Birdkill: Why I Couldn't Quite Get Out Of The Middle East

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

'You write very well, you know. You just need to get out of the Middle East. It's doing you no favours. We really, really don't care about it.'

So did a prominent London literary agent advise me. The words hit home hard: I had thought being the only person writing spy thrillers set in this most colourful and conflicted area since Eric Ambler gave us The Levanter would be a good thing, but apparently not. The 'we' he referred to was the Great British Public - the people UK publishers want to sell books to.

I didn't have a firm 'next project' lined up after Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and I had been toying with the idea of making a book out of my 'Uncle Pat' joke. And so was born A Decent Bomber. I set about abandoning the Middle East with as much distress and compunction as the average psychopath has for his victim. How was I to know that, in terms of attracting British publishing, the next worst place on earth to set a book after the Middle East was Northern Ireland?

By Birdkill I'd given up trying to please anyone but myself, and yet the book was to be set in the UK. It is explicitly not located anywhere in particular. I started out with my short story as a basis and began to construct a narrative around it. That narrative exploded, pages filling with great rapidity as the dreams that had formed the beginning and end of the book raced to meet each other.

Soon enough, Mariam Shadid came calling and simply refused to leave. Great, so now I've got a Lebanese journalist with frizzy hair and a taste for combat trousers and a click-hungry Middle Eastern scandal/gossip website. The Edgware Road poked its damn oud, shisha and cardamom coffee-scented nose in. The pull continued: Robyn's past was drawn inexorably to Zahlé with its restaurants alongside the rushing little torrent of the Berdawni River and its tiled rooftops scattered across the rolling Beqaa. And then, if that wasn't all bad enough, the Château Ksara came calling with its beguiling wiles and wines.

Mary was chatting with Félicie at reception when the Englishman stalked in, an overgrown beanpole of a man, grey-haired with an aristocratic English nose and points of piercing blue under bushy brows. He looked dry and papery, but powerful. The Lebanese have a nose for power, she surmised. Some are attracted to it, seek it; moths to a candle. Others flee it, fearing the trouble and disruption it brings to our precarious lives. She sighed.

‘I would like to speak with Monsieur Delormes as a matter of urgency, please.’ He announced to Félicie who was, and this was her way if you but knew her, unimpressed. She flicked her hair back and glanced over at Mary with a hint of a roll to her eyes.

‘Would you? Who will I say is calling?’

‘Lawrence Hamilton. It is in regard to his new patient.’

Mary tried not to betray her interest. ‘I can take him there.’ She tried to mask her quickening with a shrug. ‘If you like.’

And quite where Sister Mary, the fag-smoking Lebanese nun, came from I could not even begin to tell you, even if you put the thumb screws on.

There's not much Lebanon in there, to be honest, but there's a scattering. Enough to let you know that the Middle East ain't giving me up that easily. Which, oddly enough, I find something of a comfort...

Book Research Is SUCH a Drag...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There comes a time when some form of reality has to intrude into writing novels, usually when you feel someone with access to the Internet is going to bother to work out if a fifty metre luxury yacht with such and such engines would take three days to go from Northern Spain to Malta, whether turning left from the main Dead Sea to Amman highway would take you to Bethany now there's a dual carriageway in place and you'd actually have to take a U-turn or indeed if you can actually buy terminal cancer drug Roxanol over the counter from a Lebanese pharmacy.

Researching Olives - A Violent Romance took huge dedication and involved drinking Martinis in the Four Seasons Amman, sploshing about smoking Cohibas in the Dead Sea and necking red wine in conservatories overlooking the rain-swept streets of an Amman winter. I had to eat sunny Mezzes overlooking the Golan Heights and wander around the warm spring streets of Madaba before lunching on pan-fried potato, eggs and Mediterranean herbs washed down with icy cold beers. It was hard, hard, hard people.

Still reeling from the exertions and huge personal distress I had to invest in Olives, researching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was breathtakingly difficult. Walking the city's streets with a variety of highly attractive and personable companions, pottering around the Mouawad museum and investing many selfless hours in exploring the labyrinthine bars of Gemmayze, Monot and Hamra were nothing to the long, hard hours of toil drinking in Raouché, wandering the sun-dappled corniche sipping little cups of piping hot espresso from Uncle Deek's and, of course, eating a huge amount of stuff in the name of veracity.

You'll begin to appreciate I have Suffered For My Art. And if that weren't enough, writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy took me into the mountains above Beirut for long AlMaza-laced lunches sipping sweet chai nana as my companions sat around puffing shisha in the balmy late afternoon, bees and cicadas competing to provide the soundtrack to our panoramic view of the blue city far below - let alone forays into Aleppo's tragically destroyed C14th Ottoman souk. The sweet days foraging around Tallinn and nights chasing hot plates of rich stock with bobbing islets of pelmeni down with iced vodka were agony, I can assure you. Agony.

So you'll understand the sacrifices I'm about to make in Belfast's pubs and its finest hotel, the endless journeys across Ireland's green sward to possibly the best restaurant in the world and other terrible hardships I'm currently putting into A Simple Irish Farmer. Interviewing an IRA man who did 15 years of a 27-year sentence in Long Kesh, part of the game plan, is probably the nearest thing to real 'work' I'll have ever devoted to researching a book. I'll try not to let the platters and pints distract me. Honest...

Book Post - A Truckle Of 'Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy' Trivia

For no particularly good reason, a handful of things you probably didn't know (or even want to know) about Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. Which is a book I've written. Don't know if I mentioned that before or not...

The wooden Estonian orthodox church is real
Dennis Wye meets Jaan Kallas outside a wooden church with an ageing congregation. It's real, down near the port in Tallinn (just across the road, in fact, from the Museum Of Soviet Uselessness) and rather beautiful. It's one of few surviving churches in Tallinn - Estonia seems quite proud of being the most secular country in Europe and most churches have been deconsecrated and are being used as concert halls or Irish pubs. Hence the ageing congregation. The music in these churches, by the way, is beautiful and forms a connection to the Syrian Urfalee church.

So's the ice road
And you genuinely are told not to wear a seat belt and to travel within the minimum and maximum speed limit for fear of creating resonance and cracking the ice.

Marwan Nimr is back
He was inspired by a box of fruit. There's a company that airfreights fruit out of Lebanon called 'Marwan' and its logo is a little dakota-like aeroplane whizzing through the air. And so Marwan Nimr was born. He makes a cameo in Shemlan - having survived Beirut - and he's not best pleased with our Gerald.

Talking of cameos...
Lamiable extra brut champagne makes a brief appearance, following its excellent debut in Beirut. It's actually hard to make great extra brut champagne (with little or no added sugar, or 'dosage', it's easy to make sour extra brut, hard to make flinty, dry but rounded extra brut) The family that produces this exquisite single grower grand cru champagne appear to have forgiven me for using their delicious product to kill a chap in Beirut. I know they've read it because their UK importer sent them the relevant passage. Snitch.

The Puss In Boots
Marcelle's rather outré establishment in Monot, Le Chat Botté, is actually named after a Belgian hotel I stayed in as a kid. It just seemed like a good name and I've always liked that Marcelle insists on using its French name rather than the English version. How very Lebanese, darling!

Lance Browning
The nature of Lance Browning's fate and the fact he works for a certain bank are by no means intended to be some sort of revenge on my bank and certainly not written with ferocious relish. I can state that categorically.

The baddies are really bad...
The Ühiskassa, the umbrella organisation of the Estonian mafia is real, although apparently less active these days than in its heyday before Estonia's accession to the European Union.

The goodies are hardly better - and no, the whole CIA scheme in the book is by no means far fetched
In fact, the precise scheme they're up to in Shemlan is documented as having been seriously evaluated as an operation by the CIA. There are many recorded instances of US intelligence having become involved in the international arms and drugs trades, including the ill-fated Iran contra scandal, as well as money laundering drug related funds. So now you know...

You can buy the book here. 

There's also more stuff about the book and the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies there, too!

Beirut Off Limits?

(Photo credit: Côte d’Azur)

I wonder if Gulf News gave Beirut's Phoenicia Hotel the option of dropping its quarter page colour ad in today's edition, given the paper carries the news of  the UAE Foreign Ministry's clear warning to Emiratis not to travel to Lebanon?

The warning comes as Lebanon struggles to cope with the effects of the Syrian conflict on its border (which makes a change from a Syrian conflict within its borders, which has also been known to happen), with a large and fast-growing refugee problem and myriad economic woes hanging on the conflict's coattails.

It's a pretty bleak warning as the Ministry is making travellers sign a pledge to take responsibility when they travel to Lebanon. A few days ago the Lebanese government asked Gulf governments to drop their travel warnings - intra-regional tourism is an important revenue earner for Lebanon, particularly as we go into the summer and the Gulf's favourite playground comes into its own.

This year, it's going to be a desolate little playground, methinks, filled with the sound of people playing with that brittle, manic gaiety born of desperation.

Even the UK's FCO has joined in with its own travel warnings. Given, as I pointed out (admittedly using the voice of anti-hero Paul Stokes) in Olives - A Violent Romance, the FCO is usually sensible...

"Scanning email got me a travel warning from the Yanks for Jordan: present danger despite the peace deal, terrorist threats against US and other allied nationals, extreme caution, yadayada. Great. Looking up the Foreign Office resulted in, as usual, the suggestion that Brits might like to wear a hat if walking through Gaza at midday as the sun can be tiresome."

...its warnings against travel in the Bekaa, Saida, South of the Litani and anywhere close to the Syrian border are slightly more nuanced than the Gulf's blanket warnings, but are all the more concerning for all that.

Given the Lebanese embassy to the UK (nice website for fans of the 1990s school of web design, BTW) advises travellers to "Leave a copy of your trip itinerary with a friend or relative at home and maintain regular contact with family and friends while in Lebanon." You'd perhaps begin to sense a pattern. Increasing lawlessness, sectarian violence and the re-emergence of kidnapping as a pastime have all contributed to a general feeling that perhaps the place is a tad less secure than it was, say, this time last year.

The Israelis have, of course, been lending a helping hand by conducting low-level bombing runs over Beirut, an old but much beloved pastime of theirs, breaking the sound barrier above the city and smashing much glass in the process.

Of course, 'the West' or 'the allies' - or whatever epithet the people tacitly supporting the American bid to engineer regime change in Syria wish to use to describe themselves - aren't really terribly concerned about the growing instability in the pretty little country next door.

Having just finished writing a book set in part in Beirut back in 1978, I feel terribly conscious of the echoes coming to us from a terrible age ago. And yet I can't bear to lose all hope...

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller Reviewed

"Those looking for nonstop action, political intrigue, smatterings of sex and violence and explosions aplenty need look no further."

India Stoughton reviews Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper today. The review is linked here. She doesn't let me away with much, although the review is pretty positive on the whole. Clearly in the 'liked Olives more' camp, Stoughton points out that Beirut is altogether flashier and dashier, which is a fair point.

Anyway, if the review piques your curiosity and makes you want to read a madcap international spy thriller based around a "violent, womanising alcoholic", you'll need this link here.

And if you've read Beirut - An Explosve Thriller but not left your own review on Amazon, you can always go here and air your own views on the book!

Book Post - What Price Reviews?

So I've started Beirut - An Explosive Thriller's review programme. It's reasonably wearying, tracking down active book blogs and websites, flicking through them to see if they're interested in broadly the type of book I'm getting up to, finding out what their review submission guidelines are, then emailing them with pitches, vouchers or attached book files. But, as I've said before, if every review is 10 readers, 100 emails is a thousand pairs of eyes.

Of course, getting heavier hitting media is great, but the competition for those platforms is both fierce and, all too often, restricted for self-published authors.

Which is why the review of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in the Huffington Post had me doing Little Dances Of Happiness when it dropped late last night.

Alexander McNabb outdid himself in his second novel, Beirut, An Explosive Thriller, another adventure-filled story loaded with intrigue, espionage, love, murder, international hoods and plenty of violence.

Okay, that's a good start. This next bit, for me, was the jaw-dropper. The writer is an important Lebanese media figure, former AFP and UPI staffer and was one of the Monday Morning team, so knows what she's on about:

The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.
McNabb seems to have amazing insight into Lebanon's convoluted, sectarian political system.
He masterfully merges people from the Maronite Christian community to confuse readers, with snippets of character descriptions that would fit any or all of the current leaders and former/remaining warlords.
His very expressive narrative has an eerie resemblance to the current status quo with all of Lebanon's dysfunctional problems.

Oh wow. I think she just gave me too much credit but I am most certainly not going to complain. The review goes for a showy finish, a little like a great chef putting a touch of 'English' on the plate as he presents it to the pass:

Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

You can read the full review by Lebanese journalist Magda Abu-Fadil here.

I'm still grinning today. Now, let's face realities. Not all reviews will be like this. Some people out there will hate Beirut, or just go 'meh' (the worst reaction, actually. I'd rather vilification than indifference. At least the former cares about you!). But, as Oscar Wilde tells us, there's only one thing worse than being talked about - not being talked about.

My experience with Olives - A Violent Romance taught me some stuff about how people approach buying books, and it's been something of a surprise. Reviews are important, as is word of mouth recommendation. But it actually takes quite a lot to make someone buy a book. It's not a case of reading a good review and rushing to Amazon to click that all important click. People seem to need quite a few triggers pushed at once. I'd personally rather book buying were a more, well, male process. But it ain't.

So it's going to take more than a few reviews out there. It's going to take a lot and that means a certain degree of relentlessness in the whole business of promotion. Being creative and not just repetitive will help to ease the pain, but to all of you I'd like to say sorry in advance. I'll try not to be a PITA, but you know the best thing you can do to shut me up.

Yup. Buy the book. :)

Beirut, Bombs And Chaos Theory

Rafic Hariri beirut 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I follow the #Beirut hashtag (Tweetdeck's multiple columns are a wonderful thing) and so it was that I had just finished putting up Friday's guest post by Micheline when I caught the first tweets from Achrafieh as people reported a loud explosion, some asking 'What was that?'.

The tweets quickly became more specific, Ashrafiyeh pinpointed and a large blast. People close by talked of the ground moving, while an increasing number of tweets mentioned Sassine Square - a busy area of restaurants and cafés. There was a sense people were holding back from saying it was a bomb, perhaps a gas cylinder. Anything, in fact, but a bomb. Nobody wanted to admit it could be that.

The first twitpics showed a black cloud above the city. Now tweets talked of a bomb, people linked the location to the headquarters of the March 14 movement - the anti-Syrian coalition named for the date of the last such bombing in Beirut - the massive car bomb that killed Rafiq Hariri.

News started flowing thick and fast. A car bomb, very big. People were reporting casualties. The first images from the scene came in, confirming what people had feared - a massive explosion in the busy area. The phone network was down but 3G was still working. Mainstream media reports were mentioned, LBC first to the news. The volume of retweets was going up as mainstream outlets were quoted. Some outlets ran with graphic images of body parts and pools of blood. Reports of deaths from mainstream outlets, one dead said one outlet, two said Reuters, three said another. The UK's Guardian was quoting tweets and showing twitpics on its website, many people cited Reuters' reports. Twitter started carrying calls for blood from the hospitals, queues built of up people volunteering to donate. One Lebanese news channel was reporting it wasn't a car bomb, another that the bomb was actually in a bank.

Joining in the fray, reporting at Twitter speed, mainstream outlets were helping the confusion as they posted information without confirmation and certainly lacking the 'context and analysis' that have been so often cited as a reason for their relevance. The volume of retweets was very high now,  voices from around the region joining what had been a very local conversation.

It was horrible to watch. So many friends in Beirut and here, worried for loved ones who lived or worked in the area and then, as the news sank in, so much bitter disappointment that once again the lives and hopes of ordinary people are to be sacrificed, that the optimism was to be ground out of everyone and replaced by fear. Waking up the next day to the headlines confirmed that yes, this was an assassination, that a key member of the March 14 movement was dead, along with seven others and tens more had been injured.

As so many times before Twitter looked like a Lorenzian water wheel. Initially it efficiently carried eye witness reports, the first news breaking and confirmed by multiple sources and twitpics. With the huge increase in volume comes retweets and second generation shares, the water wheel starts to become more erratic and it becomes harder to filter the information.

What I found interesting was the sight, the first time I have noticed it, of mainstream media sources getting right in there and posting flows of unconfirmed information, reprocessing tweets and posting 'breaking news' with clearly little attempt at filtering the raw data. People quickly quote mainstream sources because we have so long been told we can depend on them, yet the information they were providing was of no different quality to that being shared by eye witnesses. Mainstream media were retweeting witnessesx. I thought it a dangerous precedent.

Beirut - I Got It Covered

Isn't this all exciting? So the final edit of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is back from proofreading and ready to be formatted for CreateSpace, Smashwords and Kindle. I promised Jordanian tweep John Lillywhite a post on platforms for self publishing, so I'll do that later this week as I work on putting the book into its different formats.

In the meantime, here's the cover. It's a wee bit more stark than Olives, isn't it? I'm also now looking at a refresh of the Olives cover to come into line with this style. It ticks my boxes for a cover, which are as follows:

Thumbnails
A book cover these days needs to survive as a thumbnail. While the real estate of publishing in the age of the bookshop was shelves (and spines were vitally important), these days an idle click on catchy icon is what you seek.

Impact
Your book will rarely be presented alone on a screen, so if you can make it thoroughly eye-catching, so much the better.

Mono
On an e-paper Kindle, it'll display in mono, on a Kindle Fire or other tablet, colour. (It has to work in a 1.6 to 1 ratio and be 2500 pixels high for a Kindle cover) So, ideally, it should also work in mono.

Sell the book
This is where I had huge problems: many of the cover treatments I had considered just reinforced the annoying and outdated 'Looks like Beirut' syndrome - choppers over the mountains, revolvers et al just brought 'war' to mind. So I was looking for a cover image that was cleverer than that. I came up with a crude lipstick  bullet, but art director pal Jessy came up with this much more sophisticated image. It's supposed to make you do a mild double-take, to resolve clearly as lipstick and bullet. It's about sexy and violent, which are two words I would definitely pin on Beirut. And Beirut, come to think of it!

Print
It's got to be sensible as a print book cover, too - that means for POD like Createspace, a clear 5mm around all page edges for trim, unless you're 'bleeding' (material that's designed to run over the cover edge), in which case you need a 5mm margin all around.

It also ticks a rather esoteric little Font Nazi box for me - it uses Eric Gill's stunning Perpetua, a true serif 'stonecutter's font' and a true design classic by that most fascinating of typographers and artists.

For those who care about such things, the slug's a 9mm parabellum, which would be nicely compatible with Lynch's weapon of choice, the versatile Walter P99. The lipstick is a... just kidding.

I also tested the cover with quite a few people to guage reactions - I'd love to know yours, so do feel free to drop a comment!

Got Any Lebanese LIRA?

Pound for pound, the Lebanese LIRA is the daftest regulation you'll see in quite a while. It's yet another example of a government trying to define the role of online media as it struggles to manage the potential of unfettered human thought and opinion being freely shared, following hot on the heels of the American near-disasters we know so well as SOPA and PIPA. Once again, it shows legislators are hopelessly out of touch with the dynamic of that shifting, changing thing we know as the internet.

The Lebanese Internet Regulation Act requires owners of websites to register with the government. interestingly, the draft law was proposed at the start of a month where the region's most vibrant and important annual forum for the online and digital industries, the ArabNet Digital Summit, is to take place in Beirut. Debate on the regulation has been postponed for further discussion by the Lebanese cabinet, giving the public time to make its views known (not that anyone will be listening, I conjecture).

LIRA attempts to take the Internet and squeeze it into a square peg shape so it'll fit the Lebanese press law shaped hole. Any owner of a website would have to register with the Information Ministry and websites would be governed by the conditions imposed on journalists, media and broadcasters by the Lebanese press law, the law specifically mentioned in the new regulation is Press Law 382/94, which is the audiovisual media law - a law that, as far as I can make out, merely modifies and re-ratifies the existing 1962 press law. It does seem like a very lazy way of saying "See the press law? It holds true for the Internets as well, people" which, as we all know, simply won't cut it.

That's about it. There's absolutely no attempt to understand the dynamics of the Internet, let alone even defining what a 'website' is - does this law apply to blogs? Only to owned domain-hosted websites? Mobile Apps? Facebook pages? Twitter?

It'll be interesting to see if Lebanese information minister Walid Daouk will speak at ArabNet and, if he does, how he'll be received. There has been a very lively hashtag, #STOPLIRA, pinging around the Twitterverse for a few days now and it's likely quite a few of the 1,500 digital innovators, specialists and leaders who'll be attending will have some helpful hints and tips for the minister. As it is, the ArabNet organisers turn off the Twitter wall for the keynote session in which ministers traditionally like to tell the audience of web-heads how the Internet and youth are important to our future. You wouldn't want to be reading what Twitter says about that kind of thing, you really wouldn't...


A translation of the Arabic language regulation is to be found on Joseph Choufani's blog here.

Nostradamus

Image via Wikipedia"A Facebook group on the conflict between the army and Fatah Al Islam in Lebanon grew a membership of 8,000 in a single week: an average of two new members every minute. The movement of people, of opinions and debate in the new social networks can take place with incredible rapidity. This debate is taking place in a region where public debate, assembly and the mass publication of opinion have traditionally been discouraged. There is a new egalitarianism in the air and it’s a heady scent for many.

A flash survey of 100 Middle East based Facebook users tells us that 93% of them are using broadband connections. And 89% of them have laptop computers. 73% of those Facebook users are between 25 and 35 years of age. The survey took less than 1 hour to conduct.

There is a strong and growing Arab community using broadband technologies to move video content across the Internet, often as part of participation in social networks. The video featuring King Abdulla II of Jordan produced by the One Voice organisation, calling for peace and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, has drawn over 279,000 views in Youtube. Video clips on Lebanon have consistently drawn above 150,000 views, while other topics and productions from the Arab world have consistently driven between 60,000 and 1 million views. Few FTA channels in the region could claim such viewership.

Social networks, the core aspect of the thinking that has been characterised as Web 2.0, are driving the adoption of broadband services in the Middle East. Perhaps interestingly this is not a technical audience of technology early adopters. That the growth in adoption has not been stronger is almost undoubtedly a product of prohibitive pricing strategies among the region’s operators."

That was all written early in 2007. Not bad, huh? I recently had reason to revisit a white paper I'd written together with Spot On bright spark Mai Abaza to support my presentation at the Arab Advisors Convergence Conference in Amman. The above text is part of the argument we were making that regional telcos needed to bring down the price of broadband and stop considering it a service for shifting big files and start looking at it as a way for many people to shift many files quickly.

I recall asking the conference how many had heard of the phrase Web 2.0 or social media and getting a show of eleven hands from an audience of hundreds of operators. That's telcos for you.

Re-reading this reminded me there's a line that connects Nahr El Bared with Occupy Wall Street - those Facebook groups that sprang up contained debate and discourse we had never before seen in the region - passionate and sometimes violently abusive, the adoption rate of these groups and the way they brought people together were stunning to watch. Of course, Mai and I were so busy examining the implications for the broadband market we missed the wider implications that here was a new platform for discourse and organisation that would grow to have the ability to bring down governments.

Those groups showed people in the Middle East, for the first time, that they could not only talk to each other, but broadcast opinion to tens of thousands. It took four years' growth in adoption, but the seeds sown as the Lebanese army blasted the Nahr El Bared camp using helicopters carrying bombs in home-made cradles would lead to something a great deal bigger...

Lebanon: Will The World's Worst Web Get Better?

Gulf News filed a Reuters report today on moves to improve Lebanon's internet access. The headline alone made me laugh, "Lebanon unveils faster, cheaper internet amid political bickering'. That's one of those 'Man found dead in cemetry' headlines. Nothing happens in Lebanon without political bickering.

Lebanon, as those who know it will attest, is a beautiful country of rich soil, glorious countryside and home to a fascinatingly diverse people capable of great cleverness. Beirut can be sophisticated, sexy as hell and enormous fun. It is also home to crushing poverty. And it's all strung together with public infrastructure that sometimes defies belief. From the rocky power grid (power cuts are still commonplace) through to the state of the roads, you're often left wondering quite how so much physical, intellectual and financial wealth sits alongside such tottering examples of failed governance.

Listening to the Ministerial addresses to ArabNet is helpful to reaching an understanding of this, I find.

Lebanon's internet is cited in today's story as being the 'world's worst... the country is always much lower down the rankings than many less developed nations such as Afghanistan or Burkina Faso.' The story goes on to recount, in shocked tones, how a 1 Mbps connection in Lebanon costs Dhs 279!!!

Errr. Hello, GN? That's about what we're paying here in the UAE. A one meg DSL line is Dhs249 a month, 2 Mbps costs a whopping Dhs349 a month and you'll pay Dhs549 for a 16 meg line. If you want the highest available speed from Etisalat, you can get a 30 Mbps 'Al Shamil' line for a mere Dhs699 a month. That's $191.5 to you.

I'm not even going to mention that the Japanese home gets an average 60 Mbps line at a cost of $0.27 per megabit month. Not even thinking about going there. Oh no.

Now the promises being made (because the story is, tragically, predicated on a promise not an actual physical delivery of service) are that Lebanon will get a minimum access speed of 1 Mbps for $16 per month. That would bring it in line with markets like the UK. I genuinely hope the promise (made to Reuters by Lebanese telecoms minister Nicola Sehnawi) comes through - although Ogero might have something to say about that - for two reasons. First and foremost so my friends in Lebanon can stop gnashing their teeth and throwing laptops against the wall in frustration. The selfish second reason is that it would add pressure on the TRA to finally act and bring down the ridulous broadband prices here in the UAE - prices that are undoubtedly a key factor contributing to hindering the adoption, use and the growth of the economic opportunity derived from technology in the UAE today.


(The image at the top of the post is one of my favourite things, BTW. It's the first sketch of 'the Internet')


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This looks like Beirut!

Image via WikipediaI have long been meaning to post this but for one reason or another the timing has never seemed quite propitious. Today, the omens augur well.

I follow an awful lot of blogs around the region. I don't always comment as often as I'd like to (comments are always nice, they let people know there are eyeballs out there), but I'm usually pretty diligent at dipping into Netvibes and seeing who's been updating.

One of my favourite treats is Jad Aoun's blog, Lebanon: Under Rug Swept. A great highlight for me is Jad's one-man campaign to stop people using the cliché 'Looks like Beirut' to describe any given scene of destruction or degradation. Apart from finding the mildly obsessive spirit of Jad's endeavour attractive (he snail mails a 'looks like Beirut' certificate to offenders, as well as outing them on the blog), I'm amused by how, over twenty years after the end of the civil war, people are still using the phrase.

It's something I have encountered in my writing life, an oddly jaundiced Western view of the Middle East in general and certainly of Beirut in particular. I have had agents rejecting the manuscript of my second serious novel, with the rather over-complicated working title of Beirut, based on the fact that people don't want to hear about war zones. (I am currently represented by Robin Wade of Wade and Doherty, who is shopping Beirut around various London publishers) The book's about an international hunt for two missing nuclear warheads and is set in Hamburg, Spain, London, Brussels, Malta, Albania, the Greek Islands and, last but by no means least, that most sexy of Mediterranean cities, Beirut.

I love Beirut. I always look forward to visits with anticipation and excitement. I don't live there, so I don't have to experience the city's everyday frustrations (and they are legion) - I can just drop in and fill myself up with wandering around the streets, enjoying Ottoman architecture and the vibrant street life. I wander around stealing locations for books or snapping vignettes, exploring the fascinating diversity of the place, from the flashy shopfronts of Hamra and Verdun to the labyrinthine ethnicity of Bourj Hammoud. The city sparkles and jostles, stretched out from the long corniche along the splendid Mediterranean up into the mountains, all presided over by the great white-capped bulk of Mount Sassine. At night it lights up, bars and restaurants serving a constant tide of laughing, happy people - Gemayzeh no longer quite the place to be it once was (and Munot before it), while Hamra is becoming busier. It feels good to be there.

So I am always pained to get reactions to Beirut like 'This gritty and realistic novel is set in a war torn city' or 'We don't think the British public would be interested in a conflicted city like Beirut'. The first comment made my blood boil even more because the book is most certainly not based in a war torn city. It's based in a sexy, modern city that fizzles with life. (The fact that much of its infrastructure teeters just to the right side of disaster just adds frisson...) The comment just showed the reader had, at best, skimmed a few bits before spurning me like one would spurn a rabid dog. What made it worse was the reference, twenty years after the fact, to the place being war torn.

In fact, thinking about it, I may well just refer any future perpetrators directly to Jad!

GeekFest Beirut is a Go Go!

Image via Wikipedia

At the last GeekFest Dubai, we forgot to announce that we'd decided to expand the project and go ahead with GeekFest Beirut. The wonderful Alexandra Tohme agreed to UNorganise the event, little knowing what she'd let herself in for (Bwaa haa haa) and now it's all pretty much all sorted.

The first GeekFest Beirut will take place on Friday the 5th February 2010 and will be held at uber-funky Beiruti hangout, Art Lounge, which is close to the Forum de Beyrouth. A location map can be found here, while other details about Art Lounge can be found here (including sexy pics of its uber-funkiness).

Saadia and I are planning to be there and a number of other Dubai Geeky types have expressed an interesting in pitching up if possible. It's going to be an absolute blast, without a doubt.

You can follow @GeekFestBeirut on Twitter or you can schlep along to the obligatory FaceBook fan page if you like, where we've started to post some silly stuff and will surely post some more.

Alternatively, if you have questions or want to throw money at us, you can email Alexandra, Saadia or myself - we're all listed on the GeekFestBeirut Twitter page (because it's a graphic and the spambots can't see graphics!).

Just a reminder - GeekFest is a not for profit thingy, we don't do sponsorships or corporate stuff and we remain resolutely, as much as is practically possible, UNorganised!

Arabic

In the early days of this silly little blog, I put up a post that was essentially a crib from an experiment in Wiki creation that I was playing around with. ‘Ten Word Arabic’ was picked up by GN and a couple of big American blogs and has consequently turned out to be one of the most popular things I’ve written here in the past year. I’ve long meant to get around to doing a ‘proper’ singular version that doesn’t link out to the Wiki, which can be awfully annoying, and so here it is.

Some people think I’ve wasted 20 years in the Arab World, but I can prove ‘em all wrong. The following is the synthesis of everything insightful and useful I have learned about the Arabic language. Well, almost everything.

Arabic is not an easy language for speakers of the Romance languages. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. Worse, pretty much everyone speaks English and people are often more keen to use their English than listen to you mangling their language.

The following ten words will allow you to get by, have meaningful sounding conversations and serve you well in any number of situations and scrapes. The investment required to get from this to speaking proper Arabic is so great, and the commensurate rewards so small, that you’ll probably never progress beyond Ten Word Arabic.

1) UGH

Ugh is the most important word in the Arab World. It's also pretty useful further east as well, although I have only personally tried it in Sri Lanka and not the subcontinent.

Ugh is used in Arabic to denote agreement, denial, affirmation, condescension, surprise, pain, acrimony, patrimony and, for advanced users, pleasure at a serendipitous encounter (Eu'gh!).

Note also its close cousin, the Lebanese expression of disgust, surprise, resignation, irritation and wonderment: 'Euft'.

TE Lawrence (Thomas Edward 'Ned' Chapman, AKA TE Lawrence, AKA TE Shaw. He's always fascinated me, has 'little Lawrence'.) once entered the town of Deraa disguised as a Circassian and using only the word 'Ugh' to get by. He was captured and comprehensively buggered, so this just shows the importance of properly practicing 'Ugh'. It is also argued that it shows how daft it is to use an Arabic 'Ugh' when talking to Turks.

2) SHOU

Lebanese/Palestinian (or Lebistinian if you prefer) slang for 'shinoo' which translates as 'what?'. Jordanian slang version is 'Aish'. In Egyptian it's 'Eida'. You start to see why the Arab world is quite as much fun as it is, no?

Belongs with 'hada' which isn't a component of Ten Word Arabic, but which is useful nonetheless and means 'that'.

So shou hada means 'what's that?'

Shou also is used to denote general query, as in 'what's happening, guys?' ('Shou?') or 'What's the stock market looking like this morning?' ('Shou?').

Shou can also be used in place of any query, from 'Why are you in pain?' to 'Where are you going?'

Shou can also be used to comprehensively diss someone. It's a difficult technique that's tied in closely to body language, which is used a lot in the Arab world, but basically you say the 'shou' in a totally dismissive way, turning the head to the left and flicking it in a sideways and downwards direction. This means 'what a heap of shit'.

The only way to respond to this is by using the same gestures but saying 'shou shou'. That outshous the shou. Or, in Arabic, that'll shou 'em.

3) YANI

One of a number of highly important key phrases in Levantine, particularly Lebanese Arabic (So not a Greek chillout musician, that's Yanni).

Yani means 'kind of' and is used frequently, also serving as a replacement for 'somehow', 'umm' and a million other syntactical spacers... It helps to pronounce the 'a' from the back of the throat, because in Arabic it's an 'ain', so written ya3ni in 'MSN Arabic'.

For instance: 'So I say to him, yani, what kind of car is that heap of shit? And he's like, yani, really pissed at me.'

Also used as a response to any given question, meaning 'Oh, you know...' where the amount of aaa in the yani is used to denote a studied indifference.

'Are you still going out with Fadi's sister?'

'Yani'

'She that hot?'

'Yaaaaani'

4) KHALAS

For a two syllable word, Khalas is certainly a complex little critter.

Pronounded khalas, halas, kalas depending on the mood, nationality and context, it means 'enough' but also 'stop' and 'I've had enough of your bullshit, get down to brass tacks or I'll do yer.'

As a term of contempt ('forget it and stop being so utterly stupid'), it can be quite nicely deployed by rolling the 'kh', a sound made at the back of the throat by the bit of the tongue that would be just before the late market if your tongue was the technology adoption lifecycle, and then lengthening the aaaaaaaalaaaaaaaas.

Like much Arabic, the words alone are not enough: it helps to use the hand in a gesture of denial and avert the head. This is also performed in a certain order for maximal impact: hand signal like policeman standing in front of speeding car, say 'Khalas' and avert head. If female, it is best to toss the head.

5) NAAM

Not to be mistaken for neem, which is a type of tree that grows in buddhist temple grounds, 'naam' is Arabic for yes. So is 'aiwa, which does tend to rather complicate things. One thing that is for certain is that 'no' is always 'la'.

Naam = yes

La = no

6) AKID

The importance of the word 'akid' (akeed) in Arabic can not be overstated: it's vital. It means 'for sure' and is the only way to test if someone's serious about a date or a promise or other undertaking.

'You will have the consignment by the 14th, ya habibi.'

'Akid?'

'Inshallah'

This conversation obviously means that you're about to be royally shafted and that the consignment has, in fact, been stolen by Papuan pirates just south of Aceh and the shipping agent knows this but isn't telling you.

7) SALAAM

Arabic for 'wotcha', it actually means 'peace'. The more formal 'Salaam Aleykum' is used for a proper greeting, salaam is used to a familiar or generally mumbled to all present when getting into a lift or arriving within a gathering. The response is 'Aleykum al Salaam'.

It's important because by using it you can be polite. So few people bother with these little pleasantries, but a smile and a little politeness don't half go a long way in the Arab World.

'Tara' is 'ma'salaama'

8) FIE

Fie (pronounced 'fee') is another powerfully multipurpose word. It means 'enough' or 'sufficient' or 'plenty' or 'too much' depending on how it's used. The only certainty is its antonym, 'ma fie' which always means 'none'.

I suppose its most accurate translation would be 'a plentiful sufficiency'.

9) MUSHKILA

Mushkila means 'problem' and, given that you spend half your time here flagging up, dealing with or avoiding problems, then it gets used a lot. So you have 'fie mushkila' (a great big problem with grindy, gnarly teeth and warts and things' or the debased assurance 'mafie mushkila' (no problem. This is ALWAYS, and please don't get me wrong here, ALWAYS not the case).

You'll sometimes hear 'mish mushkila' or 'mu mushkila'. These are dialect and both mean 'mafie mushkila' and so should be ignored.

10) INSHALLAH

Broadcaster and lobbyist Isa Khalil Sabbagh tells the story of the American businessman who was closing a deal in the Middle East and was told the contract would be signed tomorrow, 'inshallah'.

'What's God got to do with this?' asked our man, angrily.

Lots, of course. Because, as a consequence of his comment, his deal never got signed.

Inshallah means 'God willing' and is a phrase fundamental in so many ways to Islamic thought. A thing will occur in the future only if it is the will of God. An expression born of piety, it is also used pragmatically as a universal get out clause and avoids an absolute undertaking.

Avoiding an absolute undertaking is seen as a good thing, at least in part because it cuts down the likelihood that you'll have to be offended by being told 'No'. This concept that the answer 'no' is offensive and should be avoided is quite a simple one, but has been known to drive callow Westerners insane.

Incidentally...

You have now mastered Ten Word Arabic and can hold entire conversations without anyone realising that you are in fact not a native of deepest Arabia.

'Salaam'
'Ugh'
'Mushkila?'
'Fie mushkila'
'Yanni, shou?'
'Shou? Shou? Yanni, shou fie.'
'Akid, akid. Mushkila fie.'

All shake heads and tut a lot. All depart.

Amaze your friends! Stun business contacts! Speak Ten Word Arabic!

Ten Word Arabic

Please note I've updated this post and made it easier to read here. Cheers!

Some people think I’ve wasted 20 years in the Arab World, but I can prove ‘em all wrong. The following is the synthesis of everything insightful and useful I have learned about the Arabic language. Well, almost everything.

Arabic is not an easy language for speakers of the Romance languages. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. Worse, pretty much everyone speaks English and people are often more keen to use their English than listen to you mangling their language.

The following ten words will allow you to get by, have meaningful sounding conversations and serve you well in any number of situations and scrapes. The investment required to get from this to speaking proper Arabic is so great, and the commensurate rewards so small, that you’ll probably never progress beyond Ten Word Arabic.

The definitions below link to the Wiki because that’s where I originally put ‘em and I can’t be bothered to move ‘em.

1) Ugh

2) Shou

3) Yani

4) Khalas

5) Naam

6) Akid

7) Salaam

8) Fie

9) Mushkila

10) Inshallah

Amaze your friends! Stun business contacts! Speak Ten Word Arabic!

Father Angelo's Last First Communion

One of the strangest buildings on earth is St Mary's Church in Sharjah. It's a marvellous, miraculous little place, even for those of us that don't really buy into the whole miracle thing. Built by donations from its (mostly unmoneyed) congregation, St Mary's has long been dominated by the figure of its priest, Father Angelo: a huge figure of a man who makes Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo look like a rank amateur.

We went today for friends' daughter Lily's First Communion, an event that would, coincidentally and ironically, be Father Angelo's Last Communion. And, to be honest, that's why I went. I've seen him in action before and it's wonderful. Now he's in his 80s, although you'd be hard put to guess that, he's about to slip away to a home for retired gentlepriests somewhere in Italy.

St Mary's is unique. A Catholic church with a touch of the Eastern tarbrush, it plays host to a strange, globalised religious eclecticism. It feels somehow a little Orthodox, its got a tiny touch of Eastern, Greek lasciviousness. And yet the choir's gospel-tinged American bible-belt singing praise-the-lord Philippino and many of the regulars are pre-Vatican Indian Christians who dress the statues, kiss the hems of their robes and stand touching the picture of Padre Pio or the robed Child of Prague, festooned in Hawaiian style flower garlands, in silent supplication. The Lebanese St. Charbel rubs shoulders with St. George, the dragon-slaying Syrian adopted by the Levant-unfriendly Brits. It's like the United Nations of Christianity in there and, just like they did when they were wearing blue helmets in Lebanon, the Irish stand around looking at the way the other fools are carrying on in wide-eyed wonderment.

And then there's Angelo himself. He's huge, bigger than his physical presence. His accent is impenetrably Italian. The last time we were in this church together was the wedding of our friends Terry and Orla. Fr. Angelo managed to marry 'Elvis' and 'Olga' in an accent so thick that I've been dining off the impersonation ever since. "Jaysuus," Father Angelo would tell us, "Jaysuus he lovva you. Jaysuus he lovva you all. He lovva me anna he lovva you. He looka downatus from heffin and he sayaa I lovva everone!"

This is the stuff.

And yet, at the same time, there's something marvellous about the man; something that makes even the most agnostic of us admire the sheer weight of belief that has shaped this church of two millenia. He believes it; the miracles, the wonder, the eucharist and the sacrament. He lives it, breathes it and is it. His passing will, somehow, make this little church in the heart of Arabia a smaller place: another last note in a sad, small threnody.