...the development of style and the measure of originality paradoxically came from the transcendence of self by killing the ego in all its forms--symbolic, real, complementary and oppositional. It came from both the destruction of the false narrative of self, which was inevitably cliche, and by the confrontation of the dead other, the frozen memory of the word deflated and dropping into oblivion. By the architecture of that. By the projections of self sitting and mocking, like birds on a wire. To transcend and destroy self and to flee from the dead memory of the world, one had to see the fear and kill it. This was difficult when your tools were only imagination and action based on that. What happened first you knew is that confronting fear brought memory to life and originality. It connected with the deadly other. The ego quivered. It desired passionately the shelter of cliche and stereotype diving into them like an ostrich into the ground. In its fear and morbid desire it could no longer laugh, love or anything as the energy for this came from outside, from the senses, from the coordination with the mind from the other's electrifying of the imagination. But it desired that love.
-This is an excerpt from the short story 'RE: CANADA BANANA', which appears in the upcoming book: RE: THE DEAD ARTS -- THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF RICHARD RATHWELL.
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Sunday, August 13, 2006
summary of the political program of the party of gnosis (bektashi)
1 To begin at the final point, anyone who says that they represent a group with any identity at all is a fraud.
2. To go on, anyone who says they have correct ideas is a charlatan.
3. It is proposed that the world requires continuous regime change from the smallest association up to the gates of heaven without exception.
4. Any growing institution should be dissolved into component parts or even smaller and nicer ones. This includes superpowers into deserts, forests and mountains.
5. A general compulsory disarmament is proposed beginning with the elimination of the reasons for arms. Mental disarmament should generally precede political disarmament.
6. There is nothing wrong with boundaries of any sort.
7. Social privilege should be based on social investment including that of the generations.
8. Basic individual needs being met and exceeded should be the only responsibility of the collective endeavour.
9. Continuous incivilities are punishable by death
10. Violations of sustainability are punishable by death.
11. Privacy should be left alone.
12 Any wealth not destined for public culture or social investment is theft.
13. There is no excuse to harm a child
13. Everything else is also to be ultimately unregulated.
2. To go on, anyone who says they have correct ideas is a charlatan.
3. It is proposed that the world requires continuous regime change from the smallest association up to the gates of heaven without exception.
4. Any growing institution should be dissolved into component parts or even smaller and nicer ones. This includes superpowers into deserts, forests and mountains.
5. A general compulsory disarmament is proposed beginning with the elimination of the reasons for arms. Mental disarmament should generally precede political disarmament.
6. There is nothing wrong with boundaries of any sort.
7. Social privilege should be based on social investment including that of the generations.
8. Basic individual needs being met and exceeded should be the only responsibility of the collective endeavour.
9. Continuous incivilities are punishable by death
10. Violations of sustainability are punishable by death.
11. Privacy should be left alone.
12 Any wealth not destined for public culture or social investment is theft.
13. There is no excuse to harm a child
13. Everything else is also to be ultimately unregulated.
Sunday, August 06, 2006
summary of bektashi definitions
Summary of Bashkati Definitions
History: Is what didn’t happen
Identity : (of a person or group) is what they definitely are not, never were and are not becoming
Memory: Is the other way of saying what is happening now
Apocalypse: is the usual thing
Narrative: erases truth
Image: disguises beauty
Poetry: precedes science
Love: is the enemy of empathy
Destiny: is a dead end.
History: Is what didn’t happen
Identity : (of a person or group) is what they definitely are not, never were and are not becoming
Memory: Is the other way of saying what is happening now
Apocalypse: is the usual thing
Narrative: erases truth
Image: disguises beauty
Poetry: precedes science
Love: is the enemy of empathy
Destiny: is a dead end.
Friday, August 04, 2006
interview
Excerpts from Birthday Interview with Richard Rathwell
BOP: On what did you base your book 'Red the Nile, Blue the Hills'?
RR: The original idea is taken from some translations I did myself from Rimbaud’s Ethiopian poems. There was also his journal of his trip to Java which a copy of is in my family. Like all of my novels it is a road trip mainly of images. In a previous novel I took the images from false primitivist painting. In this one it is from images done by artists whose religion restricts them from representation. It is also a true story.
BOP: Many have said the poems in your Book ‘Poems from the Beak’ are bossy and didactic. Some say they are ‘know it all’. Did you do that on purpose?
RR: I would prefer that to being called Aspergers prematurely. In fact the poems are adapted from poems written in the youth of one of the characters in my novel ‘Borderline: Casebook Translations'. The book depicts several identities psychologically as they are seen by each other. It is a prequel to a Fleuve Roman. The Beak is a central character. She and the others all have casebooks published elsewhere. I contacted and visited all the characters recently, fifty years after the events to see what they were doing now. The Beak was the only one I couldn’t find. I don’t know where she is. Some of her poems won awards but she is largely forgotten. Yes she did know it all.
BOP: Another thing that is said, frankly, is that you write as though you hate readers.
RR: I have loved all the readers I have initially written for. Really. I have made many of them characters. I try to do authentic witness. To do this I write in such a way as to avoid as much usual structure and reference as I can, I don’t mean stereotypes and clichés but everything that comes with you. I write slowly when it was hot. I just want to stay on the trip and see what appears there without leaving it for some dreaming. It is hard to do honestly and keep at it no matter how simple and uncharged it is or askew with syntax. It isn’t fun. Like when I realised I had seen a twenty foot high dog in the desert and then forgotten it because I was in the midst of an argument on Literature, or what I actually did when friends were murdered. Now I am writing by going through communities and reflecting them. So the discourse is developmental. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t just processing by form. It is to get something. It requires participation a bit .
BOP: Is your writing political? Some of it seems to be a defence of gangster states. This has been read in the collection ‘Death’s Doors.’, and in some of the poetry in “One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back"
RR: No. What has been read as political is really an ironical celebration of death and banality meant to bugger it up for something nicer. The other necessary thing is that it does entirely compose an epic, a kind of Fleuve Roman in which the distances between the soul, spirit and body are getting greater. The boundaries are getting more detached. That means the connections are more intense. So it sounds as though the world is at stake. It isn’t. You’ll see this in ‘Re: The Dead Arts 'coming out soon.
BOP: Did you mean just now to disrespect Aspergers persons? That is reprehensible!
RR: My record on the question of Aspergers Syndrome is clear. I have written positively on what it would be like if Aspergers ruled the world. I have also written a factumentary called “Tim and Dorothy” which highlights an actual incidence where this was planned. The proceeds from that go to the Asperger’s Liberation Front.
BOP: so what is next for you, Richard?
RR. I will continue my publishing venture but expand the list beyond the present authors to include the best of dissonant writing. I want it to be an oasis against narrative, especially international narrative which is part of an attempt to get just one. One new initiative is an e-magazine; becoming eventually hard copy called ‘Trek Report’ this is to give voice for new writing of epics, in mind and on ground. The epic has gone missing mainly because of parochial and memoirist writing and the web. The existing ‘Partisan Diary’ will still be a place for the substantial olden times anti-avant garde stuff like “Cows of Freedom “ and “Thought Materials”. I will continue to campaign as I did recently by putting the Sunday Times before the press complaints committee for hate crimes against the development of genocidal absurdities like the United Nations becoming the Mid-Wife of war, the United Kingdom becoming a failed state, the restriction of rights to regime change only to Moslem countries, the development of theories of exchange in the killing of children or of moral equivalencies in chemical warfare, the fact that aid programs are designed to increase famine, the complete destruction of a sustainable planet and so on. There is a public duty after all if only to animals and very short people.
BOP: On what did you base your book 'Red the Nile, Blue the Hills'?
RR: The original idea is taken from some translations I did myself from Rimbaud’s Ethiopian poems. There was also his journal of his trip to Java which a copy of is in my family. Like all of my novels it is a road trip mainly of images. In a previous novel I took the images from false primitivist painting. In this one it is from images done by artists whose religion restricts them from representation. It is also a true story.
BOP: Many have said the poems in your Book ‘Poems from the Beak’ are bossy and didactic. Some say they are ‘know it all’. Did you do that on purpose?
RR: I would prefer that to being called Aspergers prematurely. In fact the poems are adapted from poems written in the youth of one of the characters in my novel ‘Borderline: Casebook Translations'. The book depicts several identities psychologically as they are seen by each other. It is a prequel to a Fleuve Roman. The Beak is a central character. She and the others all have casebooks published elsewhere. I contacted and visited all the characters recently, fifty years after the events to see what they were doing now. The Beak was the only one I couldn’t find. I don’t know where she is. Some of her poems won awards but she is largely forgotten. Yes she did know it all.
BOP: Another thing that is said, frankly, is that you write as though you hate readers.
RR: I have loved all the readers I have initially written for. Really. I have made many of them characters. I try to do authentic witness. To do this I write in such a way as to avoid as much usual structure and reference as I can, I don’t mean stereotypes and clichés but everything that comes with you. I write slowly when it was hot. I just want to stay on the trip and see what appears there without leaving it for some dreaming. It is hard to do honestly and keep at it no matter how simple and uncharged it is or askew with syntax. It isn’t fun. Like when I realised I had seen a twenty foot high dog in the desert and then forgotten it because I was in the midst of an argument on Literature, or what I actually did when friends were murdered. Now I am writing by going through communities and reflecting them. So the discourse is developmental. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t just processing by form. It is to get something. It requires participation a bit .
BOP: Is your writing political? Some of it seems to be a defence of gangster states. This has been read in the collection ‘Death’s Doors.’, and in some of the poetry in “One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back"
RR: No. What has been read as political is really an ironical celebration of death and banality meant to bugger it up for something nicer. The other necessary thing is that it does entirely compose an epic, a kind of Fleuve Roman in which the distances between the soul, spirit and body are getting greater. The boundaries are getting more detached. That means the connections are more intense. So it sounds as though the world is at stake. It isn’t. You’ll see this in ‘Re: The Dead Arts 'coming out soon.
BOP: Did you mean just now to disrespect Aspergers persons? That is reprehensible!
RR: My record on the question of Aspergers Syndrome is clear. I have written positively on what it would be like if Aspergers ruled the world. I have also written a factumentary called “Tim and Dorothy” which highlights an actual incidence where this was planned. The proceeds from that go to the Asperger’s Liberation Front.
BOP: so what is next for you, Richard?
RR. I will continue my publishing venture but expand the list beyond the present authors to include the best of dissonant writing. I want it to be an oasis against narrative, especially international narrative which is part of an attempt to get just one. One new initiative is an e-magazine; becoming eventually hard copy called ‘Trek Report’ this is to give voice for new writing of epics, in mind and on ground. The epic has gone missing mainly because of parochial and memoirist writing and the web. The existing ‘Partisan Diary’ will still be a place for the substantial olden times anti-avant garde stuff like “Cows of Freedom “ and “Thought Materials”. I will continue to campaign as I did recently by putting the Sunday Times before the press complaints committee for hate crimes against the development of genocidal absurdities like the United Nations becoming the Mid-Wife of war, the United Kingdom becoming a failed state, the restriction of rights to regime change only to Moslem countries, the development of theories of exchange in the killing of children or of moral equivalencies in chemical warfare, the fact that aid programs are designed to increase famine, the complete destruction of a sustainable planet and so on. There is a public duty after all if only to animals and very short people.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
qana
I propose the crushed Qana basement to be added to the album of images that endure to mark shifts of human narrative. It should be depicted with the one of the shot little brother in Soweto and the burned naked girl on that Vietnam road. But not quite Qana no. It isn't the right image exactly for there is no movement of children like in those others. The basement is collapsed and dark. The children are crushed and silent.
So pan the remembering eye rather to the storming of the Beirut UN building, to the attacking of its bullet proof glass with children's bicycle racks.
There died the illusions purchased with the blood of millions in the last century, the illusions which suggested a world where human rights were the core of governance and the illusions that solidarity would bind all communities, all peoples in peace. These illusions are dissolved into new images of smug and certain commentators, the equivalencies that say one dead child here is worth twenty dead ones there, the policy that makes war on lemon trees and old women with equal ferocity.
It is a measure of the recent degradation of the world imagination imposed universally, mainly by the United States government that all human rights (dreams) and all (fantasies of the) rules of law are now conditional. There will be no United Nations. Only one and the tribes. In fact communities are now replaced by realities of monstrous religious and ideological sectarianism organised as armed, irrational, death seeking, tribal polities. Self defence is the only way. I hate that.
And another measure of increased degradation is that a new guiltless con of destiny enjoyed with the narcotic of being a chosen elite has been resold to the American people, and to others, not as a soft golden future fable but as an ever-present grandstand cheer, a cheer illuminated by white phosphorous bombshells while babies burn on the Astroturf as the stadium sinks into the magma. The world's children must accept the game.
I swear it is easier for many to die now in a pack than to live as a human.
Let us make no mistake: imaginative changes both precede and follow real ones. And these changes are made in hell. The United States in this present avatar is in a terminal decline of mind and soul. A decline which matches its economic hysteria as its dying appetites eat themselves. The tipping point has tipped. This is a vision from no brain but from the repititious stomach fable of its right to eternal consumption.
It has deliberately degraded the world away from sense.
Qana shows that. There is no sense there. The present US wrote the script for Qana. It animated the Zionist polity it created against the Shiiite one it inspires in a rage of petulant infantilism. The US is the author of never-ending zoo games, sadism through the bars. It is now losing these games to the animals.
How did these children bring it upon themselves? The people in Beirut attacked the UN building as the idea of world peace and justice which had betrayed them, betrayed them as the Qana building collapsed onto their families. They were attacking failed reason. A dead narrative. They were attacking the senile servant who had drowned the children in the bath on instruction of the burgler. They were attacking the illusion of any solution but apocalypse.
They were revealing in their fury a world of peace only for victors, hope only for a final judgement, charity only to collect the needy for slaughter, rights to kill neighbour children, law for thieves.
They were attacking a new jungle world created by dissolution of all past coherence, a new terrible masquerade.
So pan the remembering eye rather to the storming of the Beirut UN building, to the attacking of its bullet proof glass with children's bicycle racks.
There died the illusions purchased with the blood of millions in the last century, the illusions which suggested a world where human rights were the core of governance and the illusions that solidarity would bind all communities, all peoples in peace. These illusions are dissolved into new images of smug and certain commentators, the equivalencies that say one dead child here is worth twenty dead ones there, the policy that makes war on lemon trees and old women with equal ferocity.
It is a measure of the recent degradation of the world imagination imposed universally, mainly by the United States government that all human rights (dreams) and all (fantasies of the) rules of law are now conditional. There will be no United Nations. Only one and the tribes. In fact communities are now replaced by realities of monstrous religious and ideological sectarianism organised as armed, irrational, death seeking, tribal polities. Self defence is the only way. I hate that.
And another measure of increased degradation is that a new guiltless con of destiny enjoyed with the narcotic of being a chosen elite has been resold to the American people, and to others, not as a soft golden future fable but as an ever-present grandstand cheer, a cheer illuminated by white phosphorous bombshells while babies burn on the Astroturf as the stadium sinks into the magma. The world's children must accept the game.
I swear it is easier for many to die now in a pack than to live as a human.
Let us make no mistake: imaginative changes both precede and follow real ones. And these changes are made in hell. The United States in this present avatar is in a terminal decline of mind and soul. A decline which matches its economic hysteria as its dying appetites eat themselves. The tipping point has tipped. This is a vision from no brain but from the repititious stomach fable of its right to eternal consumption.
It has deliberately degraded the world away from sense.
Qana shows that. There is no sense there. The present US wrote the script for Qana. It animated the Zionist polity it created against the Shiiite one it inspires in a rage of petulant infantilism. The US is the author of never-ending zoo games, sadism through the bars. It is now losing these games to the animals.
How did these children bring it upon themselves? The people in Beirut attacked the UN building as the idea of world peace and justice which had betrayed them, betrayed them as the Qana building collapsed onto their families. They were attacking failed reason. A dead narrative. They were attacking the senile servant who had drowned the children in the bath on instruction of the burgler. They were attacking the illusion of any solution but apocalypse.
They were revealing in their fury a world of peace only for victors, hope only for a final judgement, charity only to collect the needy for slaughter, rights to kill neighbour children, law for thieves.
They were attacking a new jungle world created by dissolution of all past coherence, a new terrible masquerade.
Friday, July 28, 2006
open letter
preliminary reading: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2271185.html
Dear Sirs,
AA Gill on Albania (Sunday times July 23) begins by criticizing an inadequate stereotype and goes on to develop it further. He is to be commended on this. I am sure he has enhanced the ease of application of cheap simplicities and superficialities to immigration policy and to policing, something the country surely needs for purposes of its security quotas. In this respect Gill has made a contribution to literature. He has also helped enhance the condition where it is as easy to fill cells as it is for him to fill his column inches. And with the same amount of thought required.
What our country needs is more myopia, hyperbole and stereotype in regards to foreign places and people. It needs simpler scapegoats. Easier ones. It needs more banal symbols and analysis.
I should have liked Gill to describe more the evolution of the gangster state in the rubbish nation he has envisioned. Did this evolution happen the same way as Glasgow's? Did it come from dragon's teeth? From the devil's breath? From inferior DNA?
There is a poor country in the present somewhere struggling to rebuild from several disasters also called Albania. It is beautiful. Its people are clever and industrious. It can hold all the contrary generalizations to mister Gill's vision and more. It is also poignant, funny and interesting. But it isn't so easy to describe those things, except thoughtfully in several dimensions, no matter how true they are.
Doctors from that country treat your children. Air traffic controllers from there guide your planes. Herbs from there sit on on your roasts. You bought their shirts in a famous shop last week. That is not even to mention Illyrians and Butrint, or an increasing compliance to EU standards, or penetrations of Chinese and Indian markets the UK might be envious of. Be afraid. Be very afraid. They could marry someone's sister in a nice way.
From The Editor, The Sunday Times Magazine
Thank you for your correspondence in reply to AA Gill's article on his visit to Albania, which appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July. Yours was not the only response and we will be publishing a representative sample of readers' letters in the newspaper this Sunday. In the meantime let me put the article in context.
The author AA Gill is widely recognised for his brand of provocative journalism and irreverent humour which he applies to a wide range of subjects; as a critic and as a commentator. He writes fearlessly impressionistic articles and although most readers recognise and are entertained by his perspective it can and does cause occasional offence to some who may not be familiar with his tone.
I can assure you that Albanians are not alone. Recently he wrote scathingly about the English: "I don't like the English; the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd. I find England and the English embarrassing." We published that too.
It wasn't the worst - he went on to describe the English in much more disparaging terms and you can imagine some people were not amused. But most were. Our readers understand in the British, a trait for critical and self-deprecating humour and enjoy it enormously. It is a part of the British identity that Gill himself summed up as "Most people share a joke, the English aim them. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon. The English teeter on the edge of not being able to take anything seriously; the ability to be solemn, appropriate, reflective. I do it myself."
It is in this spirit that Gill visited and wrote about Albania, as he has, in the past written about Wales, Germany, Scotland and other countries. What most of our readers regard as broad-brushstroke British wit some see as offensive - it is not intended as offence or indictment. Our readers are far too sensible to assume one man's view is either the truth or the reality and the reaction of the large majority is to feel encouraged to find out for themselves. It provokes awareness, investigation and appreciation.
Naturally, one cannot visit a country and write about it and not address its image or stereotypes. And since you raised concerns about Gill's references to Albania's image abroad let me put that in context too. Albania's emerging democracy and economy requires tourism. Last year 16,000 British tourists visited Albania. More will do so this year with British Airways launching scheduled flights from London and the hotel infrastructure growing. Albania's government seeks to encourage this growth.
In writing about Albania it is impossible for any writer to ignore the facts - and those facts, sadly, include many negatives of which Albania and its citizens and nationals working abroad, must be too well aware and it is not this newspaper's practise to ignore unpalatable truths. Albania is "Europe's poorest country and faces a daunting range of challenges" says the British Department for International Development which has distributed over �35million in overseas aid to the country.
Those challenges include corruption at all levels, crime, gun and drug smuggling, the trafficking of immigrants, 'sex slaves' and children. None of these are Gill's assumptions but the result of investigation and research by internationally recognised bodies including concerned Albanian citizens.
Unicef says "trafficking, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation are daily perils.�" Amnesty International reports that 40% of Albanian women are subjected to domestic violence and no specific legislation exists to protect them. The British Foreign Office advises against travel to many areas of Albania because of widespread gun ownership and crime. The US State Dept advises travellers to Albania "organised criminal gangs operate in all regions and corruption is pervasive. In most cases police assistance or protection is limited. It lists carjacking, gun crime, serious assault as serious enough to advise travellers to exercise extreme caution.
A senior Albanian academic who worked in government in Tirana has researched and referenced "the political class in Albania is generally of low quality and often involved in corruption and crime". The Centre For European Migration and Ethnic Studies has reported "the Albanian Mafia is considered the most powerful [criminal] organisation operating in Italy and that Albanians were responsible for all heroin smuggling into Switzerland and for drug trafficking into Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Belgium.
Even Mjaft, an Albanian organisation that seeks to promote and foster international appreciation of the country, listed the following information on its website; 9,000 Albanian children trafficked for prostitution (Save The Children, 2001); 250,000 weapons in circulation (UN 2003).
That Albania is working with the international community to change this climate and the perceptions it enforces does not negate the very serious issues that confront the country and those that would seek to use it as a hub for international crime, money laundering, people smuggling.
In this climate it is understandable that hard-working, educated, God-fearing and responsible Albanians are acutely sensitive to any criticism of their country and fear being stigmatised and stereotyped. I can only apologise if you are one of those who felt that The Sunday Times Magazine was attempting to discredit a nation. It was not.
Perhaps attempting to contextualise and illustrate a country and the challenges it faces while emerging from decades of oppression, by employing a writer renowned for his acerbic wit and his observations, is a useful step in increasing international appreciation of Albania's problems.
Yours sincerely
Robin Morgan
Editor
The Sunday Times Magazine
Dear Sir
I am unhappy to see that you wish not only to defend racism but also bad writing. I have sent on the basis of your response to my initial letter a complaint to the press complaints commission and they have undertaken to investigate my complaint.
What Mr. Gill wrote was in effect a hate crime. I was bemused by this your editorial response and defense by attempting an analysis of social conditions in Albania and the style of Mister Gill. I, in fact, delivered a certain amount of the aid programs in Albania beginning in1992 through 2002 as the Director of various country programs. One of the greatest difficulties I had in getting resources to address the problems you outline below was due to the public depiction of Albanian as a sub-species by what are essentially racists like Mr. Gill.
Racism is the contention that some groups of people have inherent characteristics inferior to others. It is not a rational belief. It becomes a hate crime when the racist causes others harm. It is compounded when they wish to benefit themselves. Mister Gill has made a career with it as a travel writer and a low comic. But he only picks on targets he thinks he can attack with impunity.
Your job as editor is to make sure he is not breaking the law.
Bad writing is obvious. So, incidentally, is being patronizing and spinning. My complaint is about your defense, mister editor, not about Mister Gill's infantilism.
Yours,
Richard Rathwell
Blue Orange
Dear Sirs,
AA Gill on Albania (Sunday times July 23) begins by criticizing an inadequate stereotype and goes on to develop it further. He is to be commended on this. I am sure he has enhanced the ease of application of cheap simplicities and superficialities to immigration policy and to policing, something the country surely needs for purposes of its security quotas. In this respect Gill has made a contribution to literature. He has also helped enhance the condition where it is as easy to fill cells as it is for him to fill his column inches. And with the same amount of thought required.
What our country needs is more myopia, hyperbole and stereotype in regards to foreign places and people. It needs simpler scapegoats. Easier ones. It needs more banal symbols and analysis.
I should have liked Gill to describe more the evolution of the gangster state in the rubbish nation he has envisioned. Did this evolution happen the same way as Glasgow's? Did it come from dragon's teeth? From the devil's breath? From inferior DNA?
There is a poor country in the present somewhere struggling to rebuild from several disasters also called Albania. It is beautiful. Its people are clever and industrious. It can hold all the contrary generalizations to mister Gill's vision and more. It is also poignant, funny and interesting. But it isn't so easy to describe those things, except thoughtfully in several dimensions, no matter how true they are.
Doctors from that country treat your children. Air traffic controllers from there guide your planes. Herbs from there sit on on your roasts. You bought their shirts in a famous shop last week. That is not even to mention Illyrians and Butrint, or an increasing compliance to EU standards, or penetrations of Chinese and Indian markets the UK might be envious of. Be afraid. Be very afraid. They could marry someone's sister in a nice way.
From The Editor, The Sunday Times Magazine
Thank you for your correspondence in reply to AA Gill's article on his visit to Albania, which appeared in The Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July. Yours was not the only response and we will be publishing a representative sample of readers' letters in the newspaper this Sunday. In the meantime let me put the article in context.
The author AA Gill is widely recognised for his brand of provocative journalism and irreverent humour which he applies to a wide range of subjects; as a critic and as a commentator. He writes fearlessly impressionistic articles and although most readers recognise and are entertained by his perspective it can and does cause occasional offence to some who may not be familiar with his tone.
I can assure you that Albanians are not alone. Recently he wrote scathingly about the English: "I don't like the English; the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd. I find England and the English embarrassing." We published that too.
It wasn't the worst - he went on to describe the English in much more disparaging terms and you can imagine some people were not amused. But most were. Our readers understand in the British, a trait for critical and self-deprecating humour and enjoy it enormously. It is a part of the British identity that Gill himself summed up as "Most people share a joke, the English aim them. The English constantly use their humour as an indiscriminate bludgeon. The English teeter on the edge of not being able to take anything seriously; the ability to be solemn, appropriate, reflective. I do it myself."
It is in this spirit that Gill visited and wrote about Albania, as he has, in the past written about Wales, Germany, Scotland and other countries. What most of our readers regard as broad-brushstroke British wit some see as offensive - it is not intended as offence or indictment. Our readers are far too sensible to assume one man's view is either the truth or the reality and the reaction of the large majority is to feel encouraged to find out for themselves. It provokes awareness, investigation and appreciation.
Naturally, one cannot visit a country and write about it and not address its image or stereotypes. And since you raised concerns about Gill's references to Albania's image abroad let me put that in context too. Albania's emerging democracy and economy requires tourism. Last year 16,000 British tourists visited Albania. More will do so this year with British Airways launching scheduled flights from London and the hotel infrastructure growing. Albania's government seeks to encourage this growth.
In writing about Albania it is impossible for any writer to ignore the facts - and those facts, sadly, include many negatives of which Albania and its citizens and nationals working abroad, must be too well aware and it is not this newspaper's practise to ignore unpalatable truths. Albania is "Europe's poorest country and faces a daunting range of challenges" says the British Department for International Development which has distributed over �35million in overseas aid to the country.
Those challenges include corruption at all levels, crime, gun and drug smuggling, the trafficking of immigrants, 'sex slaves' and children. None of these are Gill's assumptions but the result of investigation and research by internationally recognised bodies including concerned Albanian citizens.
Unicef says "trafficking, forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation are daily perils.�" Amnesty International reports that 40% of Albanian women are subjected to domestic violence and no specific legislation exists to protect them. The British Foreign Office advises against travel to many areas of Albania because of widespread gun ownership and crime. The US State Dept advises travellers to Albania "organised criminal gangs operate in all regions and corruption is pervasive. In most cases police assistance or protection is limited. It lists carjacking, gun crime, serious assault as serious enough to advise travellers to exercise extreme caution.
A senior Albanian academic who worked in government in Tirana has researched and referenced "the political class in Albania is generally of low quality and often involved in corruption and crime". The Centre For European Migration and Ethnic Studies has reported "the Albanian Mafia is considered the most powerful [criminal] organisation operating in Italy and that Albanians were responsible for all heroin smuggling into Switzerland and for drug trafficking into Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Belgium.
Even Mjaft, an Albanian organisation that seeks to promote and foster international appreciation of the country, listed the following information on its website; 9,000 Albanian children trafficked for prostitution (Save The Children, 2001); 250,000 weapons in circulation (UN 2003).
That Albania is working with the international community to change this climate and the perceptions it enforces does not negate the very serious issues that confront the country and those that would seek to use it as a hub for international crime, money laundering, people smuggling.
In this climate it is understandable that hard-working, educated, God-fearing and responsible Albanians are acutely sensitive to any criticism of their country and fear being stigmatised and stereotyped. I can only apologise if you are one of those who felt that The Sunday Times Magazine was attempting to discredit a nation. It was not.
Perhaps attempting to contextualise and illustrate a country and the challenges it faces while emerging from decades of oppression, by employing a writer renowned for his acerbic wit and his observations, is a useful step in increasing international appreciation of Albania's problems.
Yours sincerely
Robin Morgan
Editor
The Sunday Times Magazine
Dear Sir
I am unhappy to see that you wish not only to defend racism but also bad writing. I have sent on the basis of your response to my initial letter a complaint to the press complaints commission and they have undertaken to investigate my complaint.
What Mr. Gill wrote was in effect a hate crime. I was bemused by this your editorial response and defense by attempting an analysis of social conditions in Albania and the style of Mister Gill. I, in fact, delivered a certain amount of the aid programs in Albania beginning in1992 through 2002 as the Director of various country programs. One of the greatest difficulties I had in getting resources to address the problems you outline below was due to the public depiction of Albanian as a sub-species by what are essentially racists like Mr. Gill.
Racism is the contention that some groups of people have inherent characteristics inferior to others. It is not a rational belief. It becomes a hate crime when the racist causes others harm. It is compounded when they wish to benefit themselves. Mister Gill has made a career with it as a travel writer and a low comic. But he only picks on targets he thinks he can attack with impunity.
Your job as editor is to make sure he is not breaking the law.
Bad writing is obvious. So, incidentally, is being patronizing and spinning. My complaint is about your defense, mister editor, not about Mister Gill's infantilism.
Yours,
Richard Rathwell
Blue Orange
ultraeye redux
Ultreye,
invisible guy, I see in red silver blue
In your middle playground in a tower
broadcasting holograms and text
to our compulsory receiver
Stuccoed songbird
In a perfect cage killed by sound
Of fat, fat bomb
A split plastic train
smiling and musical
In a deep stoney hole
All rational from Ultreye
Invisible guy
invisible guy, I see in red silver blue
In your middle playground in a tower
broadcasting holograms and text
to our compulsory receiver
Stuccoed songbird
In a perfect cage killed by sound
Of fat, fat bomb
A split plastic train
smiling and musical
In a deep stoney hole
All rational from Ultreye
Invisible guy
Thursday, July 13, 2006
101st post
While me, I only believe that language is a field that has entrances from every world. I desire to find in that field ways my mind can go on journies out of the place encased.
I want witness. I want report and it is better about a kind of beauty, an image that is assembled as though for the first time true, even real. And it is in this life, connected.
I want to stay in a group playing in the field.
Don't mind the raw and jagged. The mysterious evil. The burst of blood.
There is the public work to do. The dividing of two into one. The getting out.
I want witness. I want report and it is better about a kind of beauty, an image that is assembled as though for the first time true, even real. And it is in this life, connected.
I want to stay in a group playing in the field.
Don't mind the raw and jagged. The mysterious evil. The burst of blood.
There is the public work to do. The dividing of two into one. The getting out.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
images will not be displayed
I just spoke to my one remaining political friend who suggested solutions to those missiles that theoretically could hit the United States. Theoretical weapons are a great danger to world peace. We have found this out to our cost in the last few years.
My friend pointed out that most of the anxiety in the world is caused by the United States. Such anxiety is provoking the development of theoretical weapons and the horrible consequences that follow. It is provoking hallucinations of freedom and sovereignty. It is provoking paranoia and resistance to being liberated. My friend suggested that the problem is a simple one to solve. It is only the institutions of the USA, its culture and social organisation which seem to be involved in the recent disruption, both in mind and body, in theory and practice, in the consolidation of world peace and in the quality of people’s lives. Easy peasy to solve.
The solution to this problem would be to first temporarily close the US borders to prevent egress. Then one would start a program to dissolve the United States into component parts. Vermont would be a good integrated place to dissolve into. Florida too. California also good in that sense; a self standing, sovereign, self reliant locality and narrative of California would be neat. But each new place would be very popular to its inhabitants especially to consolidate new liberated identities. Woodsman, surfer poet, peach grower, turtle racer.
The narrative of a metaphysical YouEssAy identity could be preserved. Why not? It is part of history, but only as a myth like Christianity and with many sects. There could be churches and community centres. But the troublesome institutions like the Army and NASA would be gone. The local identities could then work out new relations with each other and with the world. They could become beautiful and unique, pleasant, graceful little homelands.
The above solves the institutional problem. Next is the social problem. The main strategy in this regard is to outlaw the private ownership of weapons during the transition period. The government will issue official semi-automatic weapons to every adult before it dissolves to be used in the transition period. The last federal institution, the FBD, the Federal Bureau of Dissolution, would make any use of the official weapon except for self-defence and defence of the environment illegal. Violation is punishable by firing squad. Also illegal is the wearing of flak jackets or protective clothing for adults. All children however will be issued with flak jackets and helmets. During the transition, the constitution and legal code will be suspended. The law will consist only of a secularisation of the Ten Commandments to which “thou shalt not pollute” is added. What is left by natural selection, manifest destiny and the grape press of the Gods will be reality. The end of the bad dream.
Yes, the dream, for the cultural problem of course remains. Here the belief in the superiority of American Cliché and Stereotype and the iron narrative of manifest smugness must, temporarily, be crushed. It is a sad thing but true. The FBD will issue a list of ten most wanted clichés. This will be renewed weekly. Clichés will be taken off when eradicated and new ones added. Anyone caught sincerely using such clichés, either as a phrase or as a narrative structure, especially as a personal identity, will be exported. In the place where they find themselves they will be sold into servitude and have to learn the language, the local myths of origin and the structure of the local epic. No cheating with Gilgamesh or Rolande. We’re talking the Wagadu Chant. The funds raised from the sales of stereotypes into servitude would be used to maintain the FBD and, at the point of final dissolution, provide a souvenir album and flag to the inhabitants of the unconfederate states.
The old borders will then dissolve. Everyone would go home. A new era begins.
At last the theoretical missiles and those omnipresent, other-dimensional weapons of mass destruction, the evil doers, the nay sayers and the foreigners will have nothing to target.
There will only be the Oaks of Oregon, The Sea of Misty mountains, Walden Pond, The Green Bayous. What’s the point in targeting that?
My friend pointed out that most of the anxiety in the world is caused by the United States. Such anxiety is provoking the development of theoretical weapons and the horrible consequences that follow. It is provoking hallucinations of freedom and sovereignty. It is provoking paranoia and resistance to being liberated. My friend suggested that the problem is a simple one to solve. It is only the institutions of the USA, its culture and social organisation which seem to be involved in the recent disruption, both in mind and body, in theory and practice, in the consolidation of world peace and in the quality of people’s lives. Easy peasy to solve.
The solution to this problem would be to first temporarily close the US borders to prevent egress. Then one would start a program to dissolve the United States into component parts. Vermont would be a good integrated place to dissolve into. Florida too. California also good in that sense; a self standing, sovereign, self reliant locality and narrative of California would be neat. But each new place would be very popular to its inhabitants especially to consolidate new liberated identities. Woodsman, surfer poet, peach grower, turtle racer.
The narrative of a metaphysical YouEssAy identity could be preserved. Why not? It is part of history, but only as a myth like Christianity and with many sects. There could be churches and community centres. But the troublesome institutions like the Army and NASA would be gone. The local identities could then work out new relations with each other and with the world. They could become beautiful and unique, pleasant, graceful little homelands.
The above solves the institutional problem. Next is the social problem. The main strategy in this regard is to outlaw the private ownership of weapons during the transition period. The government will issue official semi-automatic weapons to every adult before it dissolves to be used in the transition period. The last federal institution, the FBD, the Federal Bureau of Dissolution, would make any use of the official weapon except for self-defence and defence of the environment illegal. Violation is punishable by firing squad. Also illegal is the wearing of flak jackets or protective clothing for adults. All children however will be issued with flak jackets and helmets. During the transition, the constitution and legal code will be suspended. The law will consist only of a secularisation of the Ten Commandments to which “thou shalt not pollute” is added. What is left by natural selection, manifest destiny and the grape press of the Gods will be reality. The end of the bad dream.
Yes, the dream, for the cultural problem of course remains. Here the belief in the superiority of American Cliché and Stereotype and the iron narrative of manifest smugness must, temporarily, be crushed. It is a sad thing but true. The FBD will issue a list of ten most wanted clichés. This will be renewed weekly. Clichés will be taken off when eradicated and new ones added. Anyone caught sincerely using such clichés, either as a phrase or as a narrative structure, especially as a personal identity, will be exported. In the place where they find themselves they will be sold into servitude and have to learn the language, the local myths of origin and the structure of the local epic. No cheating with Gilgamesh or Rolande. We’re talking the Wagadu Chant. The funds raised from the sales of stereotypes into servitude would be used to maintain the FBD and, at the point of final dissolution, provide a souvenir album and flag to the inhabitants of the unconfederate states.
The old borders will then dissolve. Everyone would go home. A new era begins.
At last the theoretical missiles and those omnipresent, other-dimensional weapons of mass destruction, the evil doers, the nay sayers and the foreigners will have nothing to target.
There will only be the Oaks of Oregon, The Sea of Misty mountains, Walden Pond, The Green Bayous. What’s the point in targeting that?
Monday, June 12, 2006
the purpose of the pharoah is to be divine
And I’m saying to you that writing, not just poetry or even not just writing but even language and thinking, even the mind and maybe the body too, certainly the feelings and the soul governing what the body does and the spirit which sends it all messages from the writing and language and all the rest of it outside; I’m saying all this has to be wrested and torn from the dead grasp of commercial leisure reading and spiderworked masturbatory doing, stripped out of the clichés or plundered from the box of vocabulary being pissed and dipped into with greasy fingers by every songwriter and sloganeering bullshitter; I’m saying that it should be put back into the ears and guts maybe even onto dat ol' street because we gotta break out of all this dreaming once more. Did you ever notice sweetheart that it’s the assholes at war and mayhem that make the myths from lovely Orpheus to Cowboy Joe? To cover it up and say oh my look at tragic us. But groping the pony at the same time. There’s 2000 novels a minute and a million poemz and they all spin the wheels on the beach until they connect with the otherside. I’m writing from the otherside witnessing the first Armageddon in which the divine is getting real assistance from the animals. That’s what I’m gonna do. Thats what I’m saying.
Rules of The River:
1. Only a corner, a certain limited size of great horror, can be grasped. 90 bodies, not 600. One sinking boat overloaded. Two burning cars. Stained newspaper.
2. Even then you look to dream (the wrinkled blue robes, crushed cellophane, a humming sound).
3. The purpose of the pharaoh is to be divine. To bring a logic to a rhythm, flood seasons, incest, insects and the ducks rising noiselessly above the river.
4. A sleeping dream is rational. In doing it brings an absurd logic to feelings and sensations recollected or feared. The associations are rational. It follows the laws and above the natural. It is not the real world which has broken the laws. They have rotted here.
5. All life seeks to dream, to associate itself with a new size and speed easily grasped. To encompass everything. To connect differently. To feel right through.
6. Dreaming comes faster than making sense. All the men wear armbands (they don't). My loved one is crying (no). They fired at children (but the fathers did do that).
7. Dreams collide, individuals, nations, epochs. With each other. It is a storm of dust.
8. No one can read hieroglyphics (the frauds!) or old ideograms. The new ones haven't arrived yet to be buttoned into the brain. We're detached.
9. Catch feelings and logic in a folding, speeding structure, beginning middle end, not that it is a dream explained, or death of dream let alone reality. Plot, character development, fear different sleep. Forgetting in the morning.
10. Then there is the not dream, the awake! Stunned passive or embracing dream detached. Stunned white light.
Law of Lek: everything fights back
11. Non-graspable things (as chaos). Fathers shoot children, the walls collapse on the pilgrim, non-story things outside reason —outside god-making leak from my dreams.
Rules of The River:
1. Only a corner, a certain limited size of great horror, can be grasped. 90 bodies, not 600. One sinking boat overloaded. Two burning cars. Stained newspaper.
2. Even then you look to dream (the wrinkled blue robes, crushed cellophane, a humming sound).
3. The purpose of the pharaoh is to be divine. To bring a logic to a rhythm, flood seasons, incest, insects and the ducks rising noiselessly above the river.
4. A sleeping dream is rational. In doing it brings an absurd logic to feelings and sensations recollected or feared. The associations are rational. It follows the laws and above the natural. It is not the real world which has broken the laws. They have rotted here.
5. All life seeks to dream, to associate itself with a new size and speed easily grasped. To encompass everything. To connect differently. To feel right through.
6. Dreaming comes faster than making sense. All the men wear armbands (they don't). My loved one is crying (no). They fired at children (but the fathers did do that).
7. Dreams collide, individuals, nations, epochs. With each other. It is a storm of dust.
8. No one can read hieroglyphics (the frauds!) or old ideograms. The new ones haven't arrived yet to be buttoned into the brain. We're detached.
9. Catch feelings and logic in a folding, speeding structure, beginning middle end, not that it is a dream explained, or death of dream let alone reality. Plot, character development, fear different sleep. Forgetting in the morning.
10. Then there is the not dream, the awake! Stunned passive or embracing dream detached. Stunned white light.
Law of Lek: everything fights back
11. Non-graspable things (as chaos). Fathers shoot children, the walls collapse on the pilgrim, non-story things outside reason —outside god-making leak from my dreams.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
from a bektashi cookbook
From a Baktashi cookbook:
It is amazing how you think your children are more probably doing wrong than right.
It is amazing how you think your old friends have led wasted lives.
It is amazing how you consider only silently that somehow guilt is shared.
It is amazing that you become passionately independent when others notice things you do badly.
Making dinner is to cooking as misquotation is to scholarship.
If you want to break eggs ask a tyrant for an omlette.
Farces repeat themselves, the first time is history.
Cheat: Cooking for the Distress will appear at some point in the future, published by Blue Orange Publishing.
It is amazing how you think your children are more probably doing wrong than right.
It is amazing how you think your old friends have led wasted lives.
It is amazing how you consider only silently that somehow guilt is shared.
It is amazing that you become passionately independent when others notice things you do badly.
Making dinner is to cooking as misquotation is to scholarship.
If you want to break eggs ask a tyrant for an omlette.
Farces repeat themselves, the first time is history.
Cheat: Cooking for the Distress will appear at some point in the future, published by Blue Orange Publishing.
Monday, May 29, 2006
ANNOUNCEMENT
As we approach our one hundredth post.
The texts of the short stories The Cows of Freedom and The Queen Anne House can be read in full on The Partisan Diary website, and soon the poem-of-poems Prism will be there too.
This blog is and will continue to be updated regularly. New postings will appear at least twice a week.
This blog can be read serially. Each month can represent a chapter. The idea is that it is a work in itself, a whole. There are games and contests inside which can be played.
The texts of the short stories The Cows of Freedom and The Queen Anne House can be read in full on The Partisan Diary website, and soon the poem-of-poems Prism will be there too.
This blog is and will continue to be updated regularly. New postings will appear at least twice a week.
This blog can be read serially. Each month can represent a chapter. The idea is that it is a work in itself, a whole. There are games and contests inside which can be played.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
hay
I am just returned from the Hay literary festival. This is a yearly event in deep rural Wales that someone called 'The Woodstock of the Mind'. What nonsense. It's better. Really.
The festival is sponsored by the review section of a London newspaper, the dissident TV station and several publishers. Thousands and thousands go. All are readers who have travelled to this idyllic place to discuss good thought about real things, watch and discuss timely films and catch up with thinking. The programme goes for two weeks with films, seminars,and discussions on everything from of the damn war through Savonarola to Dorritos. The village it is held in has the greatest number of bookstores to population on the planet.
I have lately disliked most things. But...I got charmed. Some of it selfishly.
At one point the streets were filled with those reading my books. I was asked both to sign and to explain my views and stance. At one point I sat al fresco in a pub garden while a tattooed lady conducted people to come and meet me. She read passages to great effect to others. I had never seen her before. Nice.
I realized that I liked mind stuff and wanted to write to exchange thought and didn't dislike readers so much after all. Felt better. Images stood up ok. I felt restored. This for its own sake.
I stayed at night a few miles away in a tiny village in a little stone and beam miners' pub that spoke five languages till dawn about words and sustenance, next to a lake you expected Excalibur from.
Wished you were there. Next year I think I will rent that corner of the pub garden for a week and have a tiny organized fringe festival of me and friends and/or their books. I think a hundred academics and reviewers walked by every second. There were book clubs in clumps. We were all so sincere. Several commented I looked like a nice person. Want in for next year? The time is right and world is waiting. I'm serious. I know a way to ace it. I'm serious.
I signed books for lady bishops and Australian gangsters. And that wasn't all.
I moved 300 like a knife through butter. I ran out. And I learned things and told great internal jokes about the chattering classes and those who tour them. And I thought of us guys. I do wish you had been there. I thought of you.
The festival is sponsored by the review section of a London newspaper, the dissident TV station and several publishers. Thousands and thousands go. All are readers who have travelled to this idyllic place to discuss good thought about real things, watch and discuss timely films and catch up with thinking. The programme goes for two weeks with films, seminars,and discussions on everything from of the damn war through Savonarola to Dorritos. The village it is held in has the greatest number of bookstores to population on the planet.
I have lately disliked most things. But...I got charmed. Some of it selfishly.
At one point the streets were filled with those reading my books. I was asked both to sign and to explain my views and stance. At one point I sat al fresco in a pub garden while a tattooed lady conducted people to come and meet me. She read passages to great effect to others. I had never seen her before. Nice.
I realized that I liked mind stuff and wanted to write to exchange thought and didn't dislike readers so much after all. Felt better. Images stood up ok. I felt restored. This for its own sake.
I stayed at night a few miles away in a tiny village in a little stone and beam miners' pub that spoke five languages till dawn about words and sustenance, next to a lake you expected Excalibur from.
Wished you were there. Next year I think I will rent that corner of the pub garden for a week and have a tiny organized fringe festival of me and friends and/or their books. I think a hundred academics and reviewers walked by every second. There were book clubs in clumps. We were all so sincere. Several commented I looked like a nice person. Want in for next year? The time is right and world is waiting. I'm serious. I know a way to ace it. I'm serious.
I signed books for lady bishops and Australian gangsters. And that wasn't all.
I moved 300 like a knife through butter. I ran out. And I learned things and told great internal jokes about the chattering classes and those who tour them. And I thought of us guys. I do wish you had been there. I thought of you.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
from eden
Eve
Father,
I hate the sound of children on my grass
under stars on holy night
and the neighbours hearing them.
I hate them outside
turning on and off lights
when they are not there.
Father,
I gave lovely ones gifts and dreams
of my redemption so they wouldn't
speak of sins and believe.
They don't
Mother,
I am the only child,
of the only family.
There will never be enough
compensation for
death.
translated into Japanese
イブの父、
私は神聖な夜の星およびそれらを聞いている隣人の下で私の草の子供の音を憎む。
私はそこにないときそれらを不規則なライトを回す外側憎む。
父は、私は美しい物に私の買戻しのギフトそして夢を与えた従って罪の話さなかったし、信じない。それらは
母は、私はグループだけの一人っ子、である。決して死のための十分な補償がない。
translated into English
The father of eve, I the star of the holy night
Hate the sound of
the child of grass.
I hate the neighbour who inquires.
I hate when there is no-one there
And those outside turning the irregular
light to write.
As for the father, as for me,
I gave the gift and dream of my redemption to beautiful ones
And therefore dream the crime that you did not speak
And that does not believe.
As for those all, and as for the mother,
As for me the one person, as for the child just of the gathering,
Ever there is insufficient compensation
For death.
Father,
I hate the sound of children on my grass
under stars on holy night
and the neighbours hearing them.
I hate them outside
turning on and off lights
when they are not there.
Father,
I gave lovely ones gifts and dreams
of my redemption so they wouldn't
speak of sins and believe.
They don't
Mother,
I am the only child,
of the only family.
There will never be enough
compensation for
death.
translated into Japanese
イブの父、
私は神聖な夜の星およびそれらを聞いている隣人の下で私の草の子供の音を憎む。
私はそこにないときそれらを不規則なライトを回す外側憎む。
父は、私は美しい物に私の買戻しのギフトそして夢を与えた従って罪の話さなかったし、信じない。それらは
母は、私はグループだけの一人っ子、である。決して死のための十分な補償がない。
translated into English
The father of eve, I the star of the holy night
Hate the sound of
the child of grass.
I hate the neighbour who inquires.
I hate when there is no-one there
And those outside turning the irregular
light to write.
As for the father, as for me,
I gave the gift and dream of my redemption to beautiful ones
And therefore dream the crime that you did not speak
And that does not believe.
As for those all, and as for the mother,
As for me the one person, as for the child just of the gathering,
Ever there is insufficient compensation
For death.
Monday, May 15, 2006
i gave up narrative
Now I will have to be thoughtful and get syntax.
I have been making notes on depiction as dream, as opposed to description as only theory, a word sequence not quite accounting for the complexity and otherness of real things (let alone the supernatural). I think however dreaming can end; end in situations which can be depicted in image and sound. And that is something!
I think that depiction can move to depiction like situation to situation does or can do.
I think dreaming can end, in life as well. With some dreams this is a real good thing.
Thought interests me. Image does more. Reality enlivens. All seems useful.
Now science, guys, is only a narrative to account for observed phenomena in patterns. Like all narratives it must be delusionary. Especially with its laws. That's what makes it work as a narrative. For people who only have limited senses and experience which is only supra molecular.
I think ideology caps living movement. It redirects it to dead self. Dying a lie in thought, memory and deed.
We were in a narrative, it suited our motivation and construction of self to do that kind of pretending. I agree that we sought a finish of things. A final narrative strain.
Then, accumulatively, as a pretending dreaming it was inadequate. I argue it was for the mind and soul, for capture of image.
I gave up narrative all together or mostly. I started lusting for places and words about places.
That stuff not only was inadequate for soul and gnosis, it sure was inadequate for defence of the nation and social advancement of humanity. Didn't hold much romance neither.
Let alone theory derived from practice, (so-called) economic science, even statistical interpretation and no prophecy, no cultural redemption, just shit, less than delusion. No vision derived from practice, even cowardly practice. No depiction, no prediction, no diction.
I believe that really no-one had any doubt about the real, about the Narcisstic personality disorder, the cant and the brutality. And the other racial, continental narrative.
Lenin capped a revolution which was a good idea that the people had. Land Peace Bread. So did Mao, he capped and distorted a simple fundamental desire for living to match his own appetites. But at least that revolution began as real. Stalin was a pure fantasist. The people had no revolution, no idea. They tried to work for a living and he moved them about from cradle to grave in blocks. No idea but his own. No science but his own narrative.
Marx did some depiction and some prediction. Bit of a chancer.
I dragged Mao here and asked him is ideological movement necessary before objective change? Are there two lines amongst people? He agreed it didn't seem so. I asked Stalin about the socialism in one country and culture being for all classes. I asked why when his army was destroyed and people were being butchered he reacted by thinking he had not purged enough otherthinkers and ordered a counterattack. Why the purges, why state farms, why is it now? He apologized. I asked Marx about his inferior races, the superiority of a manual class for generating new ideas,and why he got drunk in Camberwell. I asked him about party norms, committees and inclusive fora, about internationals I asked about dictatorship, about two lines and science. I asked about negation of the negation (say what!). He said oops but seemed confused. He said why am I here?
That's what I said too.
I have been making notes on depiction as dream, as opposed to description as only theory, a word sequence not quite accounting for the complexity and otherness of real things (let alone the supernatural). I think however dreaming can end; end in situations which can be depicted in image and sound. And that is something!
I think that depiction can move to depiction like situation to situation does or can do.
I think dreaming can end, in life as well. With some dreams this is a real good thing.
Thought interests me. Image does more. Reality enlivens. All seems useful.
Now science, guys, is only a narrative to account for observed phenomena in patterns. Like all narratives it must be delusionary. Especially with its laws. That's what makes it work as a narrative. For people who only have limited senses and experience which is only supra molecular.
I think ideology caps living movement. It redirects it to dead self. Dying a lie in thought, memory and deed.
We were in a narrative, it suited our motivation and construction of self to do that kind of pretending. I agree that we sought a finish of things. A final narrative strain.
Then, accumulatively, as a pretending dreaming it was inadequate. I argue it was for the mind and soul, for capture of image.
I gave up narrative all together or mostly. I started lusting for places and words about places.
That stuff not only was inadequate for soul and gnosis, it sure was inadequate for defence of the nation and social advancement of humanity. Didn't hold much romance neither.
Let alone theory derived from practice, (so-called) economic science, even statistical interpretation and no prophecy, no cultural redemption, just shit, less than delusion. No vision derived from practice, even cowardly practice. No depiction, no prediction, no diction.
I believe that really no-one had any doubt about the real, about the Narcisstic personality disorder, the cant and the brutality. And the other racial, continental narrative.
Lenin capped a revolution which was a good idea that the people had. Land Peace Bread. So did Mao, he capped and distorted a simple fundamental desire for living to match his own appetites. But at least that revolution began as real. Stalin was a pure fantasist. The people had no revolution, no idea. They tried to work for a living and he moved them about from cradle to grave in blocks. No idea but his own. No science but his own narrative.
Marx did some depiction and some prediction. Bit of a chancer.
I dragged Mao here and asked him is ideological movement necessary before objective change? Are there two lines amongst people? He agreed it didn't seem so. I asked Stalin about the socialism in one country and culture being for all classes. I asked why when his army was destroyed and people were being butchered he reacted by thinking he had not purged enough otherthinkers and ordered a counterattack. Why the purges, why state farms, why is it now? He apologized. I asked Marx about his inferior races, the superiority of a manual class for generating new ideas,and why he got drunk in Camberwell. I asked him about party norms, committees and inclusive fora, about internationals I asked about dictatorship, about two lines and science. I asked about negation of the negation (say what!). He said oops but seemed confused. He said why am I here?
That's what I said too.
projection
Projection
projection not of
will but spirit
shrapnel in cloudy
haunting,
animating objects in
a new way, not
by memory but by
artefact generating life
or freeing it in bursts from
dead hands, false stories,
dead ends, evil minds and dimensional time
making a surprise
opening a secret door
keeping a broken promise
in your blue jar
what spirit?
made by life, borrowed from life,
consumed by
senses refined and stored by minds,
projected
by creativity and imagination
motivated by love
triumphant ever
banality and death.
a simple thing, photos,
garden, book, ring,
not a cross
or albatross.
spit in face
of those for whom others
have never been a motivation but only
own anxious image
and desperate resentful
holy gratification
in the air.
'Projection' is a poem from an unpublished collection.
projection not of
will but spirit
shrapnel in cloudy
haunting,
animating objects in
a new way, not
by memory but by
artefact generating life
or freeing it in bursts from
dead hands, false stories,
dead ends, evil minds and dimensional time
making a surprise
opening a secret door
keeping a broken promise
in your blue jar
what spirit?
made by life, borrowed from life,
consumed by
senses refined and stored by minds,
projected
by creativity and imagination
motivated by love
triumphant ever
banality and death.
a simple thing, photos,
garden, book, ring,
not a cross
or albatross.
spit in face
of those for whom others
have never been a motivation but only
own anxious image
and desperate resentful
holy gratification
in the air.
'Projection' is a poem from an unpublished collection.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
'Tim and Dorothy' excerpt
The best time with Tim was in the field of wild grass they had found on an abandoned farm near where Tim’s dad was painting the cottage. The first time they saw it they got off their bikes and began right away to walk sideways into the field sliding their feet together tight on the ground. This made a path through the centre of the field in the grass. Then they made a path just inside the edges. The next time they went they made a diagonal path and a winding circular one. As they slid along side by side they released clouds of tiny insects. Birds circled above them.
They made more and more paths as the summer went on. By the end of summer the grass had grown above their heads and the paths were waving tunnels. The floor of the paths shone wet in dark brown and smelt like molasses.
Their game was to chase each other. The idea was to calculate where the other would go and to catch them where the paths crossed. They would calculate whether the other would run in a ‘W’ or a ‘Pi’. When they met they would laugh and wrestle and then run off again. They did it all summer in that summer before kissing started.
Once Tim had wanted her to pretend she was the Grand Inca and he was Pissaro. That game didn’t last long, it just wasn’t right. She thought it was because Tim knew that the Incas were terrified of the Spaniards who negotiated the destinies of the dead with God in prayer instead of just leaving them. They also killed everything they saw for gold. The Incas could not get their minds to accept that; they thought war should be a beautiful dance of heroes watched by singing women. They loved the dead, especially the ones they ate the hearts of. When she saw Tim thinking that, she knew the game would stop. Another time Tim wanted them to be grasshoppers and ants but that was too difficult. The best was to run and catch, run and catch and run off again another way.
'Tim and Dorothy' is an upcoming novel from Blue Orange Publishing.
They made more and more paths as the summer went on. By the end of summer the grass had grown above their heads and the paths were waving tunnels. The floor of the paths shone wet in dark brown and smelt like molasses.
Their game was to chase each other. The idea was to calculate where the other would go and to catch them where the paths crossed. They would calculate whether the other would run in a ‘W’ or a ‘Pi’. When they met they would laugh and wrestle and then run off again. They did it all summer in that summer before kissing started.
Once Tim had wanted her to pretend she was the Grand Inca and he was Pissaro. That game didn’t last long, it just wasn’t right. She thought it was because Tim knew that the Incas were terrified of the Spaniards who negotiated the destinies of the dead with God in prayer instead of just leaving them. They also killed everything they saw for gold. The Incas could not get their minds to accept that; they thought war should be a beautiful dance of heroes watched by singing women. They loved the dead, especially the ones they ate the hearts of. When she saw Tim thinking that, she knew the game would stop. Another time Tim wanted them to be grasshoppers and ants but that was too difficult. The best was to run and catch, run and catch and run off again another way.
'Tim and Dorothy' is an upcoming novel from Blue Orange Publishing.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Red the Nile, Blue the Hills excerpt: the storm
The sound of the explosion was muffled by a heavy squall of sand and dust blowing down from the desert into the city. The storm had continued for several days gusting with the highest wind speeds measured by the weather ministry since records had begun. In the suburbs, old gnarled trees had fallen onto cars parked on the boulevards. One had fallen through the window of a jewellery shop, which was then looted.
The fallen trees were used in café arguments to illustrate that this storm was the worst ever of all the storms that had ever come in this week, in this season, from any year. The trees had been on the boulevard since the time of the Ptolemys. It must be a sign.
Dust and sand from the storm lay a centimetre thick on the street where the engineer lay crushed. Eddies and tiny whirlwinds spun from around where the heavy lid had fallen. There were muddy pools around the steel.
The winter winds had been born in the central desert; there they divided into spinning arms each hundreds of miles long. The weakest scythed into West Africa attracted by pressure troughs in the Atlantic. In Nigeria they became the dirty, dry, maddening, endlessly blowing Harmattan. The strongest arms broke away, rotated, divided and then divided again to spin across the desert north to Cairo in a chaos of gust and squall.
From southern Assuit to Cairo many of the winds spilled down from the desert plateau into the narrow valley cut by the Nile. From over the rooftops in Cairo they descended into the streets in moaning pulses that exploded on the ground into torrents of fine, dry, drenching sand that instantly covered the oven lid, transforming it to a brown mound.
From Cairo, the winds bubbled on across the delta to swirl over the sea. When they reached the beaches, the winds quickened, passing over the waves as beige and yellow clouds. As the clouds rose, hammers of clear air smashed into the sea mist. Some of the squalls bounced on the pressure and incoming sea breezes to return to shore in small wet furies.
The weather caused wild wave patterns down the Nile. From Assuit through to the delta and to the sea feluccas and tourist boats were rocked. On the Mediterranean into the Ionian Sea the waves were tumultuous at the mouths of the small harbours and bays. In Albania they blew from the port of Vlora over the mountain passes to Gramsch.
In Egypt trailing gusts drove the surfaces of marshes, lagoons and wetlands over coastal roads and into delta towns. The windowless cement hut in Raz El Bar where the dead engineer had holidayed before he retired was flooded. The waters left patterns of shards of cracked shells on the street in front of it. The road to the hut was littered with heaps of rubbish and piles of dead birds woven with reeds and small stones.
The evening before, the only fishing boat that had risked a trip out from the port of Raz El Bar had difficulty threading the narrow opening between concrete abutments to get back into the harbour. It surfed in high on the swells from the deep water, its hold empty, moving sideways until turning sharply, almost at right angles just as it reached the narrow harbour entrance. The boat hovered there an instant, seemingly on the spray and in the sky. It then jerked itself around, turning, keeling over, and knifed in close to tipping, with its masts at acute angles to the sea. The boat righted at the last moment, hurled into the calm inner harbour on a dying wave, scraping its sides on the jetty behind the seawall.
Red the Nile, Blue the Hills is published by Blue Orange Publishing.
The fallen trees were used in café arguments to illustrate that this storm was the worst ever of all the storms that had ever come in this week, in this season, from any year. The trees had been on the boulevard since the time of the Ptolemys. It must be a sign.
Dust and sand from the storm lay a centimetre thick on the street where the engineer lay crushed. Eddies and tiny whirlwinds spun from around where the heavy lid had fallen. There were muddy pools around the steel.
The winter winds had been born in the central desert; there they divided into spinning arms each hundreds of miles long. The weakest scythed into West Africa attracted by pressure troughs in the Atlantic. In Nigeria they became the dirty, dry, maddening, endlessly blowing Harmattan. The strongest arms broke away, rotated, divided and then divided again to spin across the desert north to Cairo in a chaos of gust and squall.
From southern Assuit to Cairo many of the winds spilled down from the desert plateau into the narrow valley cut by the Nile. From over the rooftops in Cairo they descended into the streets in moaning pulses that exploded on the ground into torrents of fine, dry, drenching sand that instantly covered the oven lid, transforming it to a brown mound.
From Cairo, the winds bubbled on across the delta to swirl over the sea. When they reached the beaches, the winds quickened, passing over the waves as beige and yellow clouds. As the clouds rose, hammers of clear air smashed into the sea mist. Some of the squalls bounced on the pressure and incoming sea breezes to return to shore in small wet furies.
The weather caused wild wave patterns down the Nile. From Assuit through to the delta and to the sea feluccas and tourist boats were rocked. On the Mediterranean into the Ionian Sea the waves were tumultuous at the mouths of the small harbours and bays. In Albania they blew from the port of Vlora over the mountain passes to Gramsch.
In Egypt trailing gusts drove the surfaces of marshes, lagoons and wetlands over coastal roads and into delta towns. The windowless cement hut in Raz El Bar where the dead engineer had holidayed before he retired was flooded. The waters left patterns of shards of cracked shells on the street in front of it. The road to the hut was littered with heaps of rubbish and piles of dead birds woven with reeds and small stones.
The evening before, the only fishing boat that had risked a trip out from the port of Raz El Bar had difficulty threading the narrow opening between concrete abutments to get back into the harbour. It surfed in high on the swells from the deep water, its hold empty, moving sideways until turning sharply, almost at right angles just as it reached the narrow harbour entrance. The boat hovered there an instant, seemingly on the spray and in the sky. It then jerked itself around, turning, keeling over, and knifed in close to tipping, with its masts at acute angles to the sea. The boat righted at the last moment, hurled into the calm inner harbour on a dying wave, scraping its sides on the jetty behind the seawall.
Red the Nile, Blue the Hills is published by Blue Orange Publishing.
Monday, April 24, 2006
holiday
Holiday
Inside
Outside
A decline.
of fashionable successions
of colourful sterotypes
of decaying monuments
of unageing intellect
none could tell the end of it
in the world
never being
so much booty, samite robes veir,
choicest things,
large women and eunuchs
wicked
curves of swords shortened
cowering Platonic
academics hiding ‘til
Lucretia is born
A time since you paced the boundaries
Under an image
Blazoned in the sky.
Inside
Outside
A decline.
of fashionable successions
of colourful sterotypes
of decaying monuments
of unageing intellect
none could tell the end of it
in the world
never being
so much booty, samite robes veir,
choicest things,
large women and eunuchs
wicked
curves of swords shortened
cowering Platonic
academics hiding ‘til
Lucretia is born
A time since you paced the boundaries
Under an image
Blazoned in the sky.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
some desire
Some Desire
some desire to
live through
Armageddon
to predict it
obsessive stress
of god, not world but
the moving
black priest in a crowd
dust billowing
over the plateau
muddy rain.
some desire to
live through
Armageddon
to predict it
obsessive stress
of god, not world but
the moving
black priest in a crowd
dust billowing
over the plateau
muddy rain.
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