• This is what my friend's friends did to a potato in Arizona. Tagged: Potato, Burnt, Arizona.
• Also thanks to Ed, you should listen to these funny Flanders and Swann-esque creations about medicine. NB Amateur Transplants played the Edinburgh Fringe last year. Tagged: Amateur Transplants, Music, Cult, Medicine.

So it would seem the Lib Dems are completely up the shitter. If they don't lose seats at the next election it will be a miracle. We can just hope for the resurgence of the Tories, or for the time being British politics will have become a one-party affair. I would have sympathy for Simon Hughes' treatment at the hand of the press if it weren't for his disgraceful anti-gay platform for the 1983 Bermondsey by-election against Peter Tatchell.

Tagged: Tatchell, Liberal, Democrats, Simon, Hughes.

do you see me from atop
those clouds i only can imagine?
no. such thoughts must stop,
like i must stop and turn away
from all i loved.
for all i cried is as nothing
in the mirrors of a moving car
a moving
moving car
whose motion carries it and me
to a new horizon
away from thee.

you might have understood
but only
one fleeting glimpse of
cracking skin and
cracking up
is nothing in my rear view mirror,
such thoughts must stop.

we could have been eight against
but it was only last year
we ate that ice cream
from that shop
i reverse-parked your hyundai getz
because heaven knows
how you passed the test.

i passed the test and failed another.

there's only one place to crack up:
the cafe in asda-wal*mart
a window overlooks a plaza overlooks
ephemeral grass and plastic flowers
and the spikes on the B of the Bang
are falling off
so i couldn't turn left earlier.

the coffee's 97p
just like 1001 other things.
the margin which keeps 97p
from 99p
is the gap between you and me.

it couldn't be further
yet the fault-line grows
and i can't see you
can't see you
can't see you
such thoughts must stop.

who'd have thought that northern dream
of mine would be in floods of tears
which burn my every organ;
acid rain
from urban paradise
or burning postindustrial ridges
in my postmodern skin
but my bleached white sexuality
runs thick with clotted blood today
the clotting will not god away.

the stains cannot be bleached again
since i'm a delicate material
sexuality is ethereal
and
full of monsters,
monsters, ghosts and skeletons
and blood
and blood
and swelling of another kind
that never will be understood.

this milk it must be UHT
because it tastes like PPP

such thoughts must stop.

goodbye then love
you served me well, in your interest
and this is how you left me.

I have been interested that analyses and analyses are spelt the same. Perhaps a good reason for adopting U.S. spelling.

Some days I feel so bad that I'm surprised my brain continues to sustain my breathing. So, I'm stopping everything for now. I'm taking twelve months off from university and buying the complete box set of In Search of Lost Time (all six volumes, although I was sure that there are seven). Today I feel okay, but tomorrow I probably won't, and those wisps of steam ejaculating from our highly efficient boiler will be transformed once again from their indisputable innocuousness into an absolute signifier of some cosmic nightmare which threatens to engulf the whole neighbourhood. Running a high temperature transforms human perception and suddenly the imagination can do all kinds of things it could not normally do. Last night I believed I was sleeping inches away from the ceiling.

Spike Milligan said:

Born screaming small into this world—
Living I am
Occupational therapy twixt birth and death—
What was I before?
What will I be next?
What am I now?
Cruel answer carried in the jesting mind of a careless God.
I will not bend and grovel
When I die. If He says my sins are myriad
I will ask why He made me so imperfect
And he will say 'My chisels were blunt'.
I will say 'Then why did you make so many of me'.

Thus I fall. Thus I take a holiday.

Interruption

An hour's slot on television
Recalling endless mutilation.
The day will come when we forget
The cruelty laid by man on man:
Sins done that only humans can.

Flesh-burnt pillars and chalked-up walls;
We tattooed numbers which now appall.
The day will come when we forget
These marks by which the bodies fell:
These glimpses of their living hell.

The name which Europe must remember,
A vision of our burning embers.
The day will come when we forget
That we could all be interrupted:
Murdered at another Auschwitz.

Tagged: Auschwitz, Memorial, Holocaust, Original, Poetry.

Labels: poetry

Westron wynde when wylle thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne

—BM MS. Royal App. 58, f.5 (16th century)

• Peter Preston gives some sensible comments on the current sex offences scaremongering. Seems like Loughborough Grammar School taught us both something, after all; I couldn't agree with Preston more. Tagged: School, Paedophilia, Kelly, Teaching, Ruth Kelly.

A bit of crossover between Walter Benjamin and Marcel Proust via Lucien Daudet and thanks to Alain de Botton:

One day when we were coming out of a concert where we had heard Beethoven's Choral symphony, I was humming some vague notes which I thought expressed the emotion I had just experiences, and I exclaimed, with an emphasis which I only later understood to be ridiculous: 'That's a wonderful bit!' Proust started to laugh and said, 'But, my dear Lucien, it's not your poum, poum, poum that's going to convey the wonderfulness! It would be better to try and explain it!' At the time, I wasn't very happy, but I had just received an unforgettable lesson.

Tagged: Porust, True naming, Daudet, de Botton, Benjamin, Walter.

Oh, how I wish I was a bird!
My fluttering and flight, unheard,
Would carry me so far away
From all my guilt, indecency
And fear.

Oh, how I wish I was a bird!
I'd soar and swoop, without a word
To say or shout or think or sing;
No speech to reify my sin
Or fear.

Oh, how I wish I was a bird!
My body would not be interred,
No-one to grieve this wasted life;
My love, my work, my soul arrives
At fear.

Tagged: Poetry, Original, Wilshere, Birds, Fear.

Labels: poetry

• Brown proposes 'Britain Day'. And there was me thinking that Gordon was beyond all that crap. He asks, "Where is our fourth of July? What is our Independence Day?" Well, thankfully, nowhere, and that is why Britain is a better and more stable country than America and most of our neighbours. Having to institute specific "days" to demonstrate our nationalism is sign of a less, not more, cohesive society. Furthermore, it is not the role of government to establish such events, since unless the initiative for them comes from below they will completely lack legitimacy. Gordon Brown has lost my support. Tagged: Brown, Britain, Labour.

Image 1: The Express from a couple of days ago. Notice new strapline: The paper that stands for REAL values. Notice also four white faces. Image 2: Today's Express. Notice two images altered, to include an arbitrary non-white person, and also to include a faceless "hoody". Notice also that the Express is now "proud" that it is the World's Greatest Newspaper. Needless to say, my opinion of the Express has been completely transformed by this latest campaign. I now know without a shadow of a doubt that, given the opportunity, I would assassinate the paper's editor and burn down their offices.

Tagged: Daily Express, Values, Racism.

Labels: racism

• The British love affair with crisps. (From The Guardian again. I'm sorry. (Wrist falls limp)) Tagged: Crisps, Britain, Food.
• Richard Dawkins up to his usual, irritatingly unscientific, tricks. via Plasticbag. Tagged: Dawkins, Science, Religion, Reason, Faith.
• Yet another thing banned by the government. As usual, Labour reckons the solution to every problem in the world is... ban it! Tagged: Smoking, Parliament, Labour, Britain.
• Residents given access to live CCTV footage. I really am starting to consider leaving the country. The most disturbing thing about these plans is that the police would have the right to broadcast about convicts living in an area. Tagged: Crime, ASBO, CCTV, Big Brother.

We celebrate artistic idiosyncrasy, loneliness, solitude, but only in retrospect. A sad artist must be a good artist. Must it be so? Perhaps we celebrate art for its otherness, for the fact that we can say, No, he did that, and it needn't reflect anything of me. But, of course, the artist's fears, the artist's neuroses, are ours too, a projection which we try to deny by constructing the artist's Difference, even though his existence as Artist at all relies on a corporate act of legitimation in which this thinking person must be complicit.

Tagged: Art, Artist, Sociology.

• Fascinating philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes in today's Guardian on the hit TV series 24. Regular readers: Zizek discusses human dignity in this article; I'll try to come back soon to discuss Zizek some more... Tagged: Zizek, Philosophy, Television.
• That's it. I'm moving to Marrakech tomorrow.
• And David Cameron on the same topic. He really does write well. Tagged: Blair, Respect, Parenting.

Above is a photo someone on Flickr took of the billboard in front of the Quaker Meeting House near Manchester Central Library. Like you, I say "I love you" every day when dwelling on an image in my mind. Some of you know it, but others do not know how deeply I love you. In front of some of you I find it hard to articulate my love, but for you my love is strongest. I want to say this here and know so that you might know one day, though I hope I show it in my actions and that you do know after all.

I am sorry, yes, I am sorry: but: I love you, and love is strong as death.

• Doom and gloom of Evening Standard headlines. via Pootling. Sad to say that the Leicester Mercury is now part of the Mail group.
  Tagged: Evening Standard, Headlines.

Leicester Square

So there he stood as he masturbated,
Neo-naked* in Leicester Square,
The whole damn city evacuated;
"Be vigilant!" they said, "Beware!"

So there he stood as the People watched
This eight-year-old, strapped to a bomb;
Polizei stood round about him, for
They were right and he was wrong.

So there he stood like the man on telly,
The metal cut into his flesh,
Snipers focused on his eyeballs
To kill the boy from Kabul creche.

So there he fell, there he exploded
Outside Starbucks' in Leicester Square
The whole damn city celebrated,
Although there was nobody there.

So there his body parts were scattered,
Arms and nose and brains and cock;
The kiddy came as he detonated
An orgasm nobody could stop.

They washed away the blood, the brains,
In little bits the boy grew up;
Four million came at just the moment
That wanking Afghan boy blew up.

Notes

This poem probably deserves some explanation.

Apart from the obvious political stuff, I am aiming at capturing the sense you get, when watching twenty-four hour news, of disparate stories rolling into one; it is unlikely that an eight-year old would be a suicide-bomber (though it's possible; did we hear the news correctly?); it is unlikely that an eight-year old would be masturbating in public (though it's possible; did we hear the news correctly? Is it too late already? Are there more riots in Portsmouth?); the final verse is an allusion to the way twenty-four hour news (and particularly internet broadcasting) commodifies events like the one being described (is it a real event?) and that, quite probably, there are millions of people around the world getting off on a masturbating eight-year-old blowing himself up.

* This is a reference to Jon Snow's delightful invented word used during a Channel 4 News report:

Because I mean the world and his wife have been telephoning from blocks surrounding the drama reporting on what they can see from the Peabody Estate balconies. They've been recording the police commands on their mobile phones - "Come out in your underpants" and sure enough that's exactly what happened.

These men whose photos have blitzed their way across the world suddenly appear neo-naked in the balcony on the ramparts of an improving social housing estate beyond Shepherd's Bush.

Relevant links

• Complaints against press coverage of woman's suicide.
• Remember the News of the World and the Paulsgrove estate riots?
• BBC Comedy: Broken News

Technorati tags: Poetry, Original, State, Terrorism, Police.

Labels: poetry

• Ariel Sharon fights for his life. I feel duty bound to comment on this, being a Middle Eastern Studies student! Sadly, I fear that the likely passing of Sharon will also mean the passing of Israeli moderatism for the time being. If Israeli politics takes a turn towards intransigence, the peace process will probably crumble again.
  Technorati tags: Sharon, Israel, Palestine.
• And see also The Grauniad's comment on the current position of Israeli politics.

Just over a year ago there was an international essay competition being advertised in the department, funded by some obscure Catholic thinktank (according to my lecturer, "possibly to do with Opus Dei, I don't know"), the subject of which was to be, "'Human dignity will be the dominant paradigm of twenty-first century politics.' Discuss." (Or something similar.) I contemplated entry but, as usual with such things, the day I actually began thinking about it was also the closing date, so the essay never got written.

Last month Harold Pinter gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech on Channel 4 and published it on his website. An unashamed polemic which railed against the United States, it concluded with the following words:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.

This got me thinking; perhaps there was something in that essay competition after all. There have, after all, been several high-profile events over the last twelve months (and since 2001 more generally) which should raise questions about human dignity. How new a concept is it? How important? How relevant, historically, in politics both domestic and international? Do we care about this quasi-religious notion of human dignity? Does The Government care? The answer to the latter question, at least, is pretty clear: no. It is not limited to the USA and Britain. Other, more 'left wing', European countries have introduced just as Draconian anti-terror legislation post-2001. The shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes in London last July is a case in point. And not just the shooting; the shameless cover-up and failure to apologise properly for the mistake, or even to accept that it was a mistake at all. To return to Pinter:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.

What is really attacked here is, as Pinter rightly says, the notion of dignity. The police have made errors through history, people have been killed and banged up who shouldn't have been. What makes the shooting of de Menezes undignified is that nobody really seemed to care that an innocent man had been killed. After all, he had vaguely dark-looking skin. A whole host of other things could be added to this event: think Guantanamo Bay, although that's too obvious. But in a sense more immediate to all our lives, think of the growth of CCTV and digital surveillance. Only yesterday, we heard about government plans to tag parents who don't pay child support. Again, the policy itself is not so shocking. Governments come up with crazy authoritarian policy all the time. It is the lack of outright disgust with which policy like this should be publicly treated. What is less dignified than being watched, tracked, for no good judicial reason? It is pure 1984, and in this case, it turns parenthood into something devoid of dignity, devoid of true relation, and the parent-child relationship is turned into an industrial one, where duties are only monetary. What could be more Orwellian?

This has been a very rushed post, as I'm out to dinner. Happy new year everyone.