ktravula – a travelogue!

Of Tabs and Texts

I realized since a few months ago that I have a habit of opening too many tabs on my Google Chrome internet explorer. Everyone who peeped onto my computer screen while I work always wondered how I managed to concentrate on current tasks. My fiancée suggested that I most likely have attention deficit. In return, I argue that I have read enough reports that suggest that distracting oneself with stuff online actually led to efficiency. She has now asked that I limit my open tabs to ten. I have tried, and failed. Now I use Evernote to mark down some of the links I intend to read much later.

Today however, I recalled something that may be responsible for my interest in many things at once (much of them about politics, education, humour, literature, and news). Two words: my father. Thinking back now, I remember how there was always a room in every house we’ve lived in that has stacks of every current publication in Nigeria at the moment. Today, I remembered Prime People, Vintage People, Fun Times, Ikebe Super, Super Story, Vanguard, The Sketch, Newswatch, Daily Times, among very many others. Name it, we had every issue published, and they were always delivered by father’s vendor early in the day. Soon enough, the stack filled up a whole room. Literally.

It was impossible to be bored in an environment like that, and cartoon strips in the newspapers and magazines, and the continuing stories in legitimately fun publications like Ikebe Super, Fun Times, and Super Story sustained a literary interest for a very long time, long before it was eventually replaced with real literature, also from his bookshelves. So now, whenever I’m chided for opening too many webpages at once, I point back to the memory of a time when pleasure and work walked hand-in-hand while sitting on the floor of a living room with dozens of news and feature publications spread all around.

Sometime last year when an academic mentor in Ibadan asked if I had access to past issues of any Nigerian publications which used pidgin as the main language of communication, I immediately thought of Fun Times, Dauda the Sexy Guy, and Ikebe Super. He was working on a compilation of a comprehensive Nigerian Pidgin English dictionary. I have not asked father what he did with all his stack of past issues, but I assume that it will be a trip to return into the margins of those oldies at some point in the future, if they still exist. For now, new tabs and texts.

Me Plus

Here is a riddle: what is the best way to take over the world? Need a minute? The answer is this: make something that everybody uses. This was my first thought on encountering the now almost inevitable internet destination that is Google Plus. What it is is an aggregation of Google’s top services and much of what we use on the internet, in one place.

It has got everyone talking. Even my grammar professor want to know how it can be used to teach an online class (hint: it can’t without the glitches of privacy and copyright concerns). It can, however be used to manage a social existence without worries to privacy the kind that Facebook brought. What exactly is Google Plus? I’d say it’s Facebook, Twitter, Blogger combined with some of other services we use everyday. Who would have thought that a day will come when everything we search for on Google can now be indexed publicly for our friends to see if we want. Who needs twitter? Who needs Facebook? Who needs a blog even? With Google Plus, everything comes together, and you still get to keep your gmail address.

Here’s how someone put it in a recent shared post:

Instead of saying, “I’m going to write a blog post now,” or “I’m going to send an e-mail” or “I think I’ll tweet something” you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you’re going to say it to.

If you address it to “Public,” it’s a blog post.

If you address it to “Your Circles” it’s a tweet.

If you address it to your “My Customers” Circle it’s a business newsletter.

If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.

Why would you pay to keep a blog online when you can have everything a blog gives you for free on such a cool platform? Oh, I know the answer: that little issue of copyright and ownership. Besides that however, Google Plus is a nice new addition. I’ve already begun considering leaving Facebook though I know it might never really happen. It’s already a while since I last logged on to twitter. I think there is something relaxing about not having to open so many windows on my (wait for it: Google) Chrome browser.

I hope to use G+ to share some of my online curiosities and discoveries, particularly those not worth writing a whole blog post about. Join my Google Plus circle here.

Just Wondering, Just Wandering

or Astral Travel in 600 words.

The Nigerian writer and critic Ikhide Ikheloa is disillusioned about many things, and does not shy away from saying them in his frank and often witty essays at the Nigeria Village Square, African Writer.com or in the Nigerian Newspaper, NEXT – the wasted opportunity of Nigerian Pro-Democracy Activists to right the wrongs of the country when it eventually got into their hands after decades of military rule, and the portrayal of Africans by Africans themselves in movies, novels and plays written for the Western market. He has written this guest post about his positive perception of technology as the new reality – the new weapons of navigating the labyrinths of the world.

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The writer-traveler Kola Tubosun visited me in Washington DC a few months ago. We had a great time. We had never met physically; however our spirits had been communing for several moons through the Internet. I do enjoy the company of African writers even though most of these meetings have been mostly on cyberspace. The Internet is today the world’s number one wonder, offering new opportunities and challenges and taunting our expectations of community. I know now from living on the Internet that the human spirit is superior to the flesh, unless when you are having really good sex. Every now and then I actually meet someone I have known on the Internet for a long time. The meetings are always joyful reunions, flesh pressing flesh in celebration of the indomitable spirit.

Travel and communication are abiding mysteries. Life is energy, restlessness and movement – of the body and spirit. The mind wanders and travels everywhere bearing gifts, burdens, and anxieties. I often reflect on the awesome power of the airplane and the first (foolish) passenger who hoped to return to land after the flight. Today, unmanned drones hit men praying in caves thousands of miles away from the Nevada desert.

In Nigeria, when we were little, we would string together two empty tins of condensed milk and try to communicate with the result. It was awesome hearing your friend’s voice on the other end. Today, my eleven year old son is a digital native. His Smartphone is his flashlight, jukebox, Internet access and remote control. He has built an electronic fence around himself, and only allows access to those who have earned it. If it would just uncork my bottle of Malbec, now, that would be powerful.

In Africa, citizens have been mercifully spared the tyranny of inefficient state-sponsored telecommunications. Cell phones are ubiquitous and have muscled their way into the lexicon of popular African culture. In Nigeria, people are using cell phones for robust commerce. They are also empowering women and children, restoring to them the privacy denied them in a paternalistic analog world.

The Internet offers us amazing new opportunities to reconnect with the best of each other. New and emerging technologies are redefining our traditional notion of exile. It is now the norm to communicate with Africa in real time from anywhere in the world. I sometimes click on Google Earth and visit my childhood haunts. For me, exile doesn’t hurt as much as it did when I left home three decades ago.

Tubosun’s travels around America remind us that new and emerging technologies are redefining our traditional notion of exile. I salute the bravery and tenacity of the new writers and travelers. I salute the writers of generations before, warriors like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Flora Nwapa, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dennis Brutus, etc, who traveled to strange places of the heart and this world armed with nothing but their imagination and returned to teach us about the things they had learnt in their restlessness. They were our freedom fighters, teachers, entertainers and Internet access. Theirs was a crushing burden and they bore it with grace. Today the wonders of computer technology and modern travel make it possible for the individual to become a municipality of one and ignore the new criminals in black ravaging the land. We may be losing our best minds to narcissism. These new tools should empower us to help our people. Who are our freedom fighters today? What is the role of the African writer in the emancipation of Africa? Do we have an obligation to use our gifts to fight for much needed change in the land of our ancestry? I strongly and passionately believe so. There is so much to celebrate in the resurgence of African writing; our suffering people deserve some of the dividends. There is hope. It is up to us.

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Ikhide writes from xokigbo@yahoo.com, and I thank him for this wonderful expose. I don’t know what I’d have done without access to the internet and these new tools of technology, so his perspective resonates strongly with me and the purpose of this blog, which is to explore new ways of interacting with the world and confronting challenges of present generations with the means of information technology. Past guest-posts can be read here.

Blog, Writing and Real Life

I did not grow up with computers around me. I am definitely not a first generation internet user. Much of the first creative things I wrote in my life were in long hand on rough sheets of paper, and later on an abandoned typewriter in my father’s lounge. Today there are kids growing up who probably never spent a day without getting on the computer. Whether they are smarter or more efficient than us is beyond me, but I do know that there is some kind of thrill in my current adaptation to a 24hour electronic cycle. The book is dead, I’ve heard, incredulously, and yesterday when I tried to read the current edition of Time magazine in print, I found a certain kind of lazy resistance, and some unexplainable wonder that they still make paper editions of those in this age of the internet. It must be why I spend so much time trying to to finish reading a book of just 300 pages. There’s definitely a sort of taking over by the internet, and I’m surprised to be on the train, considering that my first email address was just ten years ago.

Right now, I’m going through a phase, a certain self-examination for the purpose of blogging, wondering whether it ever replaces the need for books and publishing. What’s the line between real life and a blog that is known and tied to the writer? In ideal situations, I should send my poems first to journals and literary magazines rather than publish them by myself on the blog, right? However I’ve observed a certain sense of impatience in myself that may have conditioned a different way of behaviour that has me publishing them here first of all before I show them to publishers, asking whether they want them in their journals. Most of them say NO, of course, citing the fact that I’d already published them online in some form. I blame my e-conditioned impulsiveness to have absolute control on the when and the how. There is no other way to explain the fact that I never get the urge to write anything most times until I’ve signed into WordPress, clicked on “New Post”, and having a blank post page staring at me. A few years ago, it was a blank page in Microsoft Word that elicits that kind of mental stimulation. It was the same kind of electronically conditioned inspiration that I used to get while staring at the rusty typewriter on my father’s lounge. The question then is, what will I do with the bubbly impatience that never let go of me as soon as I complete a piece of work that makes me happy but which I can’t show to anyone? It is a morbid fear of losing it, I guess, or having something happen to me before the work makes it to the public that mostly takes my hand to the “publish” button, and I’m satisfied. I found a similar kind of paranoia in a writer William Boyd who I heard admit in a recent Youtube video tour of his writing space to having always kept his manuscripts in the refrigerator because they were safer there, at least from fire in the event of an outbreak.

For my paranoia, I can only hope to write so much more, and (ah-ha!) seek an American publisher. Maybe the blog might help in that ambitious quest. Gone were the days when the pleasure was in jotting on scrap notebooks and book margins. These days, the inspiration comes from an e-blank page and the rasping of my Dell laptop keys. I can’t complain.

PS: My first electronically published short story will be published in an anthology of short stories from Africa entitled “African Roar” and published by Lion Press UK in January 2010. Considering that it will now be in a book form for the first time, I won’t be putting up a link to the full work online here, as much as I wish to do so right now. Ask me for the rationale, and I’ll say it’s the dynamics of the new media. (Or what do you think, Ivor?)

The Fifth Class

My fifth class was short, but only because it never took place. I’m blogging about it only because it has taught me another important lesson in my American experience: be punctual. But first, I should tell you why my sleeping pattern has become so irregular. Two words: time zones.

By the time it’s midnight in Illinois and I’m ready to sleep, a chat box beeps open on my laptop and someone in faraway Nigeria has woken up and wants to talk to me. It is six am their time. A little “hi” gradually turns into long phrases and sentences, and by the time my eyelids start closing by themselves, they somehow get the idea, and we part ways. It is not their fault but mine, for staying up beyond eleven pm when I should just shut down the blooming laptop and close my eyes.

"Good day class!" In today’s case however, it was none of the above reason. I was working on a translation task that took much of my time. I slept at twelve, woke up at two and slept again at five thirty. By the next time I woke up, I was thirty minutes late for my teaching class. I have never rode by bike as fast as I did today, and I got to campus panting like a deer. And silly me, I was still expecting to find the students waiting for me in class. I met only one of them the lobby, and I hurried up into the class to find an empty set of seats. Perfect. Back to the lobby, there was Bre reading, and waiting for her next class.

“Hey, where’s everyone?” I asked.

“We left.” She replied. “You weren’t there, and so we left.”

It was as simple as that.

It was another sharp reminder for me to wrap myself around the fact I’m no longer in Nigeria where students have to wait until the end of the hour for the teacher to show up in class.