Then via PZ a brilliantly transgressive and original Canadian guy who writes novels and got a gig teaching novels at the University of Toronto despite no PhD. He talked to Emily M Keeler for a series she does for a website at Random House, nicely titled Hazlitt.

I’ve just moved, so my library at home is unfortunately in storage. A thousand, maybe twelve hundred books are in storage. The books here, this tends to be what I teach. These are, of course, the treasured Proust, one of my great joys is not only having read Proust but having read him twice, and having listened to the audio CD twice. There’s two versions, one’s 50 hours and one’s 150 hours. They’re both dazzling. I like volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s the most entertaining, it’s the funniest. It’s very, very funny about human vanity, particularly gay vanity.

But the photo under that shows the Random House edition of Proust, which of course is a translation. It’s a little odd to say you’ve “read Proust” just like that when you’ve read him only in translation. It’s not odd in casual conversation of course, but when you’re talking for publication and you teach at a university – well I would think you’d be aware that reading a translation isn’t just straightforwardly reading the author.

But that’s not the interesting bit.

I got this job six or seven years ago, usually the University of Toronto doesn’t allow people to become professors without a doctorate. You have to have a doctorate to teach here, but they asked if I would teach a course, and I said I would. I’m a natural teacher, I was trained in television for many years. I know how to talk to a camera, therefore I know how to talk to a room of students. It’s the same thing. And my book The Film Club is about teaching my son about life and the world through film.

I teach modern short fiction to third and first-year students. So I teach mostly Russian and American authors. Not much on the Canadian front. But I can only teach stuff I love. I can’t teach stuff that I don’t, and I haven’t encountered any Canadian writers yet that I love enough to teach.

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

So that’s who that is.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Creepy mail. Very, very creepy mail.

Twitter pic:

Stalker baby Jesus.

But also – the usual “I made all the good things” crap which ignores all the bad things. “Today I gave someone cancer for you. In fact I gave thousands of people cancer. I caused thousands of spontaneous abortions. I broke backs, I watched while cars crashed into each other, I killed hundreds with that earthquake in Pakistan, I did nothing to stop those suicide bombers in Peshawar on Sunday or the shooters in Nairobi on Saturday, I give people malaria, and food poisoning, and Crohn’s disease, and mental illnesses. All because I luuuuuuuuuuuv you. Please call. Dad says hi.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Remember the Christian couple who run a bed and breakfast in Cornwall and refused accommodation to a gay couple because their religion? They’re going out of business, but not because everything fell apart after they lost their case – no, it’s because their b&b is shit. It sounds like Fawlty Towers except dirtier and with extra added piety. Barry Duke at the Freethinker gives us the insalubrious details.

One Christian reviewer on Trip Advisor had this to say of Peter and Hazelmary Bull’s Chymorvah Hotel:

Awful! Simply Awful.

I am Christian but that’s not the reason I went there. But I felt the place had a terrible atmosphere. I am vegetarian and there was a very limited menu. I felt like I committed a crime when I mentioned I was vegetarian. The look I received from woman could kill you. The room was cramped, not particularly clean and smelled strange, it was also cold and damp.

I really don’t like the thought of religion being forced down my throat whilst on holiday/taking a short break. I wanted to enjoy my time but I felt like I was a burden to this hotel not a guest.

It’s a real shame because it could be a lot better if the rooms were cleaner/up to date and fresh and the people running the hotel more hospitable.

That’s a real trifecta – the hotel is cold, dirty, smelly, and damp, plus the people running it are grumpy, plus you get religion forced down your throat. Anything else? Broken glass in the muesli? A rabid pet Corgi?

There are some very enthusiastic reviews on Trip Advisor too, but there’s also this one:

We were particularly disappointed with this hotel – although the owners went to very considerable lengths indeed to attempt to persuade us to leave a favorable comment with Tripadvisor. Apparently numerous people who stayed earlier were dissatisfied and made their thoughts known and there appeared to be a genuine failure to comprehend most things in this small hotel are simply substandard. Unfortunately the whole establishment is quite old, shabby,‘tired’ and most disappointing of all it’s not particularly clean anywhere. The bathroom in our bedroom was probably at least thirty years old and everywhere looked as though it needed a through deep clean – we have the photos to prove this too! Numerous fire doors are propped open most of the time and I have serious doubts if the elderly owners are actually aware of the simple fact it’s now illegal not to be fully compliant with mandatory fire regulations applied to Hotels and guest Houses throughout England – we actually felt quite unsafe. The poultry and pet animals kept on the premises were also in need of attention and cleaning and animal odours seemed to permeate everywhere. The food served was of low quality and after the second day we even had breakfasts elsewhere. Unfortunately, the elderly owners are some sort of fundamentalist evangelical Christians, and although this normally would not be a problem one does not want to read numerous wholly inappropriate religious texts than are crudely and inaccurately reproduced everywhere. Without doubt this is the worst small hotel or guest house that I have ever had the misfortune to visit and would advise any discerning visitor to totally avoid.

• Stayed June 2013, travelled as a couple

It’s pretty hilarious to think of cats and dogs and chickens running around all over the hotel, crapping on the religious magazines and pecking at the furniture.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I took a glance at the stats, as I do occasionally (mostly to see if there are spikes from the slyme pit), and saw a spike from AtheismPlus. So I looked at the page.* Ima go all #FTBulies/AtheismPlus whrblgrbl now.

Kidding! But it is pretty…dense.

*New improved link.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

God damn it.

From the Guardian on Monday:

A renowned Ghanaian poet was among the scores of casualties of the Westgate shopping mall attack in Kenya.

Prof Kofi Awoonor,  a former diplomat, was killed in the attack in Nairobi. He was in the city attending the Storymoja Hay literary festival, a celebration of pan-African writing and storytelling.

His fellow Ghanaian poet Nii Ayikewei Parkes said people attending the festival had realised something was wrong when Awoonor, known affectionately by many in Ghana as “Prof”, failed to turn up for a session at which poets from west Africa and east Africa were due to perform a reading.

“Professor Awoonor and I and two other poets were representing west Africa, and there were four poets from east Africa,” said Parkes, author of Tail of the Blue Bird, who is also Awoonor’s nephew.

Well good job, al-Shabaab. Thank you very much. Ghana thanks you. Poetry thanks you. Diplomacy thank you. Poetry-lovers and readers of Africa thank you. Making life worse with every step you take: what an amazing project.

“It was the first time I had met [Awoonor],” said Parkes. “He was very witty, wise and incredibly magnanimous. The Ghanaian high commissioner and several very successful Ghanaians in Nairobi dropped everything when they heard that he was speaking to come and hear him. Yet he was humble and warm,” Parkes said.

A memorial tribute has been organised at Nairobi’s national museum on Monday, where wellwishers have been invited to carry a candle in honour of the poet, and to sign a sympathy book for his family.

Awoonor, who is known for his experimental writing and poetry including the acclaimed novel This Earth, My Brother, was also a public figure in Ghana, with a particularly close relationship to the late president John Atta Mills.

“Professor Awoonor was a great African, a leading light whose footsteps leave big footprints,” the Storymoja Hay organisers said. “His legend must live on.”

Gladys Wundowa was a Ghanaian too. She too was murdered by Islamists. She was a cleaner at UCL, and she was on the 52 bus that blew up in Tavistock Square, on her way to school after working the night shift.

In a statement made to the police in 2006, Mr Wundowa said Gladys was a committed and loving wife and mother, and “a kind, hard-working and benevolent, very helpful Christian woman”.

Mr Wundowa told the BBC he and his wife had made plans to move back to Ghana and live in a house they were in the process of building.

“She never had a problem with anyone. She would give her last dime to make you comfortable. And cheerful, always smiling,” he said.

In the days after Gladys’s death, the Ghanaian president at the time, John Kufuor, visited the grieving Wundowa family and friends in Essex to offer his condolences. He had been on his way back to Ghana after an official visit to Jamaica.

Gladys Wundowa was buried in her home village in Ghana, where 2,000 mourners attended her funeral.

That’s just two of the many.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

By embertine in a comment on You say tomato I say mascarpone.

My preferred version of feminism is pretty fundamentally different from the equity flavour, and I don’t think that’s a minor squabble. The conversation generally goes something like this:

Equity Feminists (EFs): Equality of opportunity does not equal equality of outcome.

Me and Mine (Ms): Hard to say until we have equality of opportunity.

EFs: We DO have equality of opportunity!

Ms: I don’t think we do.

EFs: The law says we do.

Ms:  That’s a good start!  But the law can’t erase bias and harmful stereotypes.  Those still exist.

EFs:  No they don’t!  You see sexism everywhere because you have a victim mentality.  You’re the REAL misogynist.

Ms: *sigh*

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

New from Atheist Ireland -

The Dublin Declaration on Secularism Empowering Women 2013

and the closing talk by Kate Smurthwaite, which I loved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx1MFyXhj6k

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There’s a well-known bit from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier – a bit which motivated Victor Gollancz to disown the book, if I remember correctly. It was written as a Left Book Club selection and Gollancz inserted a disclaimer because of remarks like this one:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

He prided himself on that kind of philistine “good old bluff Englishman” scorn – but at any rate it’s always struck me as significant that he lumped feminism in with sandal-wearing and fruit-juice drinking. Significant and also unpleasant. I’m not fond of that kind of unembarrassed contempt for the rights of other people.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? quotes US Senator John J Ingalls in 1890:

For a generation, Kansas has been the testing ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibition, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brains of fanatics, every political fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy. [p 34]

Uh huh. Women voting – you can’t get much crazier than that.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A follow-up to Not if but where from last week. Dave Silverman is doing a Twitter survey to find out how people define “ally.” This has nudged me into realizing that the minimal sense (at least) is working together for a specific goal or cause; in other words it doesn’t necessarily mean an ally in all things, it can mean an ally for just one thing.

And I find I choke on using it that way. It has overtones of more…and I’m wondering how legitimate that is, and whether we need another word that would avoid that problem.

I choke on thinking of [people whose views on most things I detest] as allies of any kind.

I’ve been choking on this especially, lately, with the categories of atheists and skeptics. Well lots of us have. Lots of us have been finding out lately that many atheists are not our allies – except on atheism itself, and that turns out to be not enough for the purpose. It feels like a bad fit. Atheists who call us cunts at the drop of a hat don’t feel like allies of any kind.

Now if a meteor were approaching the earth then we could all be allies in trying to figure out how to survive. If the Nazis came back and started building nuclear weapons, we could all be allies in stopping them. But in issues that are not quite so urgent…it’s much more difficult.

I’m just talking about priorities, I suppose; about salience; about mattering. Atheism’s spot on my mattering map can change size, depending on what’s going on.

Or, to boil it down even further, I can just quote @splendisaurus:

Alright, so racists say they don’t like Islam. I also don’t like Islam. Should I “ally” with racists on this?

That’s a good example, and the answer is no – should not and must not; must do the very opposite.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Perusing Jessica Ahlquist’s Twitter timeline, where the small-minded and nasty go for exercise.

Texas Pride @TXPride80

@jessicaahlquist typical spoiled brat. Wanted attention along with her tree hugging, Obama worshipping parents. Just another welfare junky.

That one’s impressive for touching a lot of bases in a small space.

LibTURDS r Heartless @carrietony35

jessicaahlquist  YOU ARE A DISGRACE TO THE HUMAN RACE…YOU AND YOUR PARENTS HAVE DEEP ROOTED ISSUES

Interesting idea of what “heartless” and its opposite might be.

Jesterfaze @Jesterfaze

.@jessicaahlquist – It’s so sad that the selfishness of atheists has led to a persecution like political atmosphere for Christians.

Uh huh.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Cranston High School West has a new mural, and it had a party to celebrate.

To celebrate its 50-year reunion, the Class of 1963 gave the school the 5-by-10-foot mural on Saturday to replace the one that was taken down last year after a federal judge ruled that its references to religion made it unconstitutional.

It was the Class of ’63 that made a gift in 1959 of the original banner, which contained the words “Our Heavenly Father” and “Amen,” as well as a message to grow mentally, morally and physically.

On Saturday afternoon, before an invitation-only ceremony at the school to unveil the new mural, representatives of the class said the new gift was a way of moving on from the conflict stirred up by the old one, which drew national media coverage.

“The community is healed,” said Janice Bertino. “There is no more controversy.”

That’s sweet. Mind you, the community didn’t need to be sick in the first place.

In 2011, the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union sued the school district and the city on behalf of Jessica Ahlquist, a 16-year-old student at Cranston West who is an atheist, challenging the banner’s constitutionality.

U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux ruled in January 2012 that the banner was unconstitutional and ordered it removed. That March, school officials complied, taking down the banner and the section of auditorium wall to which it was attached.

You know who wasn’t invited to the unveiling party for the new mural?

Jessica Ahlquist.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Al Stefanelli responded on Twitter with an example of someone talking about acid in the face.

Al Stefanelli @Stefanelli

@OpheliaBenson asks “Who’s been telling Stefanelli he deserves to have acid thrown in his face?” Here you go, Ophie: http://goo.gl/WyXig8

“Ophie”? Really? I don’t call him Ally or Steffie.

The link is to a Storify. There indeed is a tweet.

So there it is: he did get such a threat. I was wrong, he didn’t confabulate it.

(I have no idea who “Misandry Bee” is.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I spotted this on a long and heated Facebook discussion of free speech and Freeze Peach (and the conflation of attack with disagreement, and the duty to educate people who keep uttering familiar backlash tropes over and over again, and the need or desire to have more interesting and productive discussions as opposed to squandering time educating people in the basics ad infinitum, and other related subjects), and it got my attention.

And so the dance continues. Free speech in regard to government is not the issue, but the ability to discuss all ideas and opinions without censorship, regardless if they make us uncomfortable or particularly disagreeable. I’ve no issue with someone not holding to my opinions or agreeing with whatever facts I put out in any given course of debate. I don’t even necessarily mind being told I can no post on someone’s personal blog. What I do mind is when my points of view are met with personal attacks or being told I deserve to have acid thrown in my face.

Well naturally; who wouldn’t mind being told that?

Wait. What? Has anyone ever told Al Stefanelli he deserves to have acid thrown in his face? Ever? I’ve certainly never heard of it – and it’s not the kind of thing that decent people say. It would be a surprising and non-routine thing to happen. If it did happen, wouldn’t the people who spend all day on Twitter blaming “FTBullies” for everything except the weather have told us all about it at least seven million times? Wouldn’t it be its own hashtag by now? Wouldn’t we all know about it?

I don’t think anyone has ever told Al Stefanelli that. I think he must have remembered that someone said that to someone, and confabulated that into someone saying it to him.

Which is pretty pathetic from my point of view, because you know who the someone is who was told that? I am. I was told that. Not Al Stefanelli; me. I was told it would be an improvement, too.

Interesting, isn’t it? They’ll not only deny that we get any harassment, not only endlessly insist that it’s not harassment it’s just disagreement aka criticism – they’ll even steal the actual harassment and pretend it was done to them.

Update: I was wrong, it did happen to Al Stefanelli. Details on the follow-up post.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Last week in Piraeus, a member of Golden Dawn murdered an anti-fascist activist and rapper, Pavlos Fyssas, aka Killah P.

A suspect was later arrested, and admitted to the killing. The man also identified himself as a member of Golden Dawn, an extreme far-right party that’s become hugely popular in Greece in recent years.

Fyssas, who grew up in the working class suburbs of Piraeus, often penned tracks that described his neighborhood, and the struggles of the people who lived there.

…

Greece’s Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, condemned the killing. Samaras said he was determined not to let “the descendants of Nazis” undermine the country that gave birth to democracy.

For its part, Golden Dawn denied, again, that it’s a neo-Nazi party, and said it had no connection whatsoever with the murder.

Still, numerous Greek cities erupted in protests last night. Anti-fascist demonstrators clashed with police, and more than 100 people were detained by the authorities.

“A lot of people here in Greece are realizing right now what the real face of this neo-Nazi party is,” Christos Michaelides, a current affairs editor for an Athens daily newspaper, told the BBC.

Learning very late.

“It is so, so sad that it took the death of a Greek person in order for the Greek society to wake up,” says Leonidas Oikonomakis.

And that’s the difference here, it seems. Fyssas was a native Greek.

Oiknomomakis points out that Golden Dawn members have been implicated in numerous deaths and beatings of immigrants in the past few years. He says both the Greek government, and its European creditors, have been turning a blind eye.

“For three years now, immigrants have been suffering, dying, being attacked by Golden Dawn. They all know about it. As long as the debts are paid, everyone is happy. They don’t care if people are dying on the streets.”

Immigrants are metoikoi, you see. Home-changers, foreigners, strangers, xenoi. We all do it; it’s not just the Greeks, not just anyone. Distance always dilutes empathy.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I got another fun piece of email! I’m in luck these days. It came in via the Contact Form, so it’s from someone (or somebot) who trawled for B&W specifically, as a suitable market.

To whom it may concern,

We specialise in modest P.E kit for Muslim school girls. Our sportswear is ideal for various physical activities such as swimming, aerobics and gymnastics. We currently supply 3 schools in the UK and are growing rapidly due to demand.

We would like to become your uniform supplier in order to encourage participation in P.E without religious boundaries.

I look forward to your response.

Kind regards

[redacted]

Well spotted! I’m just the person to invite to buy modest P.E kit for Muslim school girls. Got any cut-price crucifixes while you’re at it?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The death toll is at at least 68 in Nairobi, with 175 injured. So that was Saturday’s work; Sunday’s work was at least 75 people killed in Peshawar, in two suicide bombings at a church. And good morning to you too, religion of peace.

Two bombers blew themselves up as worshippers were coming out of the city’s historic All Saints church after attending Sunday Mass, police say.

Relatives of the victims gathered at the scene to protest against the government’s failure to protect them.

Militants linked to Pakistani Taliban have said they carried out the bombing.

The religion-testosterone cocktail strikes again.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Fun’s over.

Nick Cohen wonders

how many lives will be lost so that the Fifa World Cup™ can live up to its boast that it is the most successful festival of sport on the planet.

It’s not a rhetorical or playful question.

Qatar’s absolute monarchy, run by the fabulously rich and extraordinarily secretive Al Thani clan, no more keeps health and safety statistics than it allows free elections. The Trade Union Confederation has had to count the corpses the hard way. It found that 83 Indians have died so far this year. The Gulf statelet was also the graveyard for 119 Nepalese construction workers. With 202 migrants from other countries dying over the same nine months, Ms Burrow is able to say with confidence there is at least one death for every day of the year. The body count can only rise now that Qatar has announced that it will take on 500,000 more migrants, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, to build the stadiums, hotels and roads for 2022.

Not all the fatalities are on construction sites. The combination of back-breaking work, nonexistent legal protections, intense heat and labour camps without air conditioning allows death to come in many guises. To give you a taste of its variety, the friends of Chirari Mahato went online to describe how he would work from 6am to 7pm. He would return to a hot, unventilated room he shared with 12 others. Because he died in his sleep, rather than on site, his employers would not accept that they had worked him to death. There are millions of workers like him around the Gulf.

Nick cites Human Rights Watch, so let’s take a look at what they say about Qatar.

Qatar has the highest ratio of migrants to citizens in the world, with only 225,000 citizens in a population of 1.7 million. Yet the country has some of the most restrictive sponsorship laws in the Persian Gulf region, leaving migrant workers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Forced labor and human trafficking remain serious problems.

Wow. That sounds like the parts of the slaveholding South where slaves vastly outnumbered non-slaves, and were brutalized accordingly. That in turn sounds like Sparta, where the helots were brutalized because they vastly outnumbered the ruling class. (HRW’s “yet” would make more sense as “therefore.”)

A major barrier to redressing labor abuses is the kafala (sponsorship) system, which ties a migrant worker’s legal residence to his or her employer, or “sponsor.” Migrant workers cannot change jobs without their sponsoring employer’s consent, except in exceptional cases with permission from the Interior Ministry. If a worker leaves his or her sponsoring employer, even if fleeing abuse, the employer can report the worker as “absconding,” leading to detention and deportation. In order to leave Qatar, migrants must obtain an exit visa from their sponsor, and some said sponsors denied them these visas. Workers widely reported that sponsors confiscated their passports, in violation of the Sponsorship Law.

So Qatar has a form of slavery.

Back to Nick.

Fifa strikes me as a decadent organisation in the political rather than literary meaning of the word. It is an institution whose behaviour contradicts all of its professed purposes. If it cared about football, it would not even have thought of staging a tournament in the Qatari summer. If it cared about footballers, it would take up the case of Belounis. And if it respected human life, it would say that the kafala system could not govern World Cup contracts.

I don’t know how much longer sports journalists can ignore the abuse Fifa tolerates. The World Cup is overturning all the cliches. People say that “football is a matter of life or death”, said Bill Shankly. “It’s more important than that.” Shankly was joking. Qatar and Fifa appear to mean it. Sport is “war minus the shooting”, said Orwell. There may not be any actual shooting in Qatar but workers will die nonetheless.

The quote that ought to haunt all who love football is CLR James’s paraphrase of Kipling: “What do they know of cricket that only cricket know?” James was writing about how sport was bound up in the Caribbean with colonialism, race and class. Anyone writing about the World Cup must also acknowledge that the beautiful game is now bound up with racial privilege, exploitation and the deaths of men, who should not be forgotten so readily.

It’s horrifying.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This is an interesting test to take – it’s a shades of color discrimination test.

I like shades of color, especially among the reds and purples. I’m not great on the test though.

Update: link removed because of reports of malware.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)