Rasul Guliyev Accuses Azerbaijan Government of Pilfering Billions

Former Speaker of the National Assembly of Azerbaijan Rasul Guliyev has written an interesting analysis (translated by yours truly) of the current state of Azerbaijan in the context of the Arab Spring.

I don't always agree with Rasul - for example, I think any discussion of per capita budget numbers is pointless without taking into account how the budget is actually distributed: even the most generous per capita numbers lose their significance when the majority of funds ends up in the pockets of a small elite. But despite our disagreements, Rasul's works are always thought-provoking, and very educational. Every time I work with him, I feel like I should be getting a college credit just from all the research I have to do!

You can read the article here.

Torchwood: Miracle Day - All About Ianto?

One of the first things a writer (or a keen reader) realizes is that everything is autobiographical. Some writers wear this fact proudly; others like to hide it under layers and layers of distancing tricks; but the fact remains: a careful reader can always pick up the fictional threads that lead back to the writer's reality.

Digging through my favorite writers' heads is one of my favorite pastimes. As such, Russel T Davies has a wonderfully big one to roam around in. Brash, outspoken, confrontational, Davies wears his convictions on his sleeve, unapologetic about his radicalism. People (like myself) whose politics are in line with his might see him as an activist, a champion who screams the things too many people are afraid to whisper. Others wish he'd just shut the hell up.

Activists are driven by emotion. Some may be more diplomatic than others, but deep down, only powerful, overwhelming, undeniable emotion that keeps you up at night can force you to fashion yourself into an object of scorn and hatred. You don't make yourself a target for fun - you do it because otherwise the anger will asphyxiate you.

But writing - and especially television writing - is a highly structured affair. It demands a seemingly impossible feat: making best friends of raw, overwhelming emotion and iron-fisted control. Too much restraint, and the writing falls flat, failing to ignite the passion of the audience. Not enough restraint, and the anger will spin out of control and crash and burn like a war plane on fire.

This is exactly what seems to have happened with Torchwood: Miracle Day. For once, it felt like Davies couldn't quite force his anger into the structure of a storyline. And I think by retracing our steps, we can figure out what went wrong.

Miracle Day stands in stark contrast to the last installment of Torchwood. The powerful Children of Earth wasn't lacking in emotion - passionate rage burns through the show's exploration of the class system, the government's ongoing betrayal of its electorate, the self-hatred that makes us our own worst enemies, and the impotence of trying to make yourself heard. And yet all these beautiful literary gifts seemed overshadowed by the fans' insane overreaction to the death of Ianto Jones.

An interview with Bi Women

Bi Women is a quarterly journal published by the Boston Bisexual Women's Network. A few months back, Editor Robyn Ochs interviewed me for the Bi Women Around the World column.

You can read my interview - and, in fact, the entire issue - here.

Check out my short story Changes at SexLife Canada

SexLifeCanada.ca, the home of The National Sexlife Journal, recently started a new fiction section. My hardcore short story Changes is one of the first two pieces of fiction ever featured on the site! You can read it in the Hot Words section.

Changes was first published in Men Magazine in March 2006, along with a very explicit full-page illustration. Can we have a vote on whether or not I should scan it in? ;P

Kiran interviewed by Toronto's OMNI News

On 6 December 1989, an armed man entered Montreal's l'Ecole Polytechnique and with the screams of "I hate feminists," murdered 14 female engineering students. Protests that they weren't feminists didn't save these women. The fact that they were in a university classroom, studying to be engineers, was enough to condemn them in the eyes of this self-professed warrior.

The attack became known as the Montreal Massacre.

Since then, 6 December became National Day of Action and Remembrance on Violence Against Women. Still, and more women seem quick to disown feminism while living a feminist life. The refrain of "I'm not a feminist" has become way too common among young women who work, go to universities, live alone or with their boyfriends, choose whether and when they have children, and do a million small things women before feminism couldn't imagine doing.

So if they live a life afforded them by feminism, can they really disown it without disowning their entire lives?

Of course it's actions, not words, that truly matter. Maybe it doesn't matter that so many younger women seem to react with seething hatred to the word "feminism." As long as they keep living their feminist lives, the notion that women and men are equal will be just fine, regardless of what happens to the label.

To commemorate the Montreal Massacre, Toronto's Women Won't Forget hold a candlelit vigil on the UofT campus. This year, Kiran was invited to read her beautifully life-affirming poem The Love Manifesto. Before her performance at the vigil, Toronto's South Asian Omni News chatted with Kiran about her own experience with violence.

To watch the report, go to the Omni News website, wait for the annoying ad to end, then scroll to the beginning of the news segment about the vigil at 3:59.

Kiran is featured on the University of Toronto's Anthropology page

Kiran is currently taking Anthropology 323 at the UofT (and acing it, though if you tell her that she will not believe you), and her professor asked to feature her on the web page for the class! Kiran's short bio can be found here, at least until the end of the semester. And here, for posterity's sake, is the screencap:

Who you callin' a zombie? AMC's The Walking Dead Join the Tea Party

Zombies are not exactly the darlings of serialized television. While the recent years have seen a great deal of excellent (and not so excellent) zombie movies, weekly TV has mostly steered clear of the subject. It’s easy to see why: unsexy, dull and slow, devoid of motivation and unable to deliver snappy one-liners, zombies might just be the most two-dimensional villain a show can have.

So why, then, do I find AMC’s new weekly drama The Walking Dead - a wall-to-wall zombiefest the likes of which serial television has never seen - so damn irresistible?




The North American political discourse has a rich history of dehumanizing the enemy. Whether it’s Communists hiding under our beds or immigrants coming to steal our jobs, the easy answer holds undeniable attraction: if our enemies are mindless hordes, then we are blameless - we’d done nothing to earn their hatred, they simply want to kill us for our freedoms (or our brains). The two-dimensional villain is the villain of America’s Tea Party movement; the villain of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; and, closer to home, the villain that sent Toronto voters running scared to the polls to elect Rob Ford. And the zombie is about as dehumanized as an enemy can get.

If the two-dimensional zombie villain reflects our reluctance to examine our shortcomings, then The Walking Dead is an answer of sorts to Battlestar Galactica in America’s post-9/11 cultural polemic: where BSG tried, however successfully, to examine what makes an enemy, The Walking Dead turns fear of self-examination into a point of pride by focusing on an enemy that’s beyond examination. Our hero, the archetypal good cop Rick Grimes, played to great effect by Andrew Lincoln, simply wakes up in his hospital bed to find the world around him infested with zombies. The first episode gives no hint of questioning how the world got to be this way - and our bewildered but decidedly uncurious hero doesn’t seem to care. All he has to do is hang on to his all-American identity, signaled by his Georgia twang and his uniform, to which he clings long after the apocalypse has rendered it irrelevant.

And yet, here I am, one episode in and already hopelessly addicted. If The Walking Dead is, in fact, the Tea Party’s Battlestar Galactica, then it might just be the most entertaining piece of horror fiction the right wing has produced since Glenn Beck. But no matter how much I try to congratulate myself on being open-minded enough to enjoy the product of an ideology that I find abhorrent, or tell myself that I welcome the show’s insight into enemy mindset, I fear the real reason is much less flattering.

For I have my own hordes. Beyond the self-congratulatory attempts at understanding those who play the role of villain in my world, the desire for a simple answer is always there, gnawing at the edges of my consciousness. Each individual Tea Bagger, Rob Ford supporter, homophobe and xenophobe bases their ideology on hopes and fears that carry absolute validity in their individual life. Next to this quagmire of human psychology, the simplicity of zombies is worryingly comforting.

And there it is: the real reason I am hooked on The Walking Dead. I see right through the show’s attempt to dehumanize the villains of its world: the hordes of mindless zombies who are coming for our freedoms, jobs and brains, are people just like me. But so is Deputy Grimes. In the end, he’s not so different from a disenchanted hippie like myself, bewildered at the hordes that just keep coming and so, so tired of asking why.