Tintenherz - Ink Heart

I finally finished this book! For some bloody reason, I kept losing it! Put it down in a bookbag to read to work, forget the book on my desk, finally bring it home 3 days later, put that (different) book bag down and cover it with laundry or other stuff... rinse and repeat.

The book in question is acclaimed German YA novel Tintenherz / Ink Heart by Cornelia Funke. I'd borrowed it a while ago from my dear Miko-chan, to read as one of several attempts to de-rust my language skills. Since Miko-chan is visiting me right now and will leave early on Wednesday - and tomorrow we're seeing Gackt - it was read under a bit of time pressure, if I put it like that.

However, the end of the book went by quickly. Since it is a YA novel, the language level wasn't very challenging to me; what I had trouble with is that about the first half of the book feels like characters just hurrying back and fort without anything much happening. I already knew the "secret" of Zauberzunge (Silver Tongue in English), ( spoiler )

and while I am not usually very spoiler-sensitive, that annoyed me. Especially since the characters didn't much grip me either. Meggie is a believable little girl, but not very captivating (or active, for much of the book), her father annoyed me, Staubfinger (Dustfinger) started off as the most interesting person in the book but then just went betrayer-no-wait-maybe-not for too long... Basically, the whole thing dragged. It also consists of like eleventyhundred (ok, maybe not) chapters, which sometimes feel like they appear just so Funke can have a nice little quote from a much better children's book at the beginning.

Once they've been captured by the villain the second time, iirc, things finally start moving and the end is not bad at all. But the journey there? Too slow; I'm not planning on reading the sequels unless I'm really bored.

Next to finish: the comic Five Star Stories which have to be returned on Friday, and then Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine!

Linkshare: Article on US reporting of terrorist attack in Norway

Ramble-rant ahead. Politics, frustration, media reflections...

Why let facts ruin the story? Norwegian comments on US coverage of the Norway terror

Fox News didn’t let that stop them: “Islamic terrorism is a problem in Scandinavian countries”, we were told, after we knew who the actual perpetrator was, "where they're just sort of turning a blind eye to it." And indeed it seemed we were. The proof? After a UN speech where former president George W. Bush had kept to his favourite subject "the War On Terror", the Norwegian PM was the next speaker and had focused on the threat of (gasp!) Climate Change. Such naïveté.

Except Norway has never been the victim of Islamic terrorism. There have been some examples of political violence in the last decades: hate killings and bombings of a labour day parade, a mosque, immigrant corner shops and a left wing book store. Behind all these were right-wing extremists; loathed, few in number, but willing to use indiscriminate violence.

A Norwegian citizen who was staying in a small US town during the Utøya shooting writes about the news reporting. Now, from what I recall of Swedish news, it began with reporting the terrorist attack against Oslo, with several people voicing suspicions that it was an attack originating with a group with similar sympathies to Al-Quaeda. Iirc, most news sourches I checked were rather clear on the fact that this was only speculation. As the events from Utøya began to be reported, the story turned more to clear WTF-is-happening reporting and the next day when we woke up enough to check the news, the (white) murderer was pictured in the newspapers.

I do however have a very clear memory of checking both BBC and CNN early on, in case they had picked up something that DN or Svt hadn't had time to update yet, and reading at CNN about a "extremist Muslim terror group" that had taken responsibility.

( Media musings, private vs. state )

Of course, our (not at all very free and damnded well not politically varied) newspapers all immediately began to dig through the bastards childhood etc as soon as this blue-eyed, blond-haired man was confirmed the cause of the worst political crime in Norwegian history. And, if we stay in modern times at least, the worst in the history of Scandinavia.

Anyway. I don't give much of a fuck if his father was absent (so what? mine too. and, hey, my brother's as well, seeing as how we share one. Yet we do not commit massive terrorism. A-fucking-mazing) but I do wonder at the fact that so much focus was made on psychologizing and medicalizing him - when I can't even recall reading about the men who where on the 9/11 planes in more than cursory detail. Now, this is probably much different if one is actually in the US, but lemme tell you, my local newspapers wrote LOADS about that terror attack too. Only then it was more about Usama bin Laden (whose psychosocial family background I also don't know much about, except that he's from Saudia Arabia and rich. Did he have a good father? Fuck if I know) and about the Muslim organized terror.

Considering that Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and the European Union all have brown parties in their parliaments (and what is happening in Denmark IDK but it's pretty much all horrible to read about); considering that the fucking xenophobic bastards in SD are spouting the exact same shit that got the "New Democrats" booed out of politics in the nineties, only now the bloody liberals are falling over themselves to agree with their more polished ideas before they've been voiced; considering that we have a rising wave of hateful xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic and white's first parties in all of Europe - I WANT THE NEWS TO TALK ABOUT THIS! I do not care about that man's sad family history, that's what we have court specialists for. I do not care about how comforting the idea of "the lone monstruous killer" is - I would very, VERY much like it if people could open a history and statistics book and realize that the extreme right is currently the most violent organization we have in northern Europe, that they are gaining power and that they are really fucking nasty, fucking scary and by giving in to their ideas step-by-step we are only giving them the ownership of the societal debate and that this is dangerous.

Ugh. So tired of everything sometimes.

In conclusion: There does not need to be a grand conspiracy behind things, for extreme voices advocating violence to influence dangerous people. Sarah Palin did not shoot anyone, but her "target" rethorics did not fly into a vacuum. The ideas of a "white Europe" or the (false) "pre-Muslim invasion" Nordic homogenity and subsequent harmonic history are directly related to the bombing and shooting that directly attack the Norwegian democracy and political youth.

And that the media is still spinning the same old story, helping us repeat the same old mistakes, it's horrifying.