jill/txt

Have you seen Eminem’s Mosh yet? Yeah, I know, I’m slow, I only just did. It’s a pretty cool piece of rhetoric, a hugely compressed and intensified Fahrenheit 911, basically a very political music video raging at Bush, listing his errors, showing a narrative of individuals’ suffering under Bush and ending in wonderful storming of the White House that turns out to be the people turning out to vote him out of office. Unfortunately the single’s not being released until after the election (how pathetic) but you can watch the video online, or read the lyrics, but go, watch the video if you’re all able. The video’s no. 1 at MTV (says mtv.com), so I guess it’s getting airtime. Cool.

I try to pretend I don’t like Eminem (I mean, he’s a rude, violent, sexist prick) but still fondly remember going to see his movie with three of my girlfriends, all of us mothers with degrees in literature, explaining to each other how though he’s obviously misogynistic we were really watching the movie for the poetry, you know, that battling is our contempary Shakespeare. It was pretty awesome, actually, the poetry. I kind of like him even better seeing Mosh. Despite the crutchcrotch-grabbing. Why do they do that? (I know, I’m sounding like a grandmother…)

On Tuesday Nov 2 Prodromos Tsiavos from International Commons will be talking at Landmark in Bergen. International Commons is the organisation working on creating international licences like the Creative Commons licences, making it easier for creators of digital content to share their work in various ways. Tsiavos is in charge of Creative Commons’ cooperation with the BBC, who are opening their archives.

The week after, at our Digital og sosial conference, you can hear Cory Doctorow (author, spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, open source activist, blogger) talk about open source authorship, and you can attend a workshop on the Norwegian implementation of Creative Commons licences.
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The first second Norwegian politician’s blog is born! [after Helga Pedersen’s, see Lars’s comment to this post.] At least I think it’s the first second. Kristin Halvorsen is the leader of SV, the Socialist Left Party, who got 12,5% of the votes in the last national elections, making them fairly significant in parliament. She released a book (Rett fra hjertet or Straight from the Heart) a couple of days ago and the blog seems to be a companion piece, coming with a new website focussed on communication. Unfortunately the first (and for now only) two entries are written by Roger, her personal assistent, because Kristin’s too busy. Which is understandable but, well, maybe a personal blog isn’t the format such a busy person should take. The comments so far are almost all from right wingers wanting to pick a fight. I feel exhausted just looking at them. But you never know, it might work out well. It’s great to see politicians experimenting with new ways of keeping in touch with their constituents. I’ve written several previous posts on blogging politicians - a search for politicians blogs brings up most of the posts. And here, for future reference, is a full-size screenshot of what Kristin Halvorsen’s site looks like today. (Thanks to Kev for pointing this out!)

Cute, isn’t it?


Where are visitors to this page?
(Auto-update daily since 27-Jan-04)

I find myself wondering who’s in which city - Bergen and Oslo are easy, and Copenhagen and Helsinki, and I think I can place Philadelphia, New York and Boston and one of those Californian places, there are some people in the Netherlands, somone in Kuala Lumpur, I think, and what’s that city in South America? There are readers in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra - and Alice Springs! I just adore the idea of someone sitting in Alice, reading this!

Apart from California and South America, I’ve been to each of these places. That may not be a coincidence.

Do you like the map, or is it too intrusive? Too big brotherish? I mean, we still don’t know who you are. Just where.

Our student newspaper’s got a feature on blogs today, with brief interviews with bloggers explaining why they like blogging, and with me playing the role of the serious researcher. As always it’s strange seeing what a journalist picks from a half hours conversation. It’s great to have good media (and Studvest is a good student newspaper) but the more interviews with myself I read the more I treasure the opportunity to express myself in my own words. I like blogging.

George Bush’s official campaign website is currently off limits to anyone outside of the US and Canada. Go on, try clicking the link: georgewbush.com - it’s “403 forbidden”. Isn’t that weird? John Kerry’s site’s still talking to us.

It might be a response to a DoS attack that might be the cause of six hours of downtime on October 19. If the attack (if there was an attack - the Republicans won’t comment the blocking) was from outside of the US, it would make sense, I suppose, for their server to simply refuse to communicate with any computer outside of the US. Though surely avid hackers could get round that anyway by just attacking through a US computer?

It’s an apt metaphor for the way Bush generally handles world opinion though. Say no to the Kyoto global warming treating, though the US is responsible for 36.1% of the world’s greenhouse transmissions. Invade Iraq, though the UN says no. Refuse to sign an global treaty allowing war criminals from any nation to be tried in an international court. See no world, hear no world, speak not with the world. (via Grandtextauto)

[Update: Boing Boing has lots of reader info though no official story on this, and one of Joi Ito’s readers has this example of a polite way of banning the world.

One advantage of reading time management porn might be enhanced skills in describing those things the world doesn’t understand are productive so they sound impressive. Oh, and a sign of unproductivity for the blogger: “rereading an unupdated web page is a sign that I’m wasting time”.

Routledge is looking for four or five additional papers to go in a 2006 book they’re working on that will be called The E-bay Reader. Got any e-bay kitch, folklore, research, narrative or other experiences you want to write up as an academic article? Send it in!

It’s hard belonging to a small nation, independent in name but so completely dependent on others. From this morning’s radio news:

• Though Norway said no to the invasion of Iraq, we also just happened to supply the US with weapons for the invasion.
• Though Norway said no to joining the EU in a referendum, we sort of signed up for the EEC along with Iceland and Lichtenstein, which means we get to do what the EU says without having much of a vote. Now we’re redesigning our car licence plates, and it turns out membership in the EEC means we have to add the EU flag to our licence plates. But we’re not members! We said no!
• The American dollar is lower than it’s been in 20 years, at just 6,40 NOK. It was 9 a few years back. Sounds good? Well, apart from my x-mas shopping, no, because Norway’s pension funds are all in American dollars. And Norwegian oil and shipping companies do business in American dollars, so actually, we’re leaking money due to the dollar. Why the dollar’s down? Well, mostly the ever-increasing deficit in the US economy, which is mostly due to the war on Iraq, which Norway said no to but still kind of slipped weapons to.

How the heck did the world get messed up to the extent that we’re this dependent on elections in places where we don’t even have a vote? This is where anti-Americanism comes from. News like this, powerlessness like this, every morning.

In a linky mood? Try linking to elinor.nu!

See, nobody on the whole web has linked to ELINOR’s site except me. Not very surprising, I guess, since I’ve not announced it and all it had on it till today was “this site will be constructed and we’re going to do cool stuff for e-lit in the Nordic countries”, but now it’s got info about the seminar, and a nicer design (I used glish.com’s 2 column template and cut and pasted) and our nice new logo, which is inspired by a papyrus scroll, unrolling, see, and it looks a little like an @, too. It was designed by Torill Gallefoss. We might change the colours, we’ve had some discussions, we’ll see. And of course the website’s still a fledling - the catalogue’ll grow and it’ll be bloggified. But you’ll link even to a fledgling, won’t you? Tell the world about it? Come to the e-litteraturfest if you’re nearby?

I know it’s all in Norwegian, but see, non-Norwegians could link and say, look, I can’t read this, but isn’t it cool they’re doing this e-lit thing in Norway?

Shameless, aren’t I?

Our conference is approaching and I’m concentrating on the electronic literature part of it. I’ve shined up the ELINOR website a bit, and I’m adding in a bit more information about the seminar there. Today I’ll be organising fliers for the library and bookshops and book cafés and generally doing the publicity thing.

Morten Skogly and Anne Bang-Steinsvik are both coming to read from their visual, kinetic, interactive poems. Both create literature that combines words and images and movements and interaction, but their work is not at all the same. Scott Rettberg’s coming too, and he’s going to read from Implementation and also, I hope, a little from Kind of Blue. Both works are different altogether from the Norwegian ones and yet also bound to this new medium. This is the first one of the first readings of electronic literature in Norway, and I’m really pleased we’re able to start making electronic literature more accessible.

I love Morten Skogly’s Bokstavlek, and I love Anne Bang-Steinsvik’s imellomtiden.no, and they’ve both written other wonderful pieces I’ll tell you more about later.

Hey! Scott and Nick finished Implementation! Congratulations!

This is kind of comforting, weirdly: a Republican arguing that we should vote for Kerry because Bush is an extremist caricature of a conservative. See, if Kerry’s elected, the Republicans will have to work out why Bush lost, and become more moderate. And Kerry’s going to have so much mess to clean up that he’s unlikely to be reelected, so in four years time a “good” Republican government will be elected. I heard someone argue this on Norwegian TV a while back: the best thing that could happen is that Bush is reelected, because that would cause a second civil war in the US and you’d have a chance for a real change in politics.

The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

So if you’ve been anxious about the election, reloading that predictor of who’ll win most electoral votes based on current polling (it keeps tipping back and forth, I warn you) perhaps you can stem your anxiety. Or increase it: no matter what happens, it could get worse.

This sounds awful: Republicans are organising troops of people to challenge the right of voters to vote in Ohio, a swing state. That’s sickening. Bitch. Ph.D., and quite a few other Democrats, have volunteered to go help out during the actual voting. Ferrying people to the polls, I imagine. There won’t actually be riots, violence and civil war at the polls, will there?

So is there any point in my campaigning for Kerry on this blog? Sure nearly half my readers are in America (well, between 30-55% actually, different counts kind of vary) but probably you’ll all vote for Kerry anyway, right? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever personally met an American who admits to being a Bush supporter. If you were one, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Do vote though. If you’re able. We (a.k.a. The Rest Of The World) really appreciate your fight against Bush. Maybe you should vote by mail, though, so you don’t get beat up at the polling station.