And just to make sure that no one accuses me of picking on one particular country or culture, I am featuring one US example, and one Malaysian example. If I had the time, I am sure I could extend that to Australia, UK and Botswana…or any other country you care to name.

But these two will do:

From the Wall Street Journal 

This article describes the distress of a mother who is looking for young adult (YA) books that don’t deal with “vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark, stuff” — and couldn’t find any. The reviewer agrees that it’s tough to find good YA books, saying that the kind of books the mother was talking about reflect back “distorted portrayals of what life is”.

My comments

Apparently, according to the above article, we need sweetness and light and positiveness in the books young people read. (For God’s sake, don’t let the kids read The Bible, whatever you do. There’s some real heavy stuff within its pages, particularly grim stories about a vengeful unforgiving God destroying whole cities, sending plagues, people being turning into pillars of salt for the crime of looking over their shoulder as their whole city is wiped out — really, really nasty, upsetting stuff like that.)

Apparently, if your life sucks, and you’re fourteen, there’s not a shred of good in reading about people just like you, even if in the end they manage to cope. Much, much better, the writer of the article says, if we censor hell out of libraries so that our little darlings never read anything too bleak for them.

To me, this blinkered view of what life is like for a 13 or 14 year old is just plain weird. If a kid’s life really is bad and he or she comes across a story that reflects their own, then they will learn something about coping, and they will learn that they are not alone — surely one of the most valuable life-changing moments there is.

If said kid lives in a great neighbourhood with fabulous parents, then they are going to realise – as they will have to sooner or later — that not everyone is so lucky.

The most remarkable thing about the article, though, is this: that reading a work of fiction can change a young adult for the worse. For example, that reading fiction about self-mutilation will make some kids do it. Er…nope. Because kids will have heard about it long before they read a work of fiction about it, believe me. Take my word for it. They hear about it from TV, the internet and their friends.

Fiction doesn’t make a kid do bad things; real life does. Fiction hands them ways of coping with the bad things that happen to them so they DON’T do stupid stuff like self-mutilate.

The other thing fiction can do is offer a form of entertainment that makes real life bearable. Within the pages of a book (or to a lesser degree in a game or a TV show), a kid in trouble can escape, and in the escape gain the calm needed to deal with real life.

And of course, the article implies that all this is new. Books for young people used to be lovely…

When I was in primary school I had a lot of my mother’s books from when she was a kid. She was born in 1903. Boy, what a miserable lot of books a kid had to read in those days. All about kids who died – Little Nell (Old Curiosity Shop – yes, kids did have Dickens read to them in those days – my mother said she cried and cried over that one), Beth March (Little Women), the little match girl (Andersen — and loads of other similar fairy tales by him and brothers Grimm);  Judy Woolcot (Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner) – geez.  Their message seemed to be, “Never mind, if you are particularly good, you will die young and go to heaven all the sooner.” Lucky you, kiddo!!

I reckon today’s books offer more hope than those books. They empower kids, instead of throwing their entire fate into the arms of a capricious god.

And from The Star newspaper of Malaysia

This article is about some extraordinarily ignorant women sounding off about something they know NOTHING about (abused women and abusive men), and deciding that of course it’s ALL the fault of WOMEN who don’t know how to OBEY their potentially abusive husbands. And I gather that they think ALL MEN will be abusive given disobedient wives to manage. Wow, hard to get one’s head around this bit of ignorant garbage.

Anyway these women have the answer. They are starting up a thing called “The Obedient Wives Club”. Basically, as far as I can make out, it is a club for cult-bait. You know, the kind of people (in this case only women) who are so infantile and puerile that they need to hand over their money,  bodies, independent thought, maturity, or any sense of self, to the tyrant cult leader in their family (who will make use of them, their bodies, their money but whom they must never challenge on anything, no matter how ignorant or stupid or cruel he is).

Hmm. Come to think of it, can I join as an honorary man? Sounds like a good deal for a impecunious writer. I can write and not worry about income while all my slaves can obey my every command…

Further update:
In today’s The Star there’s more about this moranic club. Their vice-president is a woman doctor who — according to the paper – has stated that men won’t stray if wives are good in bed (Geez, lady, what planet are you from?) but … “if their husbands still abused or cheated on them despite being ‘kept happy’ in the bedroom” then a woman just has to be a good wife (read: doormat) to the end. If they don’t obey their husbands, she says, they won’t get to heaven.

What a lovely lady she is. Here’s the message, loud and clear: if your husband is a drunken  cheater who beats you within an inch of your life every other night, continue to be sweet and obliging, stay with him (with your children even if he beats them too?), and get your reward in heaven when he finally tortures you to death.

Lady, you stink.

…you know, take your kids to the nearest playground and probably half of the equipment will be lying on the ground, broken or vandalised.

This is why panic-stricken Malaysians — who are certain that Lynas Corp over in Pahang is actually peopled with evildoers doing something akin to importing pure radioactive uranium in paper bags with a view to giving us all cancer — insist on calling in overseas experts to check it all out.

Malaysian experts supplied the government and the media and the locals with all the information needed about rare earths, which is what Lynas is actually interested in, but…

…we can’t rely on local experts, you see. Locals are either incompetent, corrupt or liars. After all Malaysia has a maintenance problem, right?

This is why Malaysians would NEVER dream of:

• Flying on MAS…
• Flying on AirAsia…
• Having an operation in a Malaysian hospital…
• Going to a Malaysian-trained doctor…
• Letting a Malaysian architect design their house or their office buildings…
• Allowing a Malaysian laboratory to check if they have dengue…
• Allowing Malaysian engineers anywhere near anything like an oilrig or a gas pipeline or a bridge…
• Having a nuclear reactor running and operating in Bandar Baru Bangi for the past 28 years…

I could go on and on, but do I really need to say more?

And here’s the ultimate irony. Who are the experts the Malaysian Government is calling in, in order to please the panicked folk out there who don’t have any technical background and haven’t a clue what rare earths are?

People from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency. Yep, the same place that had a Malaysian — in the person of my husband — as a Deputy Director-General for over six years, in charge of — get this, technical assistance and cooperation.

That’s right, the International Atomic Energy Agency trusted a Malaysian, but Malaysians don’t trust their own.

I have a spam filter on the comments, and it catches most of the rubbish.

What puzzles me is what some of the spam actually is. There is stuff in Chinese, Japanese and Russian. How many people reading my blog would actually read those languages?

And why do you think someone would bother to post this (computer generated?) nonsense – on a very old blog entry:

I be enduring infer from a insufficient of the articles on your website at this very moment, and I really like your line of blogging. I added it to my favorites trap age list and disposition be checking promote soon. Will check into public notice my put as ok and vindicate me be acquainted with what you think. Thanks.

What are they selling?

Sometimes such nonsense has an “anonymous” signature that can be clicked on (which I never do), but surely – even if I did allow the comment to be published – no one would be idiot enough to click on the signature of such twaddle. And who’s even going to see it when it’s a comment on a blog post that I wrote 3 years ago?

If I was going to send out spam aimed at bringing people to my website, I think I could think up something better than a pathetic attempt like this one. And there are stacks of it, just as silly and futile. Boy, do some people follow poor business models.

And just for a real laugh, did any of you see this (via Making Light)?

You know how the conversation goes, “Oh, you’re from Australia? Do you know X? He’s from there too.”
And you carefully explain that no, you don’t know X. (And is it any wonder, when the population of Australia is over 20 million…)

So I am wondering how the conversation went when a Malaysian friend of ours, who was staying at a youth hostel in London, bumped into my Australian niece there, whom he hadn’t previously known existed, and they both found out that the degree of separation between them was … 1.

Namely, me.

So what’s your story about a huge coincidence?

Washington (CNN) — The Department of Defense recently purchased and destroyed thousands of copies of an Army Reserve officer’s memoir in an effort to safeguard state secrets, a spokeswoman said Saturday…

…at least one seller on the online auction site eBay claiming to have a first-edition printing is selling it for an asking price of nearly $2,000…

(From CNN US news, September 25th)

My comment? The Pentagon has never heard of the digital age. And can anyone persuade them to take a dislike to my books too?

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This morning and part of the afternoon was spent at the Immigration Department today. I have no complaints about the department, especially when I remember what it was like all of forty-one years ago, in the old British colonial buildings with long ceiling fans moving the air about as much as a passing bumble bee.

Now it’s airconditioned and the staff are efficient and pleasant and helpful, the business is all done with in a day.

However, once a year my husband and I have to make this trek. Sixty kms there and 60 kms back and a whole morning plus. A payment as well, to get a stamp in my passport saying I am granted another year to stay in Malaysia with my husband of 44 years. Inevitably, one of the immigration dept staff will look thoroughly puzzled and ask why I haven’t got permanent residence. They – and who can blame them – really don’t want to be bothered with this couple turning up every year wasting their time and effort for…er…what?

It’s not their choice. It’s the wisdom of the registration department who decided I am some sort of undesirable. You see, I committed the “sin” of giving up my PR when my husband was seconded (by the government, mind you!!) to the UN. We were away almost 9 years. When I came back, I did all the right things and was finally, after a certain number of years, permitted to re-apply for PR. The application was turned down without explanation – and a “no correspondence will be entered into”. In other words, we aren’t going to tell you why. Maybe they just couldn’t think of a reason?

And so, we make our annual pilgrimage. Husband has to take time off from his (government) job and come with me because he has things to sign and has to do it in person.

But this cannot go on indefinitely. If my husband were to die before me, I’d be persona non grata and have to leave, possibly at very short notice.

And so one day, we will go elsewhere. My husband – a respected senior government officer with numerous government awards – will take his numerous skills and knowledge, and I will take my income (money which comes in on a regular basis from overseas – doing its little bit for the local economy!) and we will both go somewhere where I am welcomed, no matter what the future holds.

Neither of us understand why this has to be so.
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Drove down to Devon to meet my agent today, which involved transversing darkest Somerset. So Cheryl Morgan, Somerset resident, warned us to look out for wyverns – but maybe Somerset has left the dragon age behind and entered the era of steam punk.

Engine 5521 was on the rampage, apparently hellbent on making roadkill of our our pursuing VW Golf.

• The personal preacher to the Pope has “likened accusations against the pope and the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal to ‘collective violence’ suffered by the Jews…” WHAT? Criticism of an organisation that covers up horrendous child abuse by some of its membership and makes it possible for the abusers to go on abusing for decades – is said to be akin to the ‘collective violence’ suffered by people of a particular religious persuasion?? (Verbal, justifiable criticism = the Holocaust?)

Wow, that’s a jump.

• In Australia, over Easter, the Catholic Church was busy blaming atheists for everything. It seems, according to the bishop of NSW, that atheists are responsible for “Nazism, Stalinism, Pol-pottery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships…” Wow again. But not child abuse, I see. Atheists – you are in the clear on that one.

To me, that kind of thinking has the same twisted logic as Muslim = Terrorist. Or in fact, all Catholic priests = child abusers. If you don’t like people saying it about you, they maybe you shouldn’t say it about others.

• And here in Malaysia, a married, working mother of two young physically-disadvantaged children has a beer and as a direct or indirect result, loses her job, is divorced by her husband, is unable to look for another job because the religious authorities have kept her hanging for eight months waiting for the sentencing (of caning) to be carried out. At one stage she remarked that she wanted to be caned just to get it over and done with. Now the caning has been commuted to 3 weeks community service at a children’s home.

You know what? I doubt that this was a case where the ultimate result – eight months of loss of income; eight months of stress, publicity and humiliation; strains on a marriage resulting in divorce and single parenthood of two children needing special care – was punishment appropriate to the crime.
All that for a beer??
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When a hate-fueled mob of religious idiots start to demonstrate, what do you do to counter their vicious idiocy?

Here’s a young guy who found the perfect answer. You work it so that the bigots unwittingly are instrumental in donating money to the causes they hate. Love it.

Now I just wish I could work out how to do something similar to people who ban books and seize whatever takes their fancy here in Malaysia: a book on ovarian cysts, a young adult fantasy novel, a book on feminist theory…anything their tiny little minds can’t appreciate. Or are they just collecting reading matter for their families? We don’t know because they never tell us what their criteria is. Or in fact explain anything…

My theory is that they can’t speak English and therefore judge a book by its cover.
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My husband has worked most of his life to bring opportunities to students in the national language of this country, and to keep standards high.

At ten years of age, he knew four words/expressions in English (yes, no, all right, thank you) and the number of opportunities open to kids of his age group was almost non-existent.

When he was asked at this age what he wanted to be, he said “Chief Clerk”. That was the highest ranking individual that he knew of — other than the British, of course, who, back then (and for reasons that seem inexplicable when viewed from today), thought they had a right to rule the country and be the boss of everyone while they ripped them off economically.

The ten-year-old boy could not dream of anything higher than chief clerk, because if you were a Malay with no English, you never went higher than that.

So where has education in the Malay language from kindy to university – Malaysian, Bahasa, or whatever you want to call it – got us? Not very far, if you hear this story:

This is related by a university lecturer from a VERY prestigious university in this country (fortunately, not the one my husband teaches at.)

I won’t name the uni, or the department, or even the subject. But here’s an incident from last week.

The lecturer was giving a lecture in their subject, but got the feeling that the students were a bit lost. Thinking that perhaps the students didn’t have the historical background to understand the subject of this particular lecture, the lecturer asked (and remember, this is all in Malay language to a group of students who have attended Malay language schools all their lives): ‘What do you know about black culture in the USA?’
The students admitted, not much.
The lecturer then asked a question it would never have occurred to me to ask anyone: ‘Why is there such a large minority of black African-Americans in the US in the first place?’
One student, tentatively: ‘They came looking for a better life?’
Lecturer (who must have been in a state of shock by this time) probed a bit deeper, but no student had anything to add to that. They admitted they didn’t know.
Did they know that the USA had a system of slavery in its history?
No. Really?Did they? Wow!
Have they read/seen/heard of “Gone with the Wind”?
No.
Perhaps desperate for some reassurance, the lecturer then asked if they had heard of Shakespeare.
No.
What about Romeo and Juliet? (Real desperation here).
The Russian Revolution? The French Revolution?
No.

Remember, the lecturer was not asking for in-depth knowledge. All they wanted was general knowledge – the sort of thing you might pick up from the news, or newspapers, the internet, books, films, TV…

But here were a group of university students who have been so cradled by an education system and a culture that appears to be (from this example) totally inward-looking and insular and that offers – apparently – very little to even the brighter students that is not related to local affairs.

Yes, I know this is only one incident of anecdotal evidence. But I am still horrified that it can occur. At that age – as an Australian student – I could have talked a little about, say, Russian classical literature, music and ballet; I could have said something intelligent about the Inca or Mayan culture, the Taiping Rebellion or Japanese Samurai or the San Fransisco earthquake of 1906, or Halley’s Comet, or Robespierre or Trotsky or Margaret Mitchell, or Sputnik or the Moghuls or Saladin or Beethoven or Ulan Bator or Homer or Carthage or apartheid or the Boer War or the formation of Israel or of Pakistan. I could have been much more intelligent about the political affairs of the day, whether it was Tom Mboya or the assassination of JFK.

So where have we gone with Malaysia’s education system that we can produce university students of such appalling ignorance? Or maybe I’m the one who is out of step? Perhaps in this day and age we shouldn’t learn anything outside our field of expertise, because if you need it, you can always “look it up”?
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