I don’t quite remember how it came up but I was discussing Braille porn with a friend the other day. While it doesn’t really qualify as porn in my book, Playboy has been translated into Braille since 1970 and we started to wonder how the centrefolds would work - would they be rendered as countours? I have since discovered that:

The Braille version includes all the written words in the non-Braille magazine, but no pictorial representations. That has to be a little frustrating.

Nonetheless I couldn’t stop thinking about how visual representation translates to the felt form. A photo translated to a contour is not going to feel anything like the naked body of a woman, or a man. Blind readers are not schooled in the conventions and condensations of visual representation? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work with certain discrete, life sized contours - nipples, labia, sphincter - which would then have the same metonymic, suggestive function as the partly revealed centrefold?

No time for rumination here at Stanford where the quarter system is something akin to force feeding a goose for academic pâté. And that is how I feel nearing the end of my second ten week stretch - like paste. Scrape me up and take me camping once I’m done…

But I did just come across a great quote, which in my current procrastinatory state I thought worthy of documentation:

Thus in the obscurity of their unlimitedness, bodies can be distinguished only where the ‘contacts’ (‘touches) of amorous or hostile struggles are inscribed on them. This is a paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? Neither. Does that amount to saying: no one?
(Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday LIfe, p127)

Socialism bring it on! Equal access and equal opportunity in Extremadura, Spain.

The region’s socialist government has launched a €14,000 (£12,600) campaign aimed at teaching young people how best to set about “sexual self-exploration and the discovery of self-pleasure” – or to put it less delicately: masturbation.

I can’t say I remember my sex ed classes being anywhere near that useful.

Did you know that because space is a vacuum, there is no medium through which sound can travel. So it follows, that in space no one can hear you scream.

All I hear around me now are the intermittent muffled sounds of car doors slamming. There is no collective medium here. Nothing between the lawns and windowed boxes indicates a shared presence, that my air may touch your ears. All is silent and expanding ever outwards.

A conductor on the Caltrain, ying yang ear plugs and bright toy train braces, talks incessantly holding the doors and calling after each conversational conquest as they disembark. “A couple of years back I bought 250 knives for 200 bucks. They were Chinese but still! There was a sword that I hung on the wall, Christmas presents, ones with hooks on that you could gouge people with… the lot! You name it! Only 198 bucks for a 250 piece set!”

A sign on Highway 1 advertises ‘Sedation Dentistry’.

My student wears thigh high boots and drives a red Mustang sports car.

Last week we drove out to the redwoods and the coast. The trees are twisted round with deep bark funnels that milk the sea fog from canopy to roots. We walked up to a trickle labelled ‘Waterfall’ and found a handful of banana slugs. At the coast there was a seal washed up on the rocks. We watched the dark roll in and then headed home.

Grisly but fascinating, a murdered woman whose fingers and teeth had been removed was identified by the serial number in her breast implants. I never really thought about it before, but I suppose all biological implants, like replacement hips and knees, must have serial numbers as well. I wonder how long it will be before they start tagging every permanent biomedical incorporation (organ transplants, bone marrow transplants, gene therapy) with a DNA identification sequence - is that possible?

Peak tourist season. Airlines are straining at the seams. The cheapest flight Barcelona-Lyon is via Casablanca. Where the hell is Casablanca?… The ticket bought from the airline website indicates 50 minutes in between flights. Plenty of time for connection transfer. I arrive at Barcelona airport to be told that my baggage cannot be checked through and that the second boarding pass will be provided on arrival in Morocco. I spend 20 minutes on phone to various staff from the customer service company – different to the airline company. All assure me that it will be fine, that the airline would not have sold the ticket if it were not possible to transfer in that time and that there will be plenty of people on the ground to help me. Flight attendants assure me of the same thing in flight. I arrive at Mohamed V Airport, Casablanca, Morocco. There is no one from the airline to be found. Only a long empty hall to the border gates. I have no address in Morocco to put on my landing card and do not speak enough French to explain my situation to the border police. Time is ticking. Eventually, I find someone who speaks English to help me. She manages to get me through the border to collect my bag and back again to the flight but, despite her best efforts, I am not allowed on without a boarding pass and the plane leaves without me. She lends me her home address and helps me to pass through security. I am now officially in Morocco. I find the airline service desk and explain the situation, assuming that I will be put on next flight to Lyon. The next flight to Lyon is not for two days.

And so it begins. I am stuck in Morocco with moribund high school French now 15 years old, no place to stay and an airline that refuses to accept responsibility for selling me a connecting flight that was not designed to connect. To make matters worse I have someone who has driven from The Netherlands waiting for me at the airport in Lyon. “Well there is a flight to Paris tomorrow.” “Paris is nowhere near Lyon! I need to be in Lyon!” “Well its in the same country.” Serves a few other customers. I wait. “I need to be in Lyon!” “Well you did not leave enough time between flights. The next flight to Lyon is not for two days.” “Your airline sold me the flight as a connecting flight. Therefore it is your responsibility. I don’t care when the next flight from your airline is you need to get me a flight from Casablanca to Lyon today!” “I will talk to my boss.” “Disappears and returns sometime later. Serves a few other customers. And so it continues. A sophisticated looking Moroccan woman speaking impeccable English is obviously distressed by my Western disregard for the conventions of decorous negotiation and assures me that he is getting someone to help me. I take into account my complete lack of inter-cultural nouse, cut him some slack and wait a little longer. The sophisticated lady leaves and the situation does not progress. I begin to yell.

I am sent to talk to another department. Young customer service representative, greased curls and a swagger. Hysterical woman. Some time is spent on the phone. “We are a low cost airline, we do not do transfers. You should know this.” “But your company sold me the ticket.” “You bought the ticket on the internet” “Yes, on your company’s website!” “It is not our fault that you bought such a ticket. You should have known it would not be enough time to transfer.” And so the circular argument circles until I completely lose my uncool Western cool and scream at the suave boy with greasy curls, tell him to get the fuck away from me, storm back to the original counter and proceed to burst into loud messy sobs. Man behind the counter shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

After some time my sobbing catches the attention of an employee emerging from the airline’s main office. I explain the situation. He conducts me into the main office and delivers me to the attentions of two concerned women in hijab. They are obviously distressed by my emotional disarray and plead with me to stop crying as it will not help to solve the problem. They give me a glass of water and disappear behind the scenes to make yet more phone calls. While penetrating the customer service wall is a positive development it has now been over two hours since I landed and I am increasingly overcome by hunger and the apparent hopelessness of the situation. The concerned women return, implore me, once again, to stop crying, feed me a banana and some chocolate and buy me lunch. I digest this with the information that if I catch the flight to Paris tomorrow morning and then the train to Lyon they will reimburse me for the cost of the train ticket if I post them my receipt. It is now around 5pm. This solution should deliver me to my original destination at 6pm the following day. Why I should have a problem with this, or indeed some distrust around the airline’s ability to coordinate a repayment, seems to be slightly beyond their comprehension. I have slipped through a crack in the West and landed in another world.

Its not as if I hadn’t been through before but I just wasn’t prepared this time you see. I had a schedule. A holiday planned. I expected speed, efficiency, even some degree of corporate responsibility. I was anticipating a smooth progression from one anonymous global airport to the next. A slight cultural decompression each time, at most a different ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as I transited the customer service landscape. Not this. A rapid and jarring adjustment to the new cultural terrain instructed me that the same country on the next day was a fast and reasonable solution. That internet transactions were a foreign domain because no website will accept a Moroccan credit card. That flying around the world at the drop of a hat was inconceivable. Even making an international call to my travel companion patiently waiting in Lyon involved an internecine procedure that gave me two minutes each time before I was cut off.

Eventually, I managed to gain access an internet enabled computer in the main office and began searching for other flights. Meanwhile, word about this crazy Australian woman who had tried to take a connecting flight through Casablanca to Lyon had gotten out to the big company bosses who happened to be visiting from the States. “Yes that’s me. I was sold a connecting flight and now I am stuck” I displayed my ticket receipt. And immediately I was back in familiar territory. We spoke the same kind of English. A system error. Some one had programmed in the wrong minimum transfer time. I got caught out by the code. The importance of my holiday schedule was of course tantamount. Large amounts of cash were carried in bundles up to the office of Royal Air Maroc where I was bought the only direct flight out to Lyon first thing the next morning. The rest of the office were in shock. The girl with the bundle of cash who escorted me to buy the ticket worked 11 hour days with a half hour lunch break. The money was probably a month’s salary. I felt my special treatment Western privilege like a sore thumb.

The airport hotel was surrounded by a wasteland of new suburban construction on a dusty service road by the highway. In the buffet there were tall African women in expensive two piece suits and head dresses. A scrawny stray cat slipped through the fence by the pool. In the morning, the man from the airport transport van asked for my e-mail address. As I carried my bag through the sliding doors and into the baggage line, I wondered whether it was a good idea to have given it to him. Through the passport checkpoint. I realised that I would never be confronted by the need to answer because it would get stuck in the spam filter anyway. The crack in the West closed over behind me.

View from my hotel window

Being an art history ignoramus I go blank when anyone mentions ‘the dutch masters’ but apparently they have beautiful skies.

Fantastic effects of slow sun descending and fast plane rising over the North Sea.

An accidental embryo mix up is the new hospital mistake.

A COUPLE’S last hope of having another child has been destroyed after a mistake at a fertility clinic meant their final embryo was implanted in another woman.

Meet your conception mother, your egg mother, your ooplasm mother. Your injection father - injector, injected. Watch the video of your cell division. Read your list of potential names. Meet your dish siblings and give thanks to the cow who surrendered her calf so that you could have life.