Ria Bacon: editor & writer

Linguist with wanderlust,
From the hills of New Guinea to the halls of the Sorbonne,
From the beaches of Bassam to the fields of Friesland,
From the catacombs of Rome to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
From the heather of the Veluwe to the dust of Dakar ...

Currently resident in the Land of Sea with a small tribe of kids and Mr B.

FYI

Stet means "Let it stand" and is used by editors to indicate that the original text should be left untouched.

...in Arcadia ego is a pun on a painting by Poussin.

Contact

Ria[dot]Bacon[at]gmail.com

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Perry Henzell — Fire in the belly

I’ve just heard that Perry Henzell died this morning. I spoke to his wife, Sally, only a few days ago when we were staying at her hotel, Jake’s, in St Elizabeth. I asked her where Perry was and she pointed over her shoulder, “He’s up there in the house right on top of the hill.” He

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2 comments to Perry Henzell — Fire in the belly

  • This blog should be renamed ‘the bus stop’ – nothing for ages then two or three come along at once! Thank you for this post, and the last. Evocative, fascinating, poignant.

  • Charlene

    This is a lovely memory of Perry Henzel. You were lucky to have met him.

    I bought Cane about 2 christmas seasons ago, and I still havent finished reading it yet. I couldnt figure out why I was turned off until now, I do hope you will stil edit it, becasue it seemed like a story with potential.

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The man who was buried twice

Photo taken at Port Royal, Jamaica.

In fact, this tombstone marks his third burial place, because after his death, he was buried in a nondescript area, then around 1953, at the time of a visit of Queen Elizabeth II, his remains were moved to a more conspicuous resting place in the graveyard of St Peter’s Anglican Church

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Statutory rape ha-ha

17-year-old sentenced to 3 years probation
for carnal abuse
Judge tells him to skip Biology lessons for a while
Paul Henry

Justice Lloyd Hibbert made the comment after Attorney-at-Law Jean Barnes informed him that her client – a former Calabar High School student – was furthering his studies.
As Barnes mentioned the subjects her client was pursuing at his new school,

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Jamaican grass

At the swimming lesson, a group of kids were jumping up and down, waving their hands in the air and shouting,

“Uncle Mark! Uncle Mark! Can I drown next, pleeease?”

They were practising life-saving.

After that moment of excitement, my attention was drawn to the sound of the lawnmower … and the sight of Doctor “Cutty” McQueen showing

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  • That was some impressive mowing, especially considering most mowing (or other agriculture/horticulture) activities are usually completed with a cutlass and a stick. So who knows how long Cutty has been using the lawn mover vs. the machete he probably started lawn care tasks with. I was always amazed at how fast a “real machete man” could render a fallen tree to sticks, mow a lawn to perfection, plant a field, etc. in my years in JA.

  • (Sorry for the random-ness of this post)…

    Four months ago I posted on many blogs, letting everyone know that we were trying to start a podcast (Rabbit Hole Daily) by people who had emigrated to other countries…

    I thought it would be interesting to share all of our “misadventures” and news… I had hoped to get a contributor to/from every continent (i.e., a Brazilian in Japan, a Japanese person in France, a French person in Australia, etc.).

    People leave their respective home-countries for all kinds of reasons; some people marry a “foreigner” and leave their country, some people take a job or do academic research out of their country, some are forced to leave for political reasons, some do it for the adventure. The podcast was designed to welcome all of these points of view. We’ve been working with mixed success to get all types of voices…

    Podcasts are a great way to get complex stories out that would never make it onto tv or radio, and we’d like to use the medium to create something that’s informative, eclectic, and interesting, all voices and topics welcome (provided they’re well-written)!

    At any rate, I’m writing to renew my call for contributors and say that we’re still around. We were accepted by itunes, we’ve been publishing consistently, and although we’ve had some technical concerns (people write articles, read them into a mic, then get them to me via internet or skype; getting it all edited evenly has been a challenge), we’ve just received some equipment donations by listeners that will make it possible to produce with ever-better audio quality.

    Please consider listening to the podcast, and more importantly, contributing articles. (Articles are 2-3 pages, submitted 4-6 times per year, contributors are featured on our “contributor profiles” page, rules for contributing can be found on the “contribute here” portion.) If you know someone who has emigrated from their country of origin and is a good writer, please pass the word!

    Thanks!

    Bradley.

    http://www.freewebs.com/rabbitholedaily
    rabbitholedaily@hotmail.com

  • Great, I had never seen that. I want a course.

    Manuel

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Two cultures clash

Talk of banning the “dance of death” is still doing the rounds here in Kingston, or at least it was this morning at the hairdresser’s. The dance in question is of course the “Dutty Wine”. In a country where new dance moves pop up every week, the Dutty Wine has shown unusual endurance since its first

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  • Read this article a while ago, have a little blurb on my site. Feel bad for the girls family, but not 100% convinced that her death was caused by a dance. I can just image the Yute she was dancing with, walking around going, don’t make me kill ya with the dutty wine now…(I know, I know bad joke)

  • plk

    PARASIGHTS is a beauty

  • [...] Ria Bacon comments on the clash of cultures taking place in the discussions surrounding the ultra-popular “dutty wine” dance since moves associated with the latter allegedly caused the death of a young woman. She also links to a YouTube video and says that there are 2000+ similar examples to be found on the video-sharing site. Georgia Popplewell [...]

  • there was a story in yesterday’s paper of a bajan girl who went to Jamaica to learn how to do the dutty wine correctly. i don’t think the story deserved 2 pages but obviously the Dutty Wine has a life and energy of it own.

  • Hi, Michele sent me today. I chose “stet” because no-one knows what that term means and I’m such an editing nerd. Thanks for the lesson on the Dutty Wine, I had no idea of the dangerous nature of this dance!

  • kia

    I followed the link from my posting on yours and enjoyed your story.

    What has struck me more in the days since the death is the obvious division in cultures between the middle class, educated newspaper journalists, and the semi-literate dancehall fans. The remove is such that some were not even aware of the song and dance until the recent death.

    Well, one of the reasons is practical. Middle-class people don’t go to the sorts of clubs and events where this dance happens. Not at first, anyway. For one thing, they are likely to assume that such places are dangerous.

    Street culture has been migrating upwards in Jamaica since about the 1960s. Over the years the internal barriers — prejudices, conventions, etc., — to reggae and dancehall culture and all its various forms are much more permeable than they were then. Even before I left Jamaica in my teens in the mid-late 70s I knew, and experienced, a change in Kingston speech, I was speaking a whole new middle-class slang that was full of street lamguage, to the unutterable dismay of my parents.

    But the various social stigma associated with stuff like “dutty wine” are considerably reduced, among the educated middle class, from what they would once have been.

    So now it’s pretty much just the churches that do this sort of moral policing. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t class barriers still, but these are much less to do with subtle things like syntax and “slackness” than they are to do with material status.

  • I’m reluctant that the Pit bull requirements a particular type of operator…these pet dogs, no matter how ‘trusting’ still have teeth, are still creatures with out moral concepts and when they DO bite, won’t allow go. As in all creatures…some often be more suseptable to instinctual behavior and time and time again, this breed tends to do just that.

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