February 2012
1 post
1 tag
Let Ahimaaz rejoice with the Silver-Worm who is a...
Ecstatic poem, annotated, call-&-response.
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
4 posts
3 tags
Proposal for two new verbs
Faced with institutional pressure to sign off on violent reaction, to side with power against justice, the great majority of self-styled radicals ‘working within the system’ quan. A very few, though, have the guts to fraser.
Gilad Schalit is showing signs of malnutrition. What have his captors done to him? Such shocking revelations must mean fresh scrutiny of those who have held him.
How could it not? What kind of power, after all, would deliberately starve even the youngest captives, according to chillingly cynical calorifico-political calculation, as a matter of publicly stated policy?
Advertising standards
Butter. Because natives won’t exterminate themselves.
September 2011
3 posts
Enthusing over the delicious taste of strawberries...
Delicious jam:
Gaddafi himself has on occasion cut a rather comical figure, with his eccentric dress sense and insistence on greeting dignatories in a desert tent…
…the eccentric colonel, where some wonder if he may now make his last stand. There he would hold court in a huge Bedouin tent…
…eccentric tendencies. He dressed flamboyantly, insisted on sleeping in a...
August 2011
8 posts
Celebrity to Asians - well done you on the...
More incisive politics from one of the UK’s most fêted writers.
The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?”
...
Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.
Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief.
Of course it would be pigs.
Praeteritio & political priorities
(Parenthetically, just as a muttered aside, pootling around online, swallowing bile, following links to those who, popping the collars on their threadbare contrarianism, foppishly defend primetime white supremacism, one grows tempted - sorely fucking tempted - to articulate a position whereby hate for them is the indispensable political grundnorm. But we must keep perspective. It would be a waste...
There has been universal condemnation of David Starkey’s extraordinary outburst on Newsnight, in which he blamed Jews, or ‘a culture of Jewry’, for Britain’s woes.
‘I’ve just been rereading Julius Streicher. … His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense. … But it wasn’t Jew-on-Gentile violence. … What has happened is that a...
Smash, Grab, Run
Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant...
July 2011
5 posts
2 tags
The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous certainties of Islamic savagery crumble in the face of mere truth. The efforts to continue to apportion blame where all blame must lie have been fervent but disappointing. The attempt to defend Breivik as a paladin of The West displays a regrettable lack of savoir faire: one may indulge such strategies, but one...
Elements
The earth elemental manifested in a form combining indolence & destruction. Even its evicted victim had to say well played.
Static, or what scientists term ‘poised’, fire.
In the pugilist science created to beat up the air, kerchiefs loosely tied serve roughly the same purpose as boxing gloves. Injuries to the fists are, nonetheless, common.
The - not silver! - lining to the tragedy is transmutation. That such-&-such a place is ‘paved with gold’ is bastardised gibberish of course; but it is a folk-memory of alchemico-urban aspiration. Sufficient footfall does render a surface potent. Streets become alembics. Most matter remains stubbornly not-gold, but minor alterations are feasible. Dead favourites, for example,...
June 2011
4 posts
1 tag
France to Women: 'You're Welcome.'
An Algerian man’s Bad Sexism precludes him from qualifying for French citizenship. ‘[H]is idea of sexual equality is not that of the republic’. Hurrah for the French state! One feels certain this man’s sexism had a kind of Muslimness to it, rather than displaying any fidelity to long-protected Republican traditions of ‘machismo … sexual predat[ion] …...
many places where, during the night, that thing slouching, inevitably, towards Bethlehem, rested en route, leaned on mesh that at a squint has something of the hammock or trampoline about it, leaving what-rough-beast impressions as if invisible trees have fallen
In 2011, the British Con-Dem coalition government imposed massive cuts to public spending, ostensibly to reduce the national deficit. The funding shortfalls produced by this austerity programme were to be met by opening up essential public services –schools, hospitals, universities, hospitals, libraries, and so on – to corporate investment and, where the profitability was likely too be too small...
May 2011
18 posts
Most irritating of all after the interventions of knights is the debris of the defeated.
This city is a fucking scree of dead parts.
If our spans, like antique notebooks’, were contained by endpapers! Two, three days before a baby is born, a great flat page appearing in the prepared room, by the crib, silent, intently examined by parents-to-be. They strive to parse patterns. They might smile guardedly at gilt filigrees & pleasing coloured stock, wince at ogees or particular paisleys, seeing troubled adolescence.
...
1 tag
Farewell to the Working Class
Bold & provocative Gorzian sociological taxonomy showcases Africa’s burgeoning middle class.
Like, you know, waiters, & workers in phone shops, & hat shops, & a supermarket. All those middle-class people, sashaying around on their $2/day.
So many reports. So many questions.
1 tag
We Need to Talk about Coleman
‘One of the people I would consider a public intellectual, for example, is David Coleman. He’s a demographer. And he’s written some very brave analysis of immigration to Britain. Some of his ideas are growing more acceptable to give voice to: asking the hard questions about what is a country, what is a culture? And he was writing about this kind of material when multiculturalism...
Penultimate page of Batman Year Minus One.
Inadvertently printed without text boxes.
Dignity
It’s good form, when the evidence goes your way, to be the bigger person. To Told-You-So, if you must, with calm restraint. Perhaps even, if your interlocutor has been punished as you predicted, to show melancholy, to shake the head more in sorrow than in anger, &c. We who predicted that their complicity with the wholly unnecessary mendacious disaster-celebrating malevolent economic...
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
‘[T]he laughter that shattered … all the familiar landmarks of thought’ cohabits with the quotidian bureaucracies of monetized taxonomy.
April 2011
18 posts
1 tag
Oh, my dear, you didn’t?
You thought...
Marley & Me (Spoilers!)
Thing & Thing at the start.
A movie ’about’ Growing Up & The Passage of Time in which more than a decade goes by & nothing ages but the moribund dog.
Thing & Thing at the end.
Simpering pantomimes of caninophilia are vampiric animal-despising thuggery. Here is dreamed a universe in which pets are batteries, dutiful padding life-reservoirs from which humans...
