Subway is a nasty, horrible place where you are barked at by low paid youths in a strange language seemingly of their own devising. Years ago a work colleague encouraged me to go along, echoing one of their big selling points, which is that the sandwiches are all freshly made. What he didn't say was that they were freshly made using really shit ingredients. It doesn't help me one little bit that the piece of processed plastic cheese that sits in the middle of the bread that can probably withstand nuclear attack was only just put there. It still tastes of nothing and adheres itself to the roof of my mouth.
So, it's good to know that now I have a slightly more educated* reason for this instinctive hatred, courtesy of Mark Steel. Karl Marx argued that in an industrialised society workers become alienated from the things that they make. This is because "the garment or pot that they are making ceases to be a garment or a pot and becomes a commodity they must labour on for a wage" - that's a quote from Mark Steel, not Marx by the way.
With the advent of the production line method of working workers became even more alienated, as not only were they not connected to the benefits of what they produced but they were also often disconnected from the end product itself.
Steel argues that when applied to Subway we, the customers, have become a part of that process that the poor sods behind the counter are alienated from. So we stand there in a queue for rubbish food, fuming at being treated like an object while the staff have been conditioned into seeing us as part of a production line. Everyone's a loser!!
Oh, and if you want this with added jokes on top then you'll have to read Mark's latest book.
*where "educated" = "intellectually pretentious", perhaps
Monday 4 May 2009
Sunday 1 March 2009
Who killed the Bishop?
Last year my favourite book was Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel which is partially set in the Trujillo-era Dominican Republic. I'd previously enjoyed Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, a story which also looked into the corruption and violence of that time in the country's recent history. So, I was intrigued to read that Junot Diaz was less than complementary about Vargas Llosa and wondered why.
When I looked around I kept on finding references back to another book, Francisco Goldman's "The Art of Political Murder", so I went out and bought that. Goldman is a novelist and journalist and this is an extended piece of journalism following the bludgeoning to death of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. Gerardi, who had been associated with Liberation Theology, was killed almost immediately after the publication of "Guatemala: Never Again" a 1400 page report detailing "the 'disappearances' massacres, murders, torture and systemic violence that had been inflicted upon the population of Guatemala since the beginning of the 1960s".
Goldman's book starts with the murder and soon dives into the chaos that ensued. With multiple characters involved, many of whom turn out to be not quite who they seem at first, the situation is a mightily confusing one. Early on the authorities chief suspect appears to be a fellow priest's elderly German Shepherd dog. In a macho culture it isn't long before the investigators are alleging a clandestine gay liaison to have resulted in the 75 year-old bishop's death. Witnesses, both potential and actual, disappear or are killed.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the church authorities didn't trust the government investigators and so they set up their own investigative team called "Los Intocables", The Untouchables. The majority of the book traces the work that these few, quite insanely brave young men undertake to try and get at the truth.
It's a sharply written piece that, for me, worked by virtue of first making me quite utterly confused as to what could have been going on and then showed how the strands of the investigation were able to knit together some kind of sense from all the obfuscations and false trails that the murderers had laid.
It's a book that raised a lot of questions in my mind. How do you try and establish a functioning democracy in a place that is so screwed up by years of foreign interference and civil war? How would I react in such circumstances? There are homeless drunks in this tale who act with a courage I doubt that I could find. And for a secular lefty, just how easy is it to read a story where the Catholic Church and the Americans turn out to be the goodies?
Oh, and Vargas Llosa? Well, very early on he wrote an article supporting the theory that it was the dog that did it. After reading this I think I get a sense for why Junot Diaz doesn't respect him for that.
When I looked around I kept on finding references back to another book, Francisco Goldman's "The Art of Political Murder", so I went out and bought that. Goldman is a novelist and journalist and this is an extended piece of journalism following the bludgeoning to death of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. Gerardi, who had been associated with Liberation Theology, was killed almost immediately after the publication of "Guatemala: Never Again" a 1400 page report detailing "the 'disappearances' massacres, murders, torture and systemic violence that had been inflicted upon the population of Guatemala since the beginning of the 1960s".
Goldman's book starts with the murder and soon dives into the chaos that ensued. With multiple characters involved, many of whom turn out to be not quite who they seem at first, the situation is a mightily confusing one. Early on the authorities chief suspect appears to be a fellow priest's elderly German Shepherd dog. In a macho culture it isn't long before the investigators are alleging a clandestine gay liaison to have resulted in the 75 year-old bishop's death. Witnesses, both potential and actual, disappear or are killed.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the church authorities didn't trust the government investigators and so they set up their own investigative team called "Los Intocables", The Untouchables. The majority of the book traces the work that these few, quite insanely brave young men undertake to try and get at the truth.
It's a sharply written piece that, for me, worked by virtue of first making me quite utterly confused as to what could have been going on and then showed how the strands of the investigation were able to knit together some kind of sense from all the obfuscations and false trails that the murderers had laid.
It's a book that raised a lot of questions in my mind. How do you try and establish a functioning democracy in a place that is so screwed up by years of foreign interference and civil war? How would I react in such circumstances? There are homeless drunks in this tale who act with a courage I doubt that I could find. And for a secular lefty, just how easy is it to read a story where the Catholic Church and the Americans turn out to be the goodies?
Oh, and Vargas Llosa? Well, very early on he wrote an article supporting the theory that it was the dog that did it. After reading this I think I get a sense for why Junot Diaz doesn't respect him for that.
Thursday 22 January 2009
Bewdley Walk
For Christmas Secret Santa gave me some laminated maps of walks around Bewdley. So, when I had a bit of a snafu with my course last Saturday and wasn't able to do any studying I decided to take myself off and do the Dowles Brook and Beyond route below.
View Larger Map
Start time: 1.20pm
Finish time: 3.05pm
Distance: 5.5 Miles
The walk starts from the car park and goes along the river for a bit. Across on the other side I saw one of the old steam trains on the Severn Valley Railway, chooching along, blowing smoke and sounding its whistle.
After about a mile or so the path turns away from the river and starts up along by Dowles Brook, which also follows the old disused railway line. You have to cross the Dowles Road, but apart from that it is a lovely, gentle country walk up to the now rather decrepit Knowles Mill. A couple I met told me that they had taken pictures of the mill wheel but I didn't see it.
The top of the walk is at Lodge Hill Farm. From there the route follows the disused railway down to the car park at Dry Mill Lane. From the top of Dry Mill Lane it is nearly all road down into Bewdley. I was somewhat disappointed that the rest of the walk was on the road, except for the walk across the fields from the top of Tanners Hill.
At Tanners Hill you turn off the road and walk down to the Dowles Road, and when you do you get the best view of the walk, right across the Severn Valley. Again, I saw the trains from SVR and heard them whistling away. By now I was starting to think that I might find all this whistling a bit tedious if I lived in Bewdley, but hey.
Now, I had intended to do some fancy pants stuff with my new N96, but I hadn't charged it and the battery died as soon as I parked up in Bewdley. Ooops. For my next walk I'm going to try and master geo-tagging photos and also recording the walk using the GPS and Maps applications. And remember to take the car-phone charger doobrage with me so the phone's definitely got some charge.
I'm also determined to do more walking this year. It always shames me when I go away on a walking holiday and realise that I haven't done a decent walk since the last one. There are so many beautiful places so close to Brum to go for a stroll and I had this lovely healthy glow to me the rest of the day.
View Larger Map
Start time: 1.20pm
Finish time: 3.05pm
Distance: 5.5 Miles
The walk starts from the car park and goes along the river for a bit. Across on the other side I saw one of the old steam trains on the Severn Valley Railway, chooching along, blowing smoke and sounding its whistle.
After about a mile or so the path turns away from the river and starts up along by Dowles Brook, which also follows the old disused railway line. You have to cross the Dowles Road, but apart from that it is a lovely, gentle country walk up to the now rather decrepit Knowles Mill. A couple I met told me that they had taken pictures of the mill wheel but I didn't see it.
The top of the walk is at Lodge Hill Farm. From there the route follows the disused railway down to the car park at Dry Mill Lane. From the top of Dry Mill Lane it is nearly all road down into Bewdley. I was somewhat disappointed that the rest of the walk was on the road, except for the walk across the fields from the top of Tanners Hill.
At Tanners Hill you turn off the road and walk down to the Dowles Road, and when you do you get the best view of the walk, right across the Severn Valley. Again, I saw the trains from SVR and heard them whistling away. By now I was starting to think that I might find all this whistling a bit tedious if I lived in Bewdley, but hey.
Now, I had intended to do some fancy pants stuff with my new N96, but I hadn't charged it and the battery died as soon as I parked up in Bewdley. Ooops. For my next walk I'm going to try and master geo-tagging photos and also recording the walk using the GPS and Maps applications. And remember to take the car-phone charger doobrage with me so the phone's definitely got some charge.
I'm also determined to do more walking this year. It always shames me when I go away on a walking holiday and realise that I haven't done a decent walk since the last one. There are so many beautiful places so close to Brum to go for a stroll and I had this lovely healthy glow to me the rest of the day.
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