Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: Apologies For The Inconvenience

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have finished writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. This is a good thing. The book really sort of finished itself, taking over from me and racing its way to a cataclysmic, bonkers finish that had me breathless writing it, let alone what it's going to be like reading it.

I'm quite pleased. Now it's getting a hard edit and then it'll go off to 1) beta readers to pull its ears and see if they can make it cry 2) a couple of subject matter experts, including a former student at MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies in Shemlan (I takes me research serious, like, I does) and last but by no means least 3) Agent Robin to see if he feels he can shop this one around.

The book is partly set in MECAS, which shut down in 1978 due to the increasingly dangerous environment that was Lebanon At War. MECAS has long fascinated me - it was from here George Blake was taken to be arrested for being a Soviet double agent. The Lebanese call it 'the British Spy School' with some justification. Few people know this little village above Beirut has such a murky past, but it's an absolute gift to someone like me. I have not hesitated to accept it!

It's a lot darker, IMHO, than Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and I would  argue it has a little more of the feel of Olives - A Violent Romance to it. But then I thought Space was funny and my first Amazon review (as usual, Big Dave) emphatically disagreed. So what would I know?

It's not just about Shemlan, of course. There are little bits set in Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Riyadh and a lot in Beirut. There's a smattering in Aleppo and a good hunk in Tallinn and the island of Hiuumaa in Estonia. It's amazing what you can get up to with a little under 100,000 words to play with!

Anyway, as a consequence I have not blogged at all this week and so owe you an apology if you were expecting a slice of the usual inanity, half-thought and uninformed comment.

Thumb. The Price Of 'Flow'.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes writing just hits a brick wall. That's been the case with Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, which stalled at 50k words way back when I decided to self publish Olives - A Violent Romance. Although a few pages were added here and there (and notes made on bits that popped up now and then), the finishing, editing and promoting of the first two books has really taken much of my 'writing time' up. I have, incidentally, spent a great deal less time and effort promoting Beirut - A Violent Romance, and it doesn't half show.

So re-reading and editing the MS of Shemlan as it existed, then restarting the telling of the story was something of a 'pick yourself up' exercise. But having restarted work, I've found myself flying along at an exhilarating pace as the  story has taken over and demanded itself be told. New angles have opened up, characters have started behaving differently and forced twists in the plot I hadn't envisaged. It's just snapped together like a well-oiled machine, to the point where I polished off something like 20,000 words over the weekend as the tale just appeared in my head and insisted on flowing into words.

I suppose that's 'flow', where you're 'in the zone' and smash away at the keyboard while you still have the fire in you. Shemlan has been moving at a ridiculous pace and has moved into its final phase now.

I had to rest up today, though. I was typing so much, smacking the keyboard exultantly as phrases and dialogue came together to my satisfaction, that I've bruised my thumb.

First world problems, huh?

Blue Lasers. The UAE's Newest Toy.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News reports, bothering to give us remarkably little background, on the arrest of a Yemeni man in Sharjah for selling 'blue lasers'. The report is linked for your scanty erudition here. It was Sharjah CID wot made the nick.

Blue lasers are nasty little things. Thanks to quantum advances in laser technology, you can now buy a hand held 1.5 Watt 450nm laser 'pointer' for under Dhs 1,000. They're freely available on the web with sellers such as this one happy to mail you a device.

Most will be aware of the prevalence of red laser pointers in the UAE's cinemas - and there have been numerous reports of dolts pointing red lasers at planes. Well, blue lasers are the Chuck Norris of hand held laser devices - they can actually burn skin, pop balloons, ignite matches and cut plastic. Needless to say, merely a passing flash of one of these babies directly into an unprotected eye could cause permanent retinal damage. In fact the reflected light from a handheld blue laser can cause retinal damage.

They're every schoolboy's dream.

In a number of applications, they're useful things. They're the technology behind Blu-Ray discs - basically, blue lasers operate at a lower waveband than red or green lasers and so can be more tightly focused, allowing manufacturers to read more data in a smaller space. But that also means they can be used to produce more powerful lasers with lower power requirements - in this case actually dangerous devices with no useful application beyond burning things and hooning around. They're based, in case you were wondering, on gallium arsenide diodes.

It would appear from Sharjah CID's action that hand-held blue laser 'pointers' are being effectively banned in the UAE (although I've seen no announcement to that effect - and Gulf News certainly doesn't bother to clarify this). But I would submit that's no bad thing...

UAE Local Produce Is "Toxic" - Gulf News

(Photo credit: Masako 川o'-')♪)

I'll admit it, I'm confused.

For years now, Gulf News has gone on about how wonderful and safe local produce is. So much assurance has been offered, the cynic might even be inclined to wonder where, given all this smoke, the fire is...

For instance this piece linked right here is pretty typical of the very many examples of the genre, "Locally produced vegetables guarantee against food risks like E. coli".

The deadly E. coli outbreak that rocked world food markets once again confirms the importance and urgency of turning to local vegetables and fruits for consumption, Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority (ADFCA), said in a statement.

Well, that's alright then. I've no need to worry. If I might be inclined to have the odd wobble, worrying for instance if the unrestricted use of pesticides in local farming might be harmful, or perhaps the impact of the oil and diesel leaking out from those filthy, weeping pumps they use to extract the water from those fast-depleting aquifers, I just need to keep reading GN for stuff like this to keep me on the straight and narrow. Yes, "Nothing beats fresh taste of local produce"

Row upon row of succulent dates greet the eye while a few steps away fresh potatoes, onions and lettuce varieties are displayed for sale. For the erstwhile customer, finding the freshest produce has become even easier at the Al Mina Fruit and Vegetable Market ever since Abu Dhabi Municipality began implementing a range of measures to promote local produce.

I will not presume to cavil at the misuse of the word 'erstwhile', unless the customer in question had, indeed, passed away or otherwise become a customer no more. Safe to say, the assurances regarding locally grown produce stretch back over the years, this one from 2001 for instance.

Whatever, we are assured that "E. coli poses no threat to consumers in the UAE" and we know we can trust our media to properly filter and investigate any empty statements or baseless claims, whether they come from business or government. That's what the media is for, right?

So it was slightly disconcerting to read in yesterday's edition of The Newspaper That Seeks Only Truth that local salad greens are 'toxic'. Their word, not mine. The piece, linked here for your convenience, quotes academics whose research over the past five years (in the face of all those assurances) found 100% of samples of locally grown girgir (that's rocket to you an' me) contaminated by E. coli and salmonella. The bacterial infection is embedded in leaves and cannot be washed out, according to Dr Dennis Russell of the American University of Sharjah.

Dr Russell on leaves. Love it.

The good doktor points to unsanitary farming practices such as using raw manure as fertiliser and the bacterial contamination of the water supply (43% of wells here were found to be contaminated GN tells us in another story).

Gulf News' advice is "Do not eat jareer and other vegetables grown or stored with it in stores". The produce continues to be sold by supermarkets here.

So is it toxic, or not? For what it's worth, I've always gone on the assumption that it is and tend to avoid it at every opportunity or wash it to death. Blame all that reassurance...

Boris

Boris Akunin at the PEN Literary Cafe (Photo credit: englishpen)

One thing Boris Akunin, a man who considers his words, said during our LitFest session popped into my head this morning. I had asked him why on earth a man who had sold 25 million books (In Russian alone) and was living in France would want to return to Russia and take a leading role in the popular movement against Vladimir Putin's vice-like grip on Russian politics.

That took the conversation down the line of repression and civil movements, with a dash of bloggery thrown in (Akunin used his blog to draw a crowd of 10,000-odd people to perform an act of quiet civil rights assertion).

"A writer is a thermometer. If you don't like the temperature, don't break the thermometer. It won't change the temperature, just your ability to measure it."

I liked that.

Watani

She was gentle, but insistent. She wanted her views known and I had a sense there was real anger beneath the polite, genteel exterior. She had come up to me with her friend after my session together with Kamal Abdel Malek at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

Her family name was Dajani and she wanted to make her protest. I shouldn't have used her family name in my book, Olives - A Violent Romance. I should have made up a name rather than sully her family's good standing by involving them in questionable morality and terrorism.

Did I not know the family was an old and respected one?

I had talked about the controversies of Olives during the session - the discussion around the behaviour of my characters in their setting and the confusion between fact and fiction. I told my visitor family names are commonly used in fiction, that books all over the world contain characters with real names not made up ones. She didn't believe me; her friend assured her that yes, books did indeed use real names. But her family name is respected. It has standing, watani.

Watani is a funny thing. It's sort of nationalistic, a passion for one's country. As a quality, it could be part of whatever it is that goes into a 'good name'.

But this is fiction. It is precisely because it was a big and common name, found in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, California and Brisbane. Would you really balk at calling one of your characters Smith in case the Smiths felt slighted? But this is not just a name. It is a family. And actually, I think my Dajanis are rather admirable. That's what they are in the book - the heroes of it. They represent a narrative, that of the Palestinians. Pick another Palestinian family to bear the burden of your book. Have you read it? Part of it (this is Arabic for 'No I haven't'). You should change the name. But it's pointless. If I made up names, I'd be the English author who doesn't know any Arab names and makes up silly sounding ones that aren't realistic. If I renamed the family Dalani, everyone would still know it was Dajani. Besides, there are Dajanis who thoroughly agree with the book and are proud their family name is in it. And I think they're just as guilty of conflating fact and fiction as my interlocutor.

It's no use, I'm never going to convince her, neither she me. She made her protest and I accepted it.

The Blogging Panel at The Emirates LitFest

It was always going to be an interesting mixture, the rationalist historian with a fascination for one of the world's most ordered cultures meeting the columnist and socialite who pops and splutters with all of the glorious, random panache of Bollywood. Boris Akunin and Shobaa De were at loggerheads within seconds flat and this moderator's work was cut out trying to ensure that respected journalist Caroline Faraj and novelist Kathy Shalhoub weren't just buried in the fascinating conflict developing between the forces of chaos and those of order.

Akunin's blog pulls anything up to and beyond 1,000 comments a post. It's in Russian, but you can use Google translate to render his words into a strange quasi-blurt of odd and disconnected semi-English. With that amount of engagement, you're looking at a lot of space for trolls and fights breaking out and Akunin, a man with a deep distaste for contemporary Russian rudeness, has a tough rule for dealing with violent disagreement. He makes combative commenters play Russian roulette. Each of the combatants is offered a number, even or odd. Akunin chooses blind and the loser is blocked from the blog. It's certainly an effective way to settle debate!

We had fun. Shobaa is certainly a character and wasted no time toasting a young starlet who had dissed 'Shobaa Aunty' in a Bollywood spatette over a whitening cream endorsement, rolling out an amusing take on the role of conroversy in her life (key) and blog (even more key). We talked about CNN Arabic and its role in promoting Arab bloggers, about blogging in disapora, about pitting yourself against Putin and using blogs to promote books.

Today I'm co-hosting a show with Siobhan Leyden on Dubai Eye Radio from 1-3pm and then I'm on stage myself in what is undoubtedly going to descend with great speed into a glorious hour of mayhem, because Kamal Abdel Malek, that well known international criminal, is on there with me.

And then, dears, I'm going home for a Martini...

ADNOC Mixes Up Diesel And Petrol. Woopsie.

إلى العين وعودة (Photo credit: Abdulla Al Muhairi)

Some companies will do anything to get behind a trending topic these days, which means we're all confronted with the awful spectacle of Mike and Bob down the local hardware shop doing their really amazing and totally funny version of the Harlem Shake. Two weeks too late. Do click on that link, BTW. It's worth it...

But ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Distribution Company) has gone for it in a big way. Clearly stunned by the amount of coverage the recent horsemeat in beef scandal has created (let alone donkey in South Africa and then pork in Waitrose Essentials meatballs and poo bacteria in Ikea's cakes), they've tried to get in on the act.

They've been filling petrol engined cars with diesel. This, as any fule kno, breaks them. Apparently someone filled the wrong reservoir at Al Ain's Al Yaher petrol station, resulting in the pump attendants blithely filling fifteen cars with the black stuff instead of the green stuff. You can only imagine they just kept going until the line of broken cars tailed back and blocked the forecourt so much they had to stop...

Abu Dhabi paper The National is a great deal more terse on the story than Gulf News, which rather appears to revel in it. ADNOC has offered to repair the damaged cars and pay for care hire in the meantime, which is fair enough I suppose. The station's been closed, presumably as they empty and clean the affected tank and pump.

Mind you, it's getting harder and harder to get the right thing in the right thing around here these days, isn't it? I think I might start slipping copies of Olives in Beirut covers and see if I can't drum up some coverage myself...

What's In My Food? Chicken Rib Meat Special!

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I occasionally do a post where I look at the content of some piece of food or other. Today, still reeling from the various horsemeat and food adulteration scandals, we hear that Ikea has recalled batches of chocolate cake from stores in 23 countries after samples were found to contain faecal bacteria. Yummy!

As I pointed out in this here post, we have accepted a dangerous principle here - that they're putting stuff in our food without us knowing what it is. It's a short step from 'improving' a natural product to 'adulterating' it. The industrialised production of food is all very well, but its when the principle of cutting corners becomes enshrined in business' approach to processing, you get horses or poo in your food. Or ground up bones.

One great example of this is chicken 'rib meat'. Take, for instance, the ingredients of a McDonald's Crispy Chicken Fillet:

Crispy Chicken Fillet: Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning [sugar, salt, sodium phosphates, modified tapioca starch, spice, autolyzed yeast extract, carrageenan, natural (vegetable and botanical source) and artificial flavors, maltodextrin, sunflower lecithin, gum arabic]. Battered and breaded with: bleached wheat flour, water, wheat flour, sugar, salt, food starch-modified, yellow corn flour, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, ammonium bicarbonate), wheat gluten, spices, corn starch, dextrose, xanthan gum, extractives of paprika. CONTAINS: WHEAT. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.

Quite apart from containing an awful lot of scary-looking chemicals, the list begs the question, what IS 'rib meat'? You won't get far by Googling it - in fact, you'll get a highly mendacious article titled "What's really in that chicken nugget?' penned by the US National Chicken Council that avers, "Rib meat is simply a natural extension of the breast meat. It is NOT an additive or a filler."

Ah, no. Rib meat is, in fact, MSM - or mechanically separated meat. Also known as 'white slime'. The meat and bone from an already-stripped carcass are pushed through a sieve under high pressure and the resulting bone-enhanced white gloop can be moulded into star shapes or whatever you fancy - dinosaur shapes, from the example photographed above. McDonalds labels its chicken nuggets as containing 'White boneless chicken', which may or may not be another way of saying 'rib meat' which is, of course, another way of saying 'Mechanically Separated Meat' or even, more deliciously, 'meat slurry'.

Interestingly, there would appear to be a regulatory requirement to label MSM as such in ingredients lists, but the regulations aren't global, aren't easy to understand and, obviously from the above example, aren't being adhered to. A certain amount of ground-up bone is permissible in MSM, typically about 3% - and pieces no larger than 0.5mm. That's the US regulation. The EU and other bodies will have their own versions.

And yes, Dimethylpolysiloxane is what it sounds like. They're putting silicone in your food.

The Emirates Literature Foundation - Formalising Literature?

Can you formalise literature? At least, the process of promoting and promulgating it? We'll see, with the new Decree No. 8 of 2013 from Dubai's Ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum establishing the Emirates Literature Foundation.

The new not for profit foundation gets Dhs18.7 million as share capital to underpin its work, with three co-founders of the foundation, Emirates Airline, Dubai Culture and the LitFest, the body that has come together around the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature over the past five years. Isobel Abulhoul has been the tireless figure behind the LitFest since it started, and one can only hope the new foundation gives her and her team better resources and backing for this remarkable event and the other projects they have started to launch around the core annual festival.

In fact, the foundation's aims are to:

...promote literature and to foster an environment which is favourable to literary intellectuals through: - Organising, managing and supervising the annual Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature; - Promoting literary output in Arabic, English and other languages, particularly literary works targeting children; - Attracting international and renowned authors to the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature to present their literary works to the public; - Encouraging reading outside of the classroom; - Nurturing and providing a platform suitable for intellectual output and for local writers, poets and other literary intellectuals; - Inviting selected writers from among UAE nationals and residents to attend other international festivals of literature; - Liaising with the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority and concerned entities to establish a "Writers Centre" which will act as a nucleus for year round activities of a literary nature; and ensuring that the Emirates Airlines Literature Festival is comprehensive and accessible for all.

Those are pretty lofty aims, but anyone involved in the LitFest (and I suppose I have been, in one peripheral way or another, since it started five years ago) will recognise how much the event has done to create a burgeoning literary scene here in the UAE - something that really didn't exist before the Festival started.

Now they've got funding, the formal  backing of the country's leadership and a clear mandate to do more of the same.

What's perhaps interesting is that the LitFest started as one woman's barmy idea, one of those notions that hit people when they wake up one day ("I want to go to the moon") which slowly became a concrete scheme that people gathered around - critically, Emirates got behind it in a big way. The LitFest's growth has been organic and community-based, if people didn't want this, weren't interested in it, then it simply wouldn't have happened. Isobel's passion and drive for the whole thing, the determination of the team of people around her to grow it, make it better (and more inclusive) and create a world class event have done just that.

But that was all informal. Now it's got formal aims and goals, objectives to meet and oversight to answer to. You'd be forgiven for thinking that a tad scary. On the other hand, it seems a quite clear "That thing you've gone and done is pretty cool. Can we do more of that?".

The result should be the promotion of narrative, discourse and the codification of knowledge. The enhancement of a young nation's ability to learn, evolve and teach - to explore and find its voice and develop its inherent creativity and build stories and dreams. A counterpoint to thoughtless consumerism and a culture of passive entitlement and moribund privilege.

Let's see, eh?