Xita – the Gozitan’s done it again

It never rains but it pours. With guys like Pierre you’d hope that posts on his blog did more of the latter than the former. His blog, once a regularly updated landmark on the Maltese blogosphere witnessed a slowdown in productivity as Pierre shifted slowly to the printed medium. In fact he did develop a knack of making his audience twist and turn with anticipation before regaling them with stories that are written as finely and as carefully as Gozitan lace.

I read Pierre’s last book “Rih Isfel” with a feeling of relaxed contentment that could only be had by the pleasure of a revival of multiple memories and familiar landscapes safely entwined within a fertile vocabulary that immediately brings the reader close to home. (see, that’s the kind of off-putting long sentence that puts people off books – but then again how do you translate wens, hedla, sliem and saudade?)

And home is of course Gozo. There is something that binds all of us who in one way or another can call the Island of Calypso and free range marijuana fields (under the watchful eye of the police) home. Without Gozo there would be no Pierre, no Rih Isfel, and probably…. no Xita.

But this is not meant to be a eulogy for Ogygia that lapses into the one thousand and one clichéed descriptions of the island where time stood still. Rather it is a post that is meant to tickle your interest into reading the product of the new blood that left the island and immersed itself in the middle of Bruxelles La Moche, there to inspire newfound stories that blend the old and the new, the sacred and the profane.

Comparisons are odious, I know, but if I were to tag Pierre I’d think of France’s Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. I am still not sure whether it is the author’s style or some of his characters that inspire the comparison. Characters is what Pierre does best as in the short story Diabolus where he playfully keeps your curiosity on tenterhooks until the final twist.

Short stories flowed out of his blog. Now you can own them in this new book “Qed nistenniek niezla max-Xita“. Given my reputation for rubbishing hopeless blurbs I can tell you that I have seen the one on this book and it rocks… a guy from the end of the blogosphere has a lot to vouch for that.

So. I cannot tell you what’s in it. I can only honestly say that I would definitely stake a high bet on what’s in it being good.

This is not a review… it is a biased participation in book marketing by someone who has already been genuinely captivated by the previous works of the young author from Nadur. For more marketing ploys (re: book launch, etc) I suggest you check out these sites:

The Author’s Site: Pierre J. Mejlak

The Facebook Event with Launch Info

Happy reading!

It’s Here

(Over)Hype in a Box

 

The most over-hyped wine is back again. It’s that time of the year again when the Beaujolais Nouveau hits the tables of the bars and bistrots. It’s a marketing ploy andyou can let yourself go happily drinking that extra bit of wine because after all (if you really needed it) its a good excuse to let some of Bacchus’ special slide down your throat. Don’t be fooled though… it’s no big deal…it’s just a lot of noise (and colour) that is the result of a clever marketing trick that persists through the years. This is the smallest crop since 1975… which does not mean that we will not have thousands of bottles flooding the tables for the end of November.

Warning: J’accuse would like to encourage its esteemed readership to enjoy wine and alcoholic beverages with responsible moderation. If Responsible Moderation is nowhere to be seen then it is normally advisable to stop drinking when “leg” fails to obey orders from “fuzzy brain”. Driving is definitely not on the menu at that point.

Seriously. Don’t drink and drive. And drink responsibly (If you want to drink that is. You don’t have to. And you cannot if you are not 17 yet).

This has been j’accuse… wine tasting so you don’t have to.

Going Medieval (The Witch Project)

Helen Duncan

Of course we have not missed the storm that has kicked up between the man we like to call Hogan and DCG. It seems that Hogan drew three hundred and thirty first blood and Daffers replied with a rather vitriolic repartee. Lovely stuff for the net oglers as the battle seems to be hyping up.

Daffers is particularly miffed by Hogan’s appending of the label “witch” to describe her. She duly responds by, among other things raising the (subject of) the dead and opening the Lorry Sant files. Whatever the spat between the two may be (it seems to involves boyfriends, girlfriends, selective reporting and general self-aggrandising thoughts) we are more interested here in the witchy element.

Being an assiduous follower of science fiction, particularly of the otherworld kind, I have developed an affinity to the world of witches and wizards. It is thus with Faustian trepidation that I move to explain that witches are not only the subject of the middle ages.

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 (which up until the Colonial Laws Validity Act also might have applied to Malta – my constitutional law history might need polishing) was used during World War II in the Uk. It was used against Scottish spiritualist Helen Duncan who, it was alleged, was using her powers to reveal military secrets.

Police raided one of her séances and charged her with conjuring up spirits. She was found guilty and sent to Holloway Prison¹. Witchcraft of any description was not decriminalised until 1951 – although the police did raid Helen Duncan one last time in 1956.

A campaign to have Helen Duncan posthumously pardoned continues.

1 – After the verdict, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, complaining about the misuse of court resources on the “obsolete tomfoolery” of the charge.

European Parliament on Blogs

Strasbourg Before the Collapse

Fears that the EP was about to embark on a regulatory project that might effect blogging in Europe were allayed yesterday. Here is the EP press release in full:

Media pluralism must be safeguarded and all citizens should have access to free media, MEPs underline in a resolution adopted on Thursday. To prevent owners, shareholders or governments from interfering with editorial content, MEPs advocate creation of editorial charters. They also encourage an open discussion of the status of weblogs.

The European Parliament adopted a resolution by 307 votes in favour to 262 against urging the Commission and the Member states to safeguard media pluralism and ensure that all EU citizens can access free and diversified media. The resolution, drafted by the PES, the ALDE and the Greens/EFA group is a revised version of a report drafted by Marianne MIKKO (PES, ET) and the Committee on Culture and Education.
 
Ensure journalistic independence
 
In the resolution, MEPs stress the need to ensure journalistic and editorial independence and suggest editorial charters to prevent owners, shareholders or outside bodies such as governments from interfering with news content.  To shed light over the aims and background of the broadcasters and publishers, the resolution also encourages the disclosure of ownership of all media outlets.  MEPs also voice concern over the media’s ability to carry out the role of a watchdog of democracy, when private media enterprises are motivated by financial profit, and warn that this could lead to loss of diversity. The resolution considers that competition law and media law should be interlinked to avoid conflicts between media ownership concentration and political power
 
Status of bloggers should be discussed
 
Weblogs represent an important new contribution to freedom of expression and are often used by both media professionals and private persons. Therefore MEPs encourage an open discussion on all issues relating to the status of weblogs.  On this point the resolution is slightly different from the proposal from the Committee on Culture and Education, that suggested a ‘clarification’ of the status of weblogs and sites based on user-generated content, assimilating them for legal purposes with any other form of public expression.
 
During the presentation of the report Monday evening, Mrs Mikko responded to the concerns of many bloggers: “My entrance into cyberspace has created rapid reaction among a lot of bloggers. I shall make it clear now that nobody is interested in regulating the internet,” she said.
 
MEPs also underline the importance of the protection of copyrights online, insisting that third parties have to mention the source when taking over declarations, call for greater transparency with respect to personal data kept on users by search engines, email providers and social networking sites.

The resolution has many ramifications and one can detect a side barrage to people like Signor Berlusconi.

Stoogle (more reading habits)

This article (Is sStupid making us google?) has popped up on Art & Literature Daily. More on the effect of internet on reading and thinking habits. I seem to have read this article before but sometimes ALDaily has this weird habit of recycling old articles back to the top of the page. Here is an extract but for the full deal click here:

I don’t know about Mr. Carr, but I have no doubt that I go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. The question is, how guilty do I need to feel about this? In his view, presumably, quite a lot guilty, since by reading online as much as I do I am depriving myself of the ability to read offline. He takes this insight to an even more alarming conclusion in the end, writing that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” And if that’s the case for veteran readers, think how much worse it must be for the jeunesse dorée of the information age, if they never developed the habits that accompany “deep reading” in the first place.