museum of illusions

And on the eighth day

2012-01-15T21:55:00.002Z

Refreshed after a day off on Sunday, God went back to work. On the eighth day he created poliomyelitis, smallpox, bubonic plague, influenza, acne, halitosis and Total Amelia syndrome. He worked in a frenzy, the ideas poured out for hours.

On the ninth day he created volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides and droughts. Again, he was inspired and elaborated his new inventions for hours.

On the tenth day he populated the firmament with a sprinkling of asteroids, meteors and comets, millions of them on random paths, and that gave him the biggest laugh of all. He felt that if he laughed while creating them, others would too when they saw them.

On the tenth day he thought, I'm becoming a bit too predictable, let's dig a bit deeper and he invented schizophrenia, paranoia, clinical depression and narcolepsy. It will add weight to the whole scene - sombre, off-beat, violet coloured interludes.

On the eleventh day, he thought, "Follow that!" And he thought, "It's still a little too obvious. The trick is to go from bad to worse, to be cruel to your characters." Let me think about it.

On the twelfth day, he spied on the people and saw with dismay how they looked at each other with love. That was not in the plan. For a while he was stumped.

Then he woke up in the middle of the night of the thirteenth day and he wrote it down on a post-it note. "Death."

Self-Portrait - Sylvia Beach

2012-01-15T14:28:00.001Z

RTÉ Player: TV50

Watching this. Archive interview from 1962 with Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses, who talks about her life and Joyce, Hemingway and lots of interesting times and people.

‎"Joyce was sitting at table and Ezra Pound was teasing him..." You get the idea of the calibre of her friends!

Good to know he pronounced "book" properly! I mean in the Dublin way.

Fascinating about Hemingway arriving in her shop with wounds still not healed from the war. "Would you like to see my wounds?" "Very much." So he showed her. ... She organised a boxing match ... Hemingway broke his thumb in the course of it. His opponent was subsequently killed fighting for the resistance. ... Now she's talking about Austin Clarke. ...

Onto Beckett now. Scott Fitzgerald. Thornton Wilder. ... What an interview. Louis Aragon.

Joyce would recite Walt Whitman to her, an enthusiasm he shared with her when Whitman was not liked at the time.

She watched the Germans arriving ... "The tears were streaming down our cheeks." A German soldier demanded her copy of Finnegans Wake from the window of her shop. She refused. He came back later and threatened to confiscate all her stock when he found that FW was no longer in the window. She moved everything out and hid the stuff in an empty apartment. Very brave! They came back and found the shop gone, name removed, shelves removed. shuttered.

She got a writer called Gordon Craig out of detention by appealing to the Gestapo. Later they arrested her and took her away, complained about her having a Jewish assistant in the shop and so forth. They were rounding up all Americans in the city and detained 400 of them at the city zoo. There were armed guards up above us and we were below in what we called The Monkey House...(not verbatim).

‎...moved to another prison for 6 months. ... on and on, fantastic interview. Retreat of the Germans - "shooting at us".

They machine gunned the people in the town while retreating. "We had to lie on our stomachs" ... later stretchers taking wounded away. "We were liberated by Ernest Hemingway .... I heard this big voice shouting Sylvia, Sylvia!"

...and he wouldn't stay for tea. He said, "Oh no, I have to liberate the cellar of the Ritz!"

Watching the Late Late Show - 1971

2012-01-06T09:46:00.000Z

RTÉ Player: TV50 - celebrating 50 years of Irish television

About 11:00: Eamonn Andrews is dead wrong about the BBC being above censorship during the war. George Orwell was one of the censors, as point of interest. His war diaries about his work in censorship are quite interesting.

If you want to see Sir Matt Busby, the famous Manchester United manager, he comes on after 14 mins. Talking about George Best etc. ‎"a secular saint".

He has an idea for a transfer window (there is now one) but in the closed season to create more stability and less panic. Does the present transfer window mean players play for one team at the start of the season and a different one at the end? I don't know enough about it but that sounds wrong.

"Air-ay" is Éire. Nostalgia for people being able to smoke on the panel. I know it's bad but there is also something good about it, something, I don't know what. You will say, "no, nothing" and you'll be right.

Next up Trevor Howard criticising David Lean very wittily but acerbically.

Matt Busby and Trevor Howard looking for a match to light up. "Dingle had 52 pubs and nowhere to eat."

Gay Byrne to Trevor Howard: "Did you or did you not say that Irish people are only interested in drinking?" "No they are interested in other things." "Like what?" "Well, you should know."

A funny lady. Real trooper, type you hardly get now. a. days. Barbara Kelly

At least these interviews are getting somewhere, not the utter tripe you get now with Graham Norton etc.

‎"Helen threw a bicycle at me when we were at Cambridge and I said that's the girl for me. I had to marry her and get my own back." Trevor Howerd

Gay does ask some tactless questions. "Would you believe your husband Helen, if he turned to you and said you're beautiful?" Ouch. But wait for this. Wait till you hear Matt Busby. Gay: "What about you Sir Matt, do you ever tell your wife she's beautiful?" "Yes. Every morning. You have to use tactics as well!" (And he goes on to conjure the whole morning conversation.)

Next up Jack MacGowran, Beckett's favourite actor. Both Eamonn Andrews and Jack MacGowran left working for Hibernian Insurance in Dublin on the same day. (!)

Aw man. Best art story ever.

Three smokers out of four on the panel. Man oh man. Jack too.

Brilliant mime by Jack MacGowran, under protest. It's sewing. You have to see it. Hard to explain. Hilarious.

We may get a song from Jack from a Sean O'Casey play. And now Peter Sellers. It's unbelievable.

Sellers is on fire. His Italian is a masterpiece - a story about the Pope...

He was first one to be defibrillated - in the world - dead for 2 minutes in L.A. Oh man he's so funny. i rate him with Milligan now.

We're promised mind reading and quick change act from Sellers in the next part. Can it get any better?

MacGowran on Lorca ... and Polanski

Vaguely remember seeing this quick change before

I probably saw that whole show before when it was on. I was 17 in 1971. But the only thing that produced the smallest atom of deja vu was the quick change setup.

Ceremony for Skippy

2011-12-11T13:48:00.007Z

We're here to celebrate the life of our friend Skippy and to request from any powers, if there are any listening, that he be accorded a most favourable place in the hereafter, if there be one and hoping there is, to ask for pleasant weather and plentiful grassy land. And if there could be hedges and borders of lavender, well please consider letting him stay nearby. And water, but I don't have to tell you, I guess, and something to eat if eating is required. Please restore him to the peak of his health.

If this all sounds a little presumptuous, please know that Skippy is a most worthy candidate. If anyone says a dog has no soul, and that a dog is like a machine that is turned off at the end, begging everyone's pardon but I would want to have a fist fight with that person and knock in all their teeth. (I'm sorry, score that against me, not Skippy).

I can't tell you all about Skippy, if this is reaching anyone, but if it is you probably know anyway. He came from a pet shop, got his name for leaping into a basket in the cage there, and lived all his life in Willesden London. We always planned to take him to the seaside in summer but every summer came and went and we never did it. Gladstone Park was as far as he travelled and that stretched his patience in the car, so I don't think he would have liked longer journeys. Now that I think of it, he did come with us as far Holloway where he had a friend called Whitey. By the way if he could meet up again with that friend, who passed on a few years ago, that would be great. It's Whitey from Q- Road, quite stocky, one testicle.

In his younger days he could run around in the local parks and would go a bit deaf when an attractive possible mate was around. I don't call it a sin but he did follow a pair, I think, of Lhasa Apso sisters all the way out of the park and across a dangerous road. That was the only time that happened. His walking wasn't so good in later life and he always suggested going by car to the park, which we did. He was a good guard dog, barking at any shadow on the door glass, even if there was no one out there but he wasn't to know that it was us, he never could fathom that.

Like I said, I can't tell you all about him. Everyone loved him, that's the main thing. He was a dog and he behaved like a dog, a good dog, and he was a fond companion and liked to play fetch - really, really liked to play fetch. Fetch is not as simple a game as some might think, not the way Skippy played it. He played the doggie hold-em version, not the return the tennis ball and go again version. In Skippy's version the thrower had to work to get the ball back and had the devil of a job to succeed in that, but sporting fellow that he was, Skippy would make it a little easier should the thrower show any sign of giving up.

Everyone, please raise your glasses to Skippy. Goodnight Skippy my dear, sláinte mhaith, sweet dreams.

Skippy in October this year

The real Irish presidential debate

2011-11-17T13:37:00.006Z

A solar flare causes massive disruption to mobile phone networks, and widespread chaos. Among side effects that people have little time to worry about, the seven candidates in the Irish presidential election 2011 are stranded in a blacked out TV studio where they were preparing for a debate. With all transport and communications blocked they have no choice but to sit tight and wait.

Dana: Oh lord Jesus preserve us. Holy Mother of God pray for us.

Michael D: Stay calm. The power will come back on in a minute.

Dana: Hail Mary full of grace....

Gallagher: [turns on iPhone like a torch, simpers...] No signal.

McGuinness: Is there no windows in this place?

Mitchell: No.

Dana: Our Father who art in heaven...

Mitchell: Dana, would you ever give it a rest?

Michael D: There's no need for that, Gay.

Mitchell: You can go and fuck off as well. Which way is the door?

Director: Gentlemen, ladies, please sit tight, it's not safe to wander with the cables and equipment.

Davis: [screams] What was that?!

Gallagher: Sorry.

Dana: Hail holy queen...

Michael D: Ah Dana, will you shut up now?

McGuinness: Who's in charge here?

Mitchell: If we all hold hands we can support each other and try and find a way out.

Michael D: Like an elephant troupe. (I must make a note of that image.)

Gallagher: Fuck this for a game of cyards. I'm going.
[Loud crash, multiple items cascading]
Aah, owww, owww!

Director: Please sit tight!

Dana: Glory be to the F-

All: SHUT UP!

Michael D: Are you all right there, Sean?

[No answer]

Mitchell: And then there were six....

McGuinness: Well whenever we're stuck here we might as well get a few things straight. I've been subjected to harassment and unfair attacks here in this studio.

Norris: Martin, you think you've been harassed. I've gone through the trials of Oscar Wilde you know.

Mitchell: The two of ye deserve each other. Why don't you get a civil union and join your miseries. You'd think nobody else had ever suffered in their lives. ... If you's had been fed on nothing but Smash and sausages in Inchicore and had an oulfella leather you whenever he'd had a bad day in the cattle market, you'd know something about misery.

Dana: We were all ....

Norris: It wasn't all that different in the boarding school, except we had a few carrots and real potatoes. Oh and maybe a chop instead of a sausage. Missing your parents and crying in each other's arms every night. Made a man of you.

Dana: Spangles?

Michael D: Yes, Dana?

Dana: You know, we had Spangles.

Gallagher: [groans]

Davis: I thought Miriam went a bit berserk in the last debate. Really think RTE could do a bit better. With all the marvellous ladies I meet around Mount Merrion, why they have to bring in a mumsy lowbrow like her, I'm sure I don't know.

Michael D: To be fair to you Mary, you have a lovely turn of phrase. But I'd swap ten of you for one of Miriam, now, so I would.

Davis: You doddery old shite. God forgive me.

Dana: We used to...

McGuinness: I was down in Inchicore today and none of them had ever heard of you Gay. I asked some of them and they said 'd'ye not mean Gay Byrne, he never ran.' I had a pint with a fella there, quartermaster for the Dublin south east brigade, and he said you were best remembered as a thick who tried to bounce a rock. "Rocky"?

Mitchell: Fuckin' amazing, you never said "whenever I was down in Inchicore" ya moron.

Gallagher: [moans]

Michael D: Shush everyone, I want to hear what Dana has to say.

Dana: It doesn't matter now. When will the power come on? I've got the shakes. Something is frightening me, I don't know what. Has anyone else got a mobile phone on them? I left mine in the dressing room.

Norris: Here, Dana. I'll pull this barstool over beside you. Now, how's that?

Dana: [screams] Get away from me! Get away from me!

Norris: Jesus Christ almighty, Dana, what is the matter with you woman? You're a nervous wreck.

McGuinness: Sing us a song Dana.

Davis: Oh please God no.

Michael D: [sings] Nach mór an t'íonadh, os chomhair na ndaoine, a bhfheiscint sinnte ar gcúl a chinn...

Gallagher: [whimpers]

Mitchell: Holy sufferin lantern o' Jasus, will yous ever cop yourselves on. It's like a fuckin' wake here. Tell some dirty jokes or something. Here's one: If the answer is two dogs and a film star, what's the question?

Dana: [sings]
Ah! Sweet mystery of life
At last I've found thee
Ah! I know at last the secret of it all!

[The power comes back on revealing: ON AIR sign, cameraman in place, Mary Davis riding Gay Mitchell, David Norris with his tongue down Martin McGuinness's throat, Sean Gallagher on all fours with his head up Dana's skirt and Michael D with legs crossed, hair like Einstein and trousers sopping wet. Small audience, earlycomers, breaks into a round of applause.]

Pain and the stars*

2011-11-15T18:29:00.006Z

Robert Mitchum's expression says, I have a little pain but it's nothing I can't handle.

Burt Lancaster says, I can bear it, I can bear it, how about you?

Mastroianni seems to say, I fear I might be next but I'll be ready for the day.

Paul Newman of course has heard about it, would like to talk about it, if you wish.

Steve McQueen is dead, died of pain, always looked like he would.

Steve Reeves, yeah right.

Which brings us to Kirk Douglas and all those other martyrs, well they got what they wanted.

But Eastwood, now he offers pain, you want it, (well do you punk?), there's plenty to go round.

Bogart is not really thinking about his own pain, his terrible pain, he only wants to ask about yours.

Edward G: I've got it, now you're going to get it.

Cagney thinks it's all the same, joy or pain, best get it while it's going.

Brando: What have you got, I'm hedging my bets but I'm thinking how can I get out of this before it hurts.

James Mason: Don't talk to me about pain, my back is killing me.

George Sanders is thinking, pain you say - we'll see about that.

There were women too, shrieking and tittering, they knew it served us right.

* It only works with old film stars, the present lot are just milling around looking for a cue. Somebody asked what Peter Lorre would say. I think he might say, "Don't be silly."

Watching the defectives - GOP foreign policy debate

2011-11-12T23:59:00.004Z

This video contains the entire debate, not just the first hour that was shown on TV. It's a beautiful quality video this time, by the way, even full screen.

It's worth listening to the logic of people like Gingrich, absolute moral bankruptcy: covert operations "all deniable". Deniable - why? A big question.

‎16:00 on: Huntsman is making great sense.

After 24:00 - Bachmann: "The table is being set for a nuclear war against Israel".

‎27:30-ish: Santorum has a good grasp of "real politik" (as they say).

Good for Ron Paul for standing up against torture against the other nincompoops. You've got to ask "What are you fighting for?" There's no point in fighting if you're offering the same prospectus as the enemy. Huntsman too. Good for him.

Every time Perry talks it's like "special needs time" and in saying that I feel it's demeaning to special needs people to even compare him to them. Oh well, he has no chance- hopefully.

About 47:00: Was that a bit of a sinister statement by Huntsman that of 500 million young people in China there are 80 million bloggers whose actions "will bring China down" and he gestured downwards, while the US goes up (gestures). I don't understand exactly what he means by that. Does he mean that democratic reform in China would bring China down?

59:00 - Cain's logic is "Anyone we torture is a terrorist". Wait till it's your son or daughter.

‎61:00 - I'm with Ron Paul on lawlessness and legality. The crowd sounds nervous, which is a good sign.

70:00 - Bachmann wants to copy China's lack of social security. "China is growing". So if you want to be ants in an ant colony, vote for Bachmann.

75:00 - Santorum "You don't cowboy this one." Made sense in context (responding to hijack of a nuclear weapon in Pakistan and he meant just sending in special ops troops by helicopter etc.)

‎77:00 - Huntsman very authoritative on the "loose nuke" question.

That's it. I will be a world authority on the policies of the candidates soon. I still predict a Romney / Huntsman ticket. However, the winner doesn't always pick a running mate from the other candidates. It happened last time but it's not a given. I was wondering if I could get a bet on that pairing, probably longer odds than the individual candidate, so I checked on William Hill .com and you might be interested in the odds they offer at present. Here you go:
2/5 Mitt Romney
6/1 Newt Gingrich
8/1 Herman Cain
10/1 Rick Perry
20/1 Ron Paul
28/1 Jon Huntsman
100/1 Rudy Giuliani
100/1 Michele Bachmann

"Others on request". They don't even quote Santorum - and where did Giuliani come from - is he even in it? A lot of money on Romney, obviously.

kitchen: 7.8. Anonymous 8

2011-10-20T16:30:00.000+01:00

kitchen: 7.8. Anonymous 8

i shor i never bladder
rum bubble

Astounding fruit and vegetables 7

2011-10-11T10:43:00.000+01:00

Turmeric, a rhizome that looks a bit like ginger but it dyes everything it touches that amazing colour and it has medicinal properties.

Gargoyle 57 is out

2011-10-07T12:00:00.000+01:00

Gargoyle Magazine and Paycock Press

She's there somewhere in the 600 pages of Gargoyle 57, "Annie" my poem about my paternal grandmother, née Annie Carey. Thanks to Richard Peabody and everybody at the magazine for all the pains they take with the proofs and every little detail. Each annual edition provides a cornucopia of items to read throughout the year.

Doggerel - YouTube

2011-10-03T17:40:00.000+01:00

Drawing sunsplashes and the onset of doggerel

The blues go like this

2011-09-27T12:59:00.003+01:00

Kitchen: Issue 6

Human pyramid

2011-09-14T12:10:00.007+01:00

This is a grizzly image but can you calculate the height, area or extent in space that would be occupied if you could connect the first umbilical cords of the first humans, starting from their mother, if there was only one (?), and connect a given size of human to them another level down and then continue through all the generations to the present day? It's tempting to say that the area of the ground floor, i.e. our generation would be the space needed for 6 billion people to stand, which I believe is approx. The Isle of Wight. That doesn't seem enough somehow. None of the males would have any connections coming down in this layout. They would of course have umbilical cords upwards but obviously do not have any downwards.*

Of course the umbilical cord is an aid to visualising the problem, it's not strictly necessary in fact it makes the problem impossible if actual umbilical cord length had to be used, so instead of that we would probably use an average human height, weighted for the change in that over time or just averaged out or anyway taken into account. So instead of joining the people physically, you could just stand them on levels, not equating to generations but equating the the number of people generated by the initial number of people. So from one we maybe get two, or five or whatever it was. Then from those five we get 20 or whatever it was, etc. They're not generations because the ages are all combined and put on the same level. But that should work, should it not or is there a fatal flaw in trying to do that?

So you get something like:
I
IIIII
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
...

Of course the men in this only have upward connections (the umbilical principle) and no downward ones*. In a way, we could omit the men from the levels and then at the bottom level, just bring all the present day men back in to give us a base approximately equal to The Isle of Wight. Then if we knew the number of levels (but is that even possible, or is there a glitch there?) and an average height, we could work out the height of the whole cone, and then assume it must be equal numbers of men and women on each level, approx, so just connect lines from the base up to the top.

Another point: if we start working back from the present level (everyone alive today) ... ah but here's the glitch: You can't put everyone alive today on the same level, because some of them are grandparents, parents or children of others alive today. That is the glitch.

Why then, if we start from the top does it feel like we can force it into levels? How would it end up to the present stage. Oh I know, it's because all of those alive today is not one of the levels. The levels are different things that don't correspond to temporal locations, they are abstract concepts. I still don't know what level people alive today would fit on. Maybe they span several levels - yes, that is it.

Ok, simplifying: forget the men, they are just ballast. It is women who define generations. Every woman alive today had a mother who had a mother and so on. It's a many-to-one relationship going backwards. Everyone has precisely one mother. Some women have daughters but some don't; not everyone links both ways in this. If we could say that there are more girls with each generation then it would be clear that the population decreases going backwards. This is known or anyway believed to be true. If every woman had precisely one daughter then there would still only be one woman alive plus her mother and grandmother perhaps, maybe even great grandmother so at most four or five women in the whole world.

It's simpler to think of the question as how many generations there have been since the first humans. We could answer if we knew the average number of girls born to each mother. We could extrapolate from the present number of females by using the average increase per generation to work out the total number of generations to date.

We could define the present generation as the set of all females (and males but they are irrelevant) who have not yet had any children. That gives us an unentangled set because they are not the parents of anyone alive at present. Of course the set is changing from minute to minute. Anyway we take a cutoff (no pun intended). Now we can neatly take the mothers of each of these (the present generation) and trace back to an imaginary "level" (not a real time) before any of those mothers had had any children. Repeat and that gives us our generation counter or visualiser.

--

* Another truism: Everyone has precisely one father and one mother (no clones as yet). So even though there is no umbilical cord to connect a child to its father, the scenario is the same. Everything that could be calculated concerning mothers could be calculated concerning fathers. It is only when combining the two that some tangling occurs. However for a complete model, we would need everyone to have two umbilical cords, one to a father and one to a mother. So let's take that from the top (ancient history) down, starting with the first father and mother. Now connect all the progeny of those two people to them by strings, stretch them out a bit and put that set as the next level. Now take all the progeny of the people standing on that level, every last one of them, and stand them on the next level down and tie them by strings (two each) up to their ancestors. Now this gives us the complete picture. Every human who ever lived. Some on each level from the second onward will have no downward links, no progeny. That's ok.

[NO: Wrong. You cannot separate all the progeny "connected by two strings" of the previous level into one next level because some of them might have a relationship upwards and be ancestors of some of the progeny on their own level. That is why it complicates it bringing in two parents. This does not arise in following only the matriarchal or only the patriarchal links.]

[ANOTHER THOUGHT: We could combine the two models, the male and female "trees" with their perfectly untangled levels but the levels do not map across exactly, so they would look like two cones with their points leaning together. They don't fit but if the male one has less levels the space between them must be stretched so both the models reach from the first humans to the present day, giving us a different average "generation length" for males and females. Model F + model M = everyone who ever lived.]

We may tend to assume that population has been increasing steadily but it might have gone down due to problems at various times, for example during the bubonic plague. The amount by which it increases or decreases could vary over time so there must be wavy edges to the pyramid but we know that over the long term it has been increasing.

If archaeology can tell us when the first humans appeared, and we combine with where we are now, which we know about, we could work out a pyramid shape. I think it would be a very tall narrow pyramid. I'm only guessing but it might reach from the Isle of Wight as the base to the Moon, maybe.

I remember reading an article in Atlantic Monthly by a leading mathematician specialising in the maths of heredity, which he said was exceedingly complicated. It turns out that everyone alive today has a common ancestor about 10,000 years ago. Anyone who was reasonably prolific, like Nefertiti or Genghis Khan for example, is most likely ancestor to everyone alive today. This effect leads to the seemingly marvellous result that everyone who researches their ancestry discovers that they are related to some famous forebear. Also he found that 3,000 years from now, everyone alive today will either have no descendants at all or will be ancestor to everyone then alive. (Ref: Joseph Chang, Yale University quoted by Steve Olsen in "The Royal We" Atlantic May 2002 Monthly http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/olson/2497/)

Monkeys' tea party commentary

2011-09-14T11:31:00.007+01:00

Republican contenders Tea Party debate (video)

Part 1

Perry can keep on with that "Ponzi scheme" crap all the way to the time when he phones up Obama to concede and congratulate him.

Ron Paul wants to get rid of Social Security for young people. Vote Ron Paul to make the US more like the Philippines: mansions with no roads between them, shanty towns, destitution, pauperisation, beggar your neighbour.

The idea that people can save for their own security or insure adaquately is a complete and utter fraud. Insurance only works through the power of everyone combining, it's bullshit to leave people high and dry when they get in trouble. What a load of claptrap these tea party bozos swallow.

These people don't understand that government IS people coming together to get themselves a guaranteed health service, education, transport etc. They think that a load of privateers can do it better, it's complete crap. The exploiters will rob you blind. Private medicine is an extortion racket by another name.*

Huntsman only borderline sane, sensible person so far. Oh and Mitt (dear God) at least he sounds halfway normal.

Part 2

‎2:30 in: Perry is a liar. New Yorker article this week shows millions of jobs created by initial stimulus. He says zero jobs were created and then goes on to build on the lie and joke about half of zero. He has a track record as a liar and self-aggrandiser.

7:00: Clever metaphor from Romney "We've gone from a pay phone world to a smartphone world."

13:30: Best bit by Cain so far. His background is good.

‎15:30: Huntsman deals the killer blow to Perry with a whisper. "I know that everything is bigger in Texas; and Governor Perry likes to talk like that as well..." (ouch).

End of part 2. I think Perry is found out for a braggart and all at sea over social security. GOP please select this loser. There are some viable tickets materialising - Huntsman + Cain, maybe, Romney + Bachmann (most likely and by the way, she kissed him and nobody else, woooo). Ron Paul is a complete non-starter in any capacity. Santorum might be a dark horse, he looks lightweight but he's a heavy hitter, still he's almost certainly out. If I had to bet money to save my life, I'd bet the ticket will be Romney & Bachmann.

Part 3

Santorum: Corporate tax zero from 35%? Madness. Sheer demented delirium.

7:00 Huntsman sensible on tax. Huntsman is my man so far.

9:00 Newt Gingrich: That's just sophistry "The Obama depression" - you're only fooling yourself man. Everybody knew that Obama walked into this situation, he inherited it, we all knew that day one. It's the Bush depression.

13:30: Bachmann is a despicable person to play word games like that with health.

15:00: Perry says, "If you think I can be bought for $5,000, I am offended." We know what he is, all we're trying to do is to establish the price.

24:00: Ron Paul wants helpless people to rely on religious charities. The moderator cited somebody who is very well and earning well and doesn't buy insurance but that is a straw man; the real problem is people are not able to pay, people that is who are not the rich exploiters riding the poor all the way to hell.

End of part 3. What you have in the hall there is a collection of greedy people who are very well off and don't want to help out in society with anyone else. They are a bunch of privateers, stab in the back artists, who couldn't be trusted to run a whelk stall. Robbers, hypocrites, sheisters, frauds, dumbbells of general ill-will to humanity. Bring on the election.

Part 4

Amazing how this bozo Perry wants the Federal government to secure the border. He thinks Washington should have nothing to do with the states and it should go to hell but when it comes to something that Texas should do, he doesn't want to do it. He wants Washington to do it. What a hypocrite.

4:30: Immigration: What Bachmann and the crowd want is to have their cheap virtual slave labour to clean their houses and harvest their crops but they don't want them to have any benefits. What they really want is slaves, that's what the people in the hall want.

6:30: Huntsman calls Perry's suggestion that they are unable to secure the border "treasonous".

13:30 - Ron Paul points out that the US has 900 bases overseas.

About 16:00: Ron Paul is telling the truth and the audience is booing him. They don't want to know why Al Qaida is against the US, they booed when he said it wasn't the entire Muslim world against the US. Arses.

Towards the end: What quirky personal thing would they bring to the White House. (Obama added a vegetable patch etc.) Romney would bring back the bust of Churchill. Huntsman would bring his Harley Davidson. Hmm. What about a Romney / Huntsman ticket? I thought earlier that Romney Bachmann might work but unfortunately she is unelectable and couldn't row back from her extremism far enough to work with Romney (Perry maybe). So Romney Huntsman might work or Romney Santorum. I think Gingrich is past it. Bachmann is toxic. I'm changing my bet to Romney Huntsman. Or Huntsman Cain. It all depends which ones make the biggest arses of themselves in the next phases.

* I think there is something to be said for funding healthcare on a state by state basis, with the proviso that some small states can combine into consortia, simply because the US might be too big an entity to have one funding system for all. However the same basic rules of 100% coverage should apply in every state. I don't know enough about the present plans to know if each state funds its own compliance with the new regulations. That should be the way it is done and if effect, comprehensive healthcare coverage should be a constitutional obligation on each state. That is the way to make it popular. It risks "postcode (zip code I suppose) lottery" problems at boundaries but that is a lesser problem, given that each state is obliged to ensure 100% healthcare; it then becomes a local election issue as to how well they are doing it in the state and enables tuning of systems to what locals prefer.

Three poems

2011-09-13T17:41:00.002+01:00

kitchen poet

You will always find me in the kitchen, except at parties.

Bulaga

2011-09-05T14:56:00.002+01:00

Slam Fiction

Scene from a party, wot I wrote (and soundtrack by The Melodians)

pretend genius interview

2011-09-02T10:16:00.000+01:00

interview with steve moran, founder of willesden herald short story contest

SM: "It's ok, the attackers got into spaceships and went away again. It's all fruity sarnies and brollies here again."

Astounding fruit and vegetables, 6: Purple carrots

2011-08-27T12:39:00.001+01:00

These are the new "wonder food", apparently. An expedition went to Borough market yesterday to get them. You have to peel them to appreciate the wet purple that appears between the dark skin and the interior, which returns to normal carrot colour. The gradation of hues is similar to when peeling sweet potatoes but purple instead of peachy. ("You know about so-and-so?" "Yes, he eats the purple carrot.")

As you can gather from my previous vegetable pictures, I am a part time kitchen porter.

Pretend Genius Press Kickstarter appeal

2011-08-26T21:48:00.002+01:00

That's me in the video inviting people to support Pretend Genius Press and help to publish rising writers. Please follow the link in the title for more details.

Interview

2011-08-22T22:52:00.000+01:00

Interview with Steve Moran of the Willesden Herald New Short Stories Competition : Jonathan Pinnock’s Write Stuff

Thanks to Jonathan Pinnock for this. Follow the link for a chance to win a copy of New Short Stories 5.

Canal of days

2011-07-12T21:46:00.002+01:00

Life is a canal on which we are narrow boats with no reverse gear. Each night, each sleep, is a lock. We enter the lock and the water of yesterday is released. Afterwards we emerge into tomorrow, to another gated day. Above us and behind that again, behind that and above again lie the days gone by. Ahead only one day, its prospect, its gate, its fall. Gone the hundreds, hail the one. Oh lucky swans.

Reflections on Saturday evening TV in England

2011-06-18T20:21:00.008+01:00

Duplicity and hypocrisy of the British establishment

Popular British media is counter-educational and devoid of dignity, purposefully designed to patronise, degrade and demoralise the general public. It is a smokescreen to obfuscate and so protect inherited privilege by debilitating the general public.

At the same time continual wars are fostered to further weaken and cull the healthy progeny of the serving classes, providing more distraction and rewarding the people's self-destruction with mealy-mouthed, cost-free acclaim and carefully forgetful "remembrance".

What about a tomb for the Unknown Citizen? Where is the ceremony of remembrance for the countless millions killed by order of British governments, whose leaders place wreaths and go back to their offices to order more bombing?

----

The BBC has two distinct levels of programming, one is at a high level encompassing new drama, popular science, investigative journalism, rigorous interviews, public debate and classical music.

The other is relentlessly patronising and meretricious, Blue Peter for all ages, moronic games, tone deaf singers, clodhopping wallopers, cheesy fops, blowsy, raucous tarts and all presented by smarmy, unconvincing phonies and deadbeats. Twenty year runs for unfunny situation comedies that died in their first season.

Other channels: With a few honourable exceptions, UK commercial television is a desert of the utterly banal and nauseating.

Newspapers: The main tabloid newspapers are nothing but a sick joke. The London Evening Standard at least has Brian Sewell, a really great columnist, and affords him two or three pages when he reviews an exhibition.

I think the Guardian is superb, a world class newspaper here, no? The Independent at least tries. The Times seems dreary and overblown but I haven't read enough to say for sure. They support the short story by running one in their Sunday supplement. The Telegraph is sensationalist, with weak science stories overplayed, sour and boorish columnists (the brilliant Boris excepted) but at least got the scoop on MP's expenses and interesting if you want to know what your enemies are thinking.

These are my impressions anyway. No doubt I'm in the throes of some vivid delusion.

Curtains

2011-06-02T19:30:00.003+01:00

You know when you're on your own in the middle of a room and you look through the window at lighting up time and wonder how many are being born, making love, dying, how many are standing looking, how many sleeping... (and a lot of other tiresome, mundane or horrible things).

Astounding fruit and vegetables

2011-06-02T19:09:00.002+01:00

Californian strawberries

Sweet potatoes (for the colours)

This GM madness has gone too far

Romanesco broccoli

Portobello mushrooms

This man's best friend

2011-05-16T01:16:00.005+01:00

Rest in peace Skippy (December 2011)

Spring flowers from the back garden today

2011-05-01T22:19:00.003+01:00

Mayflowers, bluebells and last of the lilacs

A few maybes about fiction

2011-03-22T15:51:00.006Z

The joy of fiction is not in finding out what the writer knows, it's the writer finding out what we know. Characters the writer hated turn out to be better than the writer imagined. Characters the writer loved were not all they were cracked-up to be. If non-fiction is for us to find out what the author knows then maybe fiction is an exploration in which the author sets out to discover what we know*. Then like other discoveries, it sounds obvious when we hear it. We knew that all along.

Reading fiction is following with the logic of music, notes that establish a theme, counterpoint, development, allegro, largo, andante, the theme returns, resolution... The music is out there, it's David in a block of marble, stories in the burble of a café, the susurration of congregants, the gull cries of a spoon stirring medicine in a glass, the sound of a small hammer on tin - that turns out to be a finch, the train sound from miles away that only carries on moonless nights...

(And always a basketball bouncing, though nobody round here plays basketball. Always children babbling and shrieking, though there are no children round here. Sometimes a jet flies low overhead though we're not on any flight path. Helicopters hovering where the streets are too small to land. The same Jehovah's witnesses call every couple of months, disbelieving the mezzuzah. Visits by the Seventh Day Adventists are settling into a pattern. The Church of Latter Day Saints is overstretched. A hungry teen with crow's feet round his eyes sells flannels from a tray while a Merc waits round the corner. The parcelmen knock and run away.)

But what does it matter? Turn the page, our hero is going somewhere, to where people are and there will be tea, JD, opium and lashings of ginger ale.

* Discovering homo sapiens

We are the lost tribe, the lost tribe of us, completely unaware though enrapt in a florid delusion of consciousness, where spirits live in history, and offerings are made on stage to gods of theatre, and there are such laughable concepts as careers, status, security and wisdom. Where everyone is a shaman drunk on industry, spinning in train carriages of spear carrying accountants, trouping in powdery makeup through jungles of wire.

Listening to The Beatles

2011-02-07T13:35:00.016Z

"Cry Baby Cry" from The Beatles eponymously titled album ("the white album") is a good track for headphones. There is a lot going on in it, not least the wonderful way the it goes cry-ahy-ahy-ahy-ahy with echo at the end of the lines in the chorus. Even in the first 10 seconds, it's magical the way guitar on the right, voice on the left and then some gorgeous noodling synth comes in the middle. It's worth listening just for those first 10 seconds. There are birds chirping and all sorts of things. The annoying double ending has been edited off the version above but now that it's gone I sort of miss it.

The way the different parts come in is marvellous and it then goes through all sorts of phases. Guitar plus voice, then synth, then bass drum, cymbals all coming and going, echo, etc. Most crummy songs just start with a setup and stick with it all the way through but this, although not classical music or instruments, has a lot of musical art in it. It's a long way from skiffle.

The progress of the arrangement is approximately:
00:00-00:05: Acoustic guitar (right) + vocal (left) simultaneous start (chorus)

The chorus is always in the left ear in a sort of sly or whispered mode; "cry baby cry, make your mother sigh, she's old enough to know better". Thinking about it, it's a taunt, a childish "your mother is old" jibe.

00:05: Add synth for a few seconds (middle)

00:11: The first verse starts.
The verses are all in the middle in a slightly bolder narrative voice. They are alternating with the taunting voice in the left ear, which sometimes has added faint two-part harmony over to the right middle, perhaps a metaphor for the playground gang?

00:18: Add wowy bass line (left) for a few seconds
00:27: Add piano highlighting lyric "playing piano..."
00:30: Add heavy bass drum beat - we're now in full flow
00:41: Add high hat cymbal beat for the first time
00:45: Classic Ringo fill (he said all his contribution was in the fills)
00:50: Start of a sinister high pitched synth sound. We're fully underway now with all the elements coming and going. There are rhythm and lead guitar parts blended as well.

01:15: The arrival of "the Duchess of Kircaldy" seems to be accompanied by something like birdsong that ends in a burbly warble. [From comments: I think the birds chirping are there because with the queen being in the parlour and the king somewhere else, what else to expect but four and twenty blackbirds.]

The sigh-like echoing of the the cry-ih-ih-ih-y is keyed to the "make your mother sigh-igh-igh-igh" as it is a kind of sighing. It seems to increase as the song goes on.

Notice how all the time there are superb dynamic changes to where there is a quieter spell and then the heavy drum beat makes the main thrust of the song come back with great energy, with a thrashing effect almost. There is also a strange slightly harsher turn of voice at the ends of the verses, a sort of wilful insistence on the narrative that adds to the effect and enhances the dialogue between the verse narrator in the middle and the taunting chorus on the left.

01:35 We're now getting added two-part harmony vocal in the middle, an octave higher.

And so on, and it's only 2 minutes 34 seconds long this video. There is actually a false ending to the song and it has a coda on the LP that is not on this YouTube version. There is that sense of something missing at the end of the song. However, it could be argued that it is better this way than with the somewhat annoying "Can you take me back?" little ditty that has been edited off here.

Whoever made the video adds another layer of interest by equating Mai Pang with "the friend who came to play" though the White Album was made long before John Lennon decamped to the US. John was always worrying away at his problem childhood, so I suppose that might be a starting point for working out what the hell the lyrics are about. I know he said that they just made up nonsense but he was being a little disingenuous I think. He was not one of those totally open people like McCartney who seem to have no "side" to them, Lennon was all side and everything was said for effect, I think, rather than in service to some simplistic idea of truth. No doubt I have it all wrong but luckily it is of no more consequence than a gnat's gnibble.

The missing coda is a wistful repetition in a different but strangely backward sounding tune of "Can you take me back where I came from, can you take me back? Can you take me back where I came from, brother can you take me back, can you take me back? [etc.]"

A new illusion

2010-08-06T16:44:00.003+01:00

Alight Here :: The Tube Project - Canary Wharf by Stephen Moran

Now you know I have to say this, it's concrete poetry.

Cardiff

2010-07-30T01:02:00.001+01:00

After the dry spell

2010-07-26T22:41:00.004+01:00

Alight here for poetry

2010-07-21T23:09:00.002+01:00

You wait ages for an acceptance and then two come along in one week. A poem by me for Willesden Green is now included on Alight Here, a marvellous project that has been noticed and had articles about it in well known publications as far afield as New York. I think one or two of my pictures are coming up on there as well in a while - will keep an eye out for them.

Praying to the miniature elephants

2010-07-19T11:56:00.005+01:00

Praying to the baby elephants in my bell bottoms.

Reasons to be cheerful

2010-07-17T15:30:00.012+01:00

There may be horrors on the floor of the sea
and ever more sorrows down a stony road,
but we are not at the bottom of the sea
and where this road winds nobody knows.
So while there's still rosé from France
and seasick priests are going green,
might I have the honour of this dance?
with you, my ginger Rosaleen?

Pictures from Dublin visit

2010-05-28T20:12:00.005+01:00

1. View from the Regency Hotel

2. Cúchulainn's statue and the proclamation of the Republic, G.P.O.

3. Statue of Jim Larkin, union founder and leader in the 1913 lockout

4. Dali's bicycle (actually vandalism)

5. View of the Liffey from O'Connell Bridge

6. In Boccaccio restaurant

7. View from the bridge in St. Stephen's Green

Coalition muddle : Afraid to let David Laws appear on Question Time

2010-05-28T11:04:00.000+01:00

No 10 in row over Question Time panel -
UK Politics, UK - The Independent

It is clear that this coalition government is hopelessly conflicted, muddled and doomed. Good. Bring on the next election.

May tree in May

2010-05-22T22:43:00.000+01:00

Eating grass

2010-04-26T23:28:00.001+01:00

He likes that broad-bladed grass, has that for salad every day in the park, selects the best tall fronds to eat.

Old friend in his sunny place

2010-04-25T00:21:00.000+01:00

New Short Stories 4 launched

2010-04-13T10:10:00.001+01:00

Willesden Herald short story prize results 2010

Several people have reported that I was seen at this.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir's report

Vanessa Gebbie's report

Five Irish authors feature in Haiti book

2010-03-12T12:23:00.000Z

Business And Leadership - Life

I hear the book has raised £1,200 in its first week. Funnily enough, I think it might be an interesting read as well. So it's there if you want to support the Red Cross in Haiti.

The Wonderful Thread

2010-02-05T16:57:00.001Z

I have contributed a short story to "100 Stories for Haiti" a project to raise money for the Red Cross in Haiti. It's a children's story that might bring a smile to adults as well, I hope.

Update: Unfortunately they cut off the end of the story. It now reads like a gloomy Raymond Carver, instead of a tale from Hans Andersen.

Finn's generosity

2010-01-30T13:25:00.004Z

"If the brown leaves were gold that the wood lets fall, if the white wave were silver, Finn would have given it all away." (Irish; author unknown; twelfth century)

This never fails to make me think about those who have passed on or out of our lives. It always seems in retrospect that we all have given everything we had. We had nothing more to give. You don't have to be like the pious pope John Paul II who owned nothing, went to his funeral in a plain pinewood box, and left a note leaving people free to do whatever they wished with his few personal items. We all must give everything perforce, and we should get the credit, we deserve a drink, everybody deserves a drink except the truly hateful and contemptuous. Here's to all of good will.

Hiatus

2010-01-16T23:07:00.003Z

I am out of circulation for a while. Meanwhile I leave you with the links. All the best for now.

Questions about relativity and quantum thingummies

2009-11-30T03:52:00.011Z

Einstein's formulae predict correctly how things will seem from different viewpoints (frames of reference). You can state what is measured from one point of view then feed in variables and calculate how the same event would seem from a different point of view. The idea that reality depended on point of view was and remains shocking but it is true, i.e. it works and accords with observable reality and has been proven by experiment. Although it describes a sort of mutability it is in its own way absolute in that it predicts exactly how events will be perceived.

Einstein's thoughts mainly had to do with things on a grand scale - light, time, planets, people and everyday objects but when it comes to the very tiny world of atoms and electrons, it seems that there is no such predictability. There is a finding called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that says you cannot properly know about an atomic particle because by observing it you change it. There was a famous conference of the top physicists and theorists at which Einstein presented a thought experiment (an imagined experiment) that appeared to prove you could find out the mass of a particle at the same time as finding out its position, using a specially designed machine. However, on the next day of the conference another great scientist - Bohr? - pointed out a loophole that invalidated Einstein's thought experiment.

This troubled Einstein - he didn't accept it - and he spent most of his life trying to work out a way to reconcile his theory of Relativity and the apparently anomalous experimental evidence and conclusions of quantum (smallest possible scale) science. He said "God does not play dice." At other times he confirmed that he was an atheist, but he believed in a universe that follows set laws, rules that could be discovered and documented. He was trying to produce a new theory that would hold true at both the large scale and the quantum scale. Such a theory, one that would comprise a consistent set of rules that hold for all realms of science, is known as a Grand Unification Theory and is still being sought.

It was previously thought that electrons were particles that orbited around the nuclei of atoms but it is now known that they behave as if they are simultaneously all around the atom - smeared. Yet if "observed" or put into use, they will behave as particles. An electron is at the same time a wave and a particle, they say.

It seems to me that there is something in common between these two scientific theories, the conclusion that "different snapshots of the same thing" seem to comprise different realities. On the one hand it seems that X is the case but on the other hand it seems that Y is the case. For example in relativity on the one hand it seems that 20,000 years have gone by; on the other hand (for a space traveller travelling near the speed of light) it seems that only a few years have gone by. In quantum mechanics on the one hand it appears that a photon has gone through one slit in the apparatus, on the other it appears that it has gone through the other slit in the apparatus (in a device that tries to see which route a photon takes, which produces an inconclusive result).

In relativity an event in effect is more than one thing. To viewer A it is something but to viewer B it is something else. Yet there is only one event. In quantum mechanics a photon "is more than one thing". From a pattern seen on the surface of a detector it appears that the photon has gone through both slit A and slit B.

An electron is not in one location in orbit around a nucleus. But what does being in one location consist of for something that is moving - is it ever in one location? No, because it is moving - never in one location. So let us not be surprised that we cannot discover its location, especially as it is travelling at the speed of light - a speed at which time stands still. It is making its way from place to place but in no time. Therefore there is no time interval between it being in one place and the other, which in our terms comprises being in two places (N places) at the same time.

These particles participate in the very weft and warp of what reality is. It should not surprise us, therefore, that they appear miraculous since this whole dream of life is some sort of miracle. That there are elements that are in more than one place at the same time is no more amazing than any everyday event in life - all are equally miraculous. I doubt that anything people discover or describe will ever make life any less miraculous or mysterious.

The point I want to make is that this uncertainty of position is like relativity, it is a form of certainty, in that we know that these particles will be in more than one place at once. The whole question of where the electron is is an analogy of relativity's multiple viewpoints for the same event, where the electron is the event and the multiple locations are the multiple viewpoints.

Since this electron moves at the speed of light time stands still for it. "To the electron" no time passes, yet it moves from one location around the atom to another and therefore is in both places at once, since there is no time interval, there cannot be at the speed of light - when time "stands still". To the electron it is in more than one place at the same time. We cannot participate in this, so by trying to observe and detect this we disrupt it, effectively crash the electron. All we can see is a blur, which is the blur of a particle that is in the process of simultaneously being in more than one place at the same time.

Turning back to the idea that the multiple locations might be thought of as multiple observers of the electron, imagining that at several locations around the nucleus tiny observers could be placed who would have their impressions of where the electron was, they would all receive the same impression, that it was at their location all the time. What I want to ask is this: for these tiny imaginary observers observing the electron moving at the speed of light, and setting the speed of the observed object equal to the speed of light, will we not find that the laws and formulae of relativity do indeed apply and produce the same result for every tiny observer?

Whether or not the existing formulae apply, is it not the case that a set of formulae could be worked out that would correlate the multiple location impression, i.e. quantum uncertainty, with the "definite uncertainty" of relativity where what different observers will perceive can be calculated exactly? In effect is this not just a change to the variables whereby the event is moving at the speed of light and the observers are located in an orbital path of the event such that they all receive the same impression, despite their different locations. Can this quantum scenario not be derived by some transformation of Einstein's equations? (Where T=0?)

First published in the Willesden Herald

Radio Éireann anseo agaibh

2009-11-21T15:29:00.004Z

My grandfather Peter Moran was a radio and music hall singer at one time. He subsequently lost most of his eyesight and was registered blind. He worked most of his life as a basketmaker. The picture shows a newspaper clipping of the schedule for Radio Éireann on Saturday, June 25th 1938, the day of the installation of Douglas Hyde as the first president of Ireland. I will transcribe some it.

12.40-1.30—Ceremony of Installation of the President. Commentary from St. Patrick's Hall, Dublin Castle, and from the G.P.O., Dublin.

1.30-3.0—Gramophone concert.

5.30—Kathleen Burke's Trio in Light Music, and Peter Moran (baritone).

Trio—Merrie England (German) (Chapell).
Peter Moran—Ireland, I love you Acushla Machree; My Fairest Child; Because (d'Hardelot).
Trio—Elfin Reigin [etc.]
Peter Moran—The stars that light my garden (Russell); Beautiful Isle of somewhere (Fearis).
Trio— [etc.]

You can see the rest of the schedule by clicking on the image. It returns to the installation of Douglas Hyde from 9.10 pm to 9.30 pm with a "Commentary from the state reception in St. Patrick's Hall" and closes with the national anthem at 11 pm.

All My Trials

2009-11-14T02:55:00.002Z

a painfully good video. i thought pauly was a bit o.t.t. at first but fair do's - having listened a few times - he's bang on.

dog songs #13

2009-11-06T05:13:00.003Z

this was going to be another session but mercifully the battery ran out. (edited lowlights. cold sober, my kind of gloom makes Leonard Cohen sound like Chas & Dave.)

10 tracks not to slash your wrists by (on YouTube)

2009-10-30T12:08:00.010Z

There is a cd called "Tracks to slash your wrists by" (apparently). So I thought why not an opposing list? Just from a quick browse through my YouTube favourites:

1. Summertime Blues - Eddie Cochran
You don't have to be tall

2. Eloise - Paul and Barry Ryan
You don't have to be cool

3. My Perfect Cousin - The Undertones
You don't have to be intelligent

4. Itchycoo Park - The Small Faces
You don't have to be able to dance

5. Anthem - Leonard Cohen
You don't have to be cheerful

6. Angel Flyin' Too Close to the Ground - Willie Nelson and Shelby Lynne
You don't have to be with someone

7. For My Lover - Tracy Chapman
You don't have to be sane

8. The Harder they Come - Jimmy Cliff
You don't have to be rich

9. I Dreamed A Dream - Susan Boyle
You don't have to be young and beautiful

10. Baby I Need Your Lovin' - The Four Tops
The defence rests

thoughts on listening to songbird by fleetwood mac

2009-10-23T12:03:00.012+01:00

the helplessness in fugue between fleetwood's late drumbeat, mcveigh's unrequited bass drive and christine's prismatic love

Fleetwood is an archetypal English character and John McVeigh is a hero for carrying the torch for Christine through it all, even when she sucks up to that abominably cheesy guitar virtuoso interloper. It's a "blues Abba" with Mick, John, Christine and Stevie. I love the way John clutches Christine at about 1:04 into this. You have to realise he's carried a torch for her forever and she's in with the glib mother's boy guitarist interloper whose name I've happily forgotten. She's the biggest eejit for that but she's also mother earth and all the rest.

John McVeigh's explanation of the pull of their music is that the bass leads the way and Mick Fleetwood's drumbeat follows a couple of microseconds (or whatever) behind, which gives it that distinctive flavour (drum usually sets/is on the beat) and empathy with a love scene in the court of a jester king (Fleetwood). (I don't know if I'm making any sense.)

2011: I should add I know nothing about them really, the above is just the way I imagine things might be.

Morning sun

2009-10-13T18:23:00.001+01:00

Antony and the Johnsons-You Are My Sister

2009-10-08T16:04:00.006+01:00

another version of this. (that was Boy George duetting there of course.) don't know if all the models are transgender - hardly matters. they're beautiful anyway.

...and here's another glorious bit of music:

Office dogs

2009-10-06T23:58:00.001+01:00

Office dogs
Originally uploaded by Willesden Herald

They don't do much typing but they are great receptionists

Comment I posted in discussion about plagiarism

2009-10-02T12:49:00.006+01:00

I've just read all of this (took a long time!) and I have to say I agree with the very first post by Charlie.

I'm curious which Paul Auster work was the one mentioned as plagiarised. I imagine that could have turned into an expensive legal problem, easily capable of bankrupting a small magazine, by the way. I have a vague sense of deja-vu (ironically?) about Auster and plagiarism allegations - don't know why.

There is no copyright on ideas, nor should there be, nor could there be. Die gedanke sind frei. But that is a different matter to a squalid ripoff between two erstwhile friends who are both writers. If somebody who's not a writer said to me why not write a story about a piano tuner in Ballygobackwards, I think it's perfectly in order to do so and show them the result. However, if the writer said he or she were writing it, I would have to be a right numpty to take it on myself to write the same thing, would I not? No?

Shakespeare reused old stories as the plots for his plays and that's fine. It wouldn't have been so fine to use a then contemporary writer's storylines though. It's almost the norm for books to be based on other "templates", if only as obscure as Homer's Odyssey for Joyce's Ulysses. However, courts have drawn the line at such things as a sequel to Gone With The Wind from the maid's point of view, called "The Wind Done Gone". In a more recent case J. D. Salinger blocked the publication of a lightly veiled "sequel" by some other writer to Catcher In The Rye, in which Holden Caulfield is portrayed aged 60.

I attended a talk by Bernard Cornwell in which he stated that all a writer had to do find commercial success, which was all he wanted, was to take a successful template, change all the names and settings somewhat and send it out and that that's what he had done by transforming the Hornblower novels into his Sharpe series.

His other "big idea" (from an agent) was that publishers wanted a series, and the example he gave was that if you wrote a book "How to look after your pet dog", one copy could be sold to every pet shop and that was the end of you. So - again templating - his suggestion was write a book called "How to look after your Alsation", then an endless series of almost identical ones called "How to look after your Labradoodle" (etc.)

So back to where I started, I'm with Charlie and not Cornwell.

Sympathies to Vanessa.

By the way I read hundreds of stories every year for a competition and I still haven't a clue what to write when faced with a blank page and haven't written anything for ages. It would never enter my head to bother what anyone else wanted to write. As for making money out of writing - there's more to be made washing windscreens at the traffic lights, mostly.

Reading for this

2009-09-28T18:11:00.001+01:00

Black History Month

I'll be there supporting this with Willesden Green Writers' Group, on Friday at 8 pm, reading a bit of one of my stories that touches on immigration. It's a self-contained part of "The End", which is the first story in All Those Endearing Young Charms. (And yes - before you ask - the last story is called "The Beginning").

Long grape

2009-09-19T05:00:00.005+01:00

more bloggy bits from facebook

2009-09-16T01:21:00.013+01:00

of course laughably feeble against the divine, as a gnat's breath to a hurricane, but i honestly think i'd like to punch our so-called lord right in the mush

you can go down to Ladbrokes now and place a bet that some horrible fate will now befall me. don't click "like" or the thunderbolt might veer your way. may i just say this: amen. that makes it into a good sort of film scene, the unexpected punch that floors the villainous deity and dusting my hands as i walk off the unseen cliff, i say it. amen. it's only a form of "over" "roger" "wilco" to let the boss know you've finished transmitting anyway. any standups out there need a scriptwriter, any devils in need of idle hands? more to the point anybody nearby with some double-cream? i will get out of this by making his lordship laugh. who can do that? whoever can make god laugh will be spared. maybe.

i was sitting waiting for sam mendes to appear last night and everybody in the cinema was talking. it sounded like, y'know, gabble gabble gabble, sort of nice but unintelligible. then i thought this is how we sound to god. and then i thought if i concentrate i can hear it saying words, the crowd, unwittingly making words and if i'd had a notepad i could have written a crowd poem because they were saying things. yeh. things. things like counterpane and linear and i can't remember the rest now.

did you want to know about the film (Away We Go), a review? i doubt that very much. but why stop for a mote with camels bounding by?

firstly, may i say i clapped the man like a hero, i wanted to stand up and shout and whistle when he came on stage. i cannot understand the feebleness of the crowd's response to his arrival. they are not clueless, they were film fans - damn them for an etiolated shower of blasé deadbeats. here is a local hero par excellence. i cannot tell you how much i loved "revolutionary road" and anybody who can secure the affections of kate winslet should be made king as far as i'm concerned.

he said the film was made as a refreshing change from two years of richard yeatsian gloom on r.r. to be fair, it has a few funny moments - i did get a good few laughs and belly laughs out of it, though i was highly resistant for reasons i will explain. when it was funny it was burst out laughing funny. sam said it didn't have a standard structure and put that forward as a virtue and it is really a series of episodes with titles in between, such that it could have very well been a TV mini-series. i'm afraid i found it mawkish, however, and i hated the bloke whom i guessed we were supposed to find lovable. he's a sort of forrest gump child man aged 33 going on 14. p.i.t.a. revolutionary road is about 1,000 times better than this film. and this is still a good film. it did make me laugh and drew a bit of a tear (secretly) and even made my tummy collywobbly, but i can't get past the single distressing fact that i absolutely hated that guy. everybody else was great but i just couldn't stand being in his company. if that's eggers - as it appears it is - i'm very sorry but no thank you very much. tess is a good judge, she always likes a good film and she thought it was rubbish.

i still think sam mendes is great and will return with more like american beauty and revolutionary road in the future. and clap you indolent swine who were there. friends of mine, if you were there, you were the only ones clapping enough (i'm sure.)

Away We Go - Official Trailer - HD

2009-09-14T15:09:00.004+01:00

Off to see this tonight with Tess. Looking forward to hearing from Sam Mendes before it starts - should set it up nicely. He's going to speak before this special screening at The Tricycle. I don't usually go in for this sort of blogging but I've changed my mind now (past caring).

Road dream

2009-09-09T15:30:00.005+01:00

I am beside a road which is empty on this side but on the other side there is a line of cars facing me, waiting in a jam. Suddenly a very small but high-powered black car races in the same direction past the stationary traffic on the wrong side of the road. I think this is very dangerous and turn to watch it as it speeds across a junction and straight into a cyclist on a bike coming the other way. The car has stopped on top of the now invisible bike. I think I must phone 999 and call an ambulance. As well as horror at what has just happened, there is a small feeling of righteousness about being the one to call the emergency services. I wake up perplexed. I myself must have put that cyclist in the way of the car, without first seeing straight away that he (or she) was there. From the time I saw the car speeding along the wrong side of the road towards me and before I turned around and saw the bike, that bike must already have been there. It was moving as slowly as the car was fast, peacefully making its way in the middle of its own lane, when I turned round to see it vanish under the car. Before I turned round, I had no idea that the bike was there.

How not to think

2009-09-01T10:32:00.006+01:00

"thinking is unnecessary. just work, eat, drink, sleep, excrete, repeat, not necessarily in that order. all thought is redundant because it cannot be but what blather o reilly to horse me charger killiraggert snortdorgel"

we know before we think. it has been proven experimentally anyway, but just (er) think about it. there is no need for the time-consuming thought. all can be at light speed as long as we don't think. this is the reason for beginner's luck, for example. as soon as they interpose the delayed and faulty thought, having "learned" how to play, players lose their beginner's luck. it is a one-time only gift. usually.

whatever you think you thought, you already thought before you thought you thought. how can it be otherwise. if i can stop thinking i can fly at light speed through where thought plods and get outside the earth's gravitation (so to speak, and speaking is even more redundant, especially on the internet where we are all trees falling in forests with nobody around except other trees who are falling themselves and so do not make good listeners.

(anyway listening is pointless as well. you cannot listen to what you have not already heard. listening is a form of thinking and so should be eliminated. (but elimination of thought and listening is pointless, because nature eliminates them by making them pointless and redundant, in other words they are self-eliminating. therefore to try and eliminate them is itself further redundancy piled on the initial redundancy. (whether you think or not is immaterial. (so you thought? so what? i thought and that was a nanosecond i'll never see again.

(but seeing - now that's a waste of pixels (which are themselves dismal ineffectual redundant representations of entities that preexisted the pixels (entities like trees that do not waste their time thinking (feverish thinking (a disease of the mind (before thought was the same animal, the bald ape (adam and eve, like laurel and hardy, "two heads without a single thought".

it's just a hop across a slippery stepping stone to genesis and adam and eve eating from the tree of knowledge, which is where all our troubles supposedly originated, otherwise we'd have been coasting along on beginners' luck, millions (billions) of us fololoping around in pristine ignorance, always landing the rolled up scroll in the waste paper bin first time and having comprehended the universe just by or at the same time as opening our eyes.

Next volume of autobiography

2009-08-26T12:10:00.002+01:00

Following on from the hilarious "Not Me Again", "Arse About Face" etc. comes the latest volume, "Prosetitute". It's a set of seedy stories set in the world of story cd's.

Dog man walking 2

2009-08-20T22:04:00.002+01:00

The view from London: US Election 2008

2009-08-04T14:48:00.004+01:00

Big Bridge asked me to collect responses from some London-based writers to the 2008 US presidential election. You can see the result in context by clicking on the link in the title, or together here with reports from other countries or go direct to the texts. It is called Big Bridge for a good reason - http://www.bigbridge.org/.

Remembering Tita Cory and People Power

2009-08-01T21:30:00.007+01:00

President Cory Aquino's historic speech before the U.S. Congress, part 1. Part 2. Part 3

I still have my People Power teeshirt from when I was there in 1987/8 during the runup to a referendum on the new constitution. I loved her, I don't know why - everything about the Philippines makes me want to cry. She was quite a gifted orator. I always remember her earlier presidential campaign speech when she said something like, "My opponents say I am not a good candidate. They say I'm just an inexperienced woman. It's true I have no experience. I have no experience of graft! I have no experience of corruption! ..." (Can anyone find that on YouTube?)

Dog man walking

2009-07-19T00:53:00.001+01:00

Against the gregarious indifferent

2009-07-11T13:46:00.010+01:00

Woke up with a few more thoughts on loneliness etc. For argument sake let's divide humanity into two types, the gregarious and the solitary. People may move from one group to the other over time and certainly there will be degrees in both.

Next consider how the solitary and the gregarious regard other people. I'm interested in the concept of "caring what other people say". Thinking about permutations of this attribute between the two types I suggest that being gregarious and caring what people say is good and that being solitary and not caring what people say is also good, though I'm not going to try and justify that here.

That leaves us with two other categories: the solitary who care what people say, whose condition I suggest is somewhat tragic, pitiable if you like and the gregarious who don't care what people say, whose condition I suggest is despicable. The latter are what I call the gregarious indifferent. Their condition is despicable because they foist themselves on others, intrude, trample, disport themselves generally without any concern for what others say.

This condition of gregarious indifference is what is so objectionable about alcoholics. You will note the one-sided conversations, the drunken midnight phone call that's all "me me me", demanding interaction and repetitive but utterly indifferent and unreceptive to any response. The purblind, gregarious indifferent are to be avoided like the plague.

Anticipating the objection that one can care about people but not care what they say: I'm not suggesting that caring what people say is the same as caring about other people but it's a bit more than just "being a good listener". I think caring what people say is at least part of the way down the road to caring about other people in general (whatever that entails).

My conclusion is either to care what people say and be gregarious or, if you prefer to be solitary for the time being, not to care what anybody says. Do not fall into the opposite situations, namely being solitary and caring what people say - which is tragic - or being gregarious and not caring what people say - which is despicable.

May 2011: Re-reading this I'm thinking either everyone should care what people say, or possibly nobody should care what anybody says and so the whole thing collapses. It's all tendentious, I now think. I could have made it much simpler: I just don't like drunks who want to talk but not to listen.

Don't believe a word

2009-07-10T10:42:00.008+01:00

Everything "the accepted wisdom" tells me and expects from me, I tend to disbelieve and do the opposite, which I find is usually a better course. They say only write if you have to write, I say only write if you don't have to write. They say it doesn't matter what you write, I say don't read that crap. They say some Gregorian domestic data download is thrilling beyond description, I say all they read is the cover. They say gut-wrenchingly, superlatively sublime, I say the writer has an exotic name. I don't care what people say.

World of light?

2009-06-27T21:46:00.000+01:00

If the uttermost particles are twists of energy, then matter is made of energy and energy is not made of anything else (though it must be, perhaps) then the world is made out of energy and if light is energy too, then you could say the world is made out of light. Then light doesn't just illuminate and reveal the world, it is the world. Which primitive Greek philosopher was that one? They took turns at saying the world was made out of different things: fire, water, air, butter, lemon drops...

Life: an operating system?

2009-06-18T03:05:00.006+01:00

It pains me to say it but DNA looks like an object class definition in object oriented programming (which is itself based partly on principles of heredity). The paucity of genes can be accounted for in a system where the DNA represents a program to be run by an operating system that is far more complex than the program itself.

In my analogy (below somewhere) I described DNA as like measurements and specifications such as colour and fabric for a suit, which is then made by a tailor. It is the tailor who knows how to make the suit, he or she initiates the processing and guides it by using techniques that are not described at all in the specifications for the suit. What I am saying is that you can take the material (a bolt of cloth, say) and the pattern and place them in the world and they will sit there forever and decay, fall to bits and no suit will appear. That is unless somebody or some thing - it could be a machine - takes the material, follows the pattern and after a time equivalent to gestation of a creature - outputs the finished garment.

So my question: What is it that takes the pattern of DNA and the material and not only makes it but like Pinocchio's carpenter brings it to life? And a possible answer, or rather another metaphor for it, is that Life is an operating system. In this view DNA is object class definition language, living things are object instances and Life is an operating system that implements our constructors, provides our operating environment and eventually disposes of us and recycles our material.

I foresee the objection that this is a tautology and that we have arrived at nothing more than the laws of nature, which are already described. However, the laws of nature may be described separately, as somewhat isolated phenomena, or phenomena whose interactions are investigated and catalogued as a series of fragments, whereas I suggest we are functions of a large system called Life which, in summary, drives us and all creatures, and without which we would just be piles of inanimate materials. Materials, as far as we know, do not get up and write A la Recherche du Temps Perdu or indeed anything at all, they rather tend to chaos (entropy) when left alone.

I am looking for something scientific, which will explain how DNA is translated into a finished product, to put it that way, and when the answer is known we will not be in any different position as regards "the meaning of life" - we still will not know, because behind every new mechanism lies another mechanism that must enable it. "All of our knowledge only brings us closer to our ignorance" (Eliot).

Rocks and weaver birds

2009-06-13T23:26:00.010+01:00

Can we agree that a stone is not alive? Let's not say "dead" because that implies once lived. It has no dynamic, does not interact or act with purpose of self-sustenance. Maybe it is the ability to reproduce that is definitive, although in theory something could be alive, having come to life and never died and never reproduced. A stone came to being but never reproduced itself and did not interact purposefully with anything, had no self-sustaining or any continuing process in which it was active. Then again, there are machines that are active and interact continually and purposefully, like those robots that go around and around vacuuming the floor, but are they alive? Intuitively no, so what are they lacking that for example a microbe inside a rock has? To make a self-reproducing robot is a major challenge, which as far as I know has never been achieved, but would we think that those robots were alive, if they were able to reproduce and perhaps even sustain themselves for a while? (not "indefinitely", or else the dinosaurs were never alive).

Maybe that's all there is to it: self-reproducing robots. There was a TV debate about religion (Christianity 2000 with Melvyn Bragg) where somebody in the audience argued against clerics on the panel that people were just like robots, to which the panellist replied well do you think that you are a robot and the speaker in the audience asserted that he (the speaker) was indeed a robot. It was very strange to hear somebody state in that way, "I am a robot" - almost as if it made that person into a robot by self proclamation, as if one could be or not be a robot by choice. There was a sense that that person had alienated himself from the entire audience and panel and got into a very weird situation.

But back to "What is life?" I think we can agree that a rock is not alive. If so, I guess we can also agree that a jar of acid is not alive. What if it's a jar of amino acid (some organic molecules)? We're told that DNA is made up of codes for a set of amino acids. When talking about robots and self-reproducing robots and acting purposefully for self-sustenance and continuation, what hasn't been discussed here yet is energy and motivation. We have material, sure, and we have "a scenario" (things act, reproduce, interact) but what is it that tells them how to behave, what to do and when: what starts them on a path and what guides their behaviour? (Turning straight to motivation and skipping the question of energy which is obviously just another mechanism, equivalent to the components of the robot.)

If we are agreeing that a jar of acid is not alive, is equivalent to a rock, and if we take it that DNA is code for a number of amino acids, then we are looking at a plan for items that are not in themselves inherently alive. We know that this pattern (DNA) is in living creatures ("duh") and we observe meiosis and all the events that cause half of one creature's DNA to combine with half of another creature's (for example - leaving cloning aside for the time being). We have, very obviously, the energy to power these processes. We have chemicals, patterns for chemicals and components, we can observe behaviour and formation of quasi-live spermatazoa (a form of life with a half-set of DNA, that looks and moves like plankton, say, but is humanoid?) but there is absolutely no explanation offered as to why these components proceed through very long processes (9 months in the human) of almost unimaginable complexity with clear purpose to create structures and creatures with inbuilt instincts, behaviours of their own and a big ETC.

What part of the weaver bird's DNA comprises the design of its nest and the talent and ability to create that nest from available materials in a timely way to provide a home for more little weaver birds? Hello, you've told us so far about amino acids.

The myth of DNA (continued)

2009-06-06T20:04:00.005+01:00

(Notes) The contemporary belief that DNA encodes a human being is comparable to a belief in earlier times that the earth was flat and that it was carried on the back of a giant tortoise. To be able to cut and paste DNA and have an extra eye appear or something from one animal appear in another animal, is analogous with the early voyages of our ignorant ancestors, who sailed from place to place believing their absurd cosmology. Similarly, we operate and map DNA in a functional way but not realising what we are mediating. It's true that the earth seems flat, and that one can sail from Britain to Spain and back believing that the earth is flat, and that we can cut and paste bits of DNA and cause malformations or mutations. All of these activities can take place against a background of ignorance. In effect our genetic model is at the level of Keppler's mechanical model of earth, the sun and planets. It appears to correspond to what we observe and it is brilliant but it is profoundly simplistic and misconceived. What is missing is the dynamic principle, the gravity, the big bang, the extended cosmology. In DNA we are looking at our local planets and saying "This must be what's happening." Instead we need to relate life to time and space, growth to expansion of the universe, lifespan/duration/time's arrow to the expansion of the universe. I suggest (conjecture) that expansion of the universe = duration = time's arrow. The stretching of space gives us duration but also motion, an engine that can be connected to the passive cell with its DNA. We are told by physicists that time began with the Big Bang, since when the universe has been expanding. Surely expansion = duration: no duration without expansion, no expansion without duration, time's arrow is the sense of being stretched from where we begin to where we end. Could there not also be an "unpacking" effect, in which the kit of parts of DNA is inflated and extended, and which makes us move and act? (All rubbish, most likely.)

Life etc.

2009-05-12T19:27:00.004+01:00

This is where science is somewhat deficient, in my admittedly not expert opinion. The "feeling" about our current impression of what life is is wrong and must be comparable to the "feeling" about let's say then current impressions about heredity, geology, geography etc at various times in the past. We now need a new Darwin, a new Einstein to open our eyes about life itself.

I know that the scientific take on this extends from microbes that live in rocks to other dubious and many obvious examples and there are borderline entities as well as concepts for cloudy technology-based entities that could be considered to have life. I'm not referring to borderline or artificial concepts, what I'm thinking about is the main ubiquitous animal life that "we know very well".

What makes a cell divide repeatedly and eventually fill out a model that becomes a creature and what makes these creatures spark (almost literally, electrical impulses spark the heartbeat) or grow and reproduce? Surely there isn't enough coding potential in DNA to model even a cell itself, let alone all the organs and dynamic behaviour, instincts built in, and the brain itself etc etc.

Quoting from "Kronk" (Willesden Herald): "But there are more lines in a not-particularly-complicated computer program [the machine code] than there are in the human genome. So where is the real pattern for life? We can put a pile of amino acids in a saucer but they won't get up and write À la recherche du temps perdu. Estimates vary from 25,000 to 80,000 effective genes in the human genome, and currently thought to be at the lower end of that range (ref: here). There are more parts in the body than there are elements in the genome! [Can't find an anatomical dictionary count, but an online medical dictionary boasts 82,000 entries, including 63,000 definitions.] Imagine what it would need to program any one part of the body, never mind the brain, for example. You couldn't program even a wonky robot with that number of instructions, let alone a system to build a wonky robot (which, some might jokingly argue, is what we have).

Ok, let's make a hypothesis that DNA is only a list of variations, similar to the measurements and colour list for bespoke suit, say. The tailor knows how to make that variation of a suit, so that you get a distinctive looking suit, perhaps floridly exotic-looking, large or small sizes in each component etc. But that list of measurements, colours, even drawings, is nowhere near able of itself - the pattern - to make itself. It is only a pattern or design. Even placed together with the material needed, nothing will happen. In practice we go into a tailors, get measured, select a colour, fabric and style, have it all written down and we go away and come back and the thing has been made to the specification. So that is the hypothesis, that DNA is a set of variations to something that will be made.

Maybe you might say that a car is very complicated, but the design for a car can be 100% encoded, in such a way that a robot and a computer could make the whole thing from the design and out of a factory would come a car ready to drive. We know that a human being is far more complicated than a car, so what I ask is this: can you encode the design even for a car using nothing but the coding ability of DNA and no more than the amount of DNA, with its number of genes, in a single human cell? If you find that it is impossible to encode the structure of a car using the coding potential of the four-letter DNA sequences, albeit in an analogous, mathematical estimation only, then how could it possibly encode a human being?

This is a challenge: Prove that the design for a car could be encoded using the number of units of 4-letter permutations that human DNA contains.

I want to speculate about the implications, should this challenge not be achievable, i.e. should it be the case that DNA is inadequate to encode a complete model of a human being. Let's simplify and say a complete model of a worm, imporantly this model is not just a physical model of the structure of a worm, it has to include all the behaviour, instincts, mobility, regeneratability, reproduction etc.

If (IF) DNA is inadaquate it follows that there must be something else that causes human beings and other life forms to fill out their "models" and "behave" characteristically (instincts etc.) This is not to say that it is something mystical, though it might as well be - because in effect everything we not only cannot understand but deem incapable of comprehension is mystical, almost by definition.

To be continued.

Silhouette

2009-05-08T00:12:00.003+01:00

Originally uploaded by Willesden Herald

Taken in a hotel room in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago

Anyone remember The Perfumed Garden* pirate radio?

2009-04-20T20:29:00.006+01:00

"And now on the Perfumed Garden, going out to all lovers in the cars along the Shoreham seafront, flash your lights across at our pirate radio ship, if you're digging this mellow groove with your ladylove..." [or some such twaddle]

* Not the book, which I vividly remember too, and about which much could be said. If you really think about it, it's funny what the radio station was calling itself. I think they thought it was something horticultural.

So effortless

2009-04-11T22:27:00.006+01:00

That's what my heart needs - Otis Redding (1963)

This sort of record, of which there were so many in the US, obviates most of "the British invasion", I think. Much as I loved John Lennon's singing and I think he said that he was copying, or at least trying to emulate Arthur Alexander (another US singer), Otis Redding just goes into "another gear". From the first phrase in this recording, which sounds almost folksy, the sheer mastery of both the singing and the accompaniment, makes most of the British/Merseybeat/The Animals etc records seem laboured and fussy by comparison. Just take the drumming, for example, the perfect explosion of the high hat (isn't that what that cymbal type sound is?) which is like a firework going off in the distance, and the mellifluous guitar picking, all going to show that it's not just hitting the notes it's how you play them...

Rearranging the deckchairs

2009-04-08T22:56:00.008+01:00

I think that we are missing the point about climate change. The real question should be how are we going to survive the next ice age. It's coming, we know that for sure because they have come and gone repeatedly. A small change in the course of the Gulf Stream that runs up from the Gulf of Mexico to warm the British Isles would result in this part of the world being frozen over, the sea could freeze and we'd all be under ice. The food we rely on would become largely unavailable. Transport and therefore industry would become next to impossible. A real ice age would see the land under glaciers that would obliterate everything we can currently see around us. And it's coming. Yes, let's stop pollution - just for air and water quality and yes, if it can slow the changes, well and good. But what are we doing to prepare for the artificial, troglodytic conditions of the future? Nothing. What are we doing to prepare for an asteroid impact, not preventing it - which is nearly impossible - but coping with it? Nothing. We should have places underground, with means of sustenance where we can evacuate the entire population for as long as necessary. We should be building power sources and everything needed for survival underground. We're not really building anything underground, except possibly one place in every country where the people who are responsible for getting us into wars, and for doing nothing to help the rest of us, can be protected from the consequences of their own misrule. An ice age will come, but it will also go, over thousands of years. An asteroid will come too. Do we care or not? Seemingly not.

Very well then, in Shakespeare's words, "Since the fate of man rests still uncertain, let's reason with the worst that may befall." If we don't really care about our imminent annihilation, why do we bother about comparative trivialities? Why should we reduce our consumption of water, say, to such a tightly restricted level that the population and housing can be increased to the maximum, and eventually result in our skintight usage of water becoming stretched and breaking, so that any small disruption causes us to be dying of thirst? Is it not far better to encourage people to use plenty of water, so that when there are disruptions there still may be just enough to go round, rather than encouraging everyone to skimp so much that there is just enough to go round when there is no disruption?

And why do we waste our time separating things for supposed recycling, at great additional energy cost to us, to the recyclers and through the recycling process and the possible extra cost consequent on lower quality recycled items, not to mention the fact that a lot of the time it's not recycled at all after all our wasted energy, when at the same time a huge catastrophe is making its way towards us, about which we have not one idea, not one contingency plan and not the least compunction because really deep down we know it's all a charade and we're all doomed and everybody just lasts for a few blinks anyway.

Oh ffs - eat, drink and be merry!

This life

2009-03-22T22:09:00.021Z

Before the proliferation of entertainment media, children were brought up in communities where family occasions, street and garden play with other children were their formative experiences. They were soaked in the humane and quotidian, where nothing was more important than relationships within the home, across the garden fence and along the street. Now they are soaked in an unreal, incessant welter of violent and quasi-pornographic moving images and anti-social, misogynistic, foul-mouthed and tuneless rants. They are the target of a new shamanism, invoking demons of acquisitiveness and hypnotic consumerist programming. Words that were sacrosanct such as virgin and pregnant, are now nothing more than appropriated trademarks or newsbait for 24-hour media, with its tickertape adverts, and half-hour of tendentious and unquestioned opinions repeated 48 times per day. Education is unknown, all is for sale to McDonalds or stupid, creationist businessmen. All that the "old school tie" establishment can think of is trying to keep up with the most industrialised and least paid in the world in a race to the bottom, a race to dismantle civilisation, to abolish humanity and return to the condition of cannibalistic apes.

We are in thrall to amoral, ruthless commercialism and laziness. It's time for a new austerity, a return to self-sufficiency and to shut down the globalist nonsense for good and all. Everybody is not a friend, this globalism is a sort of second wave hippie economics. I wouldn't have the EU trade with any other part of the world that has lesser human and worker rights. Let's take the hit financially - it's all a house of cards anyway - and bet on self-reliance. We can only win - could not possibly do any worse, when questions of dignity and honour are more important than a surfeit of consumption. This is the way to promote justice and human rights, by not entertaining any business approaches unless they are from countries we can verify compliant with our own minimum wages, working conditions and human rights. No deals with any country that implements the death penalty, including the USA and Russia.

People like Gordon Brown who at one time probably had hippie sensibilities (me too) have now sublimated that crock of ineffectual banality into the realm of world economics. It's like "Free Love!" this "Free Trade!" - "Let it all hang out" - well unfortunately we just had our Manson moment, and it's all fallen out with a splurge of fetid monetary ouns and bilge.

Everything that labour activists and trade unions fought for "in the day" has been sold out, in order that overseas robber barons can setup new industrial dormitories and hock new souls to their company stores, or buy peasants' children into bonded labour. We buy produce made by state prison slave labourers who send goods to Europe with "Help we are slaves - tell the world" written on the back in Chinese (I have seen this), or from children bussed out of schools to break their young backs in cotton fields. We still have not switched to electric cars, so tyrannical sheikhs and mullahs continue to use our oil money to hold their people in servitude.

Mobile execution chambers roll around China (ref. this week) while in this part of the world we are ingenuous and kind enough to still circulate mobile libraries and health screening equipment. We donate our own organs, support and run charities, while they harvest organs for sale from executed prisoners and make relatives pay for the bullet to the back of the head that killed their sons or daughters, fathers or mothers in a field - and won't even allow relatives to reclaim the body. We worry about how to support our population as people live longer, while they have decreed that there shall never again be any such thing as a brother or a sister (the one child policy).

Close the damn drawbridge. We can do 1,000% better on our own, and let them reform and come crawling back - if they're able. We have sent out the message that what we eradicated here is now, for mercenary reasons, acceptable vicariously through these other vicious, despicable regimes. It is not acceptable, we are just victims of lazy and unprincipled governance, the cupidity of the over-ambitious, and the insensibility of dullards.

Bring industry home. Bring the troops home. Let us support and strengthen national and European defences till we are 100% independent of Russia, China, OPEC and the United States. Let's get a grip and stop selling our hard won rights and laws down the river.

Funeral in Stockport

2009-02-09T19:13:00.003Z

Many turn out to honour marine (video)

On the way to a business meeting in Stockport, the taxi stopped in traffic. We were near the entrance to the local graveyard. The traffic on the other side had been blocked and there were people with cameras. I said, "There must be an important funeral today." The driver said, "I think it's that lad that was killed in Afghanistan." I looked through the back window of the taxi and saw soldiers in dress uniform lining the entrance to the cemetery. Motorcycle police approached and the video cameraman got in the middle of the road to film the approaching hearse, which was still out of sight. I feel like taking some pictures. Then I think there are enough people taking pictures. The hearse came by, just an ordinary civilian hearse. I took off my hat. The coffin was draped in the union jack and along the side, written in flowers, "Danny".

Maybe nothing happens till the story is told

2009-01-30T17:13:00.016Z

Our concept of the past is in a state of uncertainty like the position of an electron: it can either be tragic or comedy, adventure or farce. But once told it is destroyed, changed forever, weighed, frozen. No longer a living mystery, it dies.

As for the future, some have speculated that by looking into space and determining what lies there, man is narrowing the future, reducing it to what we can see receding or approaching. If we'd never made telescopes, infinite futures might have remained, but as it is we are reducing all to narrow doom.

Somebody said "The unexamined life is not worth living" but one could equally well say that the unlived life is not worth examining and by implication that the examined life is not worth living. The examined life may be nothing more than an internal conversation about living, something like talking about jazz - which somebody said was like dancing about architecture. But there are philosophers who are paid to noodle on about such things and the best of luck to them, may they noodle forever.

Short story event in Piccadilly

2009-01-14T00:12:00.010Z

Piccadilly neon signs
Originally uploaded by Willesden Herald

I was one of the readers at the first Costa Short Story Café event. The highlight was Helen Simpson reading a very funny story called "I'm going to have to let you go". There was a good turnout, standing room only. A pleasant hour. (Link: Fiction Espresso)

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

2008-12-27T02:24:00.009Z

Video of Harold Pinter's lecture on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel prize in Literature (46 min.)

Text of Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture

I remember seeing The Caretaker at the Tricycle in Kilburn last year and being duly impressed by it. The production was taut and somewhat reminiscent of Beckett in the rundown sets and characters. There was a continuous sense of imminent menace or violence, and a sort of case study in bullying. [After I posted this I remembered thinking that three or four of the lines clunked a bit in one scene, where there was a sense of the voice of the author coming through rather than a particular character.]

He wrote about power, its fluctuations, development and interactions. In the film the Servant, power migrates with feeble resistance from the ineffectual employer to the butler, through his inexorable and merciless coercion.

Those are the two productions I remember. There were those late, angry political essays and poems that I saw as well from time to time, in Granta for example. You can find examples of his poetry and make your own mind up about it: here.

His Nobel lecture is fascinating both in the introductory remarks about the inspirations for his literary work and separately, when it turns to politics. Others are far better qualified to comment on what he says, and have done and continue to do so. All I will say is that he has me convinced, and I was convinced anyway from bits of what Chomsky and others had already said. For all the good it does.

It's a long way from Tipperary

2008-12-23T17:24:00.003Z

Mon 12 January
Pulp Net Short Story Cafe 7-8pm, £5/£3
In association with Costa, Pulp Net launches the Short Story Cafe at Costa Piccadilly

An hour of short stories a month in the comfort of a London coffee-house – what more could you ask for? In the first of this event series Pulp Net presents: award-winning short story author Helen Simpson, story writer and debut novelist Chris Killen, Costa writer-in-residence Davy Spens and Willesden’s finest, Stephen Moran.

Run time: 7.30pm – 8.30pm.
A suggested donation on the door of £3 is requested towards running costs. Note: Places are limited to 40, assigned on a first-come first-served basis from 7.15pm.

Lower Ground Floor, Costa Coffee, 15 Lower Regent Street, SW1Y

Christmas cactus

2008-12-17T11:30:00.005Z

The flowers look more spectacular every day, especially on this sunny morning. The petals are like fine satin or silk.

What I've been listening to/watching on YouTube

2008-12-12T13:03:00.017Z

Note: The videos below are being decimated by WMG copyright injunctions. The George Best tribute used to be to Ordinary World by Duran Duran, which was an excellent soundtrack, but now has some maudlin song that I don't like at all.

I know I've been going on about this, but I also want to add that Last.fm and iTunes do not show what I have been mainly listening to, because lately it's mostly YouTube music videos, which are not counted. The playlist recently has been:

Leona Lewis "Run" (embedding not allowed): Link

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down:

Odetta - Cotton Fields:

James Taylor & Carly Simon - Mockingbird:

The Pogues - A Pair of Brown Eyes:

The Incredible String Band - Witch's Hat:

Each one is favourite for a while but some, such as the Duran Duran/George Best tribute and David Bowie "Bring me the disco king" and Blondie (hachachacha) - can't resist - Atomic, terribly louche but so evocative of the era; I can see that there are troubling images in it, perhaps "glamorising drug-taking" (a stupid thing to do) but also what's with the lady with the black eye?; still, for the music. (Some versions of the video cut off the naff intro bars.) Also - partly for the local connection - "Duffy - Warwick Avenue" (embedding not allowed). There are others, too many to list but you can find them all here.

Blondie - Atomic:

David Bowie - Bring me the disco king:

Duran Duran - George Best tribute/Ordinary World:

As I look back through my favourites list, I feel the enthusiasm coming back, but I can't list them all again. Unfortunately some have disappeared (and keep reappearing and disappearing) from YouTube, such as everything by Diana Ross and the Supremes, though I've managed to capture some of them with Real Player. I think the best pop video ever is probably the Supremes "You keep me hanging on", for the sheer joie de vivre - it makes me smile all the way through. So does the live video of "Where did our love go", one of the best live videos, I think, though the audience are like statues and the dancing is a bit lame, but the sound - ah, the sound. I have a soft spot for the Ed Sullivan Show clip of "Love Child" too - a great song and a great Diana Ross performance.

And I've just remembered, I've been enjoying Oasis (how many years late?), at least these two superb videos. "The Masterplan" is inspired by L. S. Lowry's paintings - beautifully drawn, especially at the beginning and end.

Oasis - The Masterplan:

Also this one, "Stop crying your heart out", which would have made the perfect and sinister lament had Barack Obama not won the US presidency in November, which thankfully he did. So we are left with this incendiary, ambivalent image of either doom or hope, not sure which.

Oasis - Stop crying your heart out:

I've also been playing some of the ones embedded elsewhere in this blog, which you can find by scrolling down, and some of the ones on other people's blogs, which you can find by clicking on the links to the right. I don't want to duplicate what others have posted, including some of their own creations and favourites (Mikey's, for example).

Here again again

2008-12-08T01:51:00.008Z

I think I said this before, but it just came up in discussion tonight. Agnostics cannot say they believe in God, therefore they are a subset of the set of all atheists. In no way can they be called believers, they are merely in denial of their atheism. They cannot be a subset of the set of all believers because their set does not intersect with the set of all believers, they are non-believers, their belief is non-existent, it is a dead parrot.

I don't believe that anybody educated and conversant with manifest reality truly believes in God. Anyone who claims to is only fooling himself or herself, but they all get together and play "let's pretend" and "la la la we're not listening".

I'm not happy that there is no God but then as somebody said, "if God lived on our street people would break his windows."

Facebook can get stuffed. Again

2008-12-02T18:38:00.000Z

Facebook to enable members to track friends on other sites

"Social networking website Facebook has launched what could yet prove to be another controversial application in the form of a tool that allows users to track 'Facebook friends' activities on other sides." (Telegraph)

If they keep it up, I'm going to bin my Facebook pages and membership.

Chewbacca

2008-12-02T17:40:00.007Z

Eating a Scooby snack sans a few teeth

My top most played tracks on Last.fm

2008-12-02T01:33:00.008Z

I think my Last.fm profile gives a truer picture of my listening habits for the past year than my iTunes chart (below) because it tends to consist of things I choose to listen to, not what I happen to have hoovered into iTunes from some ancient cheap cd or whatever. With Last.fm you can play whatever you want to, pretty much - though it has some limits on how many times. I see that according to my profile, my top ten for the past twelve months are:

1. Katmandu - Cat Stevens
I played this free, but I've since bought it. It is gloriously tuneful and with interesting lyrics. I love the little bell it starts with, and everything about it.

2. Jealous Guy - Youssou N'Dour
I love the way he pronounces things and he comes across as a very gentle sort of person, counterpointing Lennon's sharp edges.

3. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Moody and magnificent. I've tired a little of it now, but it's a classic.

4. Gordon Lightfoot - Beautiful
I found this on Last.fm and the clue is in the title. It is. It amazes me that it should be fourth in my list for the year, though. There must be something wrong with these statistics, I think.

4 (equal). Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown
In spite of the daft lyrics, I love the sound, just the impressions of sensuality hinted at. "I can see her lying back in a satin dress/In a room where you do what you don't confess". I don't know why this one is here and not some others, can't remember listening to it that many times but it's a sort of "old reliable", I guess.

6. Elvis Presley - Flaming Star
What I like about this is it has that sound that you sometimes hear when in town you stray into a record shop and it's bouncing and bumping on the speakers and you think, everything should sound this great. It's quintessential of its type and very moody, with a strange folksy intimation of mortality. It's like cool water when you're thirsty.

8 x 3. Two Katie Melua's - actually I've decided that these are unlistenable. I was in love with her voice for a while but the words are dreadfully trite and the tunes are actually just one sweet hook with a load of clunking, laboured bridges. I'd really far rather have Dusty Springfield here and perhaps Joan Baez, but I listen to them on a CD player in the kitchen on Sunday mornings so Last.fm can't count them.

The last one is Al Green - Tired of Being Alone: just always hits the mark - also nonsensical lyric-wise, but who cares?

Let's reunite Ireland as a British dominion*

2008-11-16T01:50:00.013Z

It's never too late. Step back, rewind, start over. A united Ireland under the British crown as before, with its proud capital in Dublin and its own sovereignty the same as Canada's or Australia's. I am a republican in the generic sense not a monarchist, but the petty nationalists have divided Ireland. That's exactly what they've done, not united - divided. I expect to be reviled by all sides for this idea, but this is the way to a united Ireland. It does not entail any loss of real sovereignty, laws or anything else, and it incorporates Northern Ireland into the Republic. If you claim to be for a united Ireland, you've got to start loving your unionist countrymen and give them what they want. Within a family, one sacrifices for the benefit of another. We should sacrifice our separation from Britain in order to regain our own unity on the island of Ireland. Does anyone doubt that countries such as Canada and Australia are independent? We had unity before, which was worth more than the present botched independence, but we squandered it. That is my opinion and I might be wrong, but there it is.

Update: Let me put it this way, if I were a classical cartoonist or painter of allegories, I'd depict Ireland as beautiful, innocent Unity being sacrificed on the altar of Independence by malodorous Pride.

* I'm currently reading "On Another Man's Wound" by Ernie O'Malley, and I guess this blog post makes me a "shoneen". But please remember, I am not suggesting that Ireland be ruled from London, I'm suggesting a way to reunite Ireland with rule from Dublin. We should never have given up on the "Home Rule" path, which would have led to complete independence with unity. Instead what we have done is divided Ireland and "gone off half-cocked" with the present botched independence.

Again: Unity is worth more than independence for a country. We should not have sacrificed unity at any stage, that should have been the first priority, not the last.

From one of the Dublin Fusiliers

2008-11-10T15:35:00.014Z

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,—
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

-- Thomas Kettle

(Born 1880. Died 1916, battle of the Somme. Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kettle)

I used to have a book of poetry by Thomas Kettle, which I was given as a gift, and it had its pages uncut. I wish I knew where I left it. I must have given it as a present to somebody. I think I know who. It can't be found now for love nor money, just the exact one. It's possible it was never properly published. Of course I did cut the pages, and it had this poem and one of the others I remember I used to like was called "Ennui" - it wasn't mainly war poems.

Thomas Kettle was an interesting character, a leading nationalist who followed John Redmond's decision for his Irish Volunteers, a nationalist movement, to enlist in British regiments to fight "for the rights of small nations" after Belgium had been invaded. It was on the promise of Home Rule for Ireland, which had been passed by Westminster in 1914, at Gladstone's third attempt, but then suspended because of the outbreak of war.

Whether it would have followed had not Pearse et al struck in 1916, who knows? Even in the treaty negotiations later an offer of dominion status similar to Canada's, was spurned. Wouldn't that have been far better though, even from a nationalist point of view, because afterwards they might have voted away the link anyway, like Australia keeps threatening to do? Oh well. Let's invite the Queen to Dublin, it's past time. Let the dead bury the dead. I'm not very sure what it means, but it's something a little short of letting bygones be bygones, perhaps.

The following, if it's still there (they come and go on YouTube) is a lament for a son going off to war, "Oh Danny boy, the pipes - the pipes are calling..."

(Diana Krall with the Chieftains)

My top most played tracks on iTunes

2008-11-08T21:45:00.019Z

They're not what I could wish them to be (you know, "cool") but it is interesting to me to see what I keep playing.

There are quirky personal reasons for them. For example, I see that "Core 'ngrato" (from a Three Tenors cd) is my number 1 most played track. That was my dad's party piece. There is a story connected to it, in my mind only, which I have tried to write a couple of times but never succeeded. That has happened once or twice. Another example was "Isolation" by John Lennon, the first half, which was a way into another story.

2nd is a string orchestra version of Ständchen/Schubert's serenade. This one is there purely for the joy of it, the beauty of the melody, and the wonderful idea of a serenade itself. I'm an incurable romantic, it seems.

3rd: Nessun Dorma, Luciano Pavarotti solo in that same Three Tenors concert, with another gorgeous arrangement by Lalo Schifrin (I think). To me this is an example of artistic commitment and utter transcendent rapture, when Luciano walks out on the high wire across the Grand Canyon and balances on one foot on that high C. It is a moment of complete commitment, self-abandonment and giving without reservation - religious almost. There is a feeling about it like the moment when a jet takes off from the runway.

At this point I'm amazed to find I have a top three of classical tracks, which I wouldn't have predicted.

4th is Unbreak my Heart (Toni Braxton). The reason for endlessly playing this is the same as for the Pavarotti, it's really about the high note. Surely something sexual there. Is she androgynous? I don't know. She has a nice deep voice but seems to span a few octaves, anyway it's that whoop near the end that let's us know at the same time that it is about joy but also fun and laughter. I started listening to this for the brilliant neologisms "unbreak" and "uncry". I know that Diane Warren is perhaps the most prolific hit-writer ever but regardless of what else she wrote, this is superb.

5th: Für Elise. I don't know who the pianist is - I got this from a compilation of "Romantic Classics". Another one for the sheer beauty and perfection of it. There is also a powerful emotional current deriving from the title and the history of it and its place among the works of this sometimes severe and tempestuous composer. Like the "Adagio Sostenuto" (Moonlight Serenade) it shows his humanity and wonder. Written for a piano student of his. (I hope I have that right - but assume I haven't; half of all I believe turns out to be false.)

6: Desafinado (Astrud Gilberto & George Michael)
7: Don't let it bring you down (Neil Young)
8: Diamonds and Rust (Joan Baez)
9: Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen)
10: Celtic New Year (Van Morrison)
11: Ride On (Christy Moore) (I hate the words, but the slide guitar solo is glorious.)
12: If I Fell (The Beatles)
13: Rainy Night House (Joni Mitchell)

The rest I want to forget, except for a few that are coming up and look like reaching the top 10 or 20 soon - Jealous Guy (Youssou N''Dour) and a few others. Some I liked for a while and have cooled about somewhat, such as "Mona Lisa's and Mad Hatters" (Elton John), but mostly if I'm playing randomly from about 2,000 tracks that I have in iTunes, they are the ones that always hit the spot. I'm thinking of Grace Jones "Walking in the Rain" (and any of her classics, particularly "Libertango/Strange, I've seen that face before"), Richard Schumann's "Träumerei" (Dieter Goldmann, piano), "Jokerman" (Bob Dylan), "Never had a dream come true" (Stevie Wonder), "Montague Terrace in Blue" (Scott Walker & T.W.B.)

I haven't mentioned Paul Simon, who has three tracks in my top 40, "Kodachrome", "Bernadette", "Take me to the Mardi Gras". Others with multiples are Elton John, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Van Morrison. There is another Beethoven piano track, "Adagio Sostenuto", which I mentioned already. One-offs for Sinead O'Connor "Nothing compares 2 U", which I used to love, mainly for her lovely tearful video. ("All the flowers that you planted in the backyard, mama, all died when you went away.") I'm such a sap.

Anybody else want to tag this meme. Tag this meme, baby! (Oh yeh, I know the lingo.)

See also: My most played tracks on Last.fm (above)

I'm giving up writing

2008-10-23T11:34:00.008+01:00

The world doesn't need any more writers, any more poetry or any more fiction. There's far too much already. Everything that needs to be said has already been said very well. You wouldn't spend your time writing if you knew the world was about to end. So why do it now, when it is?

You heard it first here - I can explain

2008-10-09T14:56:00.002+01:00

From Glass Hombre: "Well, I have very exciting news [...] I've just signed a contract with Future Fiction London, an imprint of Creation Books, to publish my novel Balzac of the Badlands" Steve Finbow

Steve Finbow, hotfoot from Japan, started the evening off with a virtuosic, almost musical recital in effect, of an excerpt from his extraordinary 'Balzac of the Badlands'. If that is not a novel in poetry, then...there is no then—it is. (From: There Now: Launch of New Short Stories 1)

Spotted in the wild

2008-09-19T01:16:00.005+01:00

morning / re-reading
Originally uploaded by mf delgado

Several thoughts contend. I hope the text hasn't put the reader off that marvellous-looking coffee. (One of the stories is set in a coffee house.) I was very lucky to have the art of Stratos on the cover. And a sort of wonderment.

Still smiling

2008-09-17T18:30:00.005+01:00

Your roving reporter met ~~Bobby's Girl~~ (broken link) Julie Rayne at Litcamp, and I'm glad to report she's still smiling. (That's one of those records that was always on the radio back in the day, I think, or some version of it.) I also bought a copy of Down the Angel and read her memoir of 1960's London with interest.

The New Writer's Handbook, Volume 2: Books for Writers: Scarletta Press

2008-09-15T21:06:00.001+01:00

I have an article in this. Just got my free copy today. (Amazon/Willesden Herald partner link)

The intro by Ted Koooser is interesting. He was US Poet Laureate for a while. He talks about writing "from life" and the comparative poverty of writing from imagination. In one example he says that when describing the scene at a birthday party, it's the lace that's coming away from the edge of a table cloth, or the bent tine on a fork that will evoke it, and not the candles flickering on top of the birthday cake. In other words, he claims that imagination will tend to the cliched. He makes a strong case, but I'm not sure he didn't imagine that lace himself just then, if you see what I mean. It's worth getting hold of the book just to read his intro, really, but there are loads of other interesting articles as well.

Literary day out

2008-09-13T20:56:00.002+01:00

Litcamp

I particularly enjoyed Jay Barnard's (link) poetry reading and Courtia Newland's story, which I'd already read somewhere. It is going to be on BBC4 Afternoon Story next week. There was a very funny story from Gavin Inglis, as well as lots of other delights, some from people listed in my links over there ->.

I offered to provide "post-it note critiques" for short stories, simulating the conditions of reading for a short story competition. About twenty or so landed on my table in the reading room. One thing that occurred to me was that this was a very good way to make enemies and fail to influence people. I felt that I should have worn full Venetian masquerade get-up, like Salieri in the film Amadeus: it was I who needed anonymity, not the writers.

Anyway, I really like reading this way and commenting, though I'm completely unqualified. I wrote on large post-it notes, mostly having to write on the reverse as well, and also marked up the text. There were one or two I'd seen before, amazingly enough.

I left some copies of this competition flyer (A4 version) on the books table there. Here is a version for Letter paper size. Please feel free to pass them on, copy, republish, etc.

I'm an uncle again!

2008-08-07T16:06:00.003+01:00

Thanks to my sister Pauline, and Rocker. All best wishes and love to little Harry Christopher and all the family.

Raindog day afternoon

2008-07-07T22:18:00.001+01:00

I raise a glass to Boris Johnson

2008-04-29T01:12:00.008+01:00

When given a choice, always vote for the one who would not side with mass murder for any cause, that's what I say. Boris Johnson would be the first politician to be hanged by any tyrant - such as Livingstone, if he could - because Boris speaks as he finds and he stands up for the human, not for dogma. He does not finesse with questions of human rights with hanging mullahs and truck bombing fascists etc etc. Etc.