More Talks? Yes! More Talks!

Did you ever hear of a boy doing more talking? Dubai's favourite purple café thingy has started a series of talks by talkers which is has named, with remarkable prescience, More Talks. On the 17th April at More DIFC, starting from about 6.30pm I will be gibbering in tongues, foretelling the end of the world and otherwise acting in a publicly disgraceful and disreputable manner as befits this age when men walk backwards and cats bark like dogs.

I'll likely be talking about writing books, the impact of self publishing on the global publishing industry and our  own reading habits - as well as perhaps looking at how social media communications is changing the consumer, the reader and the whole business of marketing publications.

But then again, I'll be guided by the audience - if they'd rather talk about why PR is doomed unless it goes digital, the moral challenges of the Internet age, why the Arab World has a fraught relationship with fiction or perhaps even what my new book's about, I'll be only delighted to do that.

Anyway, you have to RSVP to come, so here's the link for you to do just that.

Jail For Lunch

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You think you've seen it all, but 7Days today reports on a British expat teacher in Abu Dhabi who is in police custody after being found having lunch with a man in his house. They weren't even playing pat-a-cake. She's been in nick since last weekend.

The man, a Syrian, had just shown his wife the door we are told, having thrown her out of the house last Thursday. The estranged wife, who in fact has ownership of the house, had arrived accompanied by police with the intention of asserting  her rights when it became clear that the woman, a teacher who had been brought to the house by a colleague, was found with the man consuming alcohol. The friend who had brought her had left.

The Syrian woman pressed charges against the teacher for entering her house without permission, but has since dropped those charges. The teacher is facing criminal charges of consuming alcohol and being alone in the company of a man other than her husband or close relative.

Drinking alcohol alone in the house of an Arab man you have just met is a position many women would think twice about putting themselves in, although few would think of it as a criminal offence. But the couple were arrested on the spot and have been in custody for since last weekend awaiting a court hearing. A week in jail is a long time for a drink and a chat.

There are no substantive details in the story beyond that. If you didn't know that being alone in the company of a man other than your husband or close relative is a criminal offence in the UAE, you do now.

Did you know?

GeekFest Dubai Cometh

It's just around the corner! This Thursday, even!

As I have before mentioned, the reins of GeekFest Dubai have been formally handed over (in a properly constituted Rein Handing Ceremony) to the team of fine chaps at online gamer/geek magazine t-break. It is they, not I, wot is now irresponsible for putting together GeekFest Dubai, inasmuch as a GeekFest is put together.

Just in case you haven't encountered a GeekFest before, this is the GeekiFesto, the loosely arranged set of guidelines that defines, as much as anything defines, what a GeekFest is. Most people who have UNorganised a GeekFest have gone on to happily ignore this in part or whole and it has not had the slightest negative impact whatsoever.

This does rather run in line with one's views, expressed yesterday, on conformity!

The t-break chaps have already brought a quantum leap forward in event quality and cohesiveness by putting together a microsite thingy for it. It's linked here for your viewing pleasure. The line-up of talent giving GeekTalks and displaying their digital art looks pretty stupendous - and there are even retro games for old fogeys like me as part of GameFest.

I'm only sad that old pal and co-UNfounder Saadia Zahid can't be there to see our strange and random baby grow up and leave home.

I'll see you there!

No I won't. We're off to the UK early tomorrow and we're in such bad shape I can't even begin to contemplate taking the evening out. With huge regrets, I find I can't actually make it at all and feel terribly guilty, although I'm sure the t-break team will appreciate not having me there going 'Oh no, you don't wanna do it like thaaaat.'

PS - I don't know if you'd noticed, and this is going to be by no means the last time I mention it - you can trust me on that - but there's now a really cool button down below (thanks, Derrick Pereira!) that will allow you to send any post you like from this blog direct to your Kindle or to any Kindle app on other tablets/machines. So you can treasure it, take it to bed and cuddle it and other stuff...

Ten Reasons Why Conformity Is Evil

conformity (Photo credit: the|G|™)

Something of a departure from the usual aimless half-thoughts, this is a list of half-thoughts. It's come about because of a number of conversations I've had recently that have revolved around individuality, independence and creativity vs suits. When I first went to work, I used to wear a suit. It was very much expected of you back then. I can't remember precisely when all that changed for me, but I have a horror of them now. Both the apparel and the phenotype.

1) Conformity suppresses independent thought
The requirement to conform to a given set of behaviours encapsulates those behaviours as essentially sacrosanct. The very nature of conformity is that it is beyond question, because questioning it is in itself non-conformist. How many times have you heard, 'Don't ask questions, just do it.' - shortened by Nike to a cunning call to brand-conformity. Conformity is comforting because you can be lazy and just settle into that nice rut. So much easier to do than break out and ask quite why we all jump off the cliff because it seems, well, sort of counter-intuitive.

2) Conformity is a bully
The first thing those with a vested interest in conformity (often, although not always those higher up a given food chain than you) will do is use it to beat you around the head. It's marvellously self-fulfilling. 'I don't see anyone else around here questioning it. It's the way we do things around here, so you'd better knuckle under before there's trouble.' Stop thinking, stop questioning, just put on your grey drone suit and join the rest of us in the chain gang.

3) Conformity is a liar
There's a wonderful scene in the novel Watership Down, in which the little group of travelling rabbits the book is set around come across a foreign warren. The rabbits talk in the book, which does involve a certain degree of willing suspension of disbelief but there we go. The foreign rabbits are incredibly well fed, fat, sleek and behave in a more 'sophisticated' manner, including doing odd things like dancing. But the word 'snare' must never be uttered in the warren on pain of death. It turns out the local farmer is feeding the rabbits, whose warren is a police state, and snaring them. Conformity, see?

4) Conformity is not community
You'll often hear calls for conformity dressed up as a requirement for 'the good of us all'. The idea is simple: if you conform, we all benefit. But if you should wander, poke around in cupboards and in any other way refuse to adopt a set of accepted behaviours, you're somehow threatening the fabric of society itself. The truth is, any community that requires conformity as a rule for inclusion is inherently flawed and will fail in the face of a community that is both inclusive and diverse. When I talk about communities, by the way, I don't mean neighbourhoods or clubs. I mean any group of people gathered around a task.

5) Conformity hates diversity
My own little foray into experimenting with communities, GeekFest, excited me principally because of its diversity and inclusiveness. But where individuality is subsumed to the need to conform, diversity goes out of the window and insularity comes with its bags packed for a nice, long stay. Insular communities start to rely on their insularity to maintain cohesiveness and so is born racism and other forms of intolerance.

6) Conformity breeds intolerance
If we all need to conform and conformity is our principal attribute, we can quickly see that anyone who does not conform to the ideas or practices we conform to is not acceptable to our community. They are not welcome. We do not want them - or the ideas, challenges or new practices they bring. It's counter-genetic, this idea that we cannot explore or adopt the new because we are bound by conformity. It creates communities doomed to eventual failure.

7) Conformity smothers creativity
It's the process of exploring the new, of tweaking the nose of the everyday and flicking the nipples of the mundane that gives us that marvellous force, creativity. Dreaming up new insights, finding expression that challenges, excites and engages us in new ways is so fundamental to progress and, I would argue, the reason for living at all. If we can't create, if we can't celebrate our very ability to think up new and wonderful things, then we don't have a reason to be. And yet conformity tells us that we mustn't challenge or invent, but instead tread the well-trodden path. It protects itself by punishing challengers and inventors.

8) Conformity abhors change
Communities that have been lashed to conformity are inherently unable to change, because change naturally challenges conformity. So how do we improve? We don't, there's no need to improve. We're conforming because it's better this way, the way we've always done it. You wouldn't understand, it's not conformity so much as tradition and our culture is inherently celebrated by tradition. We have a culture of respect and your non-conformist ideas are, frankly, disrespectful. And so on. The mantras are quite seductive, aren't they? But conformity hides behind mantras like this, smothering change and blocking new and better ways of doing things because we're stuck with the old ways. There's nothing wrong, incidentally, with celebrating tradition. But that's different to using tradition as cladding for conformity.

9) Conformity breeds mediocrity
And so we have a call to be mediocre. Don't question the way we do things, keep your head down and knuckle under like the rest. Don't shine, don't be brilliant. Don't show anyone up or go around knocking down walls or exploring better, more efficient ways of doing things. Don't be outspoken or go to the line because you believe passionately in something. In fact, we'd be grateful if you wouldn't be passionate about anything. Passion can be so, well, challenging.

10) Conformity stifles innovation and breeds weakness
And so we see conformity is the natural enemy of all innovation. Some of the most innovative companies in the world also manage to be highly conformist, though. So where does that fit into McNabb's Theory of Conformity? Because conformity is often selective. You can play in the playground, but you can't play in the classroom. Innovation can happen in the areas where innovation is permitted, but not in the firewalled areas where we demand conformity. It's an insidious thing. But the weakest part of organisations, the blind spots, is frequently where conformity rules. You might invent the world's greatest transistors, but if you're totally closed to a new approach to, say, your communications strategy, you've created a weakness through conformity.

There. Glad I got that off my chest...

UAE Driving. We Need To Change The Moral Climate.

(Photo credits: smartsign.com)

There has been some disbelief expressed on Twitter this morning as The National's story on UAE national footballer Hamdan Al Kamali and his involvement in a new road safety campaign to ask reckless drivers to consider the people they'll leave behind. (Mind you, there's been more expressed about this rather silly post on The National's blog!)

Kamali's best friend, talented footballer and fellow member of the natioanal team Theyab Awana, died two years ago in a car crash when he ploughed into a parked lorry whilst texting. He was driving Kamali's car and was on the way to Kamali's house at the time he died. The two had grown up together, gone to training camp together.

Kamali freely admits he was a former 'bad boy' on the roads himself. He'd thought nothing about driving at 180kph and above. It is this that seems to have got Twitter in a twist (or, as Gulf News would have it, 'Twitter outrage') - why should we listen to a young man who quite clearly has no compunction about driving like a lunatic?

I find myself at odds with the tide of opinion. I don't think it's about whether we listen to him - it's about his peer group and whether they'll listen to him. The young men - and women - who look up to him, who would listen to a member of the national football team, of an age with themselves. Who would follow the example of a young man who holds his hand up and says, 'I did what you do every day. And I have had the opportunity, at an appalling personal price, to consider the consequence. And now I stand as an example for change.'

It think that's an incredibly powerful message. And it's timely. We're finding out that the law alone will not change things (it's all too infrequently applied. I was recently badly cut up by a speeding lunatic on the Emirates Road only to find out my aggressive friend was wearing a Dubai police officer's uniform). We have pretty much a radar every 2 kilometers and yet you'll still look around to find a Lexus or FJ Cruiser glued to your rear giving it disco lights when you're already topping out the speed limit including the 20kph 'grace'. And the accident rate on the UAE's roads is still unacceptably high - particularly among young Emiratis.

I was involved in a round table chat gig a couple of years ago at Dubai Men's College. People from the private sector are invited in just to chat with groups of students for a couple of hours. I quite enjoyed it and we all learned lots from each other. I was considerably taken aback when our chat moved to driving and my youthful friends started talking about the friends and relatives they had lost to mad driving. 'What can we do? It's in our blood! It's something we do, how we express ourselves.' were typical comments.

So Kamali, poacher turned gamekeeper, is surely worth a shot. If his campaign for drivers to consider others, not their victims on the road but family and friends - the ones they'll leave behind, results in even the slightest change in the moral environment, in attitudes towards driving in the UAE, it will have been well worthwhile.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in The National, the opinions of its Emirati 'speed freak' commentator are triggering more and more of a Twitter backlash, with Kipp Report finally giving us that 'Twitter outrage' story! :)

Book Post: Music And Books

Cover of Object 47

Finishing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy has been something of an event for me. The way it went at the end, words tumbling onto the page at a tremendous rate because I knew precisely where I was going, was great fun. And the journey there was accompanied by Rammstein and Arvo Pärt - as strange a combination as you'd ever want. I defy you to listen to Pärt's 'Fur Alina' without feeling a sense of desolation, loss, beauty and peace.

Music has always had a critical relationship to writing books for me. Tunes have influenced the tone of my writing and the type of thing I'm writing has influenced the music I listen to. I think about what I'm writing when I drive to work in the mornings, a half hour of solitary pondering that usually defines the scene I'm about to commit to type. The music on the CD player or iPod can really influence the way that goes.

Similarly, some music has had a totally seminal effect on the book I'm working on. I always had it in mind to add the 'soundtrack' of each book to the end bit but never got around to it. Here, for what it's worth, are those lists.

SPACE
It's so long since I wrote Space now, I forget much of the soundtrack, but I do recall listening to a lot of early Wire - anyone out there remember the amazing Another The Letter? Later on, I found myself editing Space listening to Object 47, which had the perfect feel for the book for me.

OLIVES - A VIOLENT ROMANCE
Olives was actually written as the result of a piece of music - I've told the tale many times, but I went to sleep one night listening to George Winston's February Sea, which had me thinking about a girl dancing in the rain (the central scene in the book) and woke up with a book in my head. I listened to a lot of George Winston while I was writing and subsequently editing Olives. Brian Eno was also a major listen, particularly the stunning 'Music for Airports', but also this amazing little thing, take a listen and see if it doesn't make you want to cry - Bone Bomb. I was also enjoying Lebanese east/west fusion act Blend at the time, although it looks like they're defuncted now. This amazing piece of music by Secret Garden informed the ending of Olives - it's actually a mother's song to a child, but I always think of it as the voice of a lost lover.

BEIRUT - AN EXPLOSIVE THRILLER
Secret Garden, appropriately, ended Olives and started Beirut - I always thought if Beirut got made into a film I'd like the title sequence to be a film of the waves as if approaching Beirut by helicopter, then flying over the city and through its streets as it woke up in the morning. The music would be this piece and the title would reveal at around  2:40. Then we move on to more sensible stuff, particularly Kasabian with the first scene in Beirut very much written listening to this (Lynch and Palmer walk out of the villa and this tune is playing as they drive up the track to the Saida Road). There was a bit of Guy Manoukian going on, as well, some Oumeima and a lot of Beirut Biloma. 

SHEMLAN - A DEADLY TRAGEDY
An awful lot of Foo Fighters, oddly enough. And then the esoterica. A lot of Silence, a huge influence on the book, as was Jorgestrada. I picked up a recording of singing from Estonian Orthodox Churches which I listened to a lot with enjoyment. Jason Hartmoor's first awakening in the book takes place with that playing in the backgrond as he looks out at the beach at Newgale. Oddly enough, that music is a huge influence on composer Arvo Pärt, whose De Profundis was also a biggie during writing. And then there was a load of Ulrich Schnauss and tons of Sigur Ros. To finish, we depended on Professor Kliq, Rammstein, Sasha and the Chemical Brothers. Seriously. And then the last few pages were very much down to Mr Pärt.

So. Now you know...

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...