[16 retratos]

Okay. Have been spending the whole day reading about censorship and surveilance and about regulation of the internet. Still trying to cull something from more than 8000 words to 3000 words. Sigh..

Let me attempt to summarise what I’ve learnt here, and figure out my key argument for the M’sian case (which is the weak point of the paper right now).

ONI’s thesis on censorship, 3 levels:
1) “Brute” and overt. Static, easily noticed and increasingly easy to be circumvented. I.e. filtering (and data retention) at choke points (ISPs) on keywords and blacklists. E.g. “Great firewall of China”
2) Random and covert – happens at critical moments in the country’s political context (e.g. elections). Just in time. a) Technical – DDos attacks, hiring of patriotic hackers, harder to trace, harder to circumvent. Looks like normal network error. Dynamic b) Laws & norms – Use of norms and punitive measures to create a culture of self-censorship. Laws are used to enforce norms. Not necessarily ICT related laws (e.g. defamation, libel etc – sounds familiar?)
3) Subtle and discursive – using tactics of confusion, misinformation and information overload (not “credible” but adds to the discourse) to disable mobilising power of ICTs. I.e. using its nature to shape the discourse, the information. To see “cyberspace” as a military resource, and to invest in its development the same way as e.g. weapons. Back full circle it seems hey? With a bit of KGB thrown in. Also international coorperation and surveillance techniques (always aided by technologies – Lessig, Code 2.0) critical in its successful deployment (also applies in 2)

Heike’s thesis:
1) The nation-state is an imaginary concept of cohesive and mutually referencing identity. The role of the nation-state is to police this boundary, to maintain its rigidity (note to self: imperviousity: virus, migration, dirt and civilisation, imageries and symbols). Gendered order (heterosexual, hegemonic masculinity, race, body) is critical in the construction of these binaries
2) Web 2.0 – interactive, everyone is producer of discourse, self-authorship, everyone is potential receiver. Potential to disrupt gender order through transgressive sexualities – pornography, consumption, erotica (nts: Foucault – madness and civilisation, punishment – spectacle. Butler – performativity). Policing is critical. (WHY)
3) Censorship when understood through a woman’s reality, is much more about social censorship (violence, norms, economic inequalities – first set of barriers) than state censorship (second set of barrier). I.e. by principle, focussing on just the state is at minimum, epistemelogically unsound. Second, it explains a lot about ONI level 2 & 3 censorship phases even works. (STILL WHY)

Lessig Code 2.0:
1) Programming (code) is an important determinant of C & S (or the kind of “free and open” or “closely regulated” internet we have) – TCP/IP’s simplicity and openness (invisible man – anonymity) was designed, and commercial interests have layered all kinds of technology on this both app-based and infrastructure-based to show that it is really right now, a very regulate-able space.

2) Anonymity shattered:

a) Who – IP > ISP. Identity layer on TCP/IP designed by M$ (like the black box, “wallet” format idea being developed by EU to “protect privacy” – is M$ a partner in this?)
b) What – packet inspection. Now also packet inspection. Cookies.
c) Where – IP geo-tracing

Malaysia research (WHO and WHERE and WHAT and HOW)

Here’s where it gets tricky. Only now I’ve figured out what the M’sian research needs to answer.

1) CONTEXTUALISING (or proving?) WHY: The primary role of race relations in shaping all layers of the idea of nation. And race relations is often defined through marriage (where forcible change of identity is not just enacted by norms, but also by law). Sexuality at the core of this. Who, how many, when do you get put in jail for it etc. Policing of sexuality gets hysterical responses when transgressions threaten (lelaki lembut, Fatine, polygamy). Transgressive sexuality also used as a political weapon to discredit and dismantle – Anwar, Soil Leck, Eli etc. (is there an increase since Anwar?). Point: making the link/proof between sexuality, gendered hierarchies, ideas of citizenship (hierarchised) and the nation.

2) ROLE OF C & S IN THIS (HOW?): – Censorship is the platform for this to happen? Regulation of speech, information, bodies? Has it changed since mass adoption of the internet? What does it take? What has been used? Examples. Also reverberates with ONI’s level 2 – explains it?

3) WHERE: Challenges ideas of privacy. What kinds of spaces or debates when this kicks off – March 8 GE, Perak takeover, Katagender Fatwa project – all involved with sexuality, race relations, religion, citizenship – all tied together. Technology’s role in this. What is censored, how is it done, what is the role of technology in this, and the role of law, include surveillance. What about women’s rights sites being taken down? Subtle – not sure how it happens. Not helped by social censorship – technical know-how divested externally.

4) NATION VS INTERNATIONAL: Additional construction of self through orientalisation|mirrorisation of the “global other”. Malaysia truly Asia. Mahathir’s West vs Asian. Mahathirs’ “Vision 2020″ MSC rooted firmly in the developing world as a leader, whilst bending over backwards in subsidiaries and concession to court international expertise (temporary only understand?) and investment. This is a play of hegemonic masculinities. My prick may be small now, but it will be bigger than yours in a few winks. Why? Cause we can control our women better than you can! So we have better morals! Fuck this shit.

5) C & S (WHAT): It polices sexual boundaries. Sexual boundaries polices gendered boundaries. Gendered boundaries polices hegemonic masculinities. Hegemonic masculinities polices the nation state. The nation state policies idea of the “global”.

The “SO WHAT”? I don’t know la. Can’t think anymore. But I think I should have enough to hammer it out… esok.

There are a lot of things that puzzle me that I simply have no time to unravel. The automatic choice of the word “unravel” puzzles me. As though puzzles were a series of interlocking question marks that have been kicked about, gnawed and crocheted by a barrel of unhappy cats.

Black, Perak and Ghandi. To be frank.. I am tired of it all. I’m pretty sure I’m meant to be excited. To feel some kind of fire bubbling over inside me. The compelling force of outrage and quest for justice in the shape of democracy. It is exciting. Everyday, twitter is like a cliff-hanger, waiting to see what happens next. Who’s going to bring who to which imagined higher body over which clause and sentence under which law. It is extremely exciting to wait and see when the queer theory idea of the ludicrous will bring the house down. It’s almost funny. Hysterical. But I guess it can only be funny when you are a spectator and not one of the actors. By force or choice or by simple accident.

I lost my train of thought. And started thinking about mirrors. About two sides of a dirty 10 sen coin. Palmed from person to person. It can get so black that only McDonald’s chilli sauce is able to stain it clean.

Ran out of words again for today.

i can’t remember the first time i met you. it seems as though you have always been present, with a huge breathtaking hug and a smile that just knocks all doubts away. how can the world begin to spell the loss of you? i just saw a video in tribute to you. and you are there, speaking, your voice sounding just like how it always is, strong, questioning, challenging, always with a hint of a laugh underneath. i cannot remember the sound of your laughter, and that really hurts me.

do you know just how much you are loved? do you know how beautiful you are, in your presence, in your life, in everything that you do and touch and see? you are like the heart of a ripple, imperceptible and humble in your constant agitation of complacency. and we have not yet seen the end of those ripples you have caused. change upon change. awakening upon awakening. you inspire.

everytime i have the chance of having a conversation with you, i leave a fuller person. did you know you do that to people? you make me feel with earth under my feet, you make me think with the tireless spinning of webs inside my head, forming question marks that are sparked by fire, pushing me to act, however small my hands and feet, they can move and make and break and create. after each conversation, you make me believe that.

when i was drowning myself in a sea full of guilt and inadequacy, for not doing more, for not giving more, you were always so light and honest in your appreciation, all scales fall away and dissolve into resolve. it doesn’t matter. what matters is everything that is, and everything that could possibly be. humility. you teach me humility.

and you have opened me to a kind of love i did not realise is possible. without lines, without trade, without spaces. you are so wise. you are so sharp. you dance in the waves of cheeky laughter. you are truly, someone the world was not prepared to deserve. and is not prepared to lose.

there is an absence that a century of grieving could not shadow the form of exactly how deep, how much we have lost. all i know is i miss you so much. an insensible craving that cannot begin to grasp the fact that you are gone. with love toni. you are a magical blessing.

tahlil for toni kasim tonight (wed) at 7pm, at mosque near subang old airport. mosque has no name but apparently you jst do a 3 o’clock at the roundabout and you’ll see it. should last from maghrib to isya’. it’s not exactly a multi-faith ceremony but friends of all faiths are welcome to be in the mosque compound to remember her in everyone’s unique way. do pass the message on.

the internet has turned me into a one-click activist. all i need is connectivity, a kind of name, an email address. i don’t have to leave my room, i don’t even have to get up from my chair, i don’t have to experience or touch or smell. all i need to do is see through an interface, read and have a split second think. then insert my name and click.

today, i received an email that called for a petition to boycott an artist – Guillermo Vargas “Habacuc”- from representing his country at the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008. I’m not sure what the event is, apart from being some kind of art exhibition.

he definitely caught a stray dog from the streets, leashed it with a rope inside a gallery in nicaragua last year as his art piece for an exhibition entitled ‘Eres Lo Que Lees’ – ‘You Are What You Read’. The title is written on the wall with dog biscuits while the stray dog walks nearby, just out of reach, tied with a rope around his neck.

it caused outrage, understandably, and pictures were released and sent over the internet that showed the dog gradually starving to death. the gallery owner insists that the dog escaped and it was only tied for 3 hours during the exhibition, before which the artist fed the dog with food he brought himself. other petition sites pulled quotes from him here and there and concluded that he admitted to starve the dog to death.

whichever way the truth, there are currently more than 2 million signatures in support of the move to boycott this “animal-hating” artist.

on the flipside, the “One Million Signatures” campaign organised by Iranian women’s rights activists since 2006, demanding for changes in laws that discriminate against women has to date only managed to get slightly more than 7 thousand signatures.

so let’s see. artist drags stray dog to be exhibited as art, disputed intentions and conclusion of actual death, 2 million supporters. whole populations of women and men in a country facing clearly documented discrimination, violence and suppression, 7 thousand odd supporters.

so the one-click activist is not only lazy in terms of activism, but also lazy in terms of analysis.

give me some pictures, clear visuals of a starving dog, easy to understand terms, and i’ll give you my name.

give me an actual complex reality of shit happening in the world, where i have to actually do some search because even information is clamped down, campaign sites filtered and blocked, people struggling to get some small measure of truth out in the open, i just can’t be bothered.

too difficult. time is passing on too fast. hyperlinks are waiting, and only those dished out ready to be served with cute buttons and easy navigation.

give me a story, full of drama, heart-rending pictures, moral outrage and digestible ethics. i’ll give you my name.

*click*

Every Malaysian is racist. Race is not a dirty language. Most Malaysians puzzle over the use of words like “ethnicity” or “origin” instead of the much richer and loaded language of race. Before any other form of self-identity, race comes first. then gender, or class, or sexuality, or brand affiliation, or anything else that needs to be named. Race as a marker is stitched so firmly into our psyche, our souls, our knowledge of the the self and our place in the universe, it’s instinctive.

I learnt that I was one out of three chinese in my class when i was seven. Before that, I learnt that pig is dirty, just like Indians, except in a different way. I knew that there are differences in our way of life and theirs – theirs being a category that can always be interchanged as the familiar other. Racist jokes about politicians, nasi lemak, roti canai and chee cheong fun abound; lazy malays, money-faced chinese, stupid indians. And amidst the punch lines that carve our alienation from each other is the shadow of violence burning through the numbers, “May 13th 1969″. Like the holy trinity, Malaysians are neatly cut up into a magical three that makes up the corners of a pyramid. With every other identity – Serani, Bengali, Orang Asli, Kadazan, Ang Mo, Indon and more – thrown into the darkness of corners, intermittently visible with a rare shift of light.

This morning, I chanced upon an abandoned Berita Harian at the next table during breakfast. Skimming through the headlines of Najib supporting Pak Lah and Hishamuddin abdicating his Pemuda UMNO leadership position, an advertisement caught my eye. Placed neatly across the bottom part of the front page, it enticed readers with a 70% discount on something. It took me awhile to figure out what the advert was about. Splashed in bold letters under the name of the company are the words, “100% dimiliki oleh bumiputera”. Initially, I thought it was a property development project. The meta keywords “milik” and “bumiputera” immediately linked to make a cohesive picture of “satu lagi project bermutu oleh NEP“.  Reading more closely, I realised that it was actually a sale of fabrics and cloth by a shop in Jalan Masjid India.

So why was it necessary to speak so directly to its potential market that their money will solely profit only bumiputeras? Berita Harian is a Malay-language newspaper. Their readership consists mainly of 20s to 40s, middle income Malays: 93% in 2007. We are freaking out silently at the moment. The recent elections results have thrown our pyramid into slight disarray. We’re a little unsure what the masses want – as informed to us through a select and concentrated number of individuals easily identified through icons and colours.

Tony Pua, my crisp and newly elected Member of Parliament, scoffed at MCA when they tried to assure voters post their recent elections “defeat” that they will continue to protect Chinese rights. He said, “They just don’t get it“. DAP is all about “Malaysians first”, the pyramid scheme just doesn’t hold political resonance anymore. But then a few days later he sputtered at Pak Lah’s statement about Chinese interests being in jeopardy if inadequate (race-based, read Chinese = MCA) representation is made in the Parliamentary Cabinet. So who is not getting what?

I think Malaysians are truly quite fed-up of being told that we can only have particular rights if we have particular kinds of race. The magic May 13th number is a little too far in time to properly evoke palpable terror. The terror of not being told the truth, of being somehow cheated of chances, of having narrow corridors to carefully sail speech bubbles – they are a lot more real somehow.

And it’s also thanks to the development discourse that have been regurgitated to visceral levels to justify all kinds of wayang. Somehow, earning a living has become our primary inalienable equal right. Getting information and communicating it, scaffolded by our accidental and ignorant bliss of an unfettered internet access – also fueled by the language of economics – have become our collective seeds of desire. Race has become an irritating fence that we just want to dismantle.

We have all been struggling against our automatic racism. But we can’t seem to let it go. Because it simply matters. It is the history and the land upon which we are now building our dreams of hope, freedom, justice, equality, etc. etc. etc. Before articulating any form of change, before cartographing our future, the raw materials we have for transformation is the bone black of our racist, nationalised beings.

So what should we do? What can someone like Tony Pua do? When he is also left with the Chinese-interest legacy of DAP. Now together with PAS and PKR attempting to shed their skins and slither anew from the ashes as Pakatan Rakyat, attempting to assuage real fears and tensions of racist Malaysians to similarly let go of this lucrative pyramid and form something new. Whichever angle you take, it still looks like a triangle albeit with a different constitution. Perhaps Hindraf will get fed up that cries of “Makkal Sakthi!” being drowned by cries of “Reformasi!” or “Allah huakhbar!” and form a separate party. Then we could have a trapezoid. Or perhaps in time, PSM will finally get registered and we could have a pentagon.

I want a multi-headed hydra or a border-ignorant paramecium. The sad fact is, we are constructed by identity-politics. We are raced, we are gendered, we are genitalised, we are monetised, we are limbed, limed and slimed with categories and cardboard boxes. We’re just at this moment in time, trapped in the room of race, prying the door handle into the room of class or perhaps gender. Obfuscating our racism by substituting Indian/Malay/Chinese-rights with rights of poor people, rights of women, rights of people living in rural areas, in the rain forest, in the office, in cyberspace.

But some rooms are more fluid than others. It is so much harder to get rid of your skin than say, changing your home address, credit limit, religion or genitals. And maybe one day, when there are so many rooms that doors take up a lot more space than walls, they will cease to matter as much. We just need to be brave and lift our one foot firmly cemented in the race room and try something a little different. Exploration has to start somewhere, so it might as well start with a careless jump.

I just got my own handphone phone. It was quite an exciting period. Mobile phones weren’t super cheap then, or subscription rates affordable. Pre-paid was only starting to be introduced. But I had a number to my name, and a device that meant anyone could get in touch with me, and me back, without having to go through ‘gatekeepers’. I grew up in a pretty dense household. Grandparents, god parents, another aunt, 5 cousins, 1 brother, kids that my grandma and godma used to take care of for extra income, neighbours… there was always people around and simultaneous conversations making a kind of comforting background noise.

The only telephone in the house was next to the television, and the television was right next to the main door in the living room. There was almost zero-chance of having a private conversation.

So now, with my very own handphone, I could have a heart-to-heart with a friend even when I was having a pee. It felt really liberating. My own space carved through a rectangular, flip-cover, plastic black Ericsson.

I got an SMS one day. By a number I didn’t recognise.

How strange. Who is this person? What does s/he mean? A friend I forgot to key into my phone?

What the fuck? I’m starting to feel a little creeped out. Who is this person? How the hell did he (no mistake now) get my phone number? Heard from where? From who? Suddenly, I didn’t feel alone anymore, safe to shape my world, my space. Everyone I could have encountered became instantly dangerous, carrying a risk of ripping apart the skin I have made between myself and people I trust. I couldn’t take it. I needed to know who this person was. I needed to establish some kind of knowledge, identity, name, space, context, something i can identify and remember. My handphone became a strange object, rattling with quiet fear. It took me some time, but I finally decided to reply.

Now I am angry. Pissed off beyond belief. How dare you intrude my phone, intrude my space, intrude my life, insinuate all kinds of shit, solicit me for sex, hide behind the cowardice of anonymity, spoil my beautiful day, my awesome week!!

It was the first time anyone I knew had ever encountered this. I didn’t know how to respond to it. I didn’t know what I could do. How palpable is the danger? Is this person stalking me? Is it someone I know? Is someone watching me when I am not looking? Am I going to be raped? What is happening?

I was working in a domestic violence shelter at that time. I answered counselling calls, and I knew the law. There were no laws against sexual harassment or stalking, and there still isn’t. Even if there was a law, it doesn’t mean I will be protected. I know how toothless laws can be. How full of gaps and decay. But I’m still not taking this. I refuse to have one fuckwit spoil my experience and what having a handphone has meant to me. And if there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s assholes who choose to exert their power through sex. I spent 2 years of my life in primary school terrified of this guy who was threatening to rape my best friend – and me by proxy – for some unknown reason. Hanging out near our school, coming to the canteen when no one was around and saying the same disgusting things over and over. I had nightmares about him for years, dreaming of his death so the threat would end. I still remember his face. I’m not a child anymore. I should have told someone, made a report, kicked his balls. Done something. Anything. No more. I refuse to be paralysed by fear and shrink my already small space any smaller.

And they simply stopped. I still have his number, and phone numbers of all other similar stalkers who have made dodgy sms to my friends. I’m saving them up for a class action suit one day!

technorati tags: takebackthetech

kek cawan ku yang begitu manja
marilah bersantai bersama-sama
ke hujung, ke akhir, riwayat kita
kek cawan, ku janji, ku bukan gila.

+++++

someone has opened a can of worms. it is crawling all over cyberspace. every corner i turn, i sight that wriggling creature making itself known. many learned people are trying to name it, but it’s stubbornly slippery. all that’s left behind is a slightly sticky trail of wetness. no one is claiming it yet, so it continues to squirm and tunnel through concrete layers of self-assurances built from years of back patting. the can opener has withdrawn to silence. smirking uncertainly for a job well done, or maybe done too well. i’m going to keep my eye on this worm.

orchestra

i saw monochromatic women and men
slowly take their seat
and place their instruments in varying
gestures of affection
on their laps;

with wind and strokes and pauses
the murmuring begins.

i closed my eyes and let
the keening colours swim inside me in
slipping streams of yearning;
a cup of silence lets the girl in gold
stride in
then her violin
sings.

the man in his coat gesticulates
as wildly as the flecks of sweat that
flies across the space between us
like a graceful ballerina
committing suicide.
or so i imagined.

how did the music know
when to bow
and when to show
a centre of attention?

what instinct do the leaves possess
to huddle when it’s time to flower?

or is it merely a kind of wisdom
to adhere, sometimes,
to a manic stick that’s wielded?

++++++++

rahmat harun stole the show on friday night when on top of his usual, magical grasp of the malay language in rhythm and taste, he lit up a self-confessed “balut” on stage. he recited 2 poems, read an open letter to benjamin zephaniah and even sang a leonard cohen song — despite having being forbidden by the one who forbids forbidding. either way, he was in top form.

the first piece was about the multiple denial of identities that might be (have been?) labelled on himself. aku bukan… xyz. the only thing he confesses to being is a “bangsat”, which he gleefully invites everyone present to name him as so. i’ve always thought bangsat was a bastard or asshole or something similar. but checking my little MPH dwibahasa dickie, apparently, it means “vagrant”. i don’t know if this is meant to be a cleaned up version for the populasi.

anyway.

his letter was on the spot. mocking the colonial traces of bejamin zephaniah’s presence (a UK performance poet brought to KL by the british council), and stitching a relational version of malaysian reality through the various laws and surveillance practices when it comes to smoking ganja. afterwhich, he casually lights up what looks like a reefer (i sat right in front and sniffed like crazy, but couldn’t smell the weed though) and read a poem about smoking up.

nice.

after the show, he literally left his mark by scrawling all over the walls in central market some rantings about forbidden to forbid and more love notes to benji.

i guess if you’re looking for “artists”, then don’t expect them to take boundaries too seriously

then benjamin came on. and he surprised me by performing stuff that was almost all political in some way (and good on him, making lots of references to ganja along the way;)). i didn’t think too much of his poems, but his performance was awesome. the beats and rhythm of his stuff was actually quite similar to rahmat’s, which was odd, and got me thinking in various strange rasta directions. anyway, he was witty, his humour cheeky, his intentions earnest. one of the poems i liked most from that was:
White Comedy
(from ‘Propa Propaganda’)

“I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.

People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don’t worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.

really got my mind flipping like when i was watched babel. thinking about where i am positioned in that discourse. strangely, nowhere. which got me thinking about racism in general. and the kind of annoyance i sometimes feel when racism as a violation only seem to apply when it comes to black/white. actually, the epicentre still lies on the white.

++++++++

supernova

such brilliance, it pierces the heart
of my eye;
i feel myself pulled to your
Excellence.

how could i question
the bringer of light,
the breather of life,
the blessed anchor of relevance?

i find myself hoping
to be drawn to your edges
so my hues can shimmer
as your shadow.

at least if i am marked as
black
as middle eastern
as muslim
as oriental
as japanese
as russian
as a threat of terrorism
or nuclear weapon
or simply a victim of mass exploitation
that you could save,
then i can have a name
that will echo.
even if mispronounced.

i found malay taxi drivers in cape town,
chinese lesbians marching in london,
burmese organic celery sellers in bangsar;
they appear like a magic trick

and i am left breathless;
under-prepared by Hollywood, Bollywood and Al-Jazeera.

supernova.
when will you implode?
and will you take me with you?

++++++++

then it was poetry slam at sek san’s impossibly beautiful space on jalan tempinis. singapore vs malaysia. gosh, however will it turn out? heh. there were a few awesome things: the space, the fact that lots of people came to watch/hear poetry, lots of people doing poetry, hearing some new decent stuff , and best of all, poetry hooliganism.

it basically works like this. after some individual and collective performances by a few people, the slam starts. and there’s a pool of poets reading their stuff, and a panel of judges giving their score at the end of each recitation. poets get eliminated until there’s 3 left standing for a final round to decide which comes first.

i think i might have expected something like chow sing chi’s lawyer show, where there’s lots of witty rhymes in response to each other spluttering spontaneously in the air. but it was prepared stuff, not really speaking to each other. so i’ve heard some of the local ones before.

there is a difference between poetry to be performed, and poetry to be chewed on at each reading. or maybe it’s just a different texture of appreciation. i wouldn’t know. i guess it might be a little like shakespeare’s stuff, where it works differently when performed and read (or even filmed). anyway, it seems like doggerels and limmericks are good for performance, humour works like a charm, and sex, as usual, sells. but then sex also, as usual, has varying degrees of resonance.

thick stuff can’t really be performed i think. it’s going to be hard to perform emily dickinson’s stuff no? but on the other hand, symzborska might work. maybe it depends on the performer, the space, the audience.

there was also a lot of suspicious singing or humming of tunes going on in this performance poetry thing, or at least at the slam. it worked for the travelogue thing done by the trio, but was ingratiatingly irritating by the solo-ists. i guess music and words crafted for tempo and rhyme is quite close to each other. i could see both benjamin’s and rahmat’s stuff work as spinal chords of songs. but humming? hmm

part of the rules is that audiences get to snap their fingers if they get bored, and stamp their feet if it gets really boring. so we did. a herd of hooligans at the back, clicking our fingers, booing the judges, calling for mutiny… it was fun! it was really good sport of the poets to not be ruffled by the crowd, and take it in stride. it must be awful, having your creations disrupted by an audibly unappreciative audience. it would kill any sense of self-confidence (for me at least). so i have deep respect for the bravado, the humour and the confidence it takes to go on stage and be assessed by a bunch of idiots.

heh.

i loved the fact that poetry hooliganism could happen. with so much vanilla and nursery school caution in the air, a jibe can do so much.