Kester Brewin

Author: KB

  • Dave Eggers | Valentino Achak Deng | Sudan

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    I went to hear Dave Eggers in conversation with Valentino Achak Deng at the ICA this evening. It was wonderful, moving and sad and funny. Deng was one of the Lost Boys in Sudan. After his town was pillaged by militias, he got separated from his family and joined 4000 or so other young boys…

  • Freedom of Information ¦ Sodom and Gomorrah ¦ Power and Accountability

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    ‘Thought for the Day’ this morning was an excellent piece  by Martin Palmer. MP’s have recently voted to exclude themselves from their own Freedom of Information legislation – a move that has angered many. It seems the law-makers want everyone else to be accountable save themselves. Palmer made an interesting connection with Abraham’s bartering with…

  • Mary Douglas Has Died

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    Mary Douglas, whose work ‘Purity and Danger’ I am heavily indebted to for the ‘dirty’ bits of Signs of Emergence, has died. Obituary here. "In 1966, Douglas published her most celebrated work, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. This book is best remembered for its stylish demonstration of the ways…

  • First Pilotless Police CCTV Drone Launches

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    Following up on the recent post about CCTV, I just had to post this story. Am I alone in thinking this is seriously worrying? That we are sleepwalking into a Stasi-style surveillance society? Get your catapults and air guns loaded my friends, the battle starts here. Technorati: BBC | CCTV | Drone | Police |…

  • Divine Comedy vs Divine Tragedy

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    In a great piece of polemic, Julian Gough has written in Prospect this month about the tendency for Western literature to express itself in the tragic, rather than the comic: “Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely…

  • CCTV ¦ The All-Seeing (soc)i(ety) ¦ Faceless

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    KB

    The other day I was walking along our high street when I saw this ‘mobile CCTV’… tank parked up. They were snapping, so I thought it only polite to reciprocate. It seems we’ve totally resigned ourselves to being discreetly observed at all times. Speed cameras, CCTV, Congestion Charge cameras… I the novel I’ve been working…