[Reader-list] On Internment Camps

Thu Sep 7 21:15:17 IST 2006

Speaking of internment camps, I'm put in mind of two
classic captivity narratives from WW II

James Clavell's KING RAT and Pierre Boulle's BRIDGE
OVER THE RIVER KWAI.

Both were also made into films, the latter being more
of a classic w/ a young Alec Guinness and William
Holden-- going on to win 7 oscars, including one for
David Lean and of course the famous whistling "Colonel
Bogey March" (echoing a dirty limerick about Hitler).

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> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. fyi: AAG meet in San Francisco: Call for
> Papers/ INURA
>       (Patrice Riemens)
>    2. Are Cities Good For Creativity? (Rana
> Dasgupta)
>    3. Are Cities Good For Creativity? (hpp at vsnl.com)
> 
> 
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 12:49:06 +0200
> From: Patrice Riemens <patrice at xs4all.nl>
> Subject: [Reader-list] fyi: AAG meet in San
> Francisco: Call for
> 	Papers/ INURA
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Message-ID: <20060906104906.GB19848 at xs4all.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Bwo of the http://www.inura.org list
> 
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Roger Keil
> <rkeil at YORKU.CA> -----
> 
> Date:         Tue, 5 Sep 2006 23:35:47 -0400
> From: Roger Keil <rkeil at YORKU.CA>
> Subject: aag in san francisco
> To: INURA at YORKU.CA
> 
> 
> The next meetings of the Association of American
> Geographers will be in San
> Francisco, April 17-21, 2007. Here is a call for
> papers for a panel we are
> planning to organize.
> 
> AAG CFP: Infrastructure and Vulnerability in the
> In-Between City
> 
> Urban morphology around the world has moved beyond
> traditional forms
> of downtown core and suburban sprawl. As Tom
> Sieverts has noted, much urban
> growth falls somewhere in between, in the spaces
> found literally between
> downtown and suburb, between the city and
> greenspaces, in areas
> dominated by large investments in major
> infrastructure, such as highways,
> airports, amusement parks, industrial parks. Despite
> such investment,
> residential pockets within this landscape are
> frequently underserviced and
> socially excluded. What is the relationship between
> the city's built landscape
> and its social landscape in these areas? How are
> these landscapes factors in
> the production of vulnerability to the effects of
> natural disaster, economic
> crisis and social upheaval?
> 
> Papers on these issues in any city are welcome.
> Please send contact info and an
> abstract to either Tricia Wood (pwood at yorku.ca) or
> Roger Keil (rkeil at yorku.ca)
> by Sept. 30.
> 
> 
> - -- 
> Roger Keil
> Director
> The City Institute at York University (CITY)
> 
> http://www.yorku.ca/city
> http://www.yorku.ca/fes/faculty/keil/index.asp
> http://www.yorku.ca/sars2003
> 
> Co-editor The International Journal of Urban and
> Regional Research ((IJURR)
>
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0309-1317
> 
> - ----- End forwarded message -----
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 09:12:52 +0530
> From: Rana Dasgupta <rana at ranadasgupta.com>
> Subject: [Reader-list] Are Cities Good For
> Creativity?
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Message-ID: <44FF953C.5070202 at ranadasgupta.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1";
> format=flowed
> 
>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/freethinkingworld/2006/09/are_cities_good_for_creativity.shtml
> 
> I want to approach this question by thinking about a
> related, and in 
> some ways opposite, one. "Are internment camps good
> for creativity?" In 
> some respects, though not all, the internment camp
> can be seen as the 
> opposite, the alter ego, of the city. We can think
> of Auschwitz and New 
> York inhabiting opposite ends of the American
> moral-spatial spectrum in 
> the second half of the twentieth century (which is
> partly why the events 
> of 9/11 had such a profound resonance).
> 
> Yesterday my neighbour came to my door to show me
> the diary of one of 
> his relatives, a Sikh fom Punjab who had fought in
> the British army in 
> the second world war, and who was captured and
> interned in a 
> prisoner-of-war camp. The man was a talented artist
> and draughtsman, and 
> had filled his notebook with drawings of camp
> scenes. Men sunbathing in 
> front of barracks, playing hockey, putting on
> theatrical performances. 
> He wrote accounts of the camp's economy (with "one
> English cigarette" as 
> the basic unit of currency) and stuck in newspaper
> clippings of 
> Mussolini's death etc. His fellow camp inmates,
> among them Eric Newby, 
> wrote poems and comments in the book, and painted
> pictures of "Jit 
> Singh, the Indian painter" at his canvass. These
> comments bore witness 
> to a deep intimacy and appreciation between the
> American, British, 
> Canadian, French - and Indian - men who found
> themselves together.
> 
> This diary put me in mind of the internment camp on
> the Isle of Man 
> during the same period. Many German and Italian
> nationals resident in 
> the UK were interned there in 1940, and a large
> proportion of these were 
> central European Jews who had arrived in England to
> flee Nazism.
> 
> They lived in great fear, believing that Hitler
> might soon invade the UK 
> and that this enclosure might be one of his first
> targets. But the camp 
> was full of Jewish artists and intellectuals, and
> nothing could stop the 
> inevitable. Within weeks of their internment, there
> were camp 
> newspapers, weekly lectures on nuclear physics, and
> regular concerts.
> 
> Three members of the future Amadeus Quartet, all
> from Vienna, met in the 
> camp. The quartet was founded in London immediately
> after the war, and 
> endured until the death of violist Peter Schidlof in
> 1987. The Viennese 
> composer Hans Gál was interned there, and wrote
> several works there. 
> Perhaps readers know of other internees.
> 
> (See also the fascinating story -
> 
>
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/quartet_for_the_2.html
> 
> - of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, written
> in the Stalag VIIIA 
> prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.)
> 
> In many respects these camps were similar to cities.
> They 
=== message truncated ===

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