New Year's Revolution

This blog will start again on 7th January 2008.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

I’m A Party

I know I’ve said this blog is changing and going off in a new direction. It is – but not quite yet. So, in the meantime I have once more succumbed to posting a comment on a newspaper site article – this time, though, it is The Daily Telegraph, and an article on how political parties should be funded.

This is my comment:

It is quite simple. All parties should only be funded by membership fees, with the only legal stipulation being that the annual fee be the same for all members so that the millionaire pays exactly the same as the manual worker, or whatever.

This means that all parties must broaden their appeal and become mass movement parties once again (and, therefore have some real rather than assumed democratic legitimacy). It also has the advantage that any party that cannot fund itself through getting enough members will go out of business, and if political parties are actually necessary (and this is debatable), new ones will arise to fill the void.

The only problem with my scheme is that the present bunch of incumbents - on all sides of the house and in all current parties - will never dare risk discovering how unpopular they really are.

***

Obviously, it is not quite as simple as that* – which is one of the reasons why I am far from gruntled with the average blog-type posting - which often come out as much less than a newspaper-length article. As I also increasingly find purportedly serious newspaper articles disappointingly bland and superficial these days, it has become a state of affairs that leads more to frustration rather than elucidation.

This is why I want to move to less frequent, but longer, essays (blessays even). I want to do this even though I know the longer a piece is on a computer screen (a blog especially) the less likely it is to be read. However, that is in itself the subject for another – hopefully quite long – essay. For now, though, this will do.

*Just by way of example, there are things like election costs and party administration, which the politicians would claim need a great deal of expenditure. But, I’m not sure how true this is, or would be for a truly mass-appeal party.

[BTW I’m a Party – see here (track 3)]

This Silent Blog (Continued)

(Continued from here – sort of)

I think I have decided what this blog is going to be for from now on. It is an idea I’ve been toying with for quite a while, in fact it was one of the ideas that I wanted to try when I began this whole blogging business back with Stuff and Nonsense (now long deleted) a few years ago now.

However, it seems that one rather intellectually cuddly person (amongst no doubt several others I have not come across) has already beaten me to it, coining the rather lovely term Blessay (blog essay) in the process.

In short this is what I want to do from now on, longish (by the standards of the average blog post anyway) essay-type pieces on subjects as and when they occur to me, and not particularly tied to anything in the news or in the MSM at the time.

Of course, this will mean that new posts will be rather haphazard, appearing whenever I have completed them, rather than to any fixed schedule. Therefore, in which case, if you are interested, then the RSS feed will be your friend.

I am already well into the first of these new style posts, so it could be along any time soon (or, rather, soonish).

See you then.

Recent Publications (to 26/11/2007)

[The previous Recent Publications Post.]

I had hoped to do this update more often, but circumstances have not been too good, of late.

However, here is everything published since March 2007.

• Poem: A Sign - Cauldron Issue 316 Spring/Summer 2007
• Poem: She Is - ABCTales magazine No. 5 October 2007

My recent ABCTales publications are:

• Poem: Beachcombing - Submitted on April 16, 2007
• Poem: A Slight Delay - Submitted on April 23, 2007 *cherrypicked*
• Poem: Sea Horses - Submitted on April 30, 2007
• Poem: A Ghost Song - Submitted on May 7, 2007
• Poem: Snow Storm - Submitted on May 14, 2007
• Poem: Sheets - Submitted on May 21, 2007
• Poem: Flying - Submitted on June 4, 2007
• Poem: Kneeling - Submitted on June 11, 2007
• Poem: The Note - Submitted on June 18, 2007 *cherrypicked*
• Short Story: Rain On The Window - Submitted on June 19, 2007
• Poem: Princess - Submitted on June 25, 2007
• Poem: Footsteps - Submitted on July 2, 2007
• Poem: Shoreline - Submitted on July 10, 2007
• Poem: Circumnavigation - Submitted on July 16, 2007
• Poem: Memories Into Touch - Submitted on July 24, 2007
• Poem: She Is - Submitted on July 30, 2007 (see above ABCTales magazine No. 5)
• Poem: Drowning - Submitted on August 6, 2007
• Poem: Our Lives - Submitted on August 13, 2007
• Poem: Dark Shadows - Submitted on August 27, 2007
• Poem: Ambition - Submitted on September 3, 2007
• Poem: Images - Submitted on September 25, 2007 *cherrypicked*
• Poem: Dead Leaves - Submitted on October 29, 2007
• Poem: Bare Rooms - Submitted on November 5, 2007
• Short Story: Socks - Submitted on November 12, 2007 *cherrypicked*
• Poem: Shadow - Submitted on November 19, 2007

*’A cherry-pick, represented by a lovely bunch of cherries, is given by the editors of ABCtales to recognise pieces of writing that they really think that other people should read.’ (from the ABCtales FAQ)

On Why This Blog Has Been Silent For So Long

Boredom with the whole blog ‘concept’, I suppose. Regurgitating half-chewed globs of ‘news’ from the msm and them adding a snide comment or two on to the beginning or end of it has lost its novelty value for me.

However, this (long) piece from The Register – an interview with Adam Curtis touches on many aspects of my disenchantment, not just with blogs, but with what they feed off, too.

At a time when there isn't anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the "empire of the self" - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security.

And that's exactly what the internet is about - "If you like this book, others before you have bought these books..." And it works to create those little circles. All those little radio stations which tell you, "If you played this, other people have played this..."

On the internet, you're constantly monitoring other people's choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, "OK I'll do that to be like that". And what that leads to, again, is Balkanisation.

And it's what advertisers rather like, because it gives them a definition.

Ok, then… well so what?

I would like to use this thing for something far more interesting – at least to me – than just a glorified linking page. I’m not sure what it will be yet, or even if it will be anything at all.

We’ll all just have to wait and see what happens.

In the meantime, I’ll use it to list my recent publications on the web and elsewhere.

A Rich Man In A Poor Man's Shirt

I wish I could quit The Grauniad’s CiF, but I can’t seem to. Here’s another one about bloody ‘authenticity’ in rock music, of all things:

My comment:

Ah, authenticity in rock music, it fair brings a tear to the old eye thinking back to when that mattered and the obscurity of your 'favourite' bluesman was worth several bonus points in the late night record collection investigations back at your mate's place.

Authenticity has always been one of the great myths of rock. In fact, it was one of the main traits that were thought to distinguish it from mere 'pop'.

So bands got successful for being 'authentic' and that success robbed them of their authenticity - 'Well I took a piss at fortune's sweet kiss/It's like eatin' caviare and dirt/It's a sad funny ending to find yourself pretending/A rich man in a poor man's shirt'* - then we could all sit around and smugly crow about how they had 'sold out'.

It was the 'selling out' of the 'dinosaur' bands that became the creation myth of punk - when it turned out most of those punk bands that created the scene were failed pub rock bands from the previous 'next big thing', trading in new (ripped) t-shirts and spiky haircuts - about as 'authentic' as any other 'natural' pre-packed processed consumer item in the supermarket.

*B. Springsteen - Better Days.

The Future Lies With The Proles

The Grauniad’s Cif again:

'The future lies with the proles'* - but Winston didn't realise that it would be in the opposite way to what he thought. Prolefeed has taken over popular culture almost completely now.

The thing is though that a big part of the blame must lie with 'the left' itself. For it was the anti-elitism of the left which led to this flattening of culture that makes even otherwise intelligent people (men and women) settle for this vacuous tripe, rather than make a bit of effort to find that which is deeper and - ultimately - far more satisfying.

It is very sad when a person will find that, for example, owning a complete DVD box set of some obscure 60s cult TV show carries more cultural cache than owning the complete works of Shakespeare (A book? How quaint.) And, if this is the most that the 'intelligent' (and I still include the Guardian in this - if now only for reasons of nostalgia) can aspire to, is it little wonder that the prolefeed itself aspires to even lower horizons?

*From Orwell's 1984, of course.

Chaos, Not Music

The Grauniad’s CiF once again:

A new rebellion by David Wilson.

'We're into chaos, not music!' John Lydon (nee Rotten) said at the time - if you can't remember that, you weren't there.
Punk lasted between anything from 6 months to a year at the most before the adverts for pre-ripped t-shirts began appearing in the back of the NME and it died of an overdose of self parody (just as 'Sid Vicious' did - oh, the irony).
The one great pity is the way it revived rock music just when it was beginning to die. An important lesson that the industry (or, rather, the youth industries)learnt so well. So, the real lasting legacy of punk was the way that it brought about the constant recycling of teenage fads we still get nowadays - the this, that and the other 'revivals' we get on slow newsdays.
I'm just glad I hate nostalgia*, or I'd be wallowing in it too.

*In particular, the nostalgia sub-industry that seems to have a sort of symbiotic relationship with the media these days.

No Box Left Unticked

The Grauniad’s Cif again, where:

'Mixed-race' is the fastest growing category of identity in the UK. This raises questions of how our understanding of ethnicity affects policy.

There's the rub though, folks.

Trying to impose rigid categories on what is a continuum is always going to leave you looking a bit silly.

Race (in as far as it exists) is such a continuum. So, unless you build high brick walls around the edges of the continents, there is always going to be a bit of... er... leakage and analysis of genetic history will show you it has been gong on for centuries.

The same applies to sexuality - another continuum. Just because some American politician, for example, fancies a same sex encounter once in a while that doesn't mean he's a liar or hypocrite.

Just like one person's bit of office banter is another's outrageous sexism, or someone's honest criticism is another's heinous blasphemy, it shows that rigid lines cannot be drawn where all is flux and reveals just why the leftish notion of achieving utopia through legislation-based social engineering is doomed to failure.

Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?

John Harris on The Guardian’s CiF wants to bury one myth: that Elvis was a racist and his music was 'stolen' from black America.

My Comment:

More to the point is that people can define 'racism' almost any way they want, and saying it loudly enough about someone famous or something in the news gets them far more attention (with, however, the concomitant danger that they may be trampled in the stampede to mount the bandwagon by others equally eager to join in) than saying something reasonable, say, as in this case how the original blues and country artists lost out during the invention of rock 'n' roll.
And, yes, Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog is better. But there is also an Elvis album where he do the blues (can't remember what it is called - Reconsider Baby(?)) where he shows he could do it and do it well.

Doth Protest Too Much

Zoe Williams on The Guardian’s CiF shows some solidarity with the self-styled ‘eco-protestors’ currently grooving it up in a typically smug self-congratulatory manner in a field near some aeroplanes.

My comment:

Of course, irritating, inconveniencing, berating and annoying ordinary people trying to go about their normal lives up to and beyond the point where they refuse to listen to what you have to say out of sheer bloody-mindedness may - just - in the end be slightly counter-productive.

The best way would be to make your case through argument and debate and appealing to people's good sense in a positive and constructive way rather than berating them, however this later course can be deeply unsatisfying to those truly committed to their cause as it tends to lack he smug self-satisfied feeling of martyrdom.

Protesters should also be made aware that over-the-top zealotry tends to make people very suspicious of you as a person, rather than drawing attention to the cause you are espousing - as can be seen from some responses to this story here and elsewhere about 'work-shy layabouts' and so on.

In short, protesting may make you feel good, but in the words of your teachers when you were at school: 'it is your own time you are wasting.'

Kids These Days

I still don't have time to do 'proper' blogging. But I thought I'd go back to reprinting here the comments I have made on various MSM sites as a way of easing myself back into the groove – as it were.

Anyroadup. Guardian CIF has this from Cheshire police about the tragic death of Garry Newlove.

My comment:

There are two ways - or rather, two strand - that societies keep order: the formal - police, laws and so on, and the informal - the community, families etc.

In the UK, over the last few decades, it seems both of these strands have been eroded. The police and the law system have been slowly strangled by bureaucratic managerialism, including such things as targets, increasing emphasis on 'defensive' actions to avoid legal counter-claims, the need to document everything a police officer does and so on.

A similar thing has happened in the informal realm where adults feel they no longer have any authority over younger folks at all. I can remember when I was young even frail old pensioners would feel justified in telling me off for even wheeling my bike on the pavement, let alone daring to ride it on the pavement.

There was a recent thread here about the police restraining some drunk woman and I recall one commenter said something like 'the trouble is the police use too much force.'

Thinking about it later I came to the conclusion that it is in fact the opposite that is true - the police, adults too, no longer have the option of forcing youngsters to behave. Yes, the good old 'clip 'round the ear' (mainly as a vague unfulfilled threat, of course). But - like teachers too -losing the power of such instant summary justice means that problems are not nipped in the bud, children are not learning at a relatively young age that certain behaviours overstep the mark and - as a consequence - are slipping further and further out of control until it gets too late for them as well as for us.

September Song

If there is anyone still bothering to read this, sorry for the lack of new stuff. But - at the moment - I don't really have anything I want to do here.
Maybe I will return in September when I have more time, if not I think I will give up on this completely.

Monday Poem: Circumnavigation

Circumnavigation

Can your small room take the place
of a whole wide world?

Can you walk the arid deserts
of this threadbare carpet?

Can you explore the jungles
of all these dense memories,

then climb the highest peaks
of this forgotten furniture?

Can you search out beyond the horizon
of these so solid walls

and see far enough to glimpse
the life you know you should have lived?

The End Of The Race?

I said in this that it was part of a longer piece. Well, in response to this CiF piece I’ve finally got around to tidying it up enough for this place too.

Maybe we should dump the notion of race altogether. Race as a concept maybe made a sort of simplistic sense in earlier times when travel between continents was difficult – which was the reason why separate ‘racial’ characteristics evolved over time, but nowadays with all the ‘races’ mixing together (and having children with each other) the concept grows increasingly more meaningless. Take, for example, the American Presidential candidate Barack Obama, Who is often described as black, even self-described as such, when he is mixed race, or by the same self-definition could call himself white. So, when race becomes a matter of you are what you say you are, it then loses whatever objective meaning it was once thought to have.

When the left adopted ‘race’ as one of its causes, naturally it saw it as a collectivist problem with – therefore - a collective solution. Rather than wasting away – just as the state was supposed to do under communism, we find that race and race ‘differences’ become accented and entrenched by what could be called the ‘race-relations’ industry – just as the state apparatus became stronger and stronger under communism.

You would have thought that after things like the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’ and apartheid and all the ‘ethnic’ cleansing, people would begin to question this 19^th Century notion of ‘the races’. Although – as this is a blog comment – I haven’t bothered to research it, I do seem to recall that there is little or no scientific, genetic, evidence for any significant differences between the races. It is literally only superficial, skin colour, different shaped noses etc and a few mostly minor differences that make someone more disposed towards, or immune to, a few medical conditions and that is it.

Anyway, a few months ago, a C4 programme analysed the DNA of various British people and discovered that far from being pure ‘white’ there were traces of DNA from all over the world, which probably makes the whole idea of ‘races’ as more or less homogeneous entities a bit of a nonsense too.

‘Multiculturalism is just another word for apartheid. Rather than creating ‘equality’, it has ossified divisions, stereotyping people into ghettos. More examples: Black actors complain of only being offered the roles of pimp or drug dealer, black (or other ethnicities) writers complain of being condemned to only write of the ‘black experience’ and so on. Personally, I find the whole ‘role-models’ theory, weak and unconvincing. However, putting those doubts to one side for a moment – why should a young black boy have all his options restricted to just ‘black role-models’?

This race business has also helped to develop ‘victim’ culture where every failing can be excused as the fault of ‘the system’ that is biased against them. It has become so successful at tapping ‘liberal guilt’ that now others vying for power and influence such as ‘the Muslim community’ are trying to extend the victim status of race into religion.

‘Identity’ (assuming that there is any meaning to this concept too) should not be imposed from outside – whether by antagonistic or benign forces, it should be created from within – deep within by the individual.

Maybe the answer is not treating people as groups – white, black, Muslims Catholics, women, lesbians or whatever, we should see them, treat them as individuals – not lock them in cages of created ‘identity’.

This article here (now subscription only) by Rod Liddle says a few related interesting things:

If you insist to black children that there is something about the colour of their skin which marks them out as fundamentally, rather than superficially, different and then insist that they are part of a culture from which they cannot — and should not wish to — escape, then you are tacitly driving them towards criminality. It is no good later shaking your heads and saying no, no, boys, I meant James Baldwin and Maya Angelou. You cannot have it both ways. It is also a quintessentially racist approach, in as far as I understand the term — although one which has underpinned the now discredited policy of multiculturalism for the best part of 40 years.

We should sweep it all away. All the discrimination, all the cant, all the misplaced attempts to instil pride in people simply because they have a greater (or, for that matter, lesser) amount of melanin. Why do we need award ceremonies, for example, like Mobo — Music of Black Origin? Why are there so many awards for black people in the media? Aren’t these little jamborees by their very definition racist? Don’t they perpetuate the notion that black people are in some way separate from the rest of us and, worse, that they should remain so? Why do our schools have a Black History Month every October? Shouldn’t the history of black people inform the subject every month of the year?

Monday Poem: Shoreline

This week’s special offer!

For one week only!

A Monday poem on Tuesday!

Shoreline


But those were early younger days.
So eager, waking with the dawn
and old enough to walk alone
on down to the deserted beach.

I never searched for shells or stooped
to pick out pebbles, choosing them
by shape or colour, leaving them
wherever they had washed ashore,
to be discovered by those who thought
such things important or worthwhile.

It was enough to stand and stare
towards the far horizon's end.
To see then, all that could be seen.
I wanted that cool salty tang
always there in my mouth and nose.

I stood there in the morning's cool
to look out over the still sea.
It seemed as flat and smooth as glass.
A sheet to touch the horizon.

But, other times it churned and writhed
in great pain or tormented hurt,
attempting to escape the chains
of gravity, as seeing clouds
above it floating free of weight,
it grew so jealous of their freedom.

I stood up on that cliff to watch
the hesitant bright-coloured specks
as people spread out on the beach
in pointillist bright waves across
the virgin sands. The way they took
the silence of the beach and grew
new waves of sound to fling right back
against the slow retreating sea.

Their tentative colonisation
of shore and then the sea, destroying
the reasons why I had just walked there.

Monday Poem: Footsteps

Footsteps

I remember too much
and I remember nothing.
So many names have danced
through my longest nights.
So many times have been lost
between dreams and memory.
I grow older and I learn
the attractions of forgetfulness.


I see colours and I see shapes,
edges resolve themselves into form,
things capable of being touched.
I touch your face with one fingertip
and comfort myself with the illusion
that understanding can begin
with this one sensual act.


But we stand here like two strangers,
watching the rain falling down
on those streets we walked through.
Each hoping in our own way
that the rain will wash
those streets clean of memories.


So, when the sun does return
we can step out together
into a world made new for us,
and that each street will not echo
with the ghosts of our footsteps.

Monday Poem: Princess

Princess

I saw your dream, held in an open hand
offered to anyone who dared even pause
in that impatient busy city street.
I saw the dance on the wide-open stage
of your outstretched palm. I saw a desire
to live for happily ever after
like the end of so many fairy tales.

But princes are rarely handsome these days.
Princesses like you are lucky to find
even these bare handfuls of happiness,
only in dreams held out in open palms
by the side of indifferent pavements.
And the song you sing is lost once again
left to drown in the crowded rushing roar.

Monday Poem: The Note

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

The Note

The note is held, there,
in the centre of the still room.
It seems even breathing stopped.

As though that one note
holds all living pulses
within its own bounds.

It fades, slowly to silence
like a snowflake falling
down on warm ground.

Fading, disappearing
and - finally - completely lost.
And breathing returns.

The heart remembers
its own particular rhythm
and blood starts to flow.

I look at you
as you look at me
as we both acknowledge

all notes come to an end
and all ends in silence.

Waltzing’s For Dreamers

There is a leader in The Grauniad, praising Richard Thompson, to which I’ve added the following comment:

By your mid-teens - if you have any intelligence and soul - you are already heartily sick of the twee banality of pop music. So you move on to rock, then by your mid-twenties at the latest you ought to have realised that rock's pompous self-aggrandising cod-Romanticism is just as hollow as the pop you left behind....

Except....

There are a bare handful of true artists who sit - often uncomfortably - almost within touching distance of that pile of detritus. People like Van Morrison, Dylan, Springsteen, Zevon and a few others like Richard Thompson. Most of them operate around the edges; get called a cult and a well-kept secret and so on.

You would like them to get more success, get the rewards they undoubtedly deserve, but then you see what happens to those that get the success - are they made bland by the success, or are they successful because they are bland?

I remember reading somewhere that only the mediocre can have true mass appeal - and it is obviously true when you think about it - and one thing Richard Thompson could never be is mediocre.

Monday Poem: Kneeling

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Kneeling

I turn back towards
a ghost of memory.
On some sun-defined morning
I could have found her there,
kneeling by a limpid rock pool
holding her long black hair
back with one hand,
as she stared, still,
into the deep of the pool
seeking through light-sharpened water
for some significant shell or stone.

Collective Failure

Reem Maghribi on The Grauniad’s Cif says ‘Cultural and religious groups should not be addressed collectively but as individuals who have a vote and a voice within a democracy.’

Here is my comment on it:

This is - quite obviously - why 'the left' has failed. At first it believed the myth of the class war, but when it discovered that the 'working class' did not act as one homogeneous group following the path the liberal middle-class laid out for it, when it found that collectivism could not work, the left began to cast around for other groupings; women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and now religious groupings and so forth that it could claim to 'represent'. All this too has failed as this article points out in the case of treating all those of one religion as one.
Collectivism is the problem, never the solution.

Monday Poem: Flying

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Flying

I hoped to break free soon, and learn then how to soar
on up toward the bluest skies and, reaching out,
forever taking handfuls from the empty air.

I searched for that one place I could see all the sky
forever arcing overhead, and catch a glimpse
of those who learnt the perfect art of flying free.

But all our greying skies are empty dreams these days.

I want to step beyond the edge, where pleading eyes
cannot attempt to drag me back to fall on down,
as we always do end up, falling slowly down.

I feel desire to fly, but don't know how to dare.
Instead, I wander deserts, past skeletal frames
of those who fell down from the unforgiving sky.

I see the empty hands that once almost took hold,
that grasped, imploring, reaching for the distant skies,
now only bony brittle sticks just thrusting up
from underneath these piles of heaping dusty sand.

So now, I only watch the dust, and how it falls,
and settles slowly down again, after each step
I take towards my home. And how, in time, the sands
will shift and bury all these dreams that used to soar.

Monday Poem: Sheets

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Sheets

Such easy days, and the time
drips by, like rain off a leaf.
We stand and laugh,
sit and smile, lie and kiss.
I feel the warm easy pressure
of your skin on my fingertips.

This is no time to worry
or to be concerned about how
the world is the way that it is.
No day to call for the downfall
of the enemies of peace and promise.
We have our own world
and we keep it safe
underneath these sheets.


To do anything otherwise would be
to step out on the cold floor.
We do not want to go naked
out into that darkness.
These sheets are our home
and we turn our backs
on the world, to face each other,
to draw close together.

So all we touch is each other.
All we think of is each other.
Our world becomes simple,
decisions can be made,
actions can be taken.
Shall I touch you there?
Shall I kiss you here?


Outside this bed, the room grows dark
and the rain sheets against the window
showering off the solid glass.
The clouds; ominous, thick and heavy
thundering their storm cannons
across our once clear blue skies.


Outside, the storm begins again.

Monday Poem: Snow Storm

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Snow Storm

Here is a moment I found
just for you.
A memory of winter days.
Tip it up and see slow snow falling.

Take this memory that can sit
fragile as a snowflake
in the open palm of one hand.

All the memories,
fading under falling snow
as the world is enclosed, limited.

It is like learning to grow older
taking a small fragment of the world
that can be our to keep,
and learning how to care for it,
to realise about edges, borders, limits.

We let it all fall around us
like slow snow falling,
like a scene held under glass.

What I Did On My Holidays

‘Last week, Tory leader David Cameron spent two days in Birmingham with the Rehmans’, at The Grauniad’s Cif site, to which I appended this comment:

Three things need to be done in this situation:

1. Dump the completely misguided, meaningless, stupid and divisive notion of 'race'. Treat all people as they are - equal.

2. Stop the notion of 'multiculturalism' which is just as misguided, meaningless etc. as above. Culture is a process, not a 'thing'. We should be building on the post-Renaissance post-Enlightenment culture that has been so successful for the west, spreading it around the world, and taking on board what those other parts of the world can add to it, as - we well know, it is not perfect. But it is the best (don't be frightened of that word) there is.

3. Only in a truly secular society can people be free to practise whichever - or none - religion they like free from external pressure. That includes school which should be secular too, treating all religions (and none) equally and fairly. But - more importantly - refusing to bow to pressure from ANY religion as to what should be taught, how the pupils should dress and so forth.

‘Race’ as it is currently defined, along with ‘multiculturalism’ are concepts created and defined by the left – both of which concepts (as with most things created and defined by the left) are seriously flawed (by way of example: the ‘race’ notion struggles with the notion of the ‘mixed-race’ person, and multiculturalism cannot cope with a collision of cultures). Both concepts – along with many other concepts based ultimately on Marxist etc analysis – have proved unable to cope with modern complexity and should therefore be dumped, even if it means a massive loss of jobs in the race-relations industry and allied trades.

Hail Fellow!

Back when I was a smoker, I used to jump on - with delight and relief - any piece of news that suggested that smoking wasn’t so bad after all; such as the notion it may delay diseases like Alzheimer’s and so on. At the same time, I was also attempting to convince myself that all the negative evidence about the many dangers of smoking was being overstated for some reason.

I was reminded about this when reading about the ‘fellow travellers’ who made excuses and gave feeble explanations when communism failed to live up to its ideals as the worker’s paradise. It seems that people do have a propensity to want to continue believe, despite the contrary evidence that confronts them. This, I suppose, also explains why people turn to religion in the teeth of natural disasters and other misfortunes. At such times, logic would suggest that such things and events disprove the very religious force that these people are looking to for protection and so forth.

All of which, I think goes towards making some sense of the subject of this pretty good article by David Aaronovitch in The Times.

Notes and Comments: 07/05/2007

Roy Hattersley on TV ads in The Guardian. To which I add this comment:
It is my firm belief that TV ads are the prime cause of obesity. This is because they are so bad, annoying, irritating or (usually car or perfume ads) incomprehensible they force you to flee the room for the duration of the break. This usually means a visit to the cupboard or the fridge with the - unless you are a sensible eater as I aspire to be - the inevitable consequences.

The Big White Lie, is a rather good examination of the doublethink that is necessary for the left mindset. I think that it may have something to do with the utopianism that underlies left thinking where it becomes necessary for you to convince yourself that what you desire is better than what is, even when the evidence suggests it isn’t.

Monday Poem: A Ghost Song

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

A Ghost Song

Days are like wind chimes
floating on the breeze.
So much that is forgotten
is forgotten.
So much that is remembered
haunts this waking dream.

This is all that was ever offered
meagre and bare
a few small moments
made precious
by careful considered memory.

Go now and this will remain
as shapes
left to gather dust,
a room no-one enters.
A door always closed
curtains drawn.

Draped dust sheets turn
furniture into ghosts
haunting
what was once a living room.

So this becomes a tune
played in an empty room
only the dust ever dances
only air moves
sound fades like the memory
of fingers brushing keys
before the plain white sheet
shrouded the piano.

Hatful Of Hollow

What are your favourite songs by the Smiths?

Being in my mid-twenties when the Smiths came along I was beginning to think I was getting too old for rock music. But they did go some way towards restoring my faith in the business - for a while. Back then I would have happily spent most of the evening arguing with you about which tracks ought to be on this list.

But now, these days, I can't stand listening to them at all and the more the media go on about the various 'anniversaries' of punk and post punk, the less interesting it gets.

It's over and gone. You - and I - are too old and nostalgia is a terribly sad disease and wallowing in it just makes it far worse.

Anyway, one day you are just going to have to face it, John Travolta's white suit had far more influence than punk, 'new wave', 'indie' and all that put together.

Notes and Comments: 05/05/2007

Excellent analysis, using the published biographies, of what the phenomenon called Tony Blair actually might be. It seems that what defines him may very well be his religion, which is probably why I’ve found him deeply distasteful from the very beginning. Man without a shadow.

A rather disturbing tale of the way that film makers, toy makers, junk food companies and so on are all working together. Another disturbing thing I find in Toy Story in The Grauniad is this:

"It would have been a dream," a Hasbro spokesperson says, had it been possible to make a live-action Transformers movie years ago, when the original hardcore fanbase - now 25 to 35 years old - was the right age to flock to cinemas and toy shops. As it is, the nostalgia factor should bring some of those original fans into cinemas….

I find it more than disturbing to think that people (male, most likely) of the 25-35 age-group would still be interested in the toys of their childhood enough to get involved in all this. But these days, it seems, people just do not grow up and wallowing in nostalgia for a childhood they never seem to want to leave is seen as something… well… ordinary, not pathologically disturbing.

Back in the early Stone Age, I used to have a Walkman. I stopped using it because I didn’t like the way it insulated me from my surroundings, took me out of the world around me and made me oblivious. I now have a – quite new – MP3 player, but I only use it for listening to audiobooks and – my great love – Shakespeare plays, which don’t tend to cocoon me in the same way that the constant music did. Anyway, it has stopped me becoming quite this sad and desperate.

My comment on this:

Quite simply political parties should be solely financed by membership fees alone. No state funding, no 'donations', nothing else at all. Furthermore, those membership fees should be fixed at such a rate that all in the party pay the same from the lowliest envelope-stuffer right up to the party leader and the millionaire 'philanthropist' (This may have to be capped by law to prevent shenanigans).

So then the parties will - if they want to survive - have to concentrate on building up a solid mass-membership and being responsive to the demands of that membership in order to still receive the funding from those members.

Not only will this approach 'reconnect' the parties to the electorate and reinvigorate their moribund states, it will also reduce the influence of those who currently control the party purse strings and reduce the power of lobbyists.

Groovy Times

Yet another of my comments on yet another Grauniad CiF article. Basic civility is about social solidarity

To say that this… well… to put it simply ‘good manners’ thing is the natural preserve of the left is just plain silly. If anything, it must be a Conservative thing, it is – after all – a conservative thing. (Although, you can make a good argument that Thatcher was not Conservative in the same way that Blair is not Labour, but that is by the by.)

As someone (redsquare) has already mentioned in the comments, this current incivility can be traced back to the ‘generation gap’ of the 50s and 60s, where it was all cool and groovy to attack the squares (daddy-o) for their bourgeois attitudes. What is interesting is how quickly this contrarian stance was taken up by first the universities (cf. The History Man – Malcolm Bradbury) and then through their influence out into the media (first the BBC and The Guardian mainly) and then onward and outward into the wider society. The key indicator is how all this talk of – and belief in the overriding importance of - ‘my rights’ has spread right down to the very lowest sections of society.

Of course, there were some good things that came from this ‘revolution’; but even there, there are still problems that a more gradualist approach rather than this rabid iconoclasm would have possibly resolved more satisfactorily. For example, it would have been better to drop the outmoded notion of ‘race’ rather than institutionalising it and the conflict between women as mothers and women with careers is still a mess that satisfies no-one.

So, really if anything ‘the left’ as it were is really the one to blame for this state of affairs, especially that part of the left that used to like to see itself as ‘progressive’, challenging the bourgeois conventions, destroying outdated modes and concepts and all that.

So, unsurprisingly for a CiF article the truth seems to be almost the exact opposite of that claimed in the article. So it goes.

Notes and Comments: 01/05/2007

‘let us just be clear that if you are to lecture the British people on our shared history of freedom, you must at the same time support the principles of liberty in your programme of legislation.’

Henry Porter on his usual good form at the Guardian’s CiF.

Legacy Issues

Not made for these times is a Guardian CiF piece by John Harris on what I suppose we could laughingly call ‘The Blair Legacy’.

He says:

Blairism, it has always struck me, was an essentially iconoclastic creed, founded in the brief era of innocence that followed the fall of communism and chiefly defined by what it was not: Old Labour, leftwing, anti-American, pro-trade-union, you name it.

However, I think ‘The 'Winter of Discontent' is where it all started, if only we had realised. That showed - for sake of simplicity I'll call it – ‘the Left’ that their idea (for simplicity's sake) of a government-planned top-down economy did not work. This was further proved, and emphasised, by the collapse of communism and so on. I suppose the only credit that Blair and his cronies can fairly claim is that they saw and understood this.

However, they still believed in that other central plank of left idealism, the top-down government-planned (again, for simplicity's sake) engineering of the social system. This they tried to nail onto a more workable freer economic system than the left-inspired one that had failed before and which led to the break-up of the post-war consensus under Thatcher.

Now this 'social-justice' notion has failed just as spectacularly as the economic one. Despite all the promises, despite all the money, despite all the promised Brave New Worlds, everyone (except the New Laborg collective and their fellow-travellers) realises that it has all gone horribly wrong.

It is this total failure of the other (and only other remaining) main plank of left ideology that is the reason for the collapse of Labour support and - if you like - goodwill amongst the general population. They will not easily be forgiven for this, just as they were not forgiven at the end of the 70s.

The Iraq war too can also be seen – in one sense - as a failure of the scrag-end of the 'ethical foreign policy' (remember that?) that didn't even survive its first contact with the reality of realpolitik. The mess that has come after the great PR show of the ‘end of the war’ victory has – though – become a kind of metaphor for, a symbol of, Labour’s collapse. A collapse into a total inability to not only sort out the mess they have made in this country, but even to really comprehend the scale of what has gone, and what continues to go, wrong with all their policies.

So, whoever is Brown’s successor will have to find some social-policy equivalent of the economic ‘Clause 4’ moment in order to begin to lead Labour out of yet another period in the wilderness. That is if the party really will want to survive with its total economic and social philosophies gone, after all it did come very close to dying in the heyday of the SDP when its economic ideas turned out to be bankrupt.

Monday Poem: Sea Horses

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Sea Horses

Now the sea horses are still, poised,
ornate like delicate jewellery.
What that means, I do not know.
We move on, in shoals, through
the depths of dark shadows
between the islands of lit tanks.

The ritual returns, it begins.
The search through rocks, weeds,
and the confirmation by label,
(helpfully illustrated)
the feeling of knowledge gained.

A worthy satisfied feeling, well-fed
by solid but digestible fact,
of time productively spent,
of edification and improvement.

A sense of the world, as somehow
slightly less out there, distant,
unknowable. Now it doesn't seen so far
out of reach by desperate, yearning hands.

But what do we really know?
A few names, forms and facts.
A handful of distinguishing marks
separating this one shoal of fish
from all the others swimming past.

Notes and Comments: 25/04/2007

NOTES:

Here’s a couple of links from a few days ago.

First at Civitas: How egalitarian social policy has failed working class children

Then at The Guardian, a rather odd piece. One of those pieces that make me feel as though the media – in particular The Guardian – seem to exist in a parallel universe to me, where it all seems similar on the surface, but on closer examination it turns out to be a far different world: Expensive tastes.

COMMENTS:

A stale, Labour-weary mood

My comment:
Back at the fag end of the Major period I voted Labour – despite Blair, not because of him – because, I thought, no matter how bad Blair could be there would be no way he could be worse than Major.

How wrong I was. How wrong all of us were.

Old labour ran aground back in the 70s, and now the New Laborg collective has screwed up completely in the 90s and beyond.

I think you are going to have to face it Polly, and those few loyal Guardianistas that still remain, the whole left wing project has failed, failed completely, and there is nothing that can be done to fix it because it is its entire underpinning ‘philosophy’ that is… well.. just simply wrong*.

Sorry.

*In fact, it seems its failure is so complete that even (some of) the French have – at last - begun to notice it doesn’t work too.

Not another digital villain

My comment:
What you must remember is that 'Ban' is a great word for newspaper headlines and one-minute news summaries - short, sharp, strong, active.

It is a great word for researchers to use to get publicity (and, hence, further grant money) for their researches, far better than weasely words like: tends to suggest, moderation, indication, and all the other doubts and hesitancies that would really reflect the world.

Politicians love the word 'ban', it makes them seem strong, active, decisive - all those things that research suggests (see?) that voters like. It gives the impression of action being taken, of wrongs being righted, of worlds being saved, of children being protected and gives the politician something to posture about to justify an otherwise pointless existence.

Meanwhile, out here in the trenches of real child-rearing we know that occasionally putting the kids in front of the TV for a bit can give us a few minutes to prepare meals, tidy up a bit, read the paper and all the other domestic trivia that tends to get re-prioritised when there is a Lego castle to build or a doll's severed-limb crisis.

However, our TV is very rarely on because we as adults very rarely watch it and the kids have therefore picked up the same habits. More importantly, though, our kids have never had a TV in their bedrooms, and never will, because that is just wrong.

Picking Cherries

As well as posting them here, I am also putting up these Monday Poems up at ABCTales. This morning I received an email saying that yesterday’s Monday Poem A Slight Delay has been ‘Cherry Picked’*.

This makes the 8^th ‘Cherry Pick’ I’ve had at this site – a site which I have to say is excellent, and I don’t say that because they like some of my stuff, it is just a very good place - and being cherry picked like this does make me feel unusually proud of myself.

*From the ABCTales FAQ: A cherry-pick, represented by a lovely bunch of cherries, is given by the editors of ABCtales to recognise pieces of writing that they really think that other people should read. This is not a scientific process, but does genuinely represent both an encouragement to writers and also a guide to the most interesting or noteworthy writing on ABCtales. If you do get a cherry, your piece is added to the list of cherry-picked pieces and you'll receive an email of congratulation.

Monday Poem: A Slight Delay

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

A Slight Delay

So talk comes to a halt again
as the rail tracks curl off into the distance
parallel lines curving off together
like some long unresolved argument.

The train we are riding on
sits like a forgotten toy
while we stare out
through opposing windows
at landscapes made alien
by their fixity.
All this used to be motion
blur, and parallax distances.

I watch a woman, stripped to the waist
washing herself in a bathroom
that backs onto this line,
the slight distortions
of the pebbled window glass
making her flesh outline
shimmer like some mirage.

I turn to speak, desire your confirmation,
but - out of the corner of my eye - I see
your formal nylon-encased knees
tight together. The straight skirt hem
efficient, like a ruler across your thighs,
and your briefcase stationed between us.

Your neck is taut
I see a vein throbbing
under your pale thin skin.
You will not turn.
You just watch the blank
corrugated metal wall of a factory.
One man with a fork-lift truck
stacking pallets neatly.

I turn back to my own window
the woman is now naked
drying herself with a pink towel
before struggling into a white gown.

And then our train moves on.

Monday Poem: Beachcombing

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

Beachcombing

Each day is a ship, sailing on the horizon.
There, and then it is gone.
We search the clouds for the memory of its sails.

On the shoreline we seek among shells and stones
sifting the wreckage of storms
searching through this flotsam for meaning and value.

The tide will erases our wandering footprints
as the wind disperses those clouds
suddenly, with an imperious dismissive gesture.

Our tentative lives on the edges of this land
are fleeting and flimsy as clouds
sailing these skies towards the horizon

while we remain here, trapped on the narrow shore
between unexplored jungles
and the wide, and far deeper, unknowable sea.

Recent Publications

The first in what I hope will become a new series.

I have had two poems published recently:

This Is How in Iota No. 77 (ISSN 0266-2922)
and
Room in an anthology To Paint A Picture - M. Afford (ed) (ISBN 1-84602-043-3)

Notes and Comments: 13/04/2007

NOTES:

Another thing that has turned me against ‘the left’, especially as delineated by the typical Guardianista is the anti-elitist elitisism, the snobbery, the holier-than-thou self-righteousness of them all. For a fine example of this smug condescension we only usually have to turn to Poly Toynbee in the aforesaid Guardian, and here she does not disappoint. The comments are also quite illuminating on how the typical Guardianista has an almost pathological hatred of The Daily Mail – and, by extension, its readership (well, everyone who isn’t like them, in reality). The Mail is – of course – like all tabloids a dire ‘newspaper’, but it seems there is something beyond mere dislike of the tabloidisation of culture – not that the Guardianistas would be ‘elitist’ enough to believe in such a bourgeois concept as ‘Culture’ – that fires this rage in those of a Guardian-leftist persuasion.

COMMENTS:

The consequence of immoderation

My comment:

Zoe, I believe in the power of language - a bit like last week's Dr Who with Shakespeare - but I don't believe in 'hate' speech, not anymore. The concept is too dangerous - the 'religious hatred' bill tipped it over the edge for me, because I do hate what religions do to some people's minds and I want to say so.

I now believe in total freedom of speech and think that outlawing 'racist, sexist, sizeist, ageist, whatever-ist speech is wrong. I think - but I'm not sure yet - I would even allow the shouting 'fire' in the crowded theatre scenario.

In short, I don't believe prohibition works and the only way of defeating such talk is to take it on - everything from treating it with contempt to outright derision and all points between. Because, in the end, the only way to really stop people being nasty about and to each other in words is to change the mind that produces those words, rather than just tying a gag over the ranting spouting mouth because that is just pretending it isn't happening not defeating it at all, really.

Notes and Comments: 12/04/2007

[Admin note: I’ve changed from numbering these Notes & Comment pieces to dating them.]

NOTES:

It seems that for as long as I can remember – or as long as I’ve been interested in politics and current affairs – the various government departments: Health, Defence, Education and so on and so forth (whatever governments of the day call them or however they arrange them) seem to stumble from cock-up to crisis to disaster with – seemingly – unfailing regularity. I have recently come to the –tentative – conclusion that it is democratic control itself that is the problem. Take for example, John Reid (currently cocking up at the Home Office) and his predecessor Charles Clarke, either of which would be over-promoted if they were tea-boy in an ordinary office. I think it is the very mediocrity that makes it possible for such people to become MPs that makes them unsuitable for the jobs they are given in government. I suppose what I’m saying is that Government is too important to be left to mere politicians. I don’t have a solution though, apart from what would have been an anathema to me only a few years ago – get government out of as much of our individual - and national – lives as possible.

Several people have argued that the NuLaborg Collective see Orwell’s 1984 not as a dire warning about totalitarianism, but as a blueprint for their perfect society.

In Orwell’s fictional world, adults become subservient to irresponsible, ill-informed, not-yet-developed, gullible and nasty children. Is New Labour in danger of creating similar kinds of kids in Britain 2007?

Tessa Mayes at Spiked! ‘on how the British government is recruiting children to spy on and ‘re-educate’ the adult population.’

COMMENTS:

Max Hastings: Blair's iron grip on his party's loyalty invites the electorate's derision

My comment:

I have always voted Labour, all through the Thatcher and Major - and Labour's wilderness - years. I voted for Labour in the Blair era despite Blair - never for him. I always regarded Blair as an intellectual pygmy, duplicitous and smarmy - events seem to have proved my instincts right for once.

However, I will never - ever - vote Labour again. It is not the Iraq war - Massive cock-up though it has been - that has so turned me against the whole 'left-wing' enterprise. No, it is the attempts at social engineering, the contempt for individual freedom, the cynical use of spin as a replacement for substance and well... the list goes on past PFI, ID cards and so on.

In fact, as far as I'm personally concerned the only positive legacy that Blair has left has been this fundamental examination of so many assumptions that I took for granted that made me a creature of the left and my - sometimes painful ultimate rejection of all of them. If there are - as I suspect many more people once of the left like me who have gone through a similar bit of soul searching as a direct result of the Blair's government's actions then the Labour party's next period in the wilderness is going to be a very, very long one indeed.

Come on readers - do your worst

My comment:

We've had articles about the 15 sailors acting like wimps in Iran, articles about teachers being 'bullied' by their pupils and now we have an article about people being a bit rude on the internet.

Why are people these days so desperate to be so feeble? So desperate to be a 'victim'? So keen to find something so 'offensive' they have to run away with their hands over their ears in case their delicate little sensibilities are slightly bruised?

What happened to 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words...'?

This has to be one of the most pernicious and - ultimately - pathetically defeatist cultural changes of recent years. I would look to something like the Daily Telegraph to begin a campaign to reverse this trend, if I did not fear it was already too late.