Words for Freedom

Missed the grand opening for the World Press Freedom Day at Central Market yesterday but was happy to meet a couple of important advocates for freedom of expression for the first time.

One was controversial blogger Jeff Ooi, pictured here with Animah Kosai and Sarah; the other director for Centre for Independent Journalism, Sonia Randhawa. I also met up again with Rocky.

I was very happy to pick up a couple of CIJ's publications for free: Instant expert: The Malaysian Media and Freedom of Expression and the Media.

Animah and I had agreed to do readings. (Or rather, I got roped in, so I roped Animah in!) My friend Diana Cooper also turned up to support. (Many thanks!)

The event was an hour later in starting (apparently because some folks wanted to go and have lunch). We got tired and hungry and hot waiting around and went to have some lunch ourselves. A good discovery was that the Indian restaurant in the annexe has some of the best tandoori chicken and naan I've tasted.

When the event finally got going, the appalling sound system meant that the readers couldn't be heard clearly. Tshiung Han See read something that turned out to be a war poem by Robert Bly. (He gave me his copy afterwards.)

A couple of young guys got up and read pieces in Tamil. (It would have been really nice if they could at least have said what they were reading.) A girl strummed a guitar and sang Bird on the Wire.

I read the piece by Asli Erdogan in my best schoolteacherly manner, trying to be as loud as possible to compensate for the distorting microphone. Animah read a verse from the Quran (remind me which one again, Animah!) which fitted the theme very well and then a very effective extract from Brecht's Gallileo.

We snuck out early, unable to bear the poor sound quality and the heat any longer.

There are some nice pictures of the opening on Jeff's blog.

Mrs. Malaprop and a Circumcised Car

I get a little mention at the end of Rehman Rashid's column in the New Straits Times today. Rehman reckons that portions of his previous piece in which he talked about bloggers:

... previously appeared, to deleterious effect, in a posting on Sharon Bakar’s estimable Bibliobibuli weblog

(Here's the piece.)

Ashamed to say that I wasn't sure what "deleterious" meant and had to look it up! (Was I being praised or having my knuckles slapped? Apparently the latter!). Which is actually the point of Rehman's article today in which he celebrates a love of words.

For I love and respect words. I love their precision and subtlety. And I love the sound of them; the way they form in the mind to trip off the fingertips or tongue; their rhythm, cadence and melody. I would be lost without them to flow across the contours of my feelings, giving them form and meaning, rendering them recognisable, palpable, and sometimes manageable.

I must confess that I like a writer bold enough to use the full palette of the English vocabulary with as much relish and abandon as Rehman.

Anthony Burgess and Will Self are other authors I admire for their linguistic appropriations.

The New Statesman even awarded an IgNoble Prize to Self:

... vocabulary builder, for the largest, most colourful and most dynamically obscure collection of words, phrases, neologisms and archaisms ever assembled, such as crulge, gubbertushed, and pastorauling.

Academic Suzanne Keen writes of Burgess' vocabulary:

... his love of odd words, old words, off-the-beaten-track words, his fascination with foreign tongues, etymologies, and dialects, has the effect of encrusting his fiction with a scumbled surface of language ...

I suspect Malaysians who read and love language are often so scared of being considered "bombastic" (a word I'd never even heard before I came to Malaysia! What does that tell you?) that they tend to limit themselves to the mundane and the cliched. There is a tendency here to stylistic safety and sameyness (does that word exist? Who cares!). Hurray for the writer who dares to purloin, snaffle, appropriate, coin, jiggle and juggle words.

Johnson (my crazy friend and noisy ex-colleague from teacher-training days) talks with relish about all the big words she'd managed to squeeze into her Reading University Masters thesis.

When her tutor tried to get her to simplify her vocabulary she pointed out that she'd carried these much loved words around with her for years, afraid to use them in the Malaysian context ... and now couldn't she ... just break out a little and slip them in?

Her tutor gave way.

The "vitruperation" about Rehman's "lexical choices" did indeed echo around the blogosphere ... and surprised me. I was pissed off by (and upset with) with Rehman's blanket condemnation of bloggers, but was amazed at how quickly - and with what vehemance - the comments targeted his writing style.

I was too lazy to write about it at the time, but being the pedantic English teacher that I am, I wanted to pick Jeff Ooi up on this post (clearly aimed at Rehman) and drum into him what a malapropism actually is!

A phrase like "monomaniacal nimrod with piscatorial propensities" (an example Jeff borrows from Zorro-unmasked) is yes, hilariously overblown, but it is not an example of a malapropism. (Luckily Jeff's more skilled at detecting other ... ahem ... textual abnormalities.)

And if the dictionaries are to be believed, there is no such verb in English as "malaprop". But then if we are encouraging inventive word play and the coining of new words in this post, we should let that one go! (Maybe award it a bouquet of jasmines!)

Another Johnson anecdote nicely illustrates what a malapropism is. (Indeed we called Johnson Mrs. Malaprop after Sheridan's famous character because she was always confusing words that sounded alike. It happened I think because her head was always half a mile ahead of her mouth.)

One day when we were driving out to school to watch a student in my (then) new Peugeot, I had to execute a rather sharp u-turn.

What Johnson meant to say was" "Does your car have a tight turning circle?"

What actually slipped out was .... "Has your car been circumcised?"

Enjoy your love of language, Rehman. And thanks for adding "deleterious" to my vocab this morning.

Silencing Cyberspace

Here's a talk I'd love to go to if I didn't have to be somewhere else Tuesday night. I hope that it gets written up in detail on the blogs. I took this from Jeff's blog in the passed on passed on nature of internet things.

SILENCING CYBERSPACE - THE FINAL FRONTIER?

Date: 6 February2007 (Tuesday)
Time: 7.30 pm
Venue: KL & Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall

Speakers:

* Mr Yeo Yang Poh, President of the Malaysian Bar Council
* Mr Jeff Ooi, Pioneer Malaysian Blogger
* Ms Sonia Randhawa, Executive Director, Centre for Independent Journalism
* Mr Lim Kit Siang, Parliamentary Opposition Leader
* Mr Lim Guan Eng, Secretary-General of DAP

As of today, we have the Printing and Publications Act 1984 which provides that it is a criminal offense to possess or use a printing press without a licence granted by the Internal Security Minister. The Minister is given "absolute discretion" in the granting and revocation of licences, which is required to be renewed on a yearly basis.

We do not require such an Act to govern us in the cyberspace. The Bill of Guarantees of the Multimedia Super Corridor project assures us, Malaysians, and the world that there will be no censorship of the Internet.

Whatever your take on the case at hand (the NST v. Jeff and Rocky Bru) the debate that is thrown up is vitally important, and freedom of speech must be safeguarded.

The Centre for Independent Journalism meanwhile offers a downloadable copy of a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents produced by Reporters Without Borders which should be compulsory reading for all who venture online.

As the blurb says:

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.

Zedeck Siew, Kakiseni editor, echoes my sentiments too when he writes:

Ahirudin and Jeff Ooi (of Screenshots, who is also being sued) are de facto public intellectuals, providing commentary on Malaysian issues for the Greater Good; this censure -- considering the NSTP has a plethora of alternative actions to debunk Rocky and Jeff’s opinions, avenues that would not stink of hammer-headed censorship -- is like impaling someone just to improve his posture. A government sanctioned sula, too. Our Prime Minister: “They cannot hope to cover themselves or hide from the laws.” We thought we were done with the Middle Ages.

My apologies for not giving you your fix of biblionews earlier in the day - my internet connection is still giving me big problems, but should be fixed tomorrow.

Malaysian Bloggers Sued

Am deeply shocked by the news that Malaysian Bloggers Jeff Ooi and Rocky aka Ahirudin Attan are to be sued by the New Straits Times over their whistle-blowing re. former editor Brendan Pereira's (alleged - let's play safe, no matter what one really feels) plagiarism of a Mitch Albom article.

All I intend to say about the case here is that I feel that it is really sad that the whole issue could not have been handled without gun-slingers needing to turn up at high noon. But then it really is, as BBC correspondent Jonathan Kent said earlier, a case of new vs. old media. There's a subtext, and it's one all bloggers should tune into.

Lim Kit Siang agrees:

As these are the first two cases of Malaysian bloggers being sued for defamation, it will have far-reaching consequences for the healthy, mature and democratic growth for free speech and expression, not only on the Internet but in the country as a whole.

It's not often I plug a law book on this blog but might I suggest that all parties purchase and read immediately Richard A. Posner's newly published The Little Book of Plagiarism which the New York Times describes as "a useful and remarkably concise overview of the subject". The book sets out to address such questions as:

... what exactly is plagiarism? How has the meaning of this notoriously ambiguous term changed over time as a consequence of historical and cultural transformations? Is the practice on the rise, or just more easily detectable by technological advances? How does the current market for expressive goods inform our own understanding of plagiarism? Is there really such a thing as “cryptomnesia,” the unconscious, unintentional appropriation of another’s work? What are the mysterious motives and curious excuses of plagiarists?

and most importantly in this case:

What forms of punishment and absolution does this “sin” elicit?

Also go read Rocky's blog (and he's looking for a lawyer to represent him).