May 2012
56 posts
Here at last - the first of the new Echo Room.
Available at £7.50 (includes postage) from Pighog Press (www.pighog.co.uk). Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Did Iranian troops take part in the Houla...
Iran has admitted that it has sent troops to Syria to help Assad. Is it possible that they played some part in the massacre at Houla? Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Cameron's dither and swither. U-turn after U-turn.
Political blogger Guido Fawkes lists the current administration’s policy u-turns, including the latest pasty and caravan tax climbdowns. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Mugabe to sign the golden book of tourism. Long...
The UN has long been a joke of obese proportions, so it’s no suprise it has appointed Mugabe as one of its tourism ambassadors. Yes, tourism ambassador, from that famous tourist-magnet, Zimbabwe, land of murdered white farmers and brutalised black serfs. Much like that other delusional institution, the EU, the UN has numerous agencies by which to flatter itself that it plays an important...
The highjacking of human rights by the progressive...
Why the UK Commission on a Bill of Rights is a progressive scam to “protect the HRA and the Strasbourg court” and thus reduce further what’s left of our national sovereignty. No suprise, then, that the LibDems are at the forefront of the exercise. Michael Pinto-Duschinksy, formerly a member of the Commission, explains what is going on. Posted via email from Michael...
Greeks devise alternative currency to survive.
The inhabitants of the Greek town of Volos have devised their own currency to get them through the diffucult times. The reporter in the BBC clip talks about “barter” - which it isn’t - this is the use of a medium of exchage, ie money. It’s just that it isn’t “official” money. Good luck to them, I say. There’s also an article from The New York...
Attracting cows with an alphorn.
Don’t ask. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Paul Fussell and the use of irony as emotional...
The Fortnightly Review draw attention to a interesting interview with Paul Fussell, who died the other day. Fussell makes a case for the disillusion of the Great War as a major impulse towards the ironic mode in literature: It protects one from emotional openness which might destroy or just weaken one, and it turns the experience toward intellect and away from emotion. I learned that by my...
Police tell Greeks not to withdraw money from...
Police are urging Greeks to keep their money in bank accounts rather than putting it at risk of theft, the Guardian reports. Greece’s banks are likely to be shored up on Friday or Monday with €18bn of bailout funds. Almost 25% of deposits have been taken out from Greek banks. via euobserver.com Next step will be to stop people taking large amounts out of their accounts. The step...
RIP Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory.
Paul Fussell, literary critic and author of the influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, has died, aged 88. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
UK energy prices will rise because of green...
That’s what the energy minister Ed Davey has warned. Not really a surprise when you close down coal-fired stations with nothing to replace them. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Peking, Bombay, Calcutta. Also feet, inches and...
Alan Massie in The Telegraph: “Why shouldn’t we call it Peking?” To which I would add: why not inches, feet, yards and miles, and all those other things some people are changing for us? Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Lincoln University in Guardian's top 50.
From The Lincolnite. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
E-books, paper books and Waterstones without an...
Tom Chivers - “Another chapter in the rise of the e-book”. The answer? Both. As to the future of the traditional bookshop I judge it from my own experience: I buy most of my books via Amazon (mainly Marketplace sellers), although I shall be going into my local Waterstones to order a copy of Marked for Death by Geert Wilders, which for some reason is not available on Amazon UK except...
Social mobility, objective potential, Seven Up,...
Deputy PM Nick Clegg delivered a speech to the Sutton Trust on social mobility. This gave him plenty of opportunity to display the utter pointlessness of his own expensive education. Using the “reference to popular media to prove how in touch I am with ordinary folk” ploy, he refers to the Up series: “There can be few more powerful illustrations of just how divided our society...
Monbiot out-lefted by Chomsky: the Genocide...
George Monbiot seems to be having a little crisis of faith with regard to one of his heroes, Noam Chomsky, over the subject of genocide. The original exchange between them is on Monbiot’s website. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Watch the webcast of the launch of Falcon 9.
Spacex launch of Falcon 9 to launch today (after aborted launch on Saturday). Watch it live. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Iran is committed to the annihilation of Israel.
Just in case you weren’t clear about Iran’s intentions (which are also those of Hamas and Hezbollah): their Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces “stressed that the Iranian nation will remain committed to the full annihilation of the Zionist regime of Israel…the full annihilation of Israel”. Perhaps the UN should send them on an equality and diversity course. ...
Cameron. Football. You ponce.
(Photo: Peter Souza) Ed West expresses a similar contempt as I have for the faux-prole politicos and media classes who go on about the bloody game as if it endows them with some sort of authenticity. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
The Lincolnshire sausage fight back.
The Lincolnshire Sausage Association intends to fight back against the dastardly DEFRA’s decision to block application for specil status. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Waterstones is a "curated" bookshop - does deal...
Having recently criticised Amazon for being unbearably successful, James Daunt, head of Waterstones, has “signed a commercial agreement with Amazon to launch new e-reading services and offer Kindle digital devices through its UK shops.” He described Waterstones as a “curated bookshop”, whatever that is. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s...
Lots of bad in Badiou.
Norman Geras makes the following point in his blog: From a piece on Alain Badiou in yesterday’s Graun: Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a “fossil of the 60s and 70s”, but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for...
Brighton launch of The Echo Room.
Via Pighog Press, news of the Brighton launch of Brendan Cleary’s classic poetry mag, The Echo Room, 25 May. I’ll be posting details of the London launch, at which I’ll be reading, as soon as I have them. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Why do mass murderers like poetry?
I don’t know what it is but there’s a bit of a tradition of killers and despots writing the stuff: Stalin: wrote some much-anthologised pieces before he gave it all up for repression and genocide. Mao: the Chairman wrote some quite decent stuff, though he saved his real talents for repression and mass murder. Karadzic: Bosnian Serb leader who liked to knock out a few verses while...
Saudi Arabia bans Gregorian (ie international)...
Saudi Arabia, leading light in international human rights and female emancipation, etc, etc, has banned the use of the Gregorian calendar and the English language in government departments. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Greenaway: escaping the confines of narrative.
More info at OpenCulture. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Creative apprentice with Writing East Midlands...
If you’re interested in this, get your application in now. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
German Finance Minister wants European "political...
German Finance Minister calls for ‘political union’ in Europe. The German Finance Minister can fuck off. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
The tyranny of those who know what's best for you.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their...
University students spend no more time with...
from the Guardian: University students in England spend almost no more time with their lecturers than they did six years ago, despite paying three times as much in tuition fees, a study has shown. A poll of more than 9,000 students by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that first- and second-year undergraduates have, on average, 13.9 hours of timetabled tutorials, seminars and...
Give us the Queen, say Jamaicans.
via The Gleaner (Jamaica): Jamaicans believe island would have been better off under British rule. With Jamaica getting ready to celebrate 50 years of political independence from the United Kingdom next year, most Jamaicans are of the view that the country would have been better off had it remained a colony of Britain. Pollster Bill Johnson, who, on May 28 and 29 and June 4 and 5, conducted...
May fire and brimstone fall on DEFRA for this!
Lincolnshire sausage protection bid butchered! Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Attention all young poets - Tower Poetry Summer...
Details of this year’s Tower Poetry Summer School are available here. If you’re between 18 and 23 you can apply for this residential course. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
RIP Carlos Fuentes, 1928 - 2012.
Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes, has died at the age of 83. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Bob Stanley interviews the fabulous Brian Matthew.
Bob Stanley of St Etienne interviews Brian Matthew, the veteran broadcaster. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
When being un-PC can lose you your job. Riley and...
Naomi Scheafer Riley recently got sacked from The Chronicle of Higher Education in the US for being critical of Black Studies in her blog (“The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies: Just Read the Dissertations”) . Looking at the titles of some recent dissertations she described them as “a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap”. That’s a...
Sorry, George, but the nuclear family has been...
Sometimes you wonder about the mental state of some people when they produce such confections of half-truths and prevarifications as George Monbiot does in his article, “Moral decay? Family life’s the best it’s been for 1,000 years” in the Guardian. His target is those who believe in the traditional description of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and the...
Bloody football, the bloody EU, Obama's gay...
* Not even football is free from the clutches of the European Union, thanks to the Lisbon Treaty. UEFA have been talking about Financial Fairness in Football, which is a means to fit in with EU regulation, though you probably won’t hear much of that from the BBC (or Guardian). You could go straight to documentation from The Orifice’s Mouth for it, though. No that I care about bloody...
Poetry prizes, rotten kippers, Aberdeen Anguses...
By Peter Riley. IN JANUARY THE poet John Burnside won the T.S. Eliot Prize with his book Black Cat Bone1 Three months earlier he won the Forward Prize with the same book. These are the two most prestigious and financially rewarding poetry prizes in the country. Burnside has now gained twelve literary prizes (of which four are for books of prose) since his first collection won the Scottish...
Ungaretti reading "Inno alla Morte" ("Hymn to...
Link to translation. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Obama evolves in favour of gay marriage while...
North Carolina voted strongly against gay marriage on Tuesday, making it the thirtieth state to do so. Meanwhile Obama finally achieved resolution to his “evolving” view on the matter and came out in favour. Presumably after he and his advisers had spent many anxious hours working out which special interest groups they could afford to lose votes from (eg, blacks and Hispanics) in...
Greeks happy to dump democracy for more handouts...
One of the amusing but depressing things about Michael Portillo’s programme (Michael Portillo’s Great Euro Crisis) on BBC last night was the fact that everybody interviewed said they wanted to remain within the euro, despite the chaos it is causing. Not only that, but the Greeks seemed content to let the EU install itself as their government and tell them how to behave. All in the...
EU should keep out of innovation's way,...
This from EUobserver: BRUSSELS - To encourage innovation in Europe, policy-makers should just keep out of the way, Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales has said. “I agree with the idea of streamlining and simplification. The only thing is that I would be much more extreme,” he told EUobserver on Tuesday (8 May) on the sidelines of a conference in Brussels on EU innovation policy...
East Germany - what ten years of capitalism did to...
In 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the photographer Stefan Koppelkamm took a series of photos of buildings in East Germany. Ten years later he went back to photograph them again. Take a look here. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
Blacklist is blacklisted by the Old Bill....
This is truly retro - it’s like being back in the 1980s. Knacker of the Yard has apparently banned the word “blacklist” from internal communications, for fear of being racist. Ironically, “whitelist” is also deemed racist. The People’s Cube show us the way forward on this important point, comrades. Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s...
Poem 4/75
connecting with angels junkyard she gives me bread I had to look at the package like this is wrong too many junk prayers Posted via email from Michael Blackburn’s Posterous | Comment »
French elect another Frenchman and expect another...
Hollande has vowed to fight back against “German-led austerity measures” and re-negotiate the Eurozone’s fiscal pact. He also said he’d employ a million more teachers, raise taxes on the rich, demand growth policies from European leaders, etc, etc. All lubricated with some Obama-lite “relief” and “hope”. France is very much the junior partner in...
Occupy the Farm destroys scientific research.
Occupiers are still holding land in Albany used by the University of California at Berkeley for agricultural research. The university had actually given them a weekend deadline to agree to a “negotiated departure” where the University would agree to sit down with them and arrange for part of the occupied land to be devoted to urban farming. In light of Occupiers missing the deadline,...
The great Oxford hack rack bust up.
Oxford student Madeline Grant annoyed the bien-pensants of the university Students’ Union by claiming she has a “great rack” on an election poster (see above). She has been fined £150 for bringing the Union into disrepute, which is an odd idea, given that most things to do with students are disreputable and nothing is more laughable than student politics. Here is a picture...
International Olympic Committee blasts Buenos...
Cristina Kirchner is increasingly isolated over the Falklands In a highly unusual intervention ahead of an Olympics, the International Olympic Committee has sharply criticised Argentina’s government over a highly offensive advertisement which it ran last Wednesday on the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the Belgrano. The propaganda piece shows Fernando Zylberberg, a member of the...