Death Stalks My Keyboard

Image by tanakawho via FlickrTo mark the start of the Dubai Summer Surprises Shopping Festival and the re-appearance of the infinite-eyed yellow tide of evil, I'm putting up a traffic-destroying writing post today.

Death Stalks My Keyboard

I was at a workshoppy thing with a client a while back, run by a very nice but terribly keen American person. I don't think anyone can properly understand wacky sects until they watch someone corporate giving it their all - the reinforcement, the expectation of people to 'become one' with the goal of being a team sometimes scares me in a mild sort of way. Anyway, the workshop was to start with everyone introducing themselves, their organisation and something that not everybody knew about them.

There were English people present. Worse, there were Jordanians there. The introduction was met with wide-eyed horror and then people started, cajoled and jollied along, to mumble their introductions. Joe Doe was from this agency and he was a karaoke singer, Jenny Penny from that agency had a secret love of Brussels sprouts.

The beam swept up to me. 'Hi, I'm Alexander McNabb and I'm from Spot On. Last week I killed a girl."

I Kill Her

The silence was rather marvellous. Our visitors smiled nervously; two watery, uncertain grins. I went on to explain and their relief was palpable, which was something of a surprise, I have to say. I mean, do murderers really confess all to visiting workshop leaders? Perhaps they do...

I had told the truth, in a way - the girl I had killed was very close indeed to my heart and hers was the first death that actually affected me. I was amazed at the strength of my reaction the decision to end the life I had essentially given her in my head. I couldn't listen to Secret Garden's ethereal Sleepsong for weeks afterwards, a song that was as connected to her death as George Winston's February Sea was to her life. It was all the more surprising as I had carried out a vast number of deaths in my first attempt to write a book, a funny book called Space. This was at least partly because one of the characters derived sexual satisfaction from the act of killing - the neat bit being that she worked for the CIA. (She also wore a black leather catsuit. That was just my female side coming through)

Olives, my first serious novel, had - as one writer friend put it - a pretty high headcount. But Beirut starts with a death, one which has invariably provoked very strong reactions indeed from test readers who had previously read Olives. It's a brutal death, a cold death - and from its terminal simplicity the whole book flows out into its different directions, plots and possibilities. And yes, the baldy bloke with the scythe and sartorial challenges is never far away.

The book I'm working on right now is totally hinged on death's inevitability. The one thing you know from the first word is the main protagonist the book is named after is going to die very soon .

Death does, indeed, stalk my keyboard. I'm not sure why, because I don't consider myself a morbid person at all. Mind you, as I pointed out in a (similar, in fact) guest post over at Phillipa Fioretti's blog, if I wasn't getting this stuff out of my system this way, who knows what I'd be getting up to?

Anyway, sorry Naeema. But I did enjoy the reaction! :)

Shemlan

I have a particular fascination for the little village of Shemlan at the moment. It nestles in the mountains high above Beirut, uphill from Aley and  Bchamoun, home to a few shops, a mildly famous restaurant and an orphanage.

Looking out over Beirut from Shemlan never fails to take my breath away. The city is spread out like a glimmering carpet below, the airport runways sitting by the infinite blue Mediterranean.

This was the shortest trip I have ever taken to Beirut in the 14-odd years I have been travelling here, literally 24 hours. My plan was simple enough, have lunch in Shemlan, go to GeekFest Beirut and nip back home. Thanks to Air Arabia and a three hour flight, this is a quite achievable and even fun. That three hour flight gets you into Beirut just in time to check in then spend the afternoon exploring or sitting around and reading newspapers over an Al Maza or whatever else floats your boat. I went up to Shemlan in the company of the delightful Micheline Hazou, patroness of genteel blog MichCafé  chatting about life during the civil war, Monday Morning and other stuff as our battered Mercedes taxi groaned up the hilly road.

We had lunch at Al Sakhra, the Cliffhouse restaurant in Shemlan. It's a fairly traditional Lebanese affair and we sat by the window popping pistachios and drinking Al Mazas as we looked out over Beirut below, dishes appearing from the kitchen with satisfying regularity to populate the table between us. The restaurant itself is fairly large, a favourite meeting place for couples being 'discreet', Micheline tells me with a hint of a glint, but also a popular place at weekends. There's a noisy party near us, filling one of the long tables set out in the conservatory, celebrating one of life's events with cloudy glasses of arrak.

The orphanage in Shemlan is the reason for my fascination with the village and the countryside around it, for it was here that the British government-run MECAS, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, was located until the civil war forced its closure in 1978. MECAS reported through the British Embassy in Beirut. It was from here the infamous George Blake was taken to London to be arrested on his arrival, finally unmasked as a Russian double agent, in 1961. The Lebanese, unsurprisingly, refer to it as the British Spy School.

GeekFest Dubai? Pat Yourselves on the Back!

If you haven't seen this already, do please watch it. Readers of this blog (both of you) and attendees to GeekFest will likely remember the name Ola Abu Jarmous. Ola, a little Palestinian girl with a life-threatening brain tumour was sent to Italy for the complex and delicate procedure that was her only hope of survival. The operation and travel costs exceeded $18,000 and the Palestine Children's Relief Fund had run of money. Thanks to Sara Refai's Ussa Nabulsiyeh blog, word got out and it became something of a GeekFest cause - people donated to the PCRF website (some people didn't want to use PayPal for an Arab cause and donated through friends), we raised funds by auctioning one of Gerald Donovan's mad GigaPixel prints and we emptied the GeekFest coffers (a not for profit event, GeekFest Dubai is cashflow positive!) to help Ola.

Sara's own GeekTalk, filmed from Nablus, is linked here.

Enough. Just watch the video below of veteran GeekTalker Steve Sosebee, head of the PCRF, talking at TEDx Ramallah. Sara was a big fat teary mess, apparently! :)



It's great that we all came together to do something small, right and wonderful. Don't forget, GeekaFest Dubai (one for the girls) is happening at the NEW Shelter on the 14th July 2011.

PS: Been trying to post this all day. The cloud has not been well at all.

PPS: And what of GeekFest Beirut? Damn but it was fine. Post tomorrow...

Gamers Take Over GeekFest Beirut

This edition of GeekFest Beirut is being put together by Lebanese technology, gadget and gamer website GIGAlb. There have been rumours that the site, perhaps rather in the way 4Chan is home to Anonymous, is associated with shadowy and feared online humour activists the Maniachis,  but nobody was available for comment at the time of posting.

The result is that GeekFest Beirut is gametabulous - tomorrow, the 17th June, Beirut Art Center will be transformed into a huge online gaming platform, including avant premier access to newly released games by Sony & Nintendo, a Mobile Gaming platform sponsored by NOKIA and a small pavilion of vintage games for hardcore geeks sponsored by Multimedia Megastore (M2).

You can register to play games at this here link here.

The vintage games pavillion is where you'll find me, drooling geriatrically and playing Galaxians, Asteroids and any other old skool stuff that's flying around.

This will be the largest GameFest in GeekFest history, with geeks and gamers competing to win prizes from Nokia, Crepaway and GoNabit!

GeekFest Beirut will be catered by Crepaway and 961 Beer and runs from 7.30pm 'till late. There's a map to it here if you're unsure where you're going and, of course, you can follow @GeekFestBeirut on Twitter or find it on Facebook!

As always, the stunning iconography for GeekFest Beirut is the doing of the uber-talented Naeema Zarif.

Who could want for more?

The Gay Girl Media Conundrum

The Gay Girl in Damascus affair has been a fascinating, if slightly irritating, sideshow to the appalling events in Syria as the country's people continue to struggle to push for change and reform in the face of brutal repression.

It's been extensively reported on elsewhere, but I am particularly interested in the reactions from 'traditional media' who appear to be taking an increasingly solid stance with reference to social media and the way it impacts/relates to the role of 'traditional' journalism. Gulf News wags its finger in an editorial today, "Beware of social media's dark side", in which it calls for 'this episode' to be 'a lesson for all of us'. Quite what the lesson is, GN doesn't make clear. I get the feeling that the writer really wanted to say 'don't trust social media because it can all be a pack of lies and that's why you need us, journalists, to filter this stuff for you' but couldn't really, because of course the biggest dupes of all have been the journalists who ran the story, parroted it and unquestioningly (especially in the Middle East's media, who should surely have known better) ran it from the newswires.

The story was broken, the blog conclusively proven to be a hoax, by online activist Ali Abunimah, who posted his reservations on his 'Electronic Intifada' blog (linked here), other bloggers (such as Liz Henry) were expressing doubts - and, to be fair, NPR's Andy Carvin, as well as the New York Times were onto the story and chasing down the increasingly ethereal 'Amina' - but most mainstream media (and, it should be noted, ALL Middle East media) were still just parroting the same stuff, derived from the blog itself, unthinkingly.

The fact is a number of people, connected online, contributed to reality checking and then publicly outing the fraud. They used their online experience, online resources and tools. They did not use the tools of 'traditional' journalism and arguably did not necessarily adhere to the standards of traditional journalism.

Commenter Charles on Liz Henry's BookManiac blog rather nails it, BTW: "One thing that struck me about the whole sordid affair was the narcissit, paternalist nature of it. Here is a white heterosexual man who, instead of supporting the efforts of real GLTB Middle-Easterners, decided instead to steal the spotlight from them and claim their voice. I guess he figured his little brown brothers and sisters just couldn’t do it themselves, so he appointed himself their spokesperson. That is rather disgusting."

Twitter Outrage Shock Horror

Dubai's tittle-tattle-tastic tabloid treat 7Days today jumps the shark and manages to be the first paper in the UAE to completely stand up a story on Twitter. 'Beach snaps land Terrys in hot water' is the stuff of tabloid dreams and is based on England and Chelsea captain John Terry, on holiday in Abu Dhabi with his wife Toni, 'frolicking' in their hotel swimming pool and beach. The 7Days story is based on a number of mildly, in my opinion, invasive snaps run by the Daily Mail (the original snaps are linked here so you can throw a brick through the screen or write to your MP or whatever it is you want to do, but I do warn you that they contain a woman wearing a skimpy bikini so clicking on the link does rather imply that you wish to see this kind of thing)  last weekend.

7Days' story is classic tabloid stuff: "The Twittersphere has been set alight by a diatribe of disgust at photos..." it starts out - rich stuff, indeed! You'd have thought it trended or something, but of course setting the Twittersphere alight (the Twittersphere? It sounds like someone's dad trying to be cool and 'rad' with the kids. I hate the neologism as much as I hated Blogosphere) isn't really about empirical evidence of a tide of opinion so much as being able to pick out a few ranty tweets and fling them at a page of type. Which is, of course, what 7Days has done: the negative comments have been plucked from an almost negligible trickle of reaction to the Mail story on the 9th June, you can see how the Twittersphere can be 'set alight' by a handful of tweets by clicking this here link to a Twitter search of "John Terry" Abu Dhabi.

Of course, the 9th June Tweet from 7Days' own Twitter feed, @7DaysUAE  "England and Chelsea footballer John Terry spotted in Abu Dhabi: http://goo.gl/Abubm" now takes us to an empty page. Can't be seen to be stoking too much of that shock and outrage, can we chaps?

So what about the 'diatribe of disgust'? Take a look at the Twitter search above - there's very little beyond the tweets that have been selected by 7Days. A couple of people wonder how genuine Terry is, a few more discuss Toni's skimpy bikini. One person said, incorrectly, that the Terrys behaviour would have been treated more harshly in Dubai and one lady called Toni 'a WAG doormat'.

Two things we can learn from this:

One, a newspaper will stand up a half page story echoing a tide of righteous public disgust on an infinitesimal sample of Tweets. This distortion of expressed opinion coming, let us not forget, from those who purport to give us 'context and analysis' and help us poor rubes to understand what's going on by filtering the facts for our convenient consumption.

Two, if you're a-tweetin', there's nothing to stop a newspaper using your tweets in a story. You have spoken and done so in public and on the record. And like anyone who goes on the record, your opinion can be used in any way whatsoever, including out of context or as part of a story that distorts your intention. That's what makes going on the record so potentially dangerous.

By the way, I do not doubt most people here find the images at best vaguely incongruous and at worst offensive, but let us not forget that these people were in a private hotel beach, where a different standard of dress and yes, to an extent, behaviour has long been accepted compared that expected in public places, including public beaches, in the (highly tolerant) UAE. And they didn't choose to make these images public.

(I have to record the POV of one cynical pal who thinks actually they did choose to make these images public in a bid to court publicity. Who knows?)

GeekFest Amman

GeekFest Amman takes place tomorrow at funky outdoor venue Q-Yard in Shmeisani. It's being put together by those nice people at Art Medium, specifically the UNorganisers are art geek Sarah Abualia and uber-blogger Roba Al-Assi. They've done a stunning job, too - as well as the talks there are a number of stations where various strange, interesting or just silly things will be happening. Because of Sara's involvement in art, there's a real arty feel to the event as far as I can see and I do think that's very cool (and something we can perhaps bring to GeekFest Dubai as a stronger element!)

The Social Map Project: 
An interactive installation where participants will physically create a tangible social map of their virtual connections by connecting their twitter handle name tag to their acquaintances online. Sign up for it here!

Twit-tionry 
A new spin on the classic game pictionary where a player's drawing on a computer will be projected on a screen using a Wacom tablet while participants tweet their guesses using a specific hashtag. The screen would be split into two sections, a section for the live twitterfeed of that hashtag and a section of the actual drawing.

Augmented reality interaction using Kinect
This will be interesting as all we manage to do with Kinects at GeekFest Dubai is behave like idiots.

Arduino workshopNow this is seriously geeky! Arduino is an open source sensor and controller array and programming language that lets people create  devices that use sensory input to control interactions and responses. Does that make sense? Here's the Arduino website!

GameFest
A mix of X-Box and Jordanian card-playing website Jawaker.

TFest!
There'll be a t-shirt making station where geeks can scribble on their own free t-shirt, provided by Mlabbas.

LegoFest
Yes, there's going to be a Lego station!


GeekFitti
As well as a jokes wall for everyone to make a mess on, there'll be live graffiti artists scrawling away through the evening!

GeekTalks
Rami Daher, an urban designer and architect who'll discuss the relationship between urban design, systems and spaces, and Jo Blin an artist who will be talking about environmental activism with art. Software engineer Fouad Mardini will discuss Artificial Intelligence and the philosophy of the mind and Roba Al-Assi will do an twitter engaging talk on that great question #IsThisArt?

As well as all that, there's pizza, cupcakes and knafeh along with drinks. Who could want for more? I'm not able to make it this time around and I'm insanely jealous. If you're in/going to be in Amman, you can follow @GeekFestJo or look 'em up on Facebook right here. Have fun, guys!

PS: If you are in Amman and planning to go along, apparently the 7th Circle - Khalda will be closed, so do plan an alternative route!

Brave New World

I was talking on Dubai Eye Radio's Business Breakfast the other week about the wonderful story of Sonia Land and Random House.

Literary agent Sonia Land (of highly respected agency Shiel Land Associates) signed up prolific author Catherine Cookson to publish her backlist online under a new imprint, Peach Publishing. Over a hundred Cookson titles have consequently appeared on Amazon's Kindle Store. The covers alone are a talking point and have prompted more than one comment along the lines of 'If that's your idea of cover art, I hope you're better at the rest of the publishing skillset."

The teensy weensy fly in the Cookson ointment is that she already has a publisher, Random House subsidiary Transworld. Land offered a higher royalty rate, according to The Bookseller. In a Hollywood-style gambit, the news was followed hard by Random House signing top author Tom Sharpe to publish his backlist on Kindle with them, cutting out his literary agent of some thirty years' standing (see where this is going yet?), Sonia Land. At least the Tom Sharpe covers are pukkah.

Heavy hitter agent Ed Victor has followed suit and others have confirmed they are looking at launching their own imprints. You'd be forgiven for surmising that, faced with an existential threat, publishing is tearing itself apart.

The issue of royalty rates for e-books has been an increasing rubbing point between agents and publishers - Amazon takes 30% of a Kindle book, leaving a whopping 70% for the publisher (or, if you're self-pubbed, author). Agents are arguing that given the physical costs of print, distribution and returns are now out of the equation, a royalty rate of 50% of the cover price for the author is equitable. Publishers are currently paying 20-25%.

Agents get, generally, 15% of their author's income from books. So an e-book with a $10 cover price (incredibly expensive, BTW, in e-book terms) would currently give Amazon $3, the publisher $4.50, the author $2.125 and the agent $0.375.

The growing pressure many authors feel in favour of self-publishing, by the way, is only increased by the realisation that selling your book at a much more realistic $2.99 would net you, the self-published author, $2.09 - nearly as much money as going through a publisher and an agent and selling at $10. There's increasing traction around that $2.99 price point - and if your book sold at that price through a publisher/agent, you as the author would get a lowly $0.635.

Meanwhile, the most successful indie author of all time, million-selling Amanda Hocking, has signed a $2 million deal with a traditional publisher through an agent, presumably retaining her digital rights. Oh, to have the clout to do that!

The question now becomes, 'How much value do a publisher and an agent give me here? What are their roles in the e-book world?' This question is also being asked a lot by publishers and agents. Any answers on a postcard, please!

As Bad As It Gets

It can't get much worse than this. The latest development in the UAE's petrol shortage saga is that the Executive Council of Sharjah, one of the seven Emirates that makes up the UAE, has demanded an end to the petrol shortages and a full explanation of what's behind them by the end of today from Enoc/Eppco.

It's a clear enough sign that the Executive Council doesn't buy the pump upgrade story, either. But then, did anyone?

How bad can it get for a company? When do you have to recognise that mendacity and silence won't wash any more - that you actually owe a duty to people? When a government is forced to call you to task publicly and demand answers from you? I guess that's about as bad as it gets.

As Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath, tells us: "Worse? How could it be worse?"

Of Genies And Bottles

Apart from a vague and popularly considered mendacious statement about pump upgrades, the petrol station operators responsible for the fuel shortages in the UAE have remained silent. Both Gulf News and The National report today with sidenotes to the effect that no spokesperson could be reached from Enoc/Eppco or Emarat. And, in fact, The National notes that officials from Jebel Ali Port were also unavailable or not commenting.

Gulf News today played catch-up with The National, which sent reporters to Enoc/Eppco petrol stations to determine that no pump upgrade work was going on, as it reported yesterday. GN today files on 'sceptical motorists' who point out, as I have indeed found, that stations 'closed for upgrading' miraculously open after the supply truck has swung by. The National has, once again, done a sterling job.

The lack of transparency is so stunning, it's amusing. This is, indeed, humour of the incongruous. And, of course, by failing to tackle the very proper concern of the general public, the operators are making it all a great deal worse. The papers are rubbishing the statements and talking to petrol pump attendants, motorists, analysts - in fact, anyone who'll talk to them. The result is a rising tide of reporting and growing public alarm which is leading to panic buying. This, of course, is putting more pressure on those stations that do have fuel and now even Adnoc stations are running dry despite the fact that they don't actually have an underlying supply problem.

So by staying silent, the operators are creating an ever-larger rod for their own backs. Tell people what the problem is, how you're solving it and how long it'll take. It's not actually very difficult.

What's the solution? Well, even the most hide-bound of morons would have worked out by now that the genie is out of the bottle. Social media, that Internetty thing, allows people to share opinions and views - so we all know what the papers are trying to prove - the stations aren't closing for upgrades. They haven't got any fuel to sell us because deliveries aren't coming through. There is a very real and basic problem here and it's not logistics or maintenance. As Gulf News quotes Kate Dourian, Middle East editor at Platts:

"Emarat, like the other two main gasoline suppliers, Enoc and Eppco, has for years been operating at a loss because it buys product at international prices and sells at government-regulated prices below market value."

This GN story goes into some depth regarding the subsidies issue.

That's not an 'issue at Jebel Ali' or a 'pump upgrade'. That's a very real systemic problem that could well have medium to long term effects - the issue has been bubbling under for months, with incidents of shortages going back to last year. So this is hardly a new situation - there has been plenty of time to plan a better, smarter communications strategy than dumb silence and unsustainable assertions.

The irony is, of course, that if irate consumers withdraw their custom, these companies will breathe a sigh of relief! So why not just clam up and wait for it to all blow over? Once supplies are restarted, people will forget all about it and life will go back to normal. They're not answerable to any consumer association or ombudsman, so a strategy of silence won't do them any harm, right?

Wrong. It's yet more bad publicity for the country as a whole (the oil producer that ran out of fuel - wait for the internationals to pick that one up) driven by old-fashioned contempt for the media and public that has resulted in considerable concern and inconvenience for a large chunk of the population.

We can all see the genie. Perhaps it's time for the operators to tell us what they're planning to do about it. When they do, they can console themselves with this: there's no shame in telling the truth.