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Poetry, Books & Culture -A Sharing Caring Night -Make time for a good read
Updated: 24 Apr 2013
World Book Night 2013: the books you've loved giving
The mass public giveaway recalls the more private pleasure of spreading literary love to friends.
Please pass on your present preferences
Beyond World Book Night ... Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy of The Open Veins of Latin America –
although it's not known if it's now a White House favourite. What would you choose, and for whom?
Happy World Book Night everyone!
I'm out and about in London town later, and am hoping to be approached by one of the 20,000 volunteers who
signed up for the mass giveaway – particularly if they come bearing Judge Dredd.
After a mass reading of the Sandman books, I'm trying to educate myself in the ways of graphic novels, and
apparently this one is "truly classic".
Today's initiative is about giving books to strangers, but there's something particularly wonderful about pressing a
book you've loved onto a friend and finding that they love it too.
It happened to me two weeks ago: I'd just finished, at a gallop, Neil Gaiman's forthcoming The Ocean at the End of
the Lane, and was desperate to discuss it with someone. Fortunately, I was at my parents', so I pressed it on my
mum, who shares my love of fantastical fiction; she'd finished it by the next day, and we could rave and dissect
together.
I'm still waiting to hear Sarah Crown's take on Stephen King's Misery and Desperation, which I passed on a while
back, and I'm now scanning my inner circle for someone to hand Joe Hill's NOS4A2 to - I was properly scared by it,
in a way I haven't been for ages, and I want to find another horror fiction fan to pick it over with.
It goes the other way too.
A few years ago, a friend gave me a biography of Mary Wesley, Patrick Marnham's Wild Mary.
I've loved Wesley's novels for years but had no idea how fascinating she was as a person.
I still haven't returned it, and now it feels like it belongs to me.
Sorry, Kate.
But how about you?
In honour of World Book Night, tell us about the books you've passed on which have found places in the hearts of
friends and family, and about those you've had pressed on you which have gone on to become favourites |
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Poetry Books & Culture - The Call to Freedom by Percy Shelley
Updated: 05 Apr 2013
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Call to Freedom (1819)
From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain, and weep for cold -
From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares -
Lastly from the palaces
Where the murmur of distress
Echoes, like the distant sound
Of a wind alive around
Those prison halls of wealth and fashion
Where some few feel such compassion
For those who groan, and toil, and wail
As must make their brethren pale -
Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to be behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold -
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -
And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thunder doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few. |
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Poetry Books & Culture - When Icicles Hang by the Wall by William Shakespeare
Updated: 05 Apr 2013
When Icicles Hang by the Wall by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The Sunday Times Published: 30 December 2012
Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost was first published in 1598 (Stock Montage)
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
From Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V, Scene II
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Poetry, Books & Culture- A Man's A Man For A'That -Robert Burns
Updated: 30 Dec 2012
A Man's A Man For A' That
Robert Burns
1795
Type: Song
Tune: For a' that.
Is there for honest Poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that;
The coward slave-we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that.
Our toils obscure an' a' that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The Man's the gowd for a' that.
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.
Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;
Tho' hundreds worship at his word,
He's but a coof for a' that:
For a' that, an' a' that,
His ribband, star, an' a' that:
The man o' independent mind
He looks an' laughs at a' that.
A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's abon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank than a' that.
Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that
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Poetry Books & Culture-The Auld Farmers New Year Salutation To His Auld Mare, Maggie-Robert Burns
Updated: 30 Dec 2012
The Auld Farmer's New-Year-
Morning Salutation To His Auld Mare, Maggie
On giving her the accustomed ripp of corn to hansel in the New Year.
Robert Burns
1786
A Guid New-year I wish thee, Maggie!
Hae, there's a ripp to thy auld baggie:
Tho' thou's howe-backit now, an' knaggie,
I've seen the day
Thou could hae gaen like ony staggie,
Out-owre the lay.
Tho' now thou's dowie, stiff, an' crazy,
An' thy auld hide as white's a daisie,
I've seen thee dappl't, sleek an' glaizie,
A bonie gray:
He should been tight that daur't to raize thee,
Ance in a day.
Thou ance was i' the foremost rank,
A filly buirdly, steeve, an' swank;
An' set weel down a shapely shank,
As e'er tread yird;
An' could hae flown out-owre a stank,
Like ony bird.
It's now some nine-an'-twenty year,
Sin' thou was my guid-father's mear;
He gied me thee, o' tocher clear,
An' fifty mark;
Tho' it was sma', 'twas weel-won gear,
An' thou was stark.
When first I gaed to woo my Jenny,
Ye then was trotting wi' your minnie:
Tho' ye was trickie, slee, an' funnie,
Ye ne'er was donsie;
But hamely, tawie, quiet, an' cannie,
An' unco sonsie.
That day, ye pranc'd wi' muckle pride,
When ye bure hame my bonie bride:
An' sweet an' gracefu' she did ride,
Wi' maiden air!
Kyle-Stewart I could bragged wide
For sic a pair.
Tho' now ye dow but hoyte and hobble,
An' wintle like a saumont coble,
That day, ye was a jinker noble,
For heels an' win'!
An' ran them till they a' did wauble,
Far, far, behin'!
When thou an' I were young an' skeigh,
An' stable-meals at fairs were dreigh,
How thou wad prance, and snore, an' skreigh
An' tak the road!
Town's-bodies ran, an' stood abeigh,
An' ca't thee mad.
When thou was corn't, an' I was mellow,
We took the road aye like a swallow:
At brooses thou had ne'er a fellow,
For pith an' speed;
But ev'ry tail thou pay't them hollowm
Whare'er thou gaed.
The sma', droop-rumpl't, hunter cattle
Might aiblins waur't thee for a brattle;
But sax Scotch mile, thou try't their mettle,
An' gar't them whaizle:
Nae whip nor spur, but just a wattle
O' saugh or hazel.
Thou was a noble fittie-lan',
As e'er in tug or tow was drawn!
Aft thee an' I, in aught hours' gaun,
In guid March-weather,
Hae turn'd sax rood beside our han',
For days thegither.
Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, an' fliskit;
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit,
An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket,
Wi' pith an' power;
Till sprittie knowes wad rair't an' riskit
An' slypet owre.
When frosts lay lang, an' snaws were deep,
An' threaten'd labour back to keep,
I gied thy cog a wee bit heap
Aboon the timmer:
I ken'd my Maggie wad na sleep,
For that, or simmer.
In cart or car thou never reestit;
The steyest brae thou wad hae fac't it;
Thou never lap, an' sten't, and breastit,
Then stood to blaw;
But just thy step a wee thing hastit,
Thou snoov't awa.
My pleugh is now thy bairn-time a',
Four gallant brutes as e'er did draw;
Forbye sax mae I've sell't awa,
That thou hast nurst:
They drew me thretteen pund an' twa,
The vera warst.
Mony a sair daurk we twa hae wrought,
An' wi' the weary warl' fought!
An' mony an anxious day, I thought
We wad be beat!
Yet here to crazy age we're brought,
Wi' something yet.
An' think na', my auld trusty servan',
That now perhaps thou's less deservin,
An' thy auld days may end in starvin;
For my last fow,
A heapit stimpart, I'll reserve ane
Laid by for you.
We've worn to crazy years thegither;
We'll toyte about wi' ane anither;
Wi' tentie care I'll flit thy tether
To some hain'd rig,
Whare ye may nobly rax your leather,
Wi' sma' fatigue. |
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Poetry Books & Culture- "American Grace"
Updated: 27 Nov 2012
American Grace
//
//
by: Rick Nagin
November 21 2012
Remember those who grew this food
Who picked and packed
Who shipped and sold.
Bronze rainbow arms
Have set this food upon our table.
Remember those who built this house
Assembled, weaved, created
Light and warmth and health.
Remember those who fought and died
To break the king’s command, the slaver’s yoke
And slay the Nazi beast.
Remember those who walked in darkness
Eyes on the gourd and the Trail of Tears,
Marching in Selma, martyred in Memphis
They can’t kill the dream, Jesús y Maria,
Che on his cross in the Andean highlands
Shot in the stadium, pushed from the airplane
Martyrs for freedom
And America.
Never forget
Our ancient foe
His craft and power,
His cruel hate
His endless thirst
Through blood and oil
For profit, profit
Uber alles.
Remember those whose songs of love
Restore us still
Pablo, Diego, Woody and Giant Paul
Mus’ keep on fightin’, Comrades all
Remember those who grew this food
Who mined and forged
Who sang and loved
Who fought and died
Who made all wealth
All honor and glory,
All power and peace
Be unto you
Be unto you.
Photo: El Vendador de Alcatraces by Diego Rivera (kamikazecactus/CC)
This poem/prayer was originally published in People's Weekly World in March 2006. |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Poem by Willie Nelson
Updated: 19 Oct 2012
"I have outlived my pecker."
A Poem - by Willie Nelson
My nookie days are over,
My pilot light is out.
What used to be my pride and joy,
Is now my water spout.
Time was when, on its own accord,
From my trousers it would spring.
But now I've got a full time job,
To find the f***in' thing.
It used to be embarrassing,
The way it would behave.
For every single morning,
It would stand and watch me shave.
Now as old age approaches,
It sure gives me the blues.
To see it hang its little head,
And watch me tie my shoes!! |
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Poetry Books & Culture- I Am by John Clare
Updated: 21 Sep 2012
I Am
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.
John Clare
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Poetry Books & Culture- John Clare, English Poet, Son of a Farm Labourer- 1793 - 1864
Updated: 21 Sep 2012
John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864 / Northamptonshire / England)
John Clare was an English poet, the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption.
His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets.
His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".
Life
Early Life
Clare was born in Helpston, six miles to the north of the city of Peterborough.
In his life time, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet".
Helpston now lies in the Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire.
He became an agricultural labourer while still a child; however, he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve. In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him.
Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House.
He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817.
In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief.
Malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his 5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later life.
Early poems
Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets.
In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury.
Drury sent Clare's poetry to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820.
This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published.
Midlife
He had married Martha ("Patty") Turner in 1820.
An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so that Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned.
Soon, however, his income became insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless.
The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself.
As he worked again in the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home.
Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours; between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children.
His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well.
In 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he felt only more alienated.
His last work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favourably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen.
As his alcohol consumption steadily increased along with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic.
A notable instance of this behaviour was demonstrated in his interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock.
He was becoming a burden to Patty and his family, and in July 1837, on the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor, Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr Matthew Allen's private asylum High Beach near Loughton, in Epping Forest.
Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care.
Later life and death
During his first few asylum years in Essex (1837–1841), Clare re-wrote famous poems and sonnets by Lord Byron. His own version of Child Harold became a lament for past lost love, and Don Juan, A Poem became an acerbic, misogynistic, sexualised rant redolent of an aging Regency dandy.
Clare also took credit for Shakespeare's plays, claiming to be the Renaissance genius himself.
"I'm John Clare now," the poet claimed to a newspaper editor, "I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly."
In 1841, Clare left the asylum in Essex, to walk home, believing that he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married with children to her and Martha as well.
He did not believe her family when they told him she had died accidentally three years earlier in a house fire.
He remained free, mostly at home in Northborough, for the five months following, but eventually Patty called the doctors in.
Between Christmas and New Year in 1841, Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St Andrew's Hospital).
Upon Clare's arrival at the asylum, the accompanying doctor, Fenwick Skrimshire, who had treated Clare since 1820, completed the admission papers.
To the enquiry "Was the insanity preceded by any severe or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?", Dr Skrimshire entered: "After years of poetical prosing."
He remained here for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Dr Thomas Octavius Prichard, encouraged and helped to write.
Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am.
He died on 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s churchyard. Today, children at the John Clare School, Helpston's primary, parade through the village and place their 'midsummer cushions' around Clare's gravestone (which has the inscriptions
"To the Memory of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and "A Poet is Born not Made") on his birthday, in honour of their most famous resident.
The thatched cottage where he was born was bought by the John Clare Education & Environment Trust in 2005 and is restoring the cottage to its 18th century state. |
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Poetry, Books and Culture- The World of Daniel Defoe 1709
Updated: 21 Sep 2012
The great, who live profusely
The rich, who live plentifully
The middle sort, who live well
The working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want
The country people, farmers, etc, who fare indifferently
The poor who fare hard
The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want
The World of Daniel Defoe 1709 |
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Poetry, Books & Culture-A People's History of London - Lindsey German & John Rees
Updated: 11 Jul 2012
Lindsey German and John Rees - A People's History Of London
Verso, £12.99
Tuesday 10 July 2012
by Jean Turner
Lindsey German and John Rees have undertaken a formidable task.
In one volume, they seek to encapsulate the history of London in terms of the ordinary people who have shaped it and given it its spirited life.
They have achieved this by drawing on many reputable and fascinating ancient chronicles, histories and biographies, including those by communist historians and activists and social reformers.
It's a history familiar to socialists and London lovers and what the book succeeds in doing is relating past with current struggles.
The chapter headings - from Lords, Lollards, Heretics and Peasants In Revolt proceed in chronological order to Neoliberal London - and enable the reader to browse in a favourite period of popular history.
Every common land, park, square, market, street and building in London is built on the foundation of a turbulent and often violent past.
Many of these places are still the centres of protest and action - as the authors demonstrate, the "London mob" has never gone away.
The City has become the centre of vast wealth arising from the exploitation and occupation of other countries, the slave-trade and present day finance capital.
The chapter Old Corruption And The Mob That Can Read records that in the 1750s bankers Alexander and David Barclay and Francis Baring made their money from the slave trade and one can only hope that Barclays soon meets the same fate as Barings Bank.
The reverse of this stupendous wealth was terrible poverty and squalor, well described by Fielding, Marx, Engels, Dickens and Mayhew and the authors emphasise that Londoners played an important part in the formation of trade unions, the rise of Chartism, universal suffrage and social welfare.
They reference the popular support in the capital for the 1848 national revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution and the national liberation movements in the British Empire.
Fascism was fought and defeated on the streets of London and Occupy UK has built on the stratagem of the communists in WWII who led the occupation of the Underground and luxury hotels for air-raid shelters.
While this is a reference book for all progressive people who want to identify with a city that never stands still, but some of its statements are questionable.
For instance, it states that "the July 1945 general election took place with a depleted electoral register and with many troops still overseas."
In fact the overseas forces were able to vote and the three weeks between the July 5 polling day and the announcement of the election result on July 26 allowed for their votes to be counted.
The Labour landslide was the result of highly politicised troops voting to return to a new society free from pre-war Tory misery.
But such errors in no way detract from the value of such a history.
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Poetry Books & Culture Fifty Shades of Grey- E.L.James -For women with adulterous minds
Updated: 10 Jul 2012
Why women love Fifty Shades of Grey
It's the fastest-selling novel for adults of all time – and it's very adult in content.
Why have millions of women been seduced by Fifty Shades of Grey.
o Zoe Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 July 2012 22.55 BST
It's pointless to deny that there's something going on here: EL James has now sold 4 million copies of her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy via her UK publisher, Random House, to add to the 15 million (it beggars belief) that have been shifted in the US and Canada. In three months.
In the UK, it's the fastest-selling book ever in both physical and ebook incarnations.
There's just been an extra print run for the UK market, to meet demand: 2.75 million copies.
It's the fastest selling adult novel of all time.
By which they mean "it's the fastest-selling novel of all time that isn't Harry Potter".
But its content is, of course, rather adult.
The trilogy features Anastasia Steele, who falls in love with Christian Grey, a troubled young billionaire who likes sex only if he can accompany it with quite formal, stylised corporal punishment.
The narrative drivers are pretty slack – improbable dialogue ("I'm a very wealthy man, Miss Steele, and I have expensive and absorbing hobbies"); lame characterisation; irritating tics (a constant war between Steele's "subconscious", which is always fainting or putting on half-moon glasses, and her "inner goddess", who is forever pouting and stamping); and an internal monologue that goes like this … "Holy hell, he's hot!"; "No man has ever affected me the way Christian Grey has, and I cannot fathom why.
Is it his looks? His civility? Wealth? Power?" Yuh huh. Civility puts me in a blue funk too.
In normal circumstances, it would be lazy, but here, it is more like a shorthand.
James writes as though she's late for a meeting with a sex scene.
Here, her voice is quite different: meticulous, inventive, radical and conflicted; Grey is only interested in a dominant/submissive relationship (with these "hard limits" – no fire, no faeces, no blood loss, no gynaecological instruments, no children or animals, no permanent disfigurement, no breath control and no direct electricity – I paraphrase for brevity).
Steele just wants a regular boyfriend (or does she? Yik yak yik yak).
This is Fifty Shades of Grey I'm talking about.
We'll come to Fifty Shades Darker later. Goddammit.
I've been infected by James's ominous, staccato delivery. After 1,600 pages of the stuff, you will too.
I'm doing it again. I can't help it.
There is a little light spanking in Jilly Cooper (Octavia, Rivals), and the romance genre (as distinct from chicklit) would be many pages lighter if nobody ever got tied to a bed with a scarf, but this is in a different league.
Its popularity has come as a bit of a surprise to publishers, who thought they knew what women wanted.
It must be a bit like being married to someone for 20 years, and suddenly finding out they like fisting.
People who like to trace all new trends back to new technology have offered this explanation – that women who wouldn't be seen dead reading smut on the tube could read it on their Kindle, and this launched a whole world of sales.
The unexpected element is that the shame of erotic fiction is largely in the imagination, and once people had read it, they felt happy to discuss it openly.
It was word of mouth that launched the paperback version on the back of the ebook.
Where do you stand on erotica in public spaces? Someone in a tube carriage last week with three people reading the paperback (and God knows how many reading it on their Kindles) tweeted, "isn't it a bit early for that sort of thing?" – as though there were an erotica yardarm, and we all knew when it was. After lunch? When the sun goes down?
It seemed a bit random, yet I can see why he'd query the wisdom of summoning a sustained erotic vignette on one's way into work.
But what do I know? I work at home. Maybe people do that all the time.
Consider, furthermore, the way high culture and low culture have collided.
It's long been acceptable to read the Financial Times and also watch the Eurovision Song contest, read Philip Roth as well as Marian Keyes. Because erotica is niche to start with, this revolution took longer to reach it, and only now have we loosened up a bit. By this reckoning, Fifty Shades is just Mills & Boon for the generation that would once have been embarrassed to be seen reading Mills & Boon.
No, there is more to it than that. First, the reason sex scenes are so difficult to write is the gear change, rather than the sex itself.
It is extremely difficult to write a regular story spliced with sex, just as it would be difficult to tell a story interspersed with explicit sexual detail.
That's why the Bad Sex Award exists, and is so easy to bestow. In the very act of describing sex as an incidental, you create an excruciating sex scene.
James's sex scenes are not incidental, they are the meat of the plot, the crux of the conflict, the key to at least one of and possibly both the central characters.
It is a sex book. It is not a book with sex in it.
The French author Catherine Millet wrote: "For me, a pornographic book is functional, written to help you to get excited.
If you want to speak about sex in a novel or any "ambitious" writing, today, in the 21st century, you must be explicit. You cannot be metaphorical any longer." I'm not sure James's writing is that ambitious, but she has certainly understood the bit about not being metaphorical.
As history is written by the victors, so S&M is written by the Ss, and the problem with sadists is that they exaggerate. They're not looking at it from the masochist's point of view – it's in their job description not to.
If the Marquis de Sade thinks any garden– variety submissive is going to get a kick out of having their back broken on a cartwheel, he's dreaming.
Conversely, two opposite predilections, across a very broad scope, might easily collide in a fantasy written from the perspective of the masochist or naïf. So that's the popularity of volume one.
The second volume is a bald and rushed go at monetising the brand. The deviant stuff is largely excised, and the move towards mainstream sexual endeavour seems to bore the author.
Her fantasies turn instead to what presents she'd like if she fetched up with a billionaire (an iPad. An Audi. No, a Saab! Nope, I feel cheap. OK, OK, just the Saab, and some clothes, ooh, a bikini, for $541 … what a terrible waste, and yet how pert my breasts look).
Now we're looking at a book you'd be embarrassed to be caught reading on the tube. Small habits begin to grate: the way everybody always seethes, scolds, smirks or whispers and nobody ever just says; the way his eyes are constantly blazing, and she is constantly biting her lip.
The link between volumes is so clumsy that you have to look away ("He thinks he doesn't deserve to be loved. Why does he feel that way? Does it have to do with his upbringing?
His birth mom, the crack whore?").
The need for a plot invites in some true gothic horror show and, stripped of his deviations, Christian Grey is just a controlling, unpleasant man whom, even 30 years ago, no sane heroine would ever have married, however Holy-hell-shit-I-can't-breathe hot he was.
The third in the series, Fifty Shades Freed, is … Oh what am I doing?
You're going to read it. Of course you're going to read it. You've probably already read it. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-The Passion of Bradley Manning by Chase Madar
Updated: 04 Jul 2012
The Passion of Bradley Manning
by Chase Madar (OR Books, £10)
Tuesday 03 July 2012
by Gordon Parsons
Whistle-blowing US army private Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This is the view of New York civil rights lawyer and writer Chase Madar.
Instead, Manning has faced calls for his execution from Fox News fanatics and even voices from Congress.
The 24-year-old soldier is now awaiting court martial for releasing "secret" Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks.
Madar is leading the struggle to relieve Manning's prison treatment - when he was first incarcerated he was deprived of clothes, exercise and sleep in his 24-hour isolation cell in military prison.
For a US public starved of truth, this book may bring about recognition of Manning's heroic role in revealing Washington's criminal activities in its worldwide "war on terror."
Incoming President Barack Obama at one point declared his support for whistle-blowers, but his hypocrisy was swiftly exposed.
Apart delivering a vicious warning to other potential whistle-blowers, the US government is clearly persecuting Manning as a step in its intent to get Julian Assange.
Madar's short book furnishes all the facts relating to the case and additionally shows how the September 11 national trauma has been used by the US government to corrode both civil liberties and the popular desire to face reality.
Most worrying is that although the incompetence of the security system made the leaked information readily available to many soldiers and diplomats, only Manning - essentially small fry - "had the courage to do the deed."
The real criminals are the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld brigade, whose ranks - shockingly for many - now include Obama.
As this book demonstrates, they are not only responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and those of thousands of their own young troops but phenomenal wastes of money and resources and the acceptance of torture as a means to their appalling ends.
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Poetry Books & Culture-US Blood & Citizenship-"We Wear the Mask" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Updated: 04 Jul 2012
"We Wear the Mask," by Paul Laurence Dunbar
(From "Lyrics of Lowly Life," 1896)
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask! |
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Poetry Books & Culture -Doing Politics by Tony Wright
Updated: 03 Jul 2012
Doing Politics
by Tomasz Pierscionek
Sun 1st Jul 2012
London Progressive Journal
‘The trouble with him is that he thinks too much’.
Such was the description Peter Mandelson gave former Labour MP Tony Wright during the latter’s days as a backbencher.
Another parliamentary colleague, a veteran MP, warned Wright that he came across as too much of an academic.
In the first part of Doing Politics, Tony Wright, MP for Cannock and Burntwood (1992-1997) and later Cannock Chase (1997-2010), provides a summary of his life.
He discusses how his embryonic interest in politics developed from an early age, fashioned through the influence of his family and working class community, and cemented by his schoolboy flirtations with Socialism and Labour politics.
Wright describes how this led to his eventual election as a Labour MP and shares many anecdotes pertaining to his time in the House and the reforms he successfully fought to introduce as chair of the Public Affairs Select Committee (PASC).
The second part of the book comprises a collection of Wright’s articles, spanning many years, covering an extensive range of subjects from reforming the House of Lords to an interesting essay on the theories of Guild Socialism.
One of his pieces, an article published in the New Statesman in 1996, warned of the emergence of an expenses scandal years before the matter came to the light.
Other essays raise the question of ‘Englishness’ in an ever devolving Britain and whether there is a future for the Monarchy.
He warns too against the growing number of ‘professional politicians’ and calls on the public to engage with politics.
The author pools his years of experience as an MP, the chair of the PASC and as an academic to provide a critical analysis of the major issues that have been debated in parliament over the past two decades.
Themes that recur throughout his writings include the necessity (and present lack) of a civic engagement with politics, highlighting the threat to democracy that results from a populace not taking an interest in politics and failing to hold politicians to account.
He has little time for those pundits, tabloid journalists and bloggers who heap scorn and ridicule on elected MPs from the safety of not having to make a binding decision.
Though Wright is emphatic that MPs who abuse their position and bring their profession into disrepute ought to be held fully accountable, he points out that politics, and by definition politicians, have often been responsible for bringing about legislation to the betterment of society.
To those who incessantly criticise politicians, he has this challenge: hold them to account to ensure the garden of democracy is well tended but recognise their importance in a democratic society; don’t grumble from the sidelines, do something about the problem.
Wright warns of the dangers to democracy posed by a growing cynicism from both the left and the right.
Although not all readers may agree with Wright’s analysis and recommendations, his writing is undeniably both thoughtful and intelligent, evidencing his academic roots and strong credentials as a supporter of democracy, accountability and improvement.
Wright provides much food for thought and gives a historical background to some of today’s most recognised problems in society.
He cautions against a blind idealism he believes emanates from both the left and the right.
He can be proud of his struggles in going against the flow, including the wishes of cabinet ministers from his own party, to introduce reforms aimed at rebalancing the discrepancy in power between the Executive and the Legislature and holding individuals ministers to account.
One of his successes included ensuring that each Prime Minister (from Blair onwards) would be required to appear twice a year in front of a select committee, a practice previously unheard of and opposed by a number of his colleagues.
When Wright stood down from parliament after 18 years an MP, Jack Straw, described him as a ‘paradigm of the best of the Members of this House who have shown that it is possible, by assiduity and imagination, to be profoundly influential from the back benches, on either side.’ |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Ballad of Accounting - Ewan MacColl
Updated: 01 Jul 2012
Ballad of Accounting
Words & Music : Ewan MacColl
Lyric as sung by Dick Gaughan
In the morning we built the city
In the afternoon walked through its streets
Evening saw us leaving
We wandered through our days as if they would never end
All of us imagined we had endless time to spend
We hardly saw the crossroads
And small attention gave
To landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave,
cradle to the grave, cradle to the grave
Did you learn to dream in the morning?
Abandon dreams in the afternoon?
Wait without hope in the evening?
Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born,
act of being born, act of being born?
Did you alter the face of the city?
Did you make any change in the world you found?
Or did you observe all the warnings?
Did you read the trespass notices, did you keep off the grass?
Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass?
Did you learn to keep your mouth shut,
Were you seen and never heard?
Did you learn to be obedient and jump to at a word,
jump to at a word, jump to at a word?
Did you ever demand any answers?
The who, the what or the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy?
Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight,
never make a fight, never make a fight? |
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Poetry Books & Culture- " What if " - Benjamin Zephaniah
Updated: 01 Jul 2012
What If - Benjamin Zephaniah
If you can keep your money when governments about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust your neighbour when they trust not you
And they be very nosy too;
If you can await the warm delights of summer
Then summer comes and goes with sun not seen,
And pay so much for drinking water
Knowing that the water is unclean.
If you seek peace in times of war creation,
And you can see that oil merchants are to blame,
If you can meet a pimp or politician,
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you cannot bear dis-united nations
And you think this new world order is a trick,
If you've ever tried to build good race relations,
And watch bad policing mess your work up quick.
If you can make one heap of all your savings
And risk buying a small house and plot,
Then sit back and watch the economy inflating
Then have to deal with the negative equity you've got;
If you can force your mind and body to continue
When all the social services have gone,
If you struggle on when there is nothing in you,
Except the knowledge that justice can be wrong.
If you can speak the truth to common people
Or walk with Kings and Queens and live no lie,
If you can see how power can be evil
And know that every censor is a spy;
If you can fill an unforgiving lifetime
With years of working hard to make ends meet,
You may not be wealthy but I am sure you will find
That you can hold your head high as you walk the streets.
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Poetry Books & Culture- This Be The Verse-Philip Larkin
Updated: 01 Jul 2012
This Be The Verse – Philip Larkin 1922-85
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy – stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-"Spirit of Beauty" by Percy Shelley
Updated: 29 Jun 2012
The first step toward becoming someone is to be visited by an irresistible passion
“Spirit of Beauty” –Percy Bysshe Shelley
“When musing deeply on the lot
Of life,at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake and bring
News of birds and blossoming,----------
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked,and clasped my hands in ecstasy"
(Hymn to Intellectual Beauty) |
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Poetry Books & Culture-The World-A Beginners Guide by Goran Therborn
Updated: 18 Jun 2012
The World - A Beginner's Guide
by Goran Therborn - Polity Press, £14.99
Tuesday 22 February 2011
by John Moore
Gloabilsation is more than markets and capital flows, though these are its primary meaning.
It signifies satellite TV and the global reach of the internet as well as mass travel and increasing migration.
In this beginner's guide, sociology professor Goran Therborn believes it all amounts to
"a mass awareness of a common humanity."
As historical background to this new planetary consciousness he compresses a vast and fascinating range of historical and current world data into a detailed but intelligible account of the changes in planetary human society.
It starts with European colonialism from the 16th to the 20th century and continues to today's shift in the centre of gravity with the rise of China and India.
Therborn does not dwell on the internal dynamics of capitalism.
His aim is to interpret the world in various ways, not to change it and his characterisation of the first world war as "imperial powers falling out among themselves" is bland.
But he underlines the right-wing meaning of globalisation since the '90s after the fall of the Soviet Union and China's adoption of capitalism.
It became a term for neo-iberalism or global capitalist competition, driven by trading in vast sums of fictitious money on currency betting and derivatives.
The upshot was financial crisis, with still unforeseeable social consequences.
Therborn sees peril in the decades to come as the US seeks to direct its military supremacy against an ecomomically more powerful China.
He has no vision of radical social change in European society, but does not rule it out.
He would probably agree that mass awareness of the need for it could save world peace. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-Revolution-A Photographic History of Revolutionary Ireland 1913-1923
Updated: 14 Jun 2012
Revolution - A Photographic History of Revolutionary Ireland 1913-1923
by Padraig Og O Ruairc (Mercier Press, £21.99)
Tuesday 22 November 2011
by David Granville
There can be no doubt that the fight for Irish freedom and independence in the first quarter of the 20th century has played a critical role in shaping the character of the Irish state up to the present day.
However, as someone with a particular liking for photo histories, I have to admit to having felt an initial tinge of disappoint on discovering that O Ruairc's book isn't the usual large format, coffee table offering.
But on closer inspection, any such disappointment soon ebbed away.
Although some of the photographs featured will be familiar to those who purchased any of the excellent 75th anniversary books which have appeared from the late 1990s onwards, a considerable number of these here are previously unpublished and from a variety of sources, including private collections, the Irish military archives, Kilmainham gaol, RTE and various British military museums.
Alongside famous classics such as the iconic and atmospheric shot of IRA volunteers patrolling Grafton Street in Dublin in 1922 and clashes between workers and the police in Sackville Street during the 1913 lockout there's a fascinating mixture of candid shots and set-pieces taken by all sides.
Particularly welcome is the fact that O Ruairc also includes photographs giving testimony to the politically progressive elements of this turbulent period, including the 1922 Irish postal strike and the Workers Soviet Mills in Limerick.
Also included is a poignant portrait of the wife and daughter of the executed revolutionary James Connolly, presumed to have been taken shortly after he was shot by the British forces.
From a later period, there's a group photograph in Kilmainham of Irish Citizen Army veterans, taken at the time of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
While the photographs alone are enough to satisfy, what helps to make O Ruairc's offering stand out above its predecessors is the well-researched and informative text which accompanies each photograph in the form of an extended caption.
Highly recommended.
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Poetry, Books & Culture-The Story of Easter Week 1916
Updated: 14 Jun 2012
The Story of Easter Week 1916
(RTE, £12.99)
Tuesday 28 April 2009
by David Granville
The veterans of the Easter Rising tell their fascinating story
An avid devotee of the vinyl record, one of my prize possessions - acquired for a mere bagatelle in an Oxfam shop in Sheffield in the days before they got internet savvy - is a BBC Home Service production entitled The Easter Rising 1916. The album featured recordings of some of the veterans of the rising.
Several of those veterans - including Piaras Beaslai, who saw action in Church Street, Desmond Ryan, who was at the GPO and went on to become the historian of the Rising and wrote a biography of James Connolly, and Liam O'Briain, who was at the College of Surgeons - were also included in a series of eight radio programmes broadcast in Ireland by RTE during Easter 1966 as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations.
The programmes were superbly narrated by historian and broadcaster Proinsias Mac Aonghusa and are now available from the Irish state broadcaster RTE, with additional presentation by Peter Woods.
The Story of Easter Week 1916 covers events from each day of the Rising from the perspectives of those who were there.
The programmes were not an attempt to provide a definitive history of the Rising and did not attempt to offer any judgements. The programmes did, however, allow some of the participants of the Easter Rising to tell their own story in their own words. They did so movingly and with tremendous dignity.
Their tales are periodically punctuated by the haunting uilleann piping of Neillidh Mulligan, whose rendition of The Foggy Dew is as striking, memorable and moving as the words of the veterans themselves.
Released initially in Ireland in 2006 to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the Rising, The Story of Easter Week 1916 has recently been made available in Britain through the auspices of Copperplate Distribution.
It's a valuable and fascinating audio documentary whose wider availability outside Ireland should be welcomed by anyone with an interest in modern Irish history.
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Poetry Books & Culture- Sheffield Doc/Fest -13-17 June
Updated: 08 Jun 2012
Sheffield Doc/fest
Wednesday 06 June 2012
by Ian Sinclair
This year's international documentary film festival covers a wide and varied range of topics, some of them challenging and controversial.
One such is Scarlet Road, a touching Australian film looking at the life of Rachel Wotton, a prostitute working in New South Wales - one of the few places in the world where selling sex is decriminalised.
Likely to inflame supporters of the "Swedish model," this non-judgmental documentary focuses on the people who make up around half Wotton's clients, severely disabled men. As the camera delicately pans over incredibly intimate scenes of the parents of one disabled man getting his bed ready for his night with Wotton, it becomes clear just how taboo the sexuality of the disabled actually is.
Wotton, who is presented as having a happy, fulfilling life as a sex worker and activist, sees herself as providing a socially important service and at one point says she hopes to open a non-profit brothel.
Call Me Kuchu (pictured above) tackles another taboo subject, homosexuality in Uganda.
Centred on the late David Kato, an LGBT activist who was by his own admission the first openly gay man in the whole of Uganda, the film gives an insight into what it means to be gay in a country where it is illegal.
With fanatical Christians denouncing homosexuality as a sin, a tabloid called Rolling Stone shockingly outs gay people on its front pages, endangering the lives of Kato and his gay friends.
The newspaper's claim that "homos" are in league with the militant Islamic group Al-Shabab would be incredibly funny if it wasn't so dangerous.
Watched from a relatively sexually enlightened Britain, Call Me Kuchu is a reminder of how the legal and political system of a nation can be organised to persecute a whole section of society.
As Martin Luther King once said, "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
When it comes to climate change and the environment it is West, and particularly the United States, that is out of step with the rest of the world.
A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle For A Living Planet is a US-centric history of the growing green movement fighting to resist the destruction of our planet.
Key figures and moments of resistance are highlighted, from the Sierra Club's opposition to dam- building in national parks in the early 20th century, to the 1970s Love Canal toxic waste controversy and the direct action of Greenpeace's save the whales campaign.
Inspiring and mainstream in intent, director Mark Kitchell maps the environmental movement's shift from saving wild places to the altogether bigger task of saving human society.
The question is, as several of the talking heads ask, is humanity up to the job - and will we act in time?
Sheffield Doc/Fest runs from June 13-17. For full details visit: www.sheffdocfest.com
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Poetry Books & Culture- The Sirens- Music on the Rocks
Updated: 08 Jun 2012
Hay Festival 2012:
Is it rational to listen to the Sirens?
Greg Davies looks at how we evaluate risk.
11:06AM BST 06 Jun 2012
Ever since Aristotle defined man as a rational animal, that has been seen as the very essence of our species. But the philosopher left a little room for interpretation.
Did he mean man to be perennially rational, constantly raising himself above the beasts, or rather merely capable of such rationality, but infrequently demonstrating it?
The latter is the more plausible.
As humans we’re certainly capable of rational thought, but we don’t have to look terribly deep within ourselves, or too closely at the behaviour of those around us, to see that it would be hubristic to suggest that a defining feature of humanity was abiding rationality.
And yet, for the past 50 years or more, the whole edifice of economic theory on which we rely has been constructed on this assumption that mankind is completely rational, all the time.
Homo economicus, the construct of rational man that economists rely on to describe reasonable human behaviour, is the extreme Aristotelian.
Not man as capable of rationality; but man as the instantiation of rationality.
At the heart of this debate is our ability to perceive and evaluate risk; and our capacity to make decisions in this inherently risky and uncertain world.
Decisions which, while they will never completely overcome risk, will at least contain it to the point where the risks to which we expose ourselves are evident, understood and accepted.
The models on which we ground financial regulation, the advice on medical risks that doctors offer to patients, the legal procedures on which we rely to ensure justice, and the extensive cost-benefit analyses that we use to advise long-term policy decisions – all these rely on our ability as a species to evaluate, quantify, and communicate notions of risk as rational agents.
This year’s Hay Festival features numerous speakers whose work explores this theme of risk and our fraught relationship with it.
The common thread may be difficult to discern simply because it straddles so many fields.
But the concept of risk and our correct “rational” response to it is so pervasive in our society that it cannot be contained in any one discipline, and is at this moment the primary concern of some of the world’s finest minds.
To truly approach the role of risk in our decision making requires a multidisciplinary effort taking in the fields of economics, mathematics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and not a little of the qualitative understanding of the human condition provided by literature.
One of the key talks on these matters at Hay will be by Daniel Kahneman, who in 2002 became the first psychologist to win the Nobel Prize for economics.
Last year he published Thinking, Fast and Slow, which draws out the major themes of his lifelong exploration into the psychology of human decision making.
In particular, he explores our (in)ability as intuitive statisticians to assess and respond accurately and rationally to risk and uncertainty in decision making.
Humans have two quite distinct modes of thinking and reasoning, which Kahneman refers to as System I (intuitive, emotive), and System II (deliberative, reflective).
While neither is necessarily irrational, System I would fall foul of Aristotle’s definition as we share this mode of thinking with all mammals. System II, however, which allows us to make long-range plans, solve maths problems, and exert self-control, relies on our possessing a neocortex, a part of the brain we share only with a few higher mammals.
Thus, the relatively new discipline of neuroscience joins philosophy, mathematics, economics and psychology as essential background for understanding risk and rationality.
(Susan Greenfield will be speaking about the neuroscience of identity.)
Our very brain structure allows for rational thought, but this component is, in Kahneman’s word, lazy. Frequently we rely on intuitive responses to risk and probability.
Our intuitions of how risky something is, and what choice to make to account for this seem to be extremely undeveloped relative to other functions our brains perform with accuracy and ease (visual recognition, for example).
It seems that when it comes to probability and statistics, even our deliberative brain finds thinking very difficult, and so tends to abdicate responsibility to the intuitive brain, which then happily gets things wrong with confidence.
(Nassim Nicholas Taleb will address the matter of how little our thoughtful selves really understand probability.)
Though we are poor intuitive statisticians, we none the less remain confident ones.
David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge (a role whose very existence speaks volumes), is due to give two talks at Hay.
All major problems we need to solve in this world, whether personal or social, require us to conquer the tension between our intuitive and “rational” responses.
To harness the power of our intuitions, while overcoming the overconfident and inaccurate beliefs they often result in. Our ability to act rationally depends not only on rational capacity, but also on our ability to suppress our intuitive brains when required.
As ever this tension was not unknown to the ancients.
When Ulysses is passing the island of the Sirens, he knows what the rational thing to do is: you listen in bliss to Sirens’ song, and then thank them politely before sailing home.
However, he also knows his rationality is imperfect.
That he is human, and therefore fallible.
So he gets his crew to tie him to the mast, and them to stop up their ears with beeswax.
Here, in the classics, is the true rationality.
The ability to realise that Homo economicus is only a part of our being, and to take steps to control and steer our own future behaviour.
* Greg Davies is Head of Behavioural Finance at Barclays.
For details of talks by Daniel Kahneman, Susan Greenfield, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and David Spiegelhalter, visit hayfestival.org |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Why the Olympics Aren't Good For Us, And How They Can Be- Mark Perryman
Updated: 02 Jun 2012
It’s the Taking Part
According to the organizers, encouraging participation in sport is one of the main benefits
of the London 2012 Olympics. Mark Perryman examines the evidence.
The Olympic motto “ The most important thing is not winning but taking part” represents some of the finest ideals not only of Olympism but of any sporting event aspiring to be democratic, participative and accessible.
After this weekend’s Jubilee hoopla fades away, the coming summer of sport - Euro 2012, a serious British challenger to win the Tour de France, Wimbledon fortnight, overseas rugby tours to the southern hemisphere, a domestic test match series and the first, and last, home Olympics for most of our lifetimes - will no doubt test such sentiments to the full.
A nation that invented many of the world’s team sports has, perhaps forgivably, some difficulty in coping with repeated defeats by the nations to which it exported them.
Add in a lengthy martial and imperial tradition, and CLR James’ famous maxim ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know’ can be seen as essential to understanding why the British are not the world’s best losers. Now well into its second week the Olympic Torch Relay would seem, at first sight, to represent all that is good about sport. Crisscrossing the country, coming soon to a city, town, or village near you, it appears to epitomize what ‘taking part’ should be all about.
But looked at more closely, it reveals the flimsy populism and chronic lack of ambition that London 2012 has come to symbolise.
The Relay has undoubtedly proved popular; any event with this scale of media coverage was likely to attract large, inquisitive crowds. And the passion of those turning up is evidently genuine.
But how is that energy connected to participation in the Games beyond waving a flag, cheering from the kerbside, and providing a backdrop to the celebrity torchbearers and sponsors’ branding?
What opportunities does the Relay really present for taking part?
A Torch Relay for all would have made popular participation its organising principle.
For each 10k leg, the roads and pathways could have been closed for the torchbearer to be followed by fun runners and active walkers, in the style of the London Marathon or Great North Run.
This could have been the biggest venture ever in participative sport.
But such opportunities have been spurned because they might detract from the all-important messages of sponsors. Villages, towns, localities within a city, each could have been given their stretch of the route for thousands to run or walk along.
Other legs could have been given over to cyclists, canoeists, ramblers and fell-runners, sailors and any other mode of human powered, or human steered transport. And why, on most nights, does the Relay stop with the Olympic flame transferred from the evening’s finishing point to tomorrow’s starting line by car?
What an experience it would be for club runners and cyclists to venture through the night, taking the torch to every part of the land.
In this way many more than the limited numbers now talking part could have been involved
But even with these changes the Relay would still leave most parts of the country with only a fleeting glimpse of the Torch as their solitary direct experience of the Olympics.
This reality has been dutifully accepted as fact by almost every media cheerleader for London 2012. It is as if the removal of all critical faculties is a condition of highly-valued journalistic accreditation.
An Olympic programme which included a multi-stage cycling Tour of Britain could have covered all parts of the country, and perhaps neighbouring nations too, as a thrilling contest throughout the duration of the Games.
And why not hold a Round Britain yacht race visiting the ports of coastal Britain?
Add a half marathon and a 10k road race to the running events, a canoe marathon and a multi-stage mountain bike race,and you begin to build a genuinely participatory Olympics, free-to-watch, decentralized, and with routes that are capable of accommodating enormous crowds from the sidelines.
In this way we can begin to re-imagine what the Olympics might look like.
Such changes, which would accommodate the widespread appetite of millions who want to take part, will not be easily achieved inside the existing framework of the Games’ organization.
Sport, as CLR James also insists, is socially constructed.
The late twentieth century popularity of sport as a TV spectacle , fashion statement ,and branding target for sponsor has been accompanied by a headlong decline in participation in organised sporting activity.
Those sports that have enjoyed growth have largely been individual ones such as [GIVE EXAMPLES HERE] , a source of recreation rather than competition.
The irony of the Olympics is that its current ethos, with an emphasis on the enormous gap between professional top-flight athletes and everyone else, sharply limits the possibility of popular participation.
The challenge is to come up with a Games that breaks with this tradition to create a People’s Games in which all can take part. Mark Perryman is the author of the forthcoming book Why The Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, And How They Can Be, available at a 15% pre-publication discount from www.orbooks.com/catalog/olympics/
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Poetry Books & Culture-On Earth Day - "Hoist The Sails" by John McConnell
Updated: 22 Apr 2012
HOIST THE SAILS!
By John McConnell
Four billion years ago
Our lonely Earth
Set sail on cosmic seas
Guided by an unseen hand
Of nature, God or chance.
As life evolved
Through endless eco-cycles
Man was born, destined
To destroy or enrich
the Precious Ship.
And now his hand
Has seized the tiller
But his ear has not
Yet caught the Captain's
Quiet command.
The sails are down, the ship becalmed,
Its fragil life at stake.
No longer do we ride the gentle swells of
Silent seas and breathe
The fragrant air.
Broken are the rhythms
Of our cyclic plants
And other living things.
But now the Captain speaks again
Our quiet thoughts at last reveal his voice.
"Hoist the sails, Earth Man.
Set them for celestial winds.
Hold the tiler firm,
The course ahead is clear."
Be He nature, God or chance
His voice is heard
And we shall heed
The Captain's quiet command.
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Poetry Books & Culture-The Race Industry by Benjamin Zephaniah
Updated: 05 Apr 2012
The Race Industry
The coconuts have got the jobs.
The race industry is a growth industry.
We despairing, they careering.
We want more peace they want more police.
The Uncle Toms are getting paid.
The race industry is a growth industry.
We say sisters and brothers don't fear.
They will do anything for the Mayor.
The coconuts have got the jobs.
The race industry is a growth industry.
They're looking for victims and poets to rent.
They represent me without my consent.
The Uncle Toms are getting paid.
The race industry is a growth industry.
In suits they dither in fear of anarchy.
They take our sufferings and earn a salary.
Steal our souls and make their documentaries.
Inform daily on our community.
Without Black suffering they'd have no jobs.
Without our dead they'd have no office.
Without our tears they'd have no drink.
If they stopped sucking we could get justice.
The coconuts are getting paid.
Men, women and Brixton are being betrayed.
Benjamin Zephaniah
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Poetry Books & Culture-Wanted: tent poems that are perfectly pitched
Updated: 29 Mar 2012
Wanted: tent poems that are perfectly pitched
A wonderful poetry scheme adds to the ongoing makeover of our seaside resorts.
Hastings's new Jerwood Gallery sits tastefully among the net huts
By Joan Bakewell
8:38PM BST 26 Mar 2012
No sooner have tents been swept away from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral than they’ll be popping up all round the coast. But they’ll be different kinds of tents, this time.
And they promise to be intriguingly beautiful.
The scheme is the brainchild of director Deborah Warner, actor Fiona Shaw and composer Mel Mercier, who have conceived what they call Peace Camp (a nod towards the Occupy movement, perhaps).
This Peace Camp will be a series of art installations – well, tents – deployed at some of the country’s most beautiful coastal landmarks.
The tents will be softly illuminated from within and hum with a soundscape made up of the country’s favourite love poetry. It begins right now: you can email or phone in the poem you would like included.
This will feed into a vast project covering Anglesey, Northern Ireland, the Outer Hebrides, Aberdeenshire, Northumberland, Cornwall’s Godrevy Head and Sussex’s Seven Sisters cliffs.
If you think it sounds too grand to pull off, think again.
The company behind it helped create Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square and the Sultan’s Elephant that brought joy to the heart of London.
Nothing is too extravagant for them.
Art is reaching away from London in other ways, too. South coast resorts we once thought lost to amusement arcades and candyfloss stalls are opening a string of beautiful and highly individual art galleries.
I was at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings last week, enjoying the tiled building discreetly set among the fishermen’s black huts.
The Turner Contemporary in Margate – a Chipperfield-designed white cube – looks fine against the blue sea and golden sand. Bexhill has refurbished its De La Warr Pavilion and there’s the Towner gallery at Eastbourne.
The idea of a weekend at a British seaside resort suddenly becomes a whole lot more attractive.
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Clearly, the most misjudged Budget initiative after the granny tax is the proposal to impose VAT on hot take-away food. A row has broken out about what exactly can be defined as bread.
You think they would learn. There was a wrangle aired in these very pages some years ago about Jaffa cakes: were they (untaxable) cakes or (taxable) biscuits; the VAT man needed to know. It’s easy enough to know what bread is, surely: “Give us this day our daily…” and so on; “our daily ciabatta” doesn’t quite do it.
Yet it’s a serious matter if your shop sells not only stone-cold ready-sliced, meant to go straight to your cupboard, but also has a popular line in toasted sandwiches, panini, warmed-over pies and pasties, meant to go straight to the mouth.
Lifestyle changes have blurred the edges in so many things – theft, chastity, bribery – but nowhere does this apply more entertainingly than to food.
Consider the following: pita, croissant, brioche, focaccia, pizza, doughnut, matzos, naan, paratha, tortilla, banana bread, chapati.
All are usually sold cold, but several of them could be sold hot and so may now incur the newly imposed rating introduced by this confused Budget. Greggs – the deservedly popular bakers – are apparently already on the job, making representations to the Government.
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My struggle to keep up with the latest gizmos has hit a problem: passwords. There’s a hint of cloak-and-dagger about the word that makes me find the whole thing shifty. I now have a laptop, an iPhone, an iPad and a Kindle. I shop online and book train tickets that way too.
I seem to need a different password for all of these things. What to choose? I have been going through characters in Shakespeare: Hamlet, Cordelia, Rosalind, Ophelia, Iago.
Then I forget which password belongs to which and where I’ve hidden them, so I have to re-register all over again. Is there some clever way of sorting this out? |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Conspiracy
Updated: 24 Mar 2012
CONSPIRACY
When our government conspires
With the monarchs and dictators,
Like a deer drowned by an alligator,
Hope of the public expires.
Flags of freedom fail to flutter,
Democracy melts like hot butter.
Certainty suffers, integrity abused.
Only the Devil amused.
Love sighs, Fraternity cries,
Equality is an extremist stand,
Justice is buried in the sand.
Humanity stretched like rubber band.
When our government conspires,
Injustice and vested interest aspire.
Our rights are flaunted and defaulted.
Truth is mocked and halted.
When our governments conspire,
Rights of the public expire.
-- Submitted by Asif Ahmed
from Birmingham, England, UK |
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Poetry Books & Culture- To the Virgins,To Make Much of Time
Updated: 21 Mar 2012
TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME.
by Robert Herrick
GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.
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Poetry Books & Culture- When I was One and Twenty - by A.E.Housman
Updated: 21 Mar 2012
When I was one-and-twenty
from A Shropshire lad
WHEN I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies 5
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again, 10
‘The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty, 15
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true
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Poetry Books & Culture-What Stephen Lawrence has taught us by Benjamin Zephaniah
Updated: 21 Mar 2012
What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us
We know who the killers are,
We have watched them strut before us
As proud as sick Mussolinis',
We have watched them strut before us
Compassionless and arrogant,
They paraded before us,
Like angels of death
Protected by the law.It is now an open secret
Black people do not have
Chips on their shoulders,
They just have injustice on their backs
And justice on their minds,
And now we know that the road to liberty
Is as long as the road from slavery.The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us to love each other
And never to take the tedious task
Of waiting for a bus for granted.
Watching his parents watching the cover-up
Begs the question
What are the trading standards here?
Why are we paying for a police force
That will not work for us? The death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us
That we cannot let the illusion of freedom
Endow us with a false sense of security as we walk the streets,
The whole world can now watch
The academics and the super cops
Struggling to define institutionalised racism
As we continue to die in custody
As we continue emptying our pockets on the pavements,
And we continue to ask ourselves
Why is it so official
That black people are so often killed
Without killers? We are not talking about war or revenge
We are not talking about hypothetics or possibilities,
We are talking about where we are now
We are talking about how we live now
In dis state
Under dis flag, (God Save the Queen),
And God save all those black children who want to grow up
And God save all the brothers and sisters
Who like raving,
Because the death of Stephen Lawrence
Has taught us that racism is easy when
You have friends in high places.
And friends in high places
Have no use whatsoever
When they are not your friends. Dear Mr Condon,
Pop out of Teletubby land,
And visit reality,
Come to an honest place
And get some advice from your neighbours,
Be enlightened by our community,
Neglect your well-paid ignorance
Because
We know who the killers are.
Benjamin Zephaniah |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- White Comedy-by Benjamin Zephaniah
Updated: 21 Mar 2012
White Comedy
from "Propa Propaganda"
I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot
Where I suffered whitewater fever.
Whitelisted as a whiteleg
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death.
People called me white jack
Some hailed me as a white wog,
So I joined de white watch
Trained as a white guard
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House. |
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Poetry Books & Culture- "Terrible World" by Benjamin Zephaniah
Updated: 20 Mar 2012
What a Terrible World
What a terrible world
I've seen streets of blood
redda than red
there waz no luv
just bodies dead
and I think to myself
What a terrible world
I've seen pimps and priests
well interfused
denying peace
to the kids they abuse
and I think to myself
What a terrible world
The killer who's the hero
the rapist who's indoors
the trade in human cargo
and dead poets on tours
I've seen friends put in jail
for not being rich
and mass graves made
from a football pitch
I've seen babies scream
Nobody cared
Civilians starve
whilst troops are prepared
and I think to myself
What a terrible world
Yes I think to myself
What a terrible world
Benjamin Zephaniah, from "Propa Proganda"
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Poetry Books and Culture-To be or not to be - A Poet ?
Updated: 15 Mar 2012
Stop the poetry pretentiousness and engage
Wednesday 14 March 2012
The Radical has tried a to write a poem or two on this website but offers visitors a public medium for their efforts.
Do "Get in touch"
The ongoing poetry debate in our paper has tended to concentrate on the technical and intellectual merits of poetry, some of which has left me puzzled.
If someone can tell me what "the passive poet has something to write, whilst the polemic poet has something to say" (M Star February 22) actually means I would be extremely grateful.
My main concern when I watch a poet perform, or read a poet's work, is can I understand the poem, whether the work has any worth, is the poem entertaining and will I remember the substance of the poem afterwards.
Poets should remember - particularly those who write for performance as I do - that the audience needs to be engaged and entertained, not patronised.
I have been writing and performing poetry since my early teens in mainly working class areas. My experience tells me most people like poetry when it is unwrapped from its elitist packaging.
Vicious funding cuts are indeed affecting poetry publishers, venues and poets themselves. But I work with many artists, poets, musicians and comics who have never applied for funding from anywhere. Funding on many occasions comes with its own complications and rules. These sometimes deny freedom to the performers, restricting artistic content and output. So, in short, the funders can take a running jump.
Finally, I am off to perform at a working men's club in Crewe - yes there are some left - and I am really looking forward to it.
Dave Puller
Manchester
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Poetry Books & Culture- Are We real People ?
Updated: 14 Mar 2012
Are we real people ?
As I sit and think and look
My window on the world
The screen I see, my life, my book
A click, a favourite, all unfurled.
The people’s history down the ages
The struggle to be free
Against the odds of sods and cages
The squirearchy’s key.
The how and why we got from there
Pass by my window every day
The young and old and those that care
And those I wish would go away.
A Globe that takes all kinds to fill
Getting smaller by the day
Yet life is cheap, one more to kill
A ray of sunshine turning grey
The killing fields have got to end
Mans inhumanity to man
A history we must mend
And weapons we must ban
by the Radical
but is it poetry ? |
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Poetry Books & Culture -Tolerance
Updated: 11 Mar 2012
Tolerance
Men need tolerance
More than you can ever know
To suffer monthly female flow
Hormones that seem to come and go
The bad mood takes away
That love she said was there
Until the dawn and then
A renewal of life so bare
Men need tolerance
Until the end day comes
Then she goes she knows not where
And when he’s gone - despair
The Radical
Is it poetry ?
It just filled my head. |
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Poetry Books & Culture- How to Write a Poem
Updated: 10 Mar 2012
How to Write a Poem
Edited by Lucy Lake and 95 others
Writing a poem is all about observing the world within you or around you.
You can write about anything, from love to the rusty gate at the old farm.
As long as you are enjoying it or finding a release of tension through it, you're on the right track.
Steps
1 Read and listen to poetry.
Whether someone who has never seen a sonnet nor heard haiku can truly be a poet is an open question.
It is almost certain, though, that any poet who has been published or who has garnered any following enhanced their skills by reading or listening to good poetry, even if they later scoffed at conventional notions of what was "good." "Good" poems fall into three categories: those that are recognized as classics, those that seem to be popular, and those that you personally like. Poems typically being short, there is no reason not to explore plenty of both.
2 Original manuscript of Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith."
The revisions on the page give us an idea of how the poem evolved.Find a spark.
A poem may be born as a snippet of verse, maybe just a line or two that seems to come out of nowhere.
This is usually called 'inspiration', and the remainder of the poem need only be written around it.
At other times you may want to write about a specific thing or idea.
If this is the case, do a little planning.
Write down all the words and phrases that come to mind when you think of that idea.
Allow yourself to put all your ideas into words.
It may sound difficult, but do not be afraid to voice your exact feelings.
Emotions are what make poems, and if you lie about your emotions it can be easily sensed in the poem.
Write them down as quickly as possible, and when you're done, go through the list and look for connections or certain items that get your creative juices flowing.
3 Think about what you want to achieve with your poem.
Perhaps you want to write a poem to express your love for your boyfriend or girlfriend; perhaps you want to commemorate a tragic event; or maybe you just want to get an "A" in your poetry class.
Think about why you are writing your poem and who your intended audience is, and then proceed in your writing accordingly.
4 Decide which poetry style suits your subject.
There are a great many different poetic styles. [1]. If you see "Winter icicles / plummeting like Enron stock..." perhaps you've got a haiku in your head.
As a poet, you have a wide variety of set forms to choose from: limericks, sonnets, villanelles ... the list goes on and on.
You may also choose to abandon form altogether and write your poem in free verse.
While the choice may not always be as obvious as the example above, the best form for the poem will usually manifest itself during the writing process.
5 Try to fit into a particular scene you want to write about.
For example, if you want to write about nature, try to visit a park or a small forest nearby.
The natural scenery may inspire few lines, even if they're not perfect.
6 Listen to your poem.
While many people today have been exposed to poetry only in written form, poetry was predominantly an aural art for thousands of years, and the sound of a poem is still important.
As you write and edit your poem, read it aloud and listen to how it sounds.
A poem's internal structure commonly focuses on rhythm, rhyme, or both.
Consider classic styles like sonnets and Greek epics for inspiration.
The bulk of English texts seems to be two-syllable words with the first syllable stressed.
You can more easily fit rhythmic patterns with second syllables stressed, like iambic pentameter with a one-syllable less-important word such as an article or preposition at the beginning of a line to offset a string of two-syllable words.
This is where poems can become songs.
It is easier to find a tune for regular meter, so maybe you want to cut words out or put some in to get the same number of syllables in each line.
Memorize it. If you believe it, then maybe someone else will learn it and love it before it is a song.
7 Write down your thoughts as they come to you.
Don't edit as you write, or do edit as you write - the choice is yours.
However, you should try both methods at least a couple times to see what works best for you.
8 Choose the right words.
It's been said that if a novel is "words in the best order," then a poem is "the best words in the best order."
Think of the words you use as building blocks of different sizes and shapes.
Some words will fit together perfectly, and some won't.
You want to keep working at your poem until you have built a strong structure of words.
Use only those words that are necessary, and those that enhance the meaning of the poem.
Choose your words carefully.
The differences between similar sounding words or synonyms can lead to interesting word play.
A computer spreadsheet such as OpenOffice.org Calc, is very efficient for rearranging words and checking rhythm through columns' alignment. Put one syllable in each cell. You can transfer the text to a word processor for fancier printing when you're done.
9 Use concrete imagery and vivid descriptions.
Love, hate, happiness: these are all abstract concepts.
Many (perhaps all) poems are, deep down, about emotions and other abstractions.
Nevertheless, it's hard to build a strong poem using only abstractions - it's just not interesting.
The key, then, is to replace or enhance abstractions with concrete images, things that you can appreciate with your senses: a rose, a shark, or a crackling fire, for example.
The concept of the objective correlative may be useful.
An objective correlative is an object, several objects, or a series of events (all concrete things) that evoke the emotion or idea of the poem.
Really powerful poetry not only uses concrete images; it also describes them vividly.
Show your readers and listeners what you're talking about--help them to experience the imagery of the poem.
Put in some "sensory" handles.
These are words that describe the things that you hear, see, taste, touch, and smell, so that the reader can identify with their own experience.
Give some examples rather than purely mental/intellectual descriptions.
As a silly example, consider "He made a loud sound", versus "He made a loud sound like a hippo eating 100 stale pecan pies with metal teeth".
10 Use poetic devices to enhance your poem's beauty and meaning.
The most well known poetic device is rhyme.
Rhyme can add suspense to your lines, enhance your meaning, or make the poem more cohesive.
It can also make it prettier.
Don't overuse rhyme. It's a crime. In fact, you don't have to use rhyme at all.
Other poetic devices include meter, metaphor, assonance, alliteration, and repetition.
If you don't know what these are, you may want to look in a poetry book or search the Internet.
Poetic devices can establish a poem, or, if they bring too much attention to themselves, can ruin it.
11 Save your most powerful message or insight for the end of your poem.
The last line is to a poem what a punch line is to a joke--something that evokes an emotional response.
Give the reader something to think about, something to dwell on after reading your poem.
Resist the urge to explain it; let the reader become engaged with the poem in developing an understanding of your experience or message.
12 Edit your poem.
When the basic poem is written, set it aside for awhile and then read the poem out loud to yourself.
Go through it and balance the choice of words with the rhythm.
Take out unnecessary words and replace imagery that isn't working.
Some people edit a poem all at once, while others come back to it again and again over time.
Don't be afraid to rewrite if some part of the poem is not working.
Some poems have lines that simply don't convey an element well, and can be replaced.
13 Get opinions.
It can be hard to critique your own work, so after you've done an initial edit, try to get some friends or a poetry group (there are plenty online) to look at your poem for you.
You may not like all their suggestions, and you don't have to take any of them, but you might find some insight that will make your poem better.
Feedback is good.
Pass your poem around, and ask your friends to critique your work.
Tell them to be honest, even if it's painful.
Filter their responses, heeding and ignoring, then edit as you see fit |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Reflection
Updated: 10 Mar 2012
Reflection
Wisdom comes without a sage
Music finds harmony
That asks for no composer of any age.
Thus,sometimes,poetry
Elizabeth Jennings
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Poetry Books & Culture-Lullaby for the Old
Updated: 10 Mar 2012
Lullaby for the Old
The old need a lullaby
As much as the young
I think of right words to sigh
Into a song
A song that reminds of the past
And all of its joys
May all through the night my song last
Sounding “Rejoice”
Elizabeth Jennings |
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Poetry Books & Culture- The Thinker
Updated: 10 Mar 2012
The Thinker
He is mild mannered and some people say
He’s in another world’ They are quite wrong.
He is in now and here, and every day
He thinks of plans to which we all belong
He’s read past notions. In his mind he holds
A shape, a purpose, meaning written live,
Night and day he watches now our world’s
Behaving wildly, He wants it to thrive.
He wants all men to share his appetite
For truth, It is a way of life, a choice
Of how to be and know. He claims no right
But tries to be a civilised, true voice.
Elizabeth Jennings |
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Poetry Books & Culture -"Good- Bye Boys" - Bring em home NOW
Updated: 29 Feb 2012
War lyric song -
"Good-bye, boys"
Lyrics and music by famous russian bard-Bulat Okudzhava
Oh war, what have you done, you villain!
Our courtyards have all grown silent.
Our boys have raised their heads,
they've become men too soon.
They appeared in the doorway a moment
and departed - soldier after soldier...
Good-bye, boys!
Boys -
try to return!
Don't hide yourselves, stand tall,
don't spare either bullets or shells,
and don't spare yourselves, but still try to return!
Oh war, what have you done, you villain!
Instead of weddings there are partings and smoke.
All our girls have given their wedding dresses
away to their little sisters.
How can you get away from those boots?!
Or from those green epaulets?!...
Spit on the gossips, girls,
we'll settle the score with them later!
Let them babble that there's nothing for you to believe in,
that you go through the war blindly...
Good-bye, girls!
Girls -
try to return! |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 13 Feb 2012
I love thee - I love thee,
'Tis all that I can say
It is my vision in the night,
My dreaming in the day.
- Thomas Hood |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 11 Feb 2012
Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
- Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 10 Feb 2012
Must, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day's Saint Valentine's.
For that good bishop's sake
Get up and let us see
What beauty it shall be
That Fortune us assigns.
- Michael Drayton |
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Poetry Books & Culture- A Valentine Poem
Updated: 09 Feb 2012
A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn't put there to stay -
Love isn't love
'Til you give it away.
- Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, You Are Sixteen (Reprise) |
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Poetry Books & Culture-A Valentine Poem
Updated: 08 Feb 2012
You've given me a reason
For smiling once again,
You've filled my life with peaceful dreams
and you've become my closest friend.
You've shared your heartfelt secrets
And your trust you've given me,
You showed me how to feel again
To laugh, and love, and see.
If life should end tomorrow
And from this world I should part,
I shall be forever young
For you have touched my heart
Valentines is near
Just wishing you were here
My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
- Jessie B. Rittenhouse |
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Poetry Books & Culture-A Valentine Poem
Updated: 07 Feb 2012
Shall we compare our hearts to a garden -
with beautiful blooms, straggling weeds,
swooping birds and sunshine, rain -
and most importantly, seeds.
- Grey Livingston |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Valentine Poem -One Perfect Rose
Updated: 06 Feb 2012
One Perfect Rose
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met,
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted pure, with scented dew still wet - -
One perfect rose.
I know the language of the floweret.
My fragile leaves, it said, his heart enclose.
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
- Dorothy Parker |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Valentine - Drink to me only, with thine eyes
Updated: 04 Feb 2012
To Celia
Drink to me, only, with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kisse but in the cup,
And Ile not look for wine.
The thirst, that from the soule doth rise,
Doth aske a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee, late, a rosie wreath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did'st onely breathe,
And sent'st it back to mee:
Since when it growes, and smells, I sweare,
Not of it selfe, but thee.
- Robert Burns: The Poetry (1896) |
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Poetry Books & Culture- "If Spirit Alone Won Battles"-the diary of a striking miner
Updated: 03 Feb 2012
A tale worth reading
Thursday 02 February 2012
I have just read If Spirit Alone Won Battles, (price £10) the diary of striking miner John Lowe by his grandson Jonathan Symcox.
An excellent foreword by Dennis Skinner sets the scene for a day-to-day account of the strike from John's diaries.
Did this struggle really take place in England's green and pleasant land?
The book gives a graphic account of the highs and lows experienced by the striking miners and how they carried on their fight in spite of the overwhelming odds against them.
It is a must-read for all.
Jack Richardson
Northampton
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Poetry Books & Culture- Love Sonnet 18
Updated: 03 Feb 2012
Love Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
- William Shakespeare |
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Poetry Books & Culture-Valentine Sayings
Updated: 02 Feb 2012
Many are the starrs I see,
but in my eye no starr like thee.
English saying
- We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.
- William Shakespeare
Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart.
Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
- Robert Browning |
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Poetry, Books & Culture - Valentine
Updated: 01 Feb 2012
Valentine
Wendy Cope 1945-
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made up it’s mind
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do
My heart has made it’s mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- A word to husbands /wives
Updated: 15 Jan 2012
A word to husbands
To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up
Ogden Nash (1901 - 71)
A word to wives
To keep your marriage alive
And your husband home at night
Be sure to let him stay on top
And always…. think he’s right
Or (………….. tucked in and tight?)
The Radical ( 1943- ) |
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Poetry Books & Culture- The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear
Updated: 14 Jan 2012
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey,
and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married;
too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong-tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-The Existentialist's Guide to Death,The Universe and Nothingness -by Gary Cox
Updated: 14 Jan 2012
The Existentialist's Guide To Death, The Universe And Nothingness
by Gary Cox (Continuum £14.99)
Tuesday 10 January 2012
by Alex Miller
Douglas Adams's famous Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy aspired to be a guide to "life, the universe and everything." In this book Gary Cox gives the existentialist version - a guide to death, the universe and nothingness.
Why this focus on death and nothingness?
The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus once wrote: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."
The answer given by the existentialists is that life is very much worth living.
But whatever worth and meaning it has is a result of our own free choices about how to live our lives.
Such choices are made in the full knowledge that we are essentially finite creatures.
We are doomed to annihilation in a universe that is itself intrinsically meaningless.
For Sartre, the most famous existentialist of them all, freedom is essentially bound up with consciousness and consciousness is being-for-itself, a nothingness that must be sharply distinguished from being-in-itself.
Cox does a good job of explaining these abstruse ideas in language accessible to non-philosophers.
He intersperses his exposition of thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Kierkegaard with illustrations from the likes of Sister Sledge, The Doors and Woody Allen.
In so doing he relates the abstract concepts of existentialist phenomenology - anxiety, authenticity, bad faith and facticity - to questions about childhood, marriage, sexual desire, God and death.
One minor criticism is that no space at all is given to the idea of political engagement.
Sartre, for example, was a committed Marxist, and politically active for much of his adult life.
This was not just an incidental biographical fact. It was closely bound up with his philosophical outlook.
After all, Marxism and phenomenology share a common root in the philosophy of Hegel.
Overall, though, Cox has produced a fine book that can be highly recommended.
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Poetry, Books & Culture - Disabled
Updated: 13 Jan 2012
Disabled
by the Radical
I don’t like being disabled
Because of my dodgy knee
And if it wasn’t for my Blue permit
I couldn’t make it for a pee
I’m restricted where I go
And where I can park my car
And if it wasn’t for my Blue Permit
I wouldn’t go so far
I don’t like being disabled
It’s all to do with work
But even though I am retired
I don't see it as a perk
I don’t like being disabled
Or staying at home to mope
My Blue permit gets me out
It gives me so much hope
I don’t like being disabled
Though the Council give so little care
And if it wasn’t for my Blue permit
From here I couldn’t get to there |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Anthem for Doomed Youth - Father C Cameron to take to troops in Afganistan ?
Updated: 21 Dec 2011
Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds. |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- "Is there for honest poverty...Shall brothers be for all that"
Updated: 20 Dec 2011
Is there for honest poverty
That hangs his head, and all that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for all that!
For all that, and all that,
Our toils obscure, and all that,
The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gold for all that.
What though on homely fare we dine,
Wear course grey woolen, and all that?
Give fools their silks, and knaves their wine -
A man is a man for all that.
For all that, and all that,
Their tinsel show, and all that,
The honest man, though ever so poor,
Is king of men for all that.
You see yonder fellow called 'a lord,'
Who struts, and stares, and all that?
Though hundreds worship at his word,
He is but a dolt for all that.
For all that, and all that,
His ribboned, star, and all that,
The man of independent mind,
He looks and laughs at all that.
A prince can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and all that!
But an honest man is above his might -
Good faith, he must not fault that
For all that, and all that,
Their dignities, and all that,
The pith of sense and pride of worth
Are higher rank than all that.
Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall have the first place and all that!
For all that, and all that,
It is coming yet for all that,
That man to man the world over
Shall brothers be for all that.
by Robert Burns |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Hope
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
Hope
Folk like me think
Is there hope?
When folk like me
Are scared to vote
by Benjamin Zephaniah |
162 |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Family Values
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
Family Values
Reds are in yu beds
Banks are in de red
Bombs in de city
Taxes burn
Crime rates soar
Hospitals fight
Schools rebel
Water kills
Cops kill
Cover up’s uncovered
Neo – Nazis rise
Pension funds not trusted
Talks fail
War looms
An yu hav de cheek to call me
A
Problem
Child
by Benjamin Zephaniah |
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Poetry Books & Culture- O! 'tis my delight on a Friday night
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
O! ‘tis my delight on a Friday night
When sprats they isn’t dear
To fry a couple of score or so
Upon a fire clear
They eats so well, they bears the bell
From all the fish I knows:
Then let us eat them while we can
Before the price is rose
The Lincolnshire Poacher
When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire
Full well I served my master for more than seven years
Till I took up to poaching, as you shall quickly hear
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
As me and my companions were setting of a snare
’Twas then we spied the gamekeeper, for him we dld not care
Far we can wrestle and fight, my boys and jump out anywhere
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
As me and my companions were setting four or five
And taking on ’em up again, we caught a hare alive
We took a hare alive my boys, and through the woods did steer
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
I threw him on my shoulder and then we trudged home
We took him to a neighbour’s house, and sold him for a crown
We sold him for a crown, my boys, but I did not tell you where
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year.
Success to ev’ry gentleman that lives in Lincolnshire
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare
Bad luck to ev’ry gamekeeper that will not sell his deer
Oh, ’tis my delight on a shiny night in the season of the year. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-Visit -www.peopleinhistory.co.uk
Updated: 18 Dec 2011
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time,for history is a pattern
of timeless moments.
So, while the light falls
on a winter's afternoon,in a secluded chapel
History is now and England
TS Eliot
Quarters 1943
Visit A People's History of England on www.peopleinhistory.co.uk |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Caring for a Cranky old Man ?
Updated: 23 Nov 2011
Cranky Old Man
What do you see nurses? . . .. . .What do you see?
What are you thinking .. . when you're looking at me?
A cranky old man, . . . . . .not very wise,
Uncertain of habit .. . . . . . . .. with faraway eyes?
Who dribbles his food .. . .. . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . .'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . .the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . .. . . A sock or shoe?
Who, resisting or not . . . .. lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . .The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking?. .Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse .you're not looking at me.
I'll tell you who I am . . . . . As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, .. . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . .with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters .. . . .. . who love one another
A young boy of Sixteen . . . . with wings on his feet
Dreaming that soon now . . .. . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . ..my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows .. . .that I promised to keep.
At Twenty-Five, now . . . . .I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . . . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . .. With ties that should last.
At Forty, my young sons .. .have grown and are gone,
But my woman is beside me . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, .. ..Babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . My loved one and me.
Dark days are upon me . . . . My wife is now dead.
I look at the future ... . . . . I shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing . . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . And the love that I've known.
I'm now an old man . . . . . . .. and nature is cruel.
It's jest to make old age . . . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles .. . . grace and vigour, depart.
There is now a stone . .. . where I once had a heart.
But inside this old carcass . A young man still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells
I remember the joys . . . . . . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . . . life over again.
I think of the years, all too few . . .. gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people . . . . . . . open and see.
Not a cranky old man .
Look closer . . . . see . .. . . .... . ME!!
Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within ... . . .
we will all, one day, be there, too!
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Poetry, Books & Culture- DUEL AND DUETS-Why Men & Women Talk so differently by John L. Locke
Updated: 17 Nov 2011
Duels And Duets - Why Men And Women Talk So Differently
by John L Locke (CUP, £14.99)
Wednesday 16 November 2011
by Justin Dowling
There is a nice little pearl at the start of Duels And Duets that deals with imaginary ornithologists wondering why "some birds" have complex and attractive songs and "other birds" do not.
The author asserts that without reference to the sex of the birds they will never be able to fully understand the function of bird song.
Locke addresses this point further by pointing out the degree of biophobia - humanity's distaste for natural systems - that exists when studying human behaviour.
Duels and Duets is centred around studying the biological differences between the apparent divergences that have evolved in male and female speech patterns.
These are differences that, post-feminism, people are often reluctant to explore.
Locke competently investigates the idea that men are often verbally combative with one another, however much "in jest," and that women are often seen to be co-operative and supporting and the providers of sympathy-building relationships.
Using examples from the animal kingdom, anthropological studies and historical reference, Locke suggests that women and men employ specific communicative behaviours that they use among themselves and that these languages are rooted in mating strategy.
Locke argues that these vastly complicated and different methods of communication may have juxtaposed and given birth to spoken language itself.
The book is fascinating, but it does wade into the middle of a highly charged political debate regarding gender politics.
It's a sad fact that most people rarely change their mind on emotive issues but if you feel like digging deeper into the science you will certainly enjoy this book and may even learn something.
It's certainly intellectually leaps and bounds beyond Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, yet it's still an accessible read.
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Poetry,Books & Culture- "YOU CAN'T SAY THAT" by Ken Livingstone
Updated: 17 Nov 2011
You Can't Say That
by Ken Livingstone (Faber and Faber, £25)
Wednesday 16 November 2011
by John Green
As an autobiography this is a fascinating and informative portrayal of London and British politics during the latter half of the 20th and into the 21st century.
It is also leavened by Ken Livingstone's sharp wit and lack of deference.
A rarity among Labour politicians, he has stayed true to his socialist convictions for all his political life.
His leadership of first the Greater London Council, before Thatcher abolished it, then later as London's mayor gave us the nearest thing to a genuinely socialist-led city council we've had.
Born in south London to a working-class family, he never lost his loyalty to working people, and was determined to make London a more just and egalitarian capital city.
He wasn't able to fully achieve his goal, not only because he was demonised and caricatured as "Red Ken" by his enemies, but because he was also sniped at and stabbed in the back by his "party comrades."
He did, however, achieve a considerable amount during his years of leadership.
He continually raised vital issues, was not frightened by controversy and battled relentlessly and with astute brilliance for his ideals.
Although Livingstone rightly clings to traditional socialist principles, he has been able to adapt to the changes demanded by the ravenous media and to maintain his "man of the people" reputation.
He is very much a maverick who refuses to toe any party line if he fundamentally disagrees.
And it was largely because he was someone who clearly stood apart from the mass of mainstream oleaginous and opportunist party politicians that he won wide admiration and respect.
Ironically, he probably lost the the election in 2008 against Boris Johnson precisely because he decided to stand as the official Labour Party candidate and Johnson was able to don his mantle as the maverick politician even though he is a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, albeit with a rather endearingly bumbling and unintentionally comedic talent.
Probably the one serious weaknesses of Ken's mayoralty was that he surrounded himself with a too-narrow cabal of people he felt he could trust politically.
This, unwittingly, gave much needed and unnecessary ammunition to his enemies.
Although the Morning Star and London communists gave him extensive, if critical, support over the years they hardly merit a mention here and then only in a rather dismissive way.
Whether Livingstone should have bowed out gracefully after his last defeat instead of deciding to fight for the mayoralty once again is a moot point.
But there is no-one at present more capable of taking up the baton, no-one who has his experience or principled track record.
That's why he merits our continued support.
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Poetry, Books & Culture-Seeing the Wood for the Trees by Mike Ward
Updated: 14 Nov 2011
Seeing the woods for the trees
By Mike Ward
Lets keep our forests fresh and green
Where with the birds we are free to roam
Where deer and squirrel make their home
Where children play and climb the trees
Where we exercise pets in pine scented breeze
Where under sun dappled canopy
We roam and ramble at our ease
Where solitude and peace are nature’s pleasure
We will fight and keep the nation’s treasure
We will bar the way to ideological measure
We will never accept defeat
We will fight in the forest
We will fight in the street |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- Speak by Faiz Ahmed
Updated: 14 Nov 2011
Speak
By Faiz Ahmed
Speak, your lips are free.
Speak,it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak,your life is still yours.
See how in the blacksmith’s shop
The flames burn wild,the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.
Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue;
Speak, ‘cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, Speak, whatever you must speak |
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Poetry,Books & Culture- Shakespeare's Macbeth-A dark Cave.A Cauldron boiling.Thunder
Updated: 02 Nov 2011
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
from Macbeth
A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder.
Enter the three Witches.
1 WITCH. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
2 WITCH. Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.
3 WITCH. Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time!
1 WITCH. Round about the caldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches' mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg'd i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
brinded - having obscure dark streaks or flecks on gray gulf - the throat drab - prostitute chaudron - entrails
The above appears at the beginning of Act IV, Scene 1 as found in:
Shakespeare, William. The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare:
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Poetry Books & Culture-Goodbye Barcelona- A Passionate New Musical
Updated: 18 Oct 2011
Goodbye Barcelona – A passionate new musical
www.goodbyebarcelona.com
In 1936, as fascism sweeps across Europe, one country reaches out in its hour of need… and tens of thousands of ordinary people make an extraordinary decision to help. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters… more than 42,000 travel to Spain from all over the world, risking their lives for the freedom of others.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, and inspired by first hand accounts, Goodbye Barcelona focuses on Sammy, a young man driven to leave his home in London and join the International Brigades to fight against the fascists.
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Poetry,Books & Culture-Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt by Richard Gott
Updated: 18 Oct 2011
Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt
Magisterial history of the foundation of the British empire, and the forgotten story of resistance to its formation.
This revelatory new history punctures the widely held belief that the British Empire was an imaginative and civilizing enterprise.
Instead, Britain’s Empire reveals a history of systemic repression and almost perpetual violence, showing how British rule was imposed as a military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship.
For colonized peoples, the experience was a horrific one, of slavery, famine, battle and extermination.
Yet, as Richard Gott shows, the Empire’s oppressed peoples did not go quietly into this good night. Wherever Britain tried to plant its flag, it met with opposition.
From Ireland to India, from the American colonies to Australia, Gott traces the rebellions and resistance of subject peoples whose all-but-forgotten stories are excluded from traditional accounts of empire.
He shows, too, how the British Empire provided a blueprint for the annihilation of peoples in twentieth-century Europe, and argues that its leaders must rank alongside the dictators of the twentieth century as authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale. |
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Poetry Books & Culture-The American Crucible-A survey of slavery, emancipation and human rights
Updated: 18 Oct 2011
The American Crucible by Robin Blackburn – review
A survey of slavery, emancipation and human rights
£20 or less...
Greg Grandin
guardian.co.uk,
A group of slaves outside their quarters on a Georgia plantation. Photograph: Corbis
It is tempting to see Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible as the capstone of an influential career.
As a founding editor of the New Left Review and Verso, leading activist in the London university protests of the late 1960s, and author of a number of important studies of New World slavery and global economics, Blackburn has long pondered many of the themes related to human freedom he explores here.
But this new book, monumental though it is, shouldn't be read as a culmination but rather a catching of breath, and a continuation of arguments initially made by the great original theorists of the Atlantic World system, Eric Williams, CLR James, and WEB Du Bois, who, writing in the early 20th century, were among the first to stress the importance of slavery in the creation of western culture and society.
- The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
- by Robin Blackburn
Because it tied together so many threads of human interaction – transportation, communication, warfare, labour, finance, trade, consumption, manufacturing, agriculture, inter-imperial rivalry, territorial expansion – slavery is the last institution that historians can still call a "system" without feeling like relics from the 1970s.
Still, there are now few big books making the argument that slavery and its overthrow made the modern world.
The American Crucible – which covers half a millennia, all of the Americas, and a good deal of Europe and Africa – bucks this trend.
Along with Williams, a descendent of both slaves and slave traders who was elected the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Blackburn stresses slavery's role in underwriting the west's industrial expansion.
With James, also a descendent of slaves, Blackburn credits the importance of political struggle and ideas in rendering slavery morally indefensible.
And with Du Bois, likewise also descended from Caribbean slaves, Blackburn explores the psychic and ideological construction of white supremacy following slavery's formal end.
The centrepiece of The American Crucible is Blackburn's measured reconstruction of the chronology of the Haitian revolution and its influence on freedom movements in the United States, Spanish America and Brazil, a persuasive rebuttal of scholarly assessments that the revolution was exceptionally bloody or that its leaders instituted a new form of anti-European racism.
It wasn't and they didn't, certainly to no greater extent than that which occurred in other chapters in the age of revolution. But Blackburn does more than defend James's argument that Haitians universalised European ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality.
He extends it across all of the Americas: "Momentous clashes over slavery," Blackburn writes, generated new notions of "human freedom and human unity" that would inform modern social democracy and human rights.
The American Crucible likewise amasses substantial data to support Williams's famous but disputed thesis that slavery financed the industrial revolution.
Beyond direct profit from the trade itself, embryonic British industrialism was nurtured, Blackburn writes, through a range of supplementary economic activity, including manufacturing exports to Africa, revenue generated by plantations, the import of cheap and abundant raw material from those plantations, and the extension of credit that financed slavery.
Blackburn, though, rejects the notion associated with Williams and other economic determinists that slavery ended only because it had become a drag on capitalist profits.
Instead, leavened by James and Du Bois, as well as by more recent scholarship, he describes emancipation in all its vexed, indeterminate grandeur, propelled by violent clashes, public debate, harrowing exposés, and the consolidation of new notions of freedom and equality.
Karl Marx himself was keenly aware that capitalism could easily support, even thrive on, chattel slavery and other forms of human bondage – a point Blackburn underscores in his other new book, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (Verso, £12.99).
Marx's analysis of the causes of the civil war holds up well compared to the smug liberal London opinion of his day, whose organs, such as the Economist, were certain that the conflict was really about tariffs.
Marx knew, well before hostilities broke out, that the crisis was about slavery.
The "dirty dogs of the Confederacy" were inherently expansionist, he thought, and would spread not just west but into Mexico and the Caribbean if unchecked.
The north, for its part, "wages war" in a way expected of "a bourgeois republic, where fraud has so long reigned supreme", its fractiousness contained only by the resolve of the "singled-minded son of the working class," as Marx described Lincoln.
Far from advocating white-skin socialism, Marx in his copious writings on the American civil war and its aftermath – the most important of which are reproduced here, along with those of Lincoln and others – demonstrates universalism: the "rescue of an enchained race", Marx wrote to Lincoln, would lead to the "reconstruction of a social world".
Actual reconstruction, carried out half heartedly by Lincoln's successors, was something else entirely.
Slaves were unchained, the union saved, but, as Blackburn points out, no unified central government emerged that could check the repression launched against the executors of emancipation's full potential: free blacks in the south, agrarian radicals in the west, and a militant working class in the north.
In other words, the prerequisite for a mass-based labour party – a strong state that could regulate capital and contain the violence of its night riders and company goons – didn't exist, leading militants, including many German-Americans allied with Marx's International, to forsake electoral politics and pursue pure syndicalism.
What would have happened, Blackburn asks, had Marx – who in Europe supported both union and party building – relocated to New York or Chicago?
His answer is necessarily wistful: just as Marx "saw the importance of slavery at the start of the civil war, so he would surely have focused on 'winning the battle of democracy'" by urging his comrades towards a more flexible, potentially successful strategy to secure both political liberty and social equality, which Blackburn, like Marx, understands to be indivisible.
An Unfinished Revolution is an apt coda to The American Crucible – the latter a probing exploration of the moral world slavery and its abolition created, the former a meditation on a world that could have been.
Greg Grandin's Fordlandia is published by Icon
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Poetry Books & Culture-Autumn by Chris Brennan
Updated: 11 Oct 2011
AUTUMN
by Christopher Brennan
Autumn: the year breathes dully towards its death,
beside its dying sacrificial fire;
the dim world's middle-age of vain desire
is strangely troubled, waiting for the breath
that speaks the winter's welcome malison
to fix it in the unremembering sleep:
the silent woods brood o'er an anxious deep,
and in the faded sorrow of the sun,
I see my dreams' dead colours, one by one,
forth-conjur'd from their smouldering palaces,
fade slowly with the sigh of the passing year.
They wander not nor wring their hands nor weep,
discrown'd belated dreams! but in the drear
and lingering world we sit among the trees
and bow our heads as they, with frozen mouth,
looking, in ashen reverie, towards the clear
sad splendour of the winter of the far south. |
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Poetry Books & Culture- Karl Marx and World Literature by S S Prawer
Updated: 08 Oct 2011
Karl Marx And World Literature
by SS Prawer (Verso, £16.99)
Wednesday 05 October 2011
by John Green
Prawer makes clear from the outset of this absorbing and accessible investigation that he is not attempting to discuss Marx's theories of literary criticism but to illuminate the role literature played in Marx's life and the development of his thinking.
As recipients of a solid German secondary school education, both Marx and Engels gained a thorough grounding in the classical literature of Greece and Rome as well as Biblical Hebrew alongside the greats of the European enlightenment such as Voltaire, Shakespeare and Goethe.
While the future political ideas of both men would challenge some of the most determinedly held assumptions of Western establishments, they found much of their inspiration in the literary works of the past.
As a young student Marx was more interested in literature than history or philosophy. One of his earliest dreams was to become a writer and he toyed with the idea of publishing his poetry.
Even in his earliest literary efforts as a teenager one can find the germs of his later thinking. He identified closely with literary figures who were men of action, "world changers" like Prometheus and Odysseus.
In his own poems he expresses an overpowering drive to action, for "praxis," rejecting romantic contemplation.
A whole number of Marx's mature ideas appear to have found their nascence in key images from literature. Certainly the evocative and fiery language used in the Communist Manifesto testifies to Marx's eloquent command of language.
Much of his early writings are littered with preconfigurations of his later mature thinking.
In the poem Human Pride, written as a 19-year-old, he evokes the "alienation" and oppressiveness of a modern city.
Yet he emphasises that the city's buildings did not create themselves but were made by human ingenuity - human labour.
Even though strongly influenced by European Romantic writers, Marx very early on rejected the movement as a road to understanding society.
He sees writers, poets and painters as "producers" of works in the same way that craftsmen and women are, not in the first instance as a different species of humanity, "creative beings."
Marx recognised the dialectical connection between aesthetics and content.
It was often the case, as with Balzac and Dickens, that the authors themselves were not political militants but captured essential truths about the societies they wrote of.
He and Engels were among the first to recognise that literature and indeed all the arts were dialectically related and connected to the societies in which they were produced.
Marx considered literature as a means of establishing complex connections between humanity's economic and cultural activities.
He made clear that not only economic and social struggle matter, but demonstrated how artistic works can and do enrich our world.
But he never fell into the trap of praising those who held progressive ideas but were poor writers.
Many crude Marxists have attempted to establish direct causal links between works of art and the economic system.
Yet Marx always emphasised that the base-superstructure relationship between the arts and the economic system was not a mechanical one.
Works of art don't simply reflect the societies in which they were given birth but are refracted and may have only a tenuous link with the economic base.
Only in a communist society, Marx argued, will everyone be in a position to express themselves creatively.
As long as class society exists, the ruling classes will maintain their hegemony over creative labour.
Throughout, Prawer reveals a sensitive and highly perceptive approach to Marx's relationship with world literature and the way it helped shape his world view.
With a deep understanding and sympathy for Marx's political ideas and an exceptional knowledge of his work, he is able to make the relevant and appropriate connections so eloquently and convincingly demonstrated in this book
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Poetry,Books & Culture-The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, The Book of Cookery & Household Management
Updated: 08 Oct 2011
The Marvellous Mrs Beeton,
with Sophie Dahl, BBC Two, review
Kylie O'Brien reviews The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl, on BBC Two.
9:05PM BST 29 Sep 2011
Could someone have a quiet word with Sophie Dahl?
Cheekbones like Sabatier knives and a smile wide as a Bath Oliver biscuit do not a great presenter make, and last night’s effort –
The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl (BBC Two) – was damp as undercooked pastry.
It could be that a lot of charm goes a very little way, as last month’s request for £500,000 to save her grandpa Roald’s shed proves (what was the Today programme thinking?
That we’d all chip in a fiver to save a millionairess model, wife to multimillionaire musician Jamie Cullum, not to mention the Dahl estate, from coughing up, simply because Sophie asked us nicely?).
It didn’t wash.
Nor did The Marvellous Mrs Beeton, of whom Sophie, eyes tearing up with all the vacuousness of an X Factor contestant, declared herself “a devotee”.
She talked to various food experts, historians and even Jilly Cooper in her exploration of the life of the country’s most iconic cook (“I want to breathe the neighbourhood that Isabella Beeton first called home,” she said, bafflingly, pacing the streets of Pinner where Isabella and her husband Sam moved as newlyweds).
She also had a go at testing Mrs Beeton’s recipes.
A lot of gush and twaddle got in the way of a great story.
The Mrs Beeton we think we know – the perfect housewife and Victorian matron – was a fabrication. Isabella Beeton, born in 1836 in Cheapside, was in fact a canny hack.
She married Sam Beeton, a magazine publisher, in her early twenties, and – far from staying at home – commuted into town where she worked for him as a journalist and editor.
Mrs B compiled her great opus when she was only 23; it was an instant hit.
The Book of Household Management sold 60,000 copies in its first year, outselling Great Expectations, and was avidly read by the burgeoning middle-class wives and mothers desperate to learn how to cook, choose servants, budget and dress.
Yet only four years after its publication Isabella Beeton died, aged 28, having caught puerperal fever after the birth of her fourth child.
In her short life she had seen two of her children die, one aged three, the other three months; she suffered several miscarriages.
Sam, having gone bankrupt while Isabella was alive, died aged 47 – possibly from syphilis, which he passed to his wife.
What Sophie also wanted to know was whether Mrs Beeton’s advice is relevant today.
She was determined to find the answer ‘‘yes’’, despite the evidence.
Especially the cookery.
Mrs B’s famous recipes (which pioneered the listing of ingredients, followed by instructions and price) are largely rewritten for modern readers, and the original versions Sophie tested were comically awful: the linseed cold remedy was described as ‘‘prosthetic snot” by botanist James Wong; the gingerbread, said the Suffolk WI, “bizarre”; the pigeon pie, with birds’ feet sticking out of the pastry, Jurassic Park meets Alien.
If you want to find out more about Mrs Beeton, I can’t recommend highly enough Kathryn Hughes’s biography,
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, televised as a drama five years ago and bound to be repeated.
Memo to Sophie: watch and learn. |
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- JOHN KOTZ -THE STORY OF A MUNICIPAL SOCIALIST
Updated: 19 Sep 2011
Vintage Red: The Story Of A Municipal Socialist
by John Kotz (Manifesto Press, £9.95)
Tuesday 13 September 2011
by Ivan Beavis
"If it is not recorded it is lost," Rodney Bickerstaffe aptly says in his foreword to this unassuming book about the life and political times of John Kotz.
He was the major political figure in the London borough of Hackney's Labour politics from the war right up until the ultra-left in the party foolishly voted him out of office during the 1980s.
Persuaded to move out to rural Essex by his family, he spent another eight years on Braintree council.
Nowadays private is good and public is bad as we grapple with yet another crisis of capitalism.
Yet Kotz demonstrates in the book that faced with the appaling aftermath of the second world war, it was the planned intervention by the Attlee government and the democratic involvement of local government that was able to create a national health service completely free at the point of use.
It secured the nationalisation of key industries so as to create jobs with decent pay and conditions and was able to instigate a huge slum clearance and house building programme to deal with the situation where many had nowhere to live having been bombed out.
The situation then was far worse than we face today but, armed with a massive mandate from the people, the Labour government and its municipal allies were able to put in place a welfare state radically different from the grinding poverty faced before the war.
It is this welfare state that the coalition is seeking to destroy following the template established by Thatcher and endorsed by new Labour.
Kotz is unashamedly "old Labour" and contemptuous of the suits that now dominate the party nationally.
Despite this he remains totally loyal to the party, believing that the members must take control of the inner party democracy and thereby reconnect with the aspirations of ordinary people.
The book is very good at reliving the experiences of a child growing up in a close-knit Jewish community and recounts its solidarity in detail, particularly when the community was threatened by Mosley's fascists at Cable Street.
What little they had was shared with each other.
There is much to learn from a book like this.
To realise that Cameron's Big Society is nothing other than an attempt to return us to the Victorian values of the rich looking after themselves and throwing scraps of care to the lower orders to make themselves feel good.
To realise that there is a real alternative that socialists like John Kotz fought for all of their lives but which was cruelly taken away when the Party was hijacked by people interested in nothing but their own power and personal enrichment.
Read it and strive for socialism.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- WHY SHOULD NOT OLD MEN BE MAD ?
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
William Butler Yeats -
Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?
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Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- HATRED
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
Hatred
Wislawa Szymborska
Look, how constantly capable
and how well maintained
in our century: hatred.
How lightly she regards high impediments.
How easily she leaps and overtakes.
She's not like other feelings.
She's both older and younger than they.
She herself gives birth to causes
which awaken her to life.
If she ever dozes, it's not an eternal sleep.
Insomnia does not sap her strength, but adds to it.
Religion or no religion,
as long as one kneels at the starting-block.
Fatherland or no fatherland,
as long as one tears off at the start.
She begins as fairness and equityt.
Then she propels herself.
Hatred. Hatred.
She veils her face with a mien
of romantic ecstasy.
Oh, the other feelings --
decrepit and sluggish.
Since when could that brotherhood
count on crowds?
Did ever empathy
urge on toward the goal?
How many clients did doubt abduct?
Only she abducts who knows her own. |
Talented, intelligent, very industrious.
Do we need to say how many songs she has written.
How many pages of history she has numbered.
How many carpets of people she has spread out
over how many squares and stadiums!
Let's not lie to ourselves:
She's capable of creating beauty.
Wonderful is her aura on a black night.
Magnificent cloud masses at rosy dawn.
It's difficult to deny her pathos of ruins
and her coarse humor
mightily towering above them columns.
She's the mistress of contrast
between clatter and silence,
between red blood and white snow.
And above all she never tires of
the motif of the tidy hangman
above the defiled victim.
She's ready for new tasks at any moment.
If she must wait she'll wait.
She said she was blind. Blind?
She has the keen eyes of a sniper
and boldly looks into the future
--she alone.
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-translated by Walter Whipple
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- THE NODDING DONKEYS
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
The Nodding Donkeys.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Oil in a pipe, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Pumping dollars from the dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Soldiers to war, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Dying for dollars in deserts and dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Voters in an election, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Saluting the dollar, loving their dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Lies on the news, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Spending dollars to dish the dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Crack in a pipe, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Rocks for dollars, amidst the dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Profits in a bank, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Printing fake dollars with blood and dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Obey or die, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Enslaved by dollars, living in dirt.
Yes or No, we control the whole show,
Nowhere to go, increase the flow,
The nodding donkeys do their work,
Liberty is dead, buried dollar deep in dirt. |
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- THE SUPER RICH SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH - by Stephen Armstrong
Updated: 06 Sep 2011
 When you mention the word 'oligarch' it has a particular resonance with the clique of men whose fortunes were made pillaging Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union - most famous among them Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and the now jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
However, as journalist Stephen Armstrong proves in his book 'The Super-rich shall inherit the Earth' oligarchs are not solely the preserve of Russia.
While, the not-quite-post-cold-war media is keen to emphasise corruption in Russia, we know very little of the internal affairs of the other 'BRIC' nations: Brazil, India and China - which all have very similar oligarchical systems in which a super-rich elite evades any government regulation or control and in which government seemingly serves their global power interests.
The sub-title of the book, 'The new global oligarchs and how they're taking over our world' reflects the emphasis that is given to these emerging world power states. It describes the litany of corporate manslaughter, government corruption, embezzlement, defrauding of entire population's resources.
After six chapters one could easily get the disconcerting feeling a message of 'and that is why we must defend the West!' coming at the end.
Those hoping for a comfortable portrayal of the evils of Johnny foreigner, against the great democratic [sic] Anglo-Saxon model will be disappointed.
The brickbats aren't just reserved for the BRICs.
In the final four chapters, Armstrong looks with intense scrutiny at the global oligarchs in the US and the UK, including - in a move bound to delight all UK Uncutters - chapter 9 'In which Philip Green couldn't give a fuck'.
This book sadly written before the incoming coalition government had appointed the knighted-under-New Labour Sir Philip to carry out a review of government spending and procurement.
Another chapter details the in-crowd of Goldman Sachs as they migrate from government to investment bank and back again.
It also explains why Lehmann Brothers was left to collapse while Goldman Sachs was saved.
All in all this is a refreshing look at the global economy: massive and growing inequality, freedom for the super-rich and increasing authoritarianism for the poor, and government no longer able or willing to defend its citizens against mobile global capital.
While Marx argued that the working man has no country, it is very clear that the super-rich require a sponsor nation - and they have several corrupt jurisdictions to choose from.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- DECLINE & FALL-OLIVER CROMWELL: NEW PERSPECTIVES by Partick Little
Updated: 05 Sep 2011
Decline & Fall - Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives
by Patrick Little (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.99)
Monday 29 August 2011
David Morgan
A new view of Cromwell as a Welshman with close and abiding affinities to the Leveller cause emerges from this new collection of essays.
Christopher Hill's classic study of Cromwell, God's Englishman, was published in 1970 and there have been countless books about the great Commonwealth and republican leader since then - revisionist accounts have sought to portray Cromwell as a man of contradictions, others have set out to establish that he was at best a flawed hero, a hypocrite and a religious zealot.
Cromwell's reputation on the left has been much tarnished by his feud with John Lilburne as he has commonly been portrayed as the villain to the latter's solid man of principle.
A very different view in this book gives a more detailed picture of Cromwell's associations with the Levellers, particularly with William Walwyn, who often remains in the shadow of Lilburne.
Philip Baker explains that Cromwell was sympathetic to Leveller ideas over a much longer period than is often appreciated.
In another illuminating contribution, Lloyd Bowen describes the Welsh family background of Cromwell and how this influenced his outlook.
While the Welshness of the Williams "alias Cromwell" side of the family is briefly mentioned by Hill, he makes very little of it.
In contrast, Bowen shows how Cromwell took great pride in his Welsh roots and took up the Welsh cause in Parliament on various occasions in the early 1640s when he was gaining a reputation as a militant puritan activist.
Bowen argues that Cromwell's important links with Wales have been almost completely ignored in both popular and academic literature.
Patrick Little sheds new light on the controversial circumstances surrounding the offer of the crown to Cromwell in 1657 and his refusal to accept it.
The offer came during a period of high tension following the foiling of an assassination attempt on Cromwell by royalists.
According to Little the "Sindercombe" plot's significance has never been "taken seriously" by historians but he claims that it shook the confidence of the republican regime quite severely.
The offer of the crown was something of a desperate bid to frustrate royalist attempts to deny the legitimacy of the regime.
Other articles cover Cromwell's role in the first civil war, his early parliamentary career, Cromwell's court, his record in Ireland and the upbringing of his successor Richard Cromwell.
It's a refreshing and highly readable series of reappraisals of a figure who is still a controversial one in English radical history more than 350 years after his death.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE - TOP GIRLS AT TRAFALGAR STUDIOS, LONDON
Updated: 26 Aug 2011
Top Girls
Monday 22 August 2011
Ciaran Bermingham
"Well of course I just owe almost everything to my own father," Margaret Thatcher famously said when she first entered Number 10.
This wasn't going to be the last time that the Iron Lady induced a collective rush for the sick bucket across the nation.
But this bizarre statement also disproved those who mistakenly thought she had any interest in improving the lives of working women
Top Girls is a pertinent reminder that Tory individualism and the interests of feminism can never be reconciled.
Caryl Churchill's 1982 play opens with a familiar dinner party scene, where the role of fathers is discussed even though men remain significantly absent throughout.
The unfamiliar guests include the 19th-century explorer Isabella Bird, a figure from medieval Japanese history Lady Nijo and the only ever female pope, Joan.
They talk about their struggles but also their achievements in a poignant scene where laughter and tears coexist, often indistinguishably.
Churchill wants us to know that these historically forgotten women would never have been accredited by Thatcher when becoming prime minister.
Suranne Jones plays Marlene in this welcome revival, whose story runs the whole way through the play and binds elements of fantasy with early 1980s realism.
The incoming managing director of Top Girls employment agency, she is aptly portrayed, sympathetically and satirically, in Jones's performance. This combination shouldn't work, but the fact that it does shows one of the many reasons why the play is rightfully a classic of modern theatre.
Jones rises to the challenges of the role and when Marlene's estranged daughter Angie (Olivia Poulet) turns up to her City office in wellies she is met with the hard-nosed disinterest of someone who has sacrificed their family for their career.
But the cracks in this front are difficult to hide. A flashback to the year before reveals a more vulnerable Marlene unable to connect to the family she has left behind for the City.
Joyce, played by Stella Gonet, is her jaded sister. Having brought up Angie as her own, she is the bitter counterweight to Marlene's success.
The structure of Top Girls might be disjointed, but the anti-capitalist message manages to be both consistent and undogmatic.
Like all the other women characters, those who attend the employment agency must accept the inhumanity of a ruthless "jobs market" where unemployment is high and social conscience low.
Unfortunately their depiction sometimes slips into retro caricature, glossing over some of the disturbing parallels with today.
This is however the only real criticism which can be directed at Max Stafford-Clark's timely production, with its versatile all-female cast.
It is easy to see why this exploration of sexual, political and class politics has made a successful transfer from Chichester Theatre here to Trafalgar Studios. With Downing Street just yards away, Cameron et al would do well to make the short walk to see this savage yet subtle critique of Thatcherism.
Runs until October 29. Box office: (020) 7492-1532.
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POETRY BOOKS & CULTURE- OPEN SEASON:THE NEIL LENNON STORY by George Galloway
Updated: 22 Aug 2011
At last it is here, the story of last season's sectarian and racist campaign to drive Neil Lennon out of Scotland.
Open Season: The Neil Lennon Story by George Galloway explodes the history of Scotland's shame, anti Irish Catholic racism and bigotry, and the culpability of the Scottish establishment in attempting to sweep it under the carpet.
Sparing no reputation, no hallowed institution, Galloway holds a mirror up to the political cowardice, rank opportunism and prejudice that is every bit as entrenched in Scotland's culture today as it was over 100 years ago.
Galloway's reputation for saying what needs to be said has never been more deserved.
Open Season is required reading by everyone with an interest in knowing what happened last season and why.
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Poetry, Books and Culture
