Rycroft in her own words

As Quillblog recently reported, Nicole Rycroft, the executive director of Markets Initiative, took part in a pro-Tibetan demonstration late last week wherein she and four others spread a banner that read “Free Tibet” over an Olympic billboard in Beijing.

Rycroft was arrested and immediately sent home to Vancouver. She recounted her experience for Quillblog today.

We unfurled a banner at about six o’clock in the morning, Beijing time, on Friday to bring attention to the continuing grave human rights situation in Tibet…. We needed to remain flexible [regarding the location] because security is very tight in Beijing at the moment…. The billboard [we chose] was outside the China Central Television building. That building is very striking architecturally and is part of the modern face of China. You see it a lot in new promotional material about Beijing, and also its being the CCTV building is symbolic from a freedom of speech perspective because it’s the [centre for] state-controlled media, or propaganda mouthpiece, of the Chinese regime.

I rappelled down the front of the billboard alongside the banner and another climber, Phil from the U.K., rappelled down the other side of the banner. We were down stabilizing the banner because it was very gusty, probably for 25 minutes to half an hour. The CCTV building is on a fairly major thoroughfare in downtown Beijing. There were probably 20 or 30 police in front of the billboard, and most of those had cameras or video cameras. There were a couple of international film crews. On the back side of the billboard where the scaffolding was there were another 15 to 20 police and then an equal number of paramilitary personnel that arrived on the scene. We had two people on the ground on the back side and a support person on the top to make sure our ropes stayed safe.

[We decided to come down] when the plainclothed police reached the top. Our support person at the top gave us a very clear signal that it was time to come up. At that point, we weren’t in danger, but it was clear that we needed to move.

We were treated well. Obviously, the Chinese authorities are handling this quite smartly. There’s obviously a lot of international attention on … the Chinese government and how they will be treating dissenting voices.

I was held for six or seven hours and then I was put on a plane that I had already booked for that afternoon…. The support I’ve received on returning home has been very heartwarming. I’ve been really appreciative – from small notes to phone calls… But really, [...] as an individual, as a person of conscience, as a former athlete, I was willing to put my personal safety on the line to bring world attention to the situation in Tibet. It’s terrible – people are being tortured, Tibetans are literally dying for the most basic human rights. More than six million have been engaged in a non-violent struggle for their independence and their homeland for more than 60 years. Largely, the rest of the world has watched the Chinese military machine roll over the Tibetan people…. I’m under no illusion that things are going to change overnight in Tibet, but if we look back on history, change does happen.

Another interview with Rycroft can be found on The Tyee‘s website.

Nicole Rycroft of Markets Initiative busted in Beijing

Nicole Rycroft, the executive director of Markets Initiative, has been arrested in Beijing for her part in a pro-Tibet demonstration. According to her spokesperson, Bruce Walsh, Rycroft scaled a wall near the China Central Television building in downtown Beijing and unfurled a banner, which read “Free Tibet” in English and Chinese. Swaddled in a Tibetan flag, she then rapelled back down again.

Along with four other activists, Rycroft was picked up by the Beijing police shortly after the stunt took place in the early morning hours. Students for a Free Tibet, the group that organized the demonstration, has been closely monitoring the situation since then. According to the official release, the activists’ whereabouts are “currently unknown,” though Walsh says he expects that Rycroft has been released and put on a plane home. “They want the protesters to go away as quickly and quietly as possible,” he says.

In her native Australia, Rycroft was an elite track athlete who competed on a national level. She was on track to join the Olympic team before a back injury scuttled those plans.

Since then, “she’s put all her drive as an athlete into being an individual activist and humanitarian,” says Walsh. “It was really important for her to [go to Beijing] because she has strong feelings about the ideals behind the games, which she feels have been totally corrupted by what China represents.”

This isn’t the first time Rycroft has put her own safety on the line in pursuit of humanitarian goals. Before joining Markets Initiative, Rycroft worked to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in western Burma, which she blamed in part on China’s support of the Rangoon regime. “She smuggled refugees through the Burmese-Thai border jungles under mortar attack,” says Walsh. “China has been in her sights for some time.”

Walsh stresses that Rycroft took part in the demonstration as an individual, and not in her capacity at Markets Initiative.

(Below is a picture of the event, courtesy of SFA.)

Tories cancel cultural travel grants

From the Toronto Star:

The federal government has scrapped a travel assistance program to promote Canadian culture abroad, suggesting it catered to fringe groups, the well-off and left-wingers.

The decision yesterday to cancel the $4.7 million program offered by Department of Foreign Affairs effective March 31, 2009, drew sharp rebuke from critics, with one calling it yet another example of censorship by the government.

[...]

Gwynne Dyer, who received $3,000 to give lectures in Canadian foreign policy and defence issues in Cuba in March 2007, was described as a “left-leaning columnist and author who has plenty of money to travel on his own.”

In another case, the North-South Institute received $18,000 to help co-ordinate a Caribbean-Cuban conference in Havana in December 2006. The institute was described as a “left-wing anti-globalization think tank.

“Why are we paying for these people to attend anti-western conferences in Cuba?” the anonymous author asked.

Former CBC journalist Avi Lewis, now a reporter with Al Jazeera, was described a “general radical” who could easily afford to travel on his own dime.

A production company, Klein Lewis Productions, co-owned by him and his wife, Naomi Klein, an author and social activist, received a grant of $3,500 to promote the film The Take at films festivals in New Zealand and Australia.

“Klein has sold millions of books, and certainly does not need $3,500 from the government of Canada,” the note stated.

The issue of whether Dyer or Lewis could have paid their own way is irrelevant – although, okay, they probably could have – this is just more pettiness and narrow-minded ideological puritanism from a government that seems to be staffed entirely with cranky AM radio hosts.

Pullman leads U.K. children’s author revolt

As we noted in Quillblog last week, British children’s book publishers are gearing up to begin putting recommended age ranges on the covers of all their books. According to a new piece in The Daily Telegraph, however, a lot of big-name authors – led by none other than Philip Pullman – are drawing a line in the sand in protest.

Mr. Pullman told The Daily Telegraph: “I don’t mind anybody having an opinion about my books. I don’t mind a bookseller deciding they are for this age group or that, or a teacher giving one of my books to a child because they think it is appropriate.

“But I don’t want to see the book itself declaring officially, as if with my approval, that it is for readers of 11 and upwards or whatever. I write books for whoever is interested. When I write a book I don’t have an age group in mind.

“I have had letters from children of seven who say they have read all the way through His Dark Materials and they have an astonishing knowledge of it. But not every child is the same. A child of nine might be tentative and unsure about reading, and to give them a book that says 9+ will reinforce their sense of failure. The book should be suited to the individual child.”

Anyone unsure as to whether a particular book is appropriate should ask the bookseller, Mr Pullman said.

This week in Fahrenheit 451 history

May 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the most infamous book burning in history – on that date in 1933, over 20,000 books banned by Germany’s Nazi regime, including works by Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, and H.G. Wells, were set aflame in Berlin’s public square by Nazi youth groups.

To mark the anniversary, Abebooks.com has an overview of the various authors and books banned at the time, and has posted feature interviews with three experts on book-burning, including Australian author Matt Fishburn, whose debut non-fiction work Burning Books is due to be published this month. In the Q&A, Fishburn discusses why books are burned so often throughout history:

“People love a celebratory bonfire, especially when it can symbolize a letting go of the past: burning old photos, marking a graduation by burning a hated textbook, or the like. [...] Tellingly, in the US (and no doubt in other countries) many universities had an impromptu tradition of turning a blind eye to their graduating class burning their textbooks at the end of semester in a great bonfire. Indeed, when the Nazi fires were first reported in 1933, this was one of the most common comparisons made – the fires in Germany were, after all, organized by students and took place relatively early in the new regime. Nor is it idle to point out that such burnings are always a great spectacle. In Berlin there were marching bands, torchlight processions, group singing and college songs, parades, movie cameras, and members of the cultural elite.

“This is not meant to trivialize the impact of any such bonfire. Most officially sanctioned fires are designed to control, and to announce what they stand for and what will be accepted under their rule. Burnings like those of the Nazis have something in common with the early modern burning of books in Europe. They announced what would be acceptable in future, and in the process shaped the new public sphere. The book burnings are the symbol; the repressive legislation that came in its wake was what enforced it.”

Paris book fair boycotted by Islamic countries

The Salon du Livre, an international book fair in Paris, is being boycotted by a coalition of Islamic nations unhappy with the decision to award the ‘Pavilion of Honour’ to Israeli writers.

From The Guardian:

The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Isesco) has urged its 50 members to boycott the fair, which starts on March 14. So far, Iran, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and Tunisia have confirmed they are to pull out.

A statement issued by Isesco said that “the crimes against humanity Israel is perpetrating in the Palestinian territories” make it an unworthy recipient of the honour.

Christine de Mazières, speaking for the French Publishers’ Association who organise the Salon, said it was an unfortunate move. “What is happening in the Middle East is very sad, but it is not linked to our event.” Israel, she stressed, was not being honoured for its politics but for its writers, such as Amos Oz and David Grossman, both of whom are due to appear at the event. All of the countries now pulling out, Ms de Mazières said, were aware of the Israeli honour at the time they signed up.

Oz and Grossman are both outspoken peace activists and highly critical of Israeli aggression.

Martin Amis throws vinegar in old wound, opens new one

The latest salvos in the Amis/Eagleton polemic come from the increasingly rancorous novelist himself, who penned an earnest rebuttal in Saturday’s Guardian – “No, I am not a racist,” pleads the headline – and then glibly ran his mouth at a debate on Monday night. At the talk at Manchester University, where Amis and Eagleton both teach, Amis revisted the incendiary subject that got him into hot water in the first place – namely, the discovery of an alleged Islamist plot against the U.K. in August 2006.

At a debate at Manchester University, where the novelist is head of creative writing, he told a packed auditorium that only a machine would not have experienced “retaliatory urges” upon learning in August last year of the alleged plot to bomb transatlantic aircraft, in which, Amis said, 3,000 people could have died.

“There should be from every corner of the west a permanent factory siren of disgust for these actions,” he told students, staff and members of the public, including Afzal Khan, the first Muslim to be lord mayor of Manchester. He acknowledged Muslim efforts “to put their house in order” were made more difficult by the jihadis’ “monopoly on intimidation”.

Upon closer inspection, Amis seems to apologize in advance for the outburst in the Saturday piece, where he advises readers never to take a novelist at his word. Sort-of quoting Nabokov, he writes, “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letters, I talk like an idiot.”

So we’re likely to hear from Amis again, in considered prose, given that he continues to speak like an idiot.

But there was less assent when he went on to speak of a “distorted sympathy” towards Palestine. “I have sympathy for Israel. It’s not nothing to have six million of your number murdered in central Europe in the last century. Don’t you think that this has had a psychological effect on this race or religion, or whatever you want to call the Jews?

“Palestinians have never suffered anything as remotely terrible as that. There is an inexplicable numbness about Israel.”

Film version of The Kite Runner postponed

One of the more highly anticipated movie releases this fall is an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s enormously popular bestseller The Kite Runner, but it looks as if most of us will have to wait until after Christmas to see it. According to The Washington Post, the planned early November release has been pushed back so that the film’s two child stars – Afghan natives Zekeria Ebrahim and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada – can be evacuated from the country.

The move follows warnings that the two boys could face reprisal attacks over a scene in which Hassan, played by Ahmad Khan, is raped by an ethnic Pashtun thug.

[...]

Abdul Latif Ahmadi, president of Afghan Film, the state-run film company, said he and many others repeatedly warned The Kite Runner filmmakers, including producer E. Bennett Walsh and director Marc Forster, that that scene could provoke dangerous problems among religiously conservative Afghans, who might find it insulting.

[...]

“This is the mentality of the people in Afghanistan,” which has a 28 percent literacy rate, Ahmadi explained. “People don’t realize that it’s not true. When they watch a film, they accept it — it’s real, why did they do it?”

The film will be given a limited U.S. release on Dec. 14, in order to qualify for Oscar consideration, but it won’t open widely until sometime in January. The film won’t be released in Afghanistan at all, but, as The Washington Post points out, Afghanis will likely have many opportunities to see it on bootleg DVDs.

Oprah talks about If I Did It

If you’re like us, you’re probably getting real sick of hearing about O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It, but attention must be paid when the queen herself, Oprah, thrusts it back into the limelight. Yesterday, she invited the Goldman family onto her show to discuss the book and their decision to publish it, a choice for which they have been criticized. According to MSNBC, which has posted a good summation of the show’s highlights, Oprah said it was a “moral, ethical dilemma” for her to give more publicity to the book:

Winfrey acknowledged that her program often promotes books and authors, yet, she said, “I don’t want to be in the position to promote this book, because I, too, think it’s despicable.”

The MSNBC piece ends by stating that, as of yesterday, If I Did It was No. 8 in sales at Barnes and Noble and No. 52 on Amazon.com. According to a more recently updated piece on The Book Standard website, however, the book has subsequently shot up to No. 1 at Barnes and Noble and No. 2 on Amazon.com. Way to go Oprah…

Read a book, read a motherf@#%ing book

After U.S. National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman had finished freaking out over declining levels of American readership, bookselling blogger The Written Nerd looked at the stats from a more reassuring angle:

The [U.S. National Endowment for the Arts] survey states that 56% of Americans read any book in 2002 (that’s ANY book, not just “literary works,” which the survey focuses on).

The Associated Press/Ipsos survey says that 73% of Americans read any book last year (i.e. in 2006).

Therefore, if these two respected organizations are to be believed…

AMERICANS READ MORE LAST YEAR THAN THEY READ FIVE YEARS AGO.

Ah, numbers. So many different ways to interpret them. Good thing words aren’t like that!

Anyway, Freeman’s article raised the spectre of how to attract more people to reading:

Now that cigarettes are becoming less and less palatable in an actor’s hand, put a book there. If the NEA wants people to read, strong-arm a copy of William Carlos Williams’ The Doctor Stories onto Grey’s Anatomy. Companies which spend millions of advertising dollars articulating their brand could say a lot more for less by using books. Why doesn’t The Gap stock copies of On the Road?

The Black Entertainment Television network, as pointed out by GalleyCat, is helping out with that angle – sort of. BET’s new animation department has produced a music video that it says celebrates literacy and black pride.

Its cartoon rapper bounces on a piano, riffing on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and in his first line bellows, “Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book!” He goes on in a similar manner to encourage listeners to brush their teeth, care for their children, drink water instead of booze, and wear deodorant. Sound advice, to be sure, but it’s all accompanied by a plethora of profanities and stereotypical rap-video images.

A Los Angeles Times article covers the mixed reactions to the clip – some see it as a funny satire of the hip-hop industry; others find its rampant use of negative African-American stereotypes offensive.

The article also describes the parts of the video that most startled Quillblog:

In one scene, a gangster uses a book as a cartridge in an automatic weapon, while another shows a woman shaking her rear with “BOOK” printed on her low-riding pants.

Nothing says “reading is fun” like guns and booty-shaking, right?

(Thanks to GalleyCat for the link.)