction between words and music, how they fit together, and how the singer interprets them. Some poetry may fit well into the structure of a song (Nikki Lee's Here Lies Dorothy Parker), but some never will (ee cummings springs to mind as the most obvious example). I think there's a reason that both Ani Difranco and Mike Doughty, who are great lyricists, treat the poems that they write as distinct entities from their songs.

But then, it's not like I disagree that some lyricists' work is poetic and can stand on its own. (See why I'm so much fun in an argument? Now I'm on this side! Now I'm on that side!) It's just that I think that poetry and songwriting need to be understood as distinct arts. But I do completely agree that it's inaccurate to say that people have lost touch with poetry. Go visit Ampersand Duck and see the posts on National Poetry Week for proof. Poetry is not dead. It's just been somewhat mangled by angst-ridden adolescents (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa).

.....
Postscript: So, some words make their own music, some music expresses itself beautifully without words (go get Kaki King's Legs to Make Us Longer. Now. I'm not joking), some words and music aren't complete without each other . . . and then there are some words and music that really need video to be fully appreciated. For instance, these gems: "Yearn/ You burn with desire/ Your pants are on fire"; "Now nothing looks better than a pair of gold pants/ Skintight fabric with enough room to dance"; and "Beats like these could break through walls/ I get my motivation from shopping in malls".  Believe!

Many, many, many thanks to TDW (you're a fireball!) and AF (gold pants forever!) for recognizing that I needed to know about this.

An ounce of prevention
Kate's recent post on Moment to Moment, and a recent spate of news about bird flu in Indonesia (this article from The Age is the latest) reminded me that I've been meaning to write about this post on WorldChanging from a few weeks back, calling for a grassroots awareness campaign about avian flu on the web.

I've had this particular post just sitting around for so long that I can't remember where I picked it up (Kottke.org, maybe?). Part of the delay in writing about it, I suppose, is that I really don't know much about public health or avian flu, so I didn't quite know what I had to offer to the conversation. And I've no desire to sound like a paranoid hypochondriac by yapping on about avian flu when I don't know anything about it. Particularly when there have been scares around nasty local illnesses before that failed to materialize as international pandemics, like Ebola and SARS. And there's the denial factor, as well. I'd very much like to go on thinking that in this age of modern medicine and technology, we would be able to avert a pandemic, so I don't really need to worry about it.

Sounds a bit like the situation around Hurricane Katrina in some ways: a bit of ignorance; a bit of denial; and a bit of experience with prior alarms that weren't false, exactly, but that didn't live up to their hype - not the sum total of what went wrong, by any means, but all contributing factors to the severity of the situation. And when things did go wrong, our technology and our medicine and our systems failed in New Orleans. What reason do we have to suppose that failure isn't equally possible in the face of a severe and highly contagious illness?

I'm not stockpiling anything, but the more I find out about the avian flu situation, the more uneasy I get. Recombinomics¹ has a list of the latest avian flu news, which is currently heavy on cases of bird-to-human transmissions in Indonesia. But this article points out that the migration of birds out of East and Southeast Asia into other areas of Eurasia means that bird-to-human transmissions will likely begin occurring over a far wider geographical range. Furthermore, the head of the World Health Organization recently said² that it's just a matter of time until a form of the virus that transmits from human to human develops, and the virus will then be able to spread far more rapidly. The Flu Wiki says that 20,000 to 40,000 people are killed every year by "normal" strains of influenza (I'm assuming that figure is for the United States), so who knows what kind of death toll a more virulent form of flu could cause?

Basically, it seems to me that it's really important to be informed about avian flu, and to have some knowledge of the resources that are currently available for keeping up with critical information about it and taking appropriate action. The WorldChanging post and its comments would be a good place to start learning about it if you feel like you need more information, but if you want to get straight to practical issues and action, the Flu Wiki is probably the way to go.

Most practically, and most importantly (especially for those of you in the northern hemisphere who are heading into cold and flu season now), take care of yourselves. Eat your greens, take your vitamins, and try not to run yourselves into the ground. I'll try to do the same on my end.


-----
¹link via comments on WorldChanging post
²link via Moment to Moment

Scatty
Topic: Navel gazing
"Scatty" is my new favorite bit of Australian slang. Google indicates that definitions vary, but in the context in which I first heard it, it was used where I would've used "scatter-brained". I like "scatty" so much better, though. It's much more evocative. Sometimes being scatty is dreadful and you feel like poo. But sometimes the randomness of it can be fun and surprising and entertaining, like when a good jazz singer scat sings.

I have most definitely been scatty lately, and it's gone back and forth between poo scatty and jazz scatty. We're on the semester break from classes this week and the next, and I've not been terribly productive this week. At least, I haven't been productive where studying is concerned. I've done many things that are good for my general sense of well-being, like housecleaning, getting my hair done, going shopping (stop smirking! My wardrobe is in a truly sorry state), and spending time with friends. I've fit in a bit of research and reading around the edges of all that, but not as much as I had planned.

I've got a lot on my mind lately, which contributes to the scattiness. Part of it is that I'm struggling a bit because I've hit the point in my stay where the newness of everything has worn off. I'm coming out of the adjustment haze and realizing that I'm in this place that opens up so many possibilities to me and I that have a very limited amount of time in which to explore them, and I start to feel stressed about that. Particularly when I realize that my time here is nearly half gone already, and I have no idea where it went.

Also, when the newness wears off, I look around and realize that, while I've met a lot of really cool people that I like a lot, I really miss my old friends. There is a point at which trying to figure new friends out goes from exhilerating to exhausting, and I am at it. I know it'll pass, and that many, maybe most, of my friendships here will survive it and be better for it, but right now, I just want a night out in Baltimore with my friends in the worst way. I want to be with people who I'm past "polite" with, who I'm past feeling like I need to impress in some way, who I'm past the initial "proving ourselves" stage with. To still be figuring all that out with people here - to not know who I'll become good friends with, and who I won't, for whatever reason - is very frustrating at the moment.

So some enterprising soul in the scientific community needs to get off her butt and start working on making those Star Trek transporter thingies happen, so I can just zap over to the States to get hugs from everyone and find out what's been going on, and zap back here in time for class. And then I can zap over to Skopje to see what's going on there . . . yeah, somebody needs to work on practical instananeous transport because I'm feeling greedy - I want the best of all my worlds, and I want it now!

Ruminating
Topic: Navel gazing
DamselFish is in the midst of a multi-country work trip, which she's writing about on In and Out of the World, and I'm jealous. Or at least, I was until she got around to writing about the indignities of air travel. I know the feeling of being a "sleepless and slimy sardine" after a long stretch of traveling a little too well, and I don't think I ever hit four countries in the course one trip, which is what DamselFish is doing. I don't envy her that part of the experience.

I do envy her trip to Sarajevo, though. I had one brief trip to Sarajevo when I was working in Skopje, but it was long enough for me to fall in love with the city. Some places hit me like that - I fell in love with Baltimore before I even really got to know the city, and five minutes into my trip to New Orleans last year, I loved it. I suppose it helped that Sarajevo was something of a legend in the former Yugoslavia -- so many people told me how much I was going to enjoy visiting, and they were always eager to share their own stories about how much they enjoyed the city. I heard over and over about how there was something special about Sarajevo.

They were right - there is something special about Sarajevo. I would step over pits in the sidewalk caused by mortar shells, look up past the bullet-pocked buildings to the steep hills where the snipers sat, notice the number of brilliantly white headstones in the cemetaries, and see uniformed NATO soldiers everywhere I looked . . . it should have been oppresive and depressing. And yet there was a vibrancy to the city. It felt to me like the people of Sarajevo were trying to get on with life, making the most of the international attention to and presence in the city, and rebuilding with what was available. I don't know that I would call the feeling hopeful, exactly, but it was inspiring, that people would pick up their lives after the war and get on with all the little things that make a city a city, despite everything that they had been through.

Reading about DamselFish's travels prompted me to flip through Ulica/Street, a book of photographs by Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski, which features snapshots of street scenes from around the world, featuring a lot of pictures of Skopje and other Macedonian cities. Some of the photos of Skopje just take me right back - I've stood on that street corner, I've shopped in that store, I've watched that little scene unfold. Funny how Manchevski's photographs do that for me in a way that my own don't.

It made me very nostalgic, although I'm not exactly sure what for. For Skopje itself, to some extent, but maybe more for who I was when I was there. I was excited, I was idealistic (well, more idealistic than I am now), I believed I was going to make a difference. And now? I'm not so sure. I learned a lot in Macedonia, and I'm learning a lot here, and some of the lessons are not easy. Development may sound good on paper, but in practice it can do harm, or not do much to effect meaningful change. I had thought I was eager to get back out into the "real world", so start working again, but now I'm thinking that there's a whole lot more I could learn about and reflect on.

For instance, I've been thinking that one thing we haven't really dealt with explicitly in any of my classes is the ethics of development work and what motivates people to do it. I just finished reading Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, which tells the stories of three UN staff who worked in various conflict situations in the 1990s, and one of the things that leapt out me was how different their motivations for getting involved in UN work were, and how it led to different kinds of problems and mistakes for each of them. It makes me wonder if I might not be better prepared to go back into the field if I was engaging with theory a bit less and myself a bit more. I know that it's not hard to get caught up in the idea of "doing good", the romance of traveling, the adventure of living in another country - only to burn out when the travel gets to be too much and the culture shock gets too severe and you realize that the amount of good you're doing is limited.

But then new inspiration comes along in a amazing person, or a really effective program, or a great idea, and you're off again, ready to try to change at least a little corner of the world. I just don't want to get so caught up in that cycle of exhileration and exhaustion that I lose sight of the big picture. Of course, I'm not at all sure what I think the big picture is at this point. Still working on that one. I just wonder, when all this studying is said and done, whether I'll be ready to jump back in to work, and I hadn't at all anticipated feeling that way when I thought about what I might get from my studies.

A picture is worth a thousand rants
Topic: Events
Got this from Ro today - did a quick check to see whether it was real or not. Snopes says its true, so I give a big around the world and back snap to the (half-asleep? quietly subversive?) Sky News caption writer responsible.

It's not easy being green
Topic: Whatever
Especially when you're used as a little green pregnancy test.

Background and summary: there is a summit going on in Washington DC right now, and its aim is to launch a rescue plan for threatened amphibian species that is projected to cost tens of millions of US dollars a year for at least a decade.

Anyone who has paid any sort of attention to environmental issues for the past decade is probably well aware that there have been many reports that things have been going badly for amphibians - the many stories about the growth in the numbers of grossly mutated frogs, for example - but apparently last year a global study called the Global Amphibian Assessment (GAA) found that the situation was more dire than expected. Nearly a third of amphibian populations around the world were found to be threatened with extinction according the criteria set out by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). (By comparison, according to the GAA key findings, 23% of mammalian and 12% of bird species are so classified.) The plans being discussed at the DC summit are a response to these findings.

While habitat loss was found to be the most serious threat to amphibians, a recently discovered fungus has been taking a severe toll on amphibian populations. The fungus causes a disease called chytridiomycosis that causes skin damage that impairs amphibians' ability to absorb air and moisture through their skins. The fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has been found in the Americas, Europe and Australia, the areas with the highest numbers of critically endangered and threatened amphibian species.

The participants in the summit are currently debating the merits of a theory, proposed by team of researchers from South Africa and Australia led by a professor at James Cook University in Australia, that suggests that the fungus was spread by the use of a species of African frog (Xenopus laevis) for pregnancy testing in the 1930s and '40s. The BBC story at the first link has more details, but apparently, the female of the species would lay eggs when injected with a sample of urine from a pregnant woman. Consequently, thousands of frogs were shipped annually from Africa to Europe, North America and Australia to be used for pregnancy and fertility testing.

This article (link via BBC) gives a history of the use of Xenopus in the hobby acquariums and laboratories of Europe. I recommend reading the first few pages - the scientific bits can be skipped over without losing the thread of the story, which relates the rise of Xenopus as a significant laboratory subject while throwing out a number of casual but tantalizing references to scientific politics and rivalries at the end of nineteenth century. But if that's too much to read, the 3rd and 4th pages are the real highlight, as they relate the story of Lancelot Hogben, a left-wing British scientist who began working Xenopus during his tenure at the University of Cape Town in the late 1920s, and both continued his own work with the species and advocated its use to others upon his return to England. Fascinating stuff.

Okay, having already outed myself as a nerd (to the maybe three people reading this who didn't already know that was the case), let me just take it to the next level. Since I've got classes in colonialism and globalization this semester, and a class taught by a committed feminist animal rights activist, I'm seeing all kinds of links to topics that have been coming up in my classes. The ethics of using animals in medical testing is an obvious issue raised by this story (the Xenopus test sounds far more humane than the other contemporary pregnancy tests, but it was still being raised in an unnatural environment and subjected to unknown stresses in the course of testing). It also provides an unusual illustration of one of the many ways that the resources of colonized countries were exploited for the benefit of the colonizer. And it describes how colonization facilitated the mobility of intellectual and natural resources, which was an earlier version of the massive flows of people, information and other resources that students of globalization are currently examining. I've also got an idea that there's a link between Xenopus and the process of bringing pregnancy and childbirth under the control of modern medicine, but that's a suspicion, not anything I'm capable of backing up with arguments or examples at the moment.

All that out of the story of an odd little African amphibian. Amazing, isn't it? Obviously, if the link between Xenopus and the prevalence of chytridiomycosis in Europe, Australia and the Americas can be proven, it will be yet another example of the unintended, unforeseen, and potentially devastating consequences of shuffling animals around the world with insufficient thought for the impact on the local environment. It seems appropriate that researchers from Australia, which suffers from the depradations of introduced species like the cane toad, rabbit and camel, among others, would find a possible link between the introduction of imported species and the decline of native ones. Unfortunately, the end result of this story is to make me feel a bit wary about human capacity to plan to "save" threatened amphibians without causing negative consequences to other species, because we really don't have the most stellar record when it comes to predicting the consequences of our own actions, particularly in sensitive and complex settings like ecosystems.

You gotta see this
Topic: Odds and ends
hee hee hee

(Via Kottke.org)

Another lawsuit I support
Topic: Politics
Indian woman leads multibillion fight against U.S. (Reuters)

Elouise Cobell became treasurer of the Blackfeet tribe in 1976. Her investigations into U.S. government payments to members of the tribe for land-usage rights have led her to file a $27.5 billion lawsuit against the U.S. government, alleging that the government has been cheating Indians for more than a century:

The complex dispute dates back to 1887, when the United States allotted lands to Indians but held them in trust for them. Under the arrangement, the government collects fees from ranchers, timber and oil companies or others using the land and distributes the money back tax free to individual Indians.

...

To demonstrate the confusion around the issue, she drove a visitor to several small oil wells, as well as along farm and grazing land across the Blackfeet Nation near the Canadian border. Typically the Indian owners of that land know little of the deals the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have arranged there, she said.

Cobell pulled out a photocopy of a May check for $69.35 she received from the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians. The stub offers no explanation. Cobell said she did not know whether the amount is for oil or other rights on her family land.

"This is an outrage," said Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer. "If you had a private company that managed a trust like the BIA managed the trust for these Indian families, you'd put them in jail -- for a long time."

...

"We're not going to roll over and play dead any more," said Cobell, who has has become a celebrity in Indian country and raised $11 million for the court fight. "I made the decision a long time ago when I was a lot younger than 59 years old to fight it for the long haul."

"I really thought the litigation would not take as long as it has."

Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, has sought a comprehensive settlement to be approved by Congress to avoid decades of litigation.

...

Cobell says a settlement could include a time-payment plan or the allocation of assets rather than cash. "We would be willing to consider other avenues such as a longer period of time to pay it," she said. "If you don't have the cash, let's talk about some of this land we can take back."

A dollar a day
Topic: Development
$365 a year with which to support yourself. It has been the standard for measuring absolute poverty since I started working in development. Since the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) are in the news this week due to the UN summit, and one of the aims of the MDGs is to dramatically reduce the number of people living on $1 per day by 2015, it's now news that maybe this measure isn't quite as absolute as it's made out to be:

Critics say the $1-a-day measurement of poverty does not distinguish between the widely different experiences of the poor, which cannot be measured simply by looking at income.

"The ... fundamental question is whether such statistical propositions as the $1-a-day-life reflect any reality that real people live in," asked Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul in his recently published book "The End of Globalism."

"After all, people at $3 a day could be living a life of pure despair in a savage slum of Lagos, a life far worse than that at $1 a day in a stable slum like Klong Toey in Bangkok, where there is a societal structure," he wrote.

...

The World Bank says the number of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 1.1 billion in 2001 from 1.5 billion in 1981 -- a much trumpeted trend that mostly reflects the economic rise of China and India.

But it also says the number living on less than $2 a day increased to 2.7 billion in 2001 from 2.4 billion in 1981.

"The 1.6 billion people in the middle, between the $1 and $2 a day poverty lines, are still very poor and remain vulnerable to economic slowdowns," it said in a recent report.

So if the goal posts were moved, and $2 a day was the benchmark -- and it is the preferred measure of some analysts -- it would suggest that global poverty is in fact on the rise.

It seems a bit absurd, doesn't it, to quibble over the dollar amount at which the poverty line should be drawn, when trying to live on $3 per day sounds every bit as impossible as living on $1 a day. I'm with the "[c]ritics [who] contend that the goals themselves set an objective on poverty that obscures the complexity of the problem and that focusing on the $1-a-day measure can be misleading", but realistically, I don't expect this measure to be displaced by a more complex one any time soon. For one thing, it's relatively simple information to acquire and to compare across time. For another, it satisfies a psychological need to have clear lines drawn against which to measure progress (or the lack thereof). And, perhaps most tellingly, it situates "extreme poverty" squarely in the "developing" world, and doesn't shift the focus back to the ways that Western countries are failing to meet the needs of their own poor, as a more complex measure might.

Back with a vengeance
Topic: Events
In case you hadn't noticed, I'm officially off hiatus . . . although you could be excused for not noticing that I was ever on it. I am so not good at staying away from the internet.

But there's so much stuff out there crying out for comment! Today in particular, we have:

• UK universities offer places to Katrina students (Guardian Education), which would be a great opportunity for those who can make it work for them. I can't even imagine how frustrating it must be for all those students who have had their study disrupted by the hurricane. Not that picking up and studying in England would make it all better, particularly for those students who were really invested in the social and academic life at their school, but at least for some students I would imagine that this could be a good opportunity to make the best of a bad situation.
• The latest on Scott Parkin's case here and here, from Barista. Apparently, Parkin was once arrested in the US for participating in a Greenpeace protest that involved a group of activists all dressing up as Tony the Tiger and running around Exxon Mobil HQ in Texas. Still no word on what he's done in Australia to be considered a threat to national security.
• From Uncommon Sense, this link to Nomination Watch, where the National Women's Law Center is blogging John Roberts' confirmation hearings, and is not pleased with the way he's been refusing to answer questions about his position on abortion.
• Good e-mails: from EE, this BBC News overview of major problems that Bush administration policies (not to mention Ambloodybassador Bolton) are likely to cause at the upcoming UN summit, and from the Mrs half of the Good Doctors, this essay from CommonDreams.org critiquing both the lack of attention to women's and children's rights in the Millenium Development Goals and the Bush administration's current attempts to undermine the MDGs.

More to come in a moment . . .