Orwell the Blogger

Give a big welcome to a new blogger - a British author by the name of George Orwell who wrote, among much else, Animal Farm and 1984.

Well yes, I know that he actually died in 1950, but the clever folks who set up the Orwell Prize for political writing seem to have brought him back to life again by publishing his diaries online, at the rate of one blog post a day.

According to the BBC Tadio 4 website (where you can find podcasts of Orwell's son Richard Blair reading extracts) :

The diaries, written from 1938, cover the descent of Europe into war, as well as Orwell's travels in Morocco, following his sojourn in Catalonia, fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

But Orwell wrote about other issues beside politics :

... (he) was also interested in travel, food - and even slugs. ... he even includes newspaper clippings of sloe gin recipes.

Another famous dead author blog you might enjoy is that of the famous C17th diarist, Samuel Pepys, which I think is great enhanced by the use of hyperlinks to explain all the references. (This is, I think an example of digital literature working far better than the print version.)

These diaries seem to suit the medium so well that I have no doubts that if these guys were around today, both would have been happily blogging away!

Library in a Battle Zone

The battle to keep some semblance of normalcy in a corner of the world gone mad is chronicled in the diary entries of the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, Saad Eskander.

Saad is struggling to keep the central library open and replace the rare books and documents that have been destroyed despite:

... bombings, blockades, shootings, threats, shortages and petty frustrations that make up everyday life.

The diary is now available online via the British Library website, reports Patricia Cohen in the New York Times. Here's just a few of the things he has had to contend with:

As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets”; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered.”

A single poignant story that represents the whole mess that is Iraq.

Update (10/6/08) :

I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together." He claims to have paid special attention to women's rights.

Saad Eskanderhas more to say about running his library in heart-breaking timees in this interview by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian.

Dear Diary

Now this story might be more suited to Ripley's Believe It or Not than my blog.

I came across this wonderful story on the Kircher Society's website [via and via] of Robert Shields, a man who kept a diary for twenty years detailing every single thing that happened to him in entries written at five minute intervals. (A sample page of his diary can be found here, and the scary thing is how riveting it is!)

It is, of course, the longest diary in the world, and Shields has give the diary to Washington State University Library along with a $100,000 charitable trust to ensure that it will be cared for.

There is much such bizarro stuff on the Kircher Society's blog, I know I'm going to be wasting a lot of time there!

Freedom Writers Project

Brian from my writing class sent me this link to this BBC article about a writing project in a Philadelphia school which has completely changed the lives of inner-city teenagers.

Trey McCloud, 14, once refused to bring a pen to class but now has a passion for writing. ... (he) says he gets upset a lot and "breaks down". But when he reads aloud to his fellow classmates, he feels respect. Writing helps him release anger that he has been "storing up". And it has turned him around academically, his teacher Mr Galbraith says: "Trey showed the most rapid development of any student I've had, and that's after 13 years in the business."

It's inspiring stuff. So inspiring that Hollywood apparently wants in on it! Yet the BBC article barely scratches the surface of what is a truly wondrous story about the power of writing to reclaim and transform lives.

The Freedom Writing Project was born when an idealistic new teacher called Erin Gruwell decided to do something different with her class of alienated and so-called "unteachable" students who:

...mocked Erin's efforts and bet on how long she would last. Then, one day, Erin intercepted a student's racial caricature. Furious, she invoked the racism that led to the Holocaust. Receiving only blank stares, she realized the students had never heard of the Holocaust. But when she asked how many of them had been shot at, almost every student raised his or her hand.

Erin dispensed with the textbooks and brought in books by teens who had lived through racism and warfare, such as Anne Frank and Zlata Filipovic. This time, the students made a powerful emotional connection. With Erin, they began to document their own lives in individual, anonymous diaries. They called themselves the "Freedom Writers," to honor the Civil Rights activists known as the Freedom Riders. As they wrote, the class made a firm and lasting commitment to change.

And change they did. Every single one of her 150 students made it to college. Some of them became journalists, teachers and writers.

The project has a website which is well worth exploring. And a book about the project is due for release in 2007.