Kids in Conakry, Guinea gather late at night to revise for exams in the airport's main carpark, vying for positions under the streetamps. The country's economy is in severe crisis and most of the country, under martial law, is currently without electric power. A scene that's at the same time too strange, vivid and touching, too depressing and somehow optimistic to have been invented - with a reality like this one Science Fiction scarcely seems necessary. 

"The lot is teeming with girls and boys by the time Air France Flight 767 rounds the Gulf of Guinea at an hour-and-a-half before midnight. They hardly look up from their notes as the Boeing jet begins its spiraling descent over the dark city, or as the newly arrived passengers come out, shoving luggage carts over the cracked pavement.   

"I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We're used to it," says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test."

The whole story is here. I found it by a link at the excellent BoingBoing.

A friend, E, from whom I didn't hear in a long while wrote this to me:

"the other day, I put on a jacket which I hadn't taken for ages. what I found in the pocket was a theatre ticket from 1994. A moment which made me really feel how fundamentally times have changed in the past 10 to 15 years. But which also brought back something from that time, you know, the Proust kind of thing. It was BAK Truppen at Theater am Turm Frankfurt. A company which probably no longer exists, a theatre which no longer exists. Even the money which the ticket was paid in no longer exists. (but both, this company and the theatre, had fundamentally shaped my vision of theatre/performance.) I know it sounds banal, but there are those moments which make things clear in an unexpected way. sharp. and at the same time such moments bring back an imprint of how one used to be, used to feel and no longer is. makes me think about in which way I no longer exist. I mean, the "I" from that time, from ten years ago, it just no longer exists. again, nothing to be sentimental about. strange enough that all the correspondance from those times still is hidden somewhere in the far back of my computer. hard to believe, taking into account how often one changes the computer, the crashes etc. but, no, it is still there, isn't even dusty, the system still can read it. of course I cannot go through it again, just one glimpse, there it says, "that I can´t know you like this". no. seeing it with different eyes, we used to say. but what really is it that's different? sediments of experiences. can I still write to you like this? for a moment I feel quite close..."
 

New Tony White story at 1001 Night's Cast here, complete with the narrator cheerfully drawing attention to the total absurdity of his or her own selections of material. Once again (as I wrote about a little here) there's a very beautiful sense of letting disconnected things (stories and voices) sit together in a suspension, and then just leaving it all for the reader to figure out.

I just caught up with the fact that The Fall's Mark E. Smith made a collaboration with Mouse on Mars by name of Von Sudenfed. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention. One track here.

Also a review of Forced Entertainment's Dirty Work from back at Toynbee here.

Days doing micro-editing on The Broken World - moving into the final phase with it. I love Word's track changes function because it at least starts to show something of the layers and layers that a text has. Some of the sentences I am working on I must have written in their first form three years ago and they've been through endless variation, wholesale rewriting here, erasure, restoration, minute additions and subtractions. (See also my recent project for the Sheffield Pavillion in Venice - City Changes).

On the level I'm working at right now what's interesting to me is that a lot of the work is so much refining (or pointless twiddling). I'm *supposed* to be tightening the structure in the middle of the book (which I am doing, honest) but at the same time I do get sucked into details. Waves of work in which I add words here and there, making it flow more easily, followed by days in which I decide this flow is too comfortable and I go thru removing the new stuff, even erasing words here and there from the original, cutting up the flow in places.

Best sight of the week, so far: aeroplanes slowly criss-crossing the darkening sky above Central Park as we watched The Decemberists last night.