Trial and Punishment

Monday, January 24, 2022

I wrote this epic poem during the second lock-down. Beset by concerns for my children and grandchildren in an unravelling climate emergency, I dropped into a purple vein and finished the poem in six weeks, a 22 line stanza a day marathon. Written like a science fiction novella, it sets out the terrible fate that might await humanity. Two individuals, a modern day Adam and Eve are chosen by alien arbiters to decide the planet’s fate. You can download it from this site.

Here’s a quote from the Second Canto:

Canto Two

‘The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.’

-William Shakespeare

The Species

1

Humanity’s self-styled ‘third’ millennium

Had not regained the equilibrium

It once had before the rise of norms

Of ownership, coinage and cuneiform

It had endured a moral regression

In contrast to its scientific progression

Making knives to bombs-atomic

Dividing and conquering, in chronic

Tension between good and evil

Disintegrating through the visceral

Urges of the species, the Us and Them

The blood of battle was never stemmed

Whether on streets or in imperialist mayhem

And often in defence of some religion

Fervent faiths that burgeoned

On mystery and legend

Furthered through conduits of lie and fraud

Intent on spreading the word abroad

‘Sacred’ books followed to the letter

And rituals convincing them they were better 

Than others who took oaths to different tracts

Based on equally mythic facts

Tags: Epic Poetry. The Climate Emergency. Can humanity survive?

The Podcaster

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Here I am, getting all techy sith my mic, baffles to absorb sound and a rather neat podcasting platform called Buzzsprout. the intent? To draw people to this website and encourage them to download books.

it�s quite addictive, actually. Choosing extracts to read, getting the head around presentation, music underpinnings, the arts of sound shaping with various effects like �fade-in�, �fade out� and �sound normalisation�. But the big one is the actual reading! Do I put on voices? Do I heavily dramatise?

In the end I have opted for a nuanced narrative voice, no character accents, but building up a style that is clear but allows the reader to impose her/his own interpretive subjectivity. I think I�m getting better at it.

If you�d like to listen, go to the following link: https://hisauthorsvoice.buzzsprout.com/ and I hope it entertains you!

Tags: how to podcast

The Transitory Nature of Life

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

My son Joseph mentioned that in Japan, where he lives, ceramics are worth a great deal more if they are broken and then mended with gold filling. That led to me writing some lines in a Blues, as follows:

Yet the greatest thing I have to share

Is that love�s like china and oft needs repair

But if you mend each crack with melted gol

Its beauty increases for all to behold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

(Cracked China Blues)

At the heart of this is a reverence for how the transitory nature of life can be held up momentarily for inspection, while accepting the inevitable order of things.

I have been unlocking poems I wrote thirty or so years ago, refreshing and sprucing them up to meet the demands of my older eye. They deal with the same subject, though in a more direct. challenging way.

Passing

We make a mark in sand or snow to watch the tide 

Or sun erase our passing tracks

We press a finger on another�s cheek

To see the soft-red imprint, dull then fade

We lie upon the hothouse summer corn

To watch the stalks rebound upon our love

We sit upon the dry stone of a grave

And dampen it with thoughts of what will be

Spectres

Four events emerge 

Ghostly through the driving

Winter snow

A rabbit bobbling slow

With myxomatosis

Feeling blindly down a furrow

A dove dancing along a fence

Cooing, impotent, in the gale

A crow blunt-beaking frozen flesh

On a tree-hung corpse�s bone

Three acts

In play on nature�s stage 

Conjoined

By a fourth, 

An invisible trudging man 

The Three Legged Cow

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

What�s in a gift I ask of you?

Over my life I�ve received a few

But none to match my five year old joy

At receiving a gift from a miner�s boy

Of a brown lead cow with a leg short of four 

Which I carefully placed in my secret drawer

From then until now there�s been no repeat

It�s been lead in my heart with each gift�s receipt

The ones that made my heart go cold

Like a box of chocolates white with mould

Or socks that were more than a size too small

�I never realized you�d grown so tall�

Or a tee shirt with a motif I once desired

With the label: �Keep away from fire�

Or a prog rock vinyl, corners frayed

With scratches showing it�d already been played

Or a radio implanted in a knight�s vizored head

Whose kitschiness conspired to fill me with dread

Or those �perfect� presents, so carefully thought

That somehow still amounted to nought

From birth to puberty to adult male

Birthdays and christmases left a trail

Of dashed expectations as hope ever dwindled

That those five year old�s feelings would �ere be rekindled

I never knew that that wondrous day

Would leave me this void I can never allay

Mandala in Purple

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

�Don�t visit my grave,� you said

�It�s an empty shell,�

But I lay purple petals on the earth

Defying you with a spell

For though you were right you weren�t to know

That I need a certain place 

Where memories may come and go 

And looking down on my small bouquet

They form a mandala, a ring, a Mobius

Strip encircling time

Making a Now that whispers Us

Long before there was Christmas

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

The family sits separate around the tree

Among wrapped gifts tied in ribbonry

Carols on the telly and turkey on a spit

Sweets being chewed, mobiles all lit

Cars outside under fairy lights

Hanging from trees and eaves through the night

Under floor heating at 30 degrees

Tee shirts with logos and neatly pressed jeans

The house is just one of millions at play

Fleetingly observing a middle eastern day

A babe in a barn and three wise men

A virgin mother and a Bethlehem

But long before that and swamped by time

There was a feast which had more reason and rhyme

Family gatherings had an intimate knowledge

Of why they must gather and pay the sun homage

This was the solstice, the midwinter feast

That marked the new sun�s ascent in the east

Before the invention of prophets and gods

And the wheel and the horse were not yet shod

When spears and arrows had flint splinter tips  

And tying was done with fine leather strips 

And wolves became dogs to guard the camps

While the moon and torch were nightly lamps

On this shortest day and longest night

Hunters and farmers engaged in a rite

To banish the dark and nurture the sun

And remember a year of lives come and gone

They doused an infant, the newest born

And pressed its lips with salvia soaked corn

And girded its ankles in copper thread

And a cloth soaked in rosemary tied round its head

And they built their fires near holy trees

Whose fruit made a potion that set the soul free

To voyage across the Sea of Dreams

In a burning raft of juniper leaves�

With root crops and sour fruit sweetening the tongue

Fermented in honey while the old sun shone

With stored grain baked in a twisted braid

In a pocket of embers while the old year was laid

Under the black with its prescient stars

They drank to forget the previous year�s scars

And toasted the kin who were lost to the feast

And would never again share the flesh of the beast

They drummed and chanted the ancient song

That nurtured the sun and made it strong

And they sang for the stars that mapped all new birth

And sang for the rains that nourished the earth

For much of history this feast�s potent power

Fuelled the sun so that nature could flower

But then it was stolen and given a new face

By creeds where its rituals no longer held place

And with its going communion was lost

Nature disowned at humanity�s cost

Replaced by feasts both specious and crude

In praise of false gods and material goods

The family sits separate around the tree

Among wrapped gifts tied in ribbonry

Carols on the telly and turkey on a spit

Sweets being chewed, mobiles all lit

The Lilac Tree

Sunday, August 9, 2020

One day when I was six or seven

And doubted there might be a heaven

A place with angels and a bearded God

Who ruled the Earth with his lightning rod

Well, on that day, I had to pee

And Mrs Drummond let me be

So out I went into the yard

Where urinals waited, yellow tarred

By years of bursting childhood wee

From nose-held careless infancy 

I did my bit to add more stain

With my little spray of acid rain

Then, just as I had started back,

I stopped mid-step on my usual tack,

A rush of colour caught my gaze

The playground tree was a purple haze

It enticed me up its bursting tower

Of dripping pendules of lilac flower

I found myself a place to perch

High inside its pagan church

And fell into a reverie,

A drug-enhanced cacophony

Of flies and beetles, stripy bees

Murmuring on the violet seas

And there I dozed until the bell

Which let my schoolmates out as well

Some climbed too so they could be

Co-celebrants in the sorcery

By telepathy we shared a prayer

To an Ancient One we sensed was there

That childhood spell still wraps my skin

And stops life trying to shut me in

From the lilac tree I still derive

My sense of truly being alive 

Stop the World

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Stop the world I want to get off

For I hear my father in my cough

My life was carved in words now worn

On the altar stone when I was born

Stop the world enough�s enough

Of collecting all this material stuff

That builds around me like a tomb

And turns the sunlight into gloom

I want to die and be born anew

So I do not do what others do

I want a path to love not war

A paradise on a far off shore

Stop the world I want to try

And look around with a baby�s eye

And smell the scent of a thousand flowers

And sleep below a broad leafed tower

At home among the fur and wings

Of a thousand living breathing things

To be a feral wandering soul

Without a sense of aim or goal

Stop the world I want an end

Of seeing what is round the bend

All I want is to be known

For words in water not in stone

Stray Woman Blues (song for guitar 15)

Monday, April 27, 2020

This morning I woke up in my secret lover�s bed
I woke up in a cold sweat in my lover�s bed
I�d just had a nightmare that filled me full of dread
 
 
I was dead in a coffin made from the willow tree
I was dead in a coffin made from the willow tree
And my eyes were open for the whole world to see
 
 
And the ladies all spat as they passed me by
And the ladies all spat as they passed me by
But they curtsied to the man who stood at my side
 
 
�Oh my wife,� he whispered, �I killed you for your lies
�Oh my wife,� he whispered, �I killed you for your lies.�
�I loved you and forgave you not just once but twice�
 
 
�You played me for a fool, left my side in the night
You played me for a fool, left my side in the night
For another man�s bed and to share his delights.�
 
 
�The third time you strayed I put a knife in your heart
The third time you strayed I put a knife in your heart
For we swore the Book that we would never part.�
 

This morning I woke up in my secret lover�s bed
I woke up in a cold sweat in my lover�s  bed
I�d just had a nightmare that filled me full of dread

Super Hero (song for guitar 14)

Thursday, March 19, 2020

�

She works as a hotel cleaning maid
For a nasty boss who�s rich and mean
The pay just covers living costs�
=With a bit left over for her laptop screen

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

She dons a lycra body suit
With hood and gloves and full face mask
And heads off to the sleazy streets
To execute heroic tasks

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

She breaks the necks of evil men
Pushers, hitmen die in reams
She rips the throats of racketeers
And pimps with all their sordid schemes

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

And on every victim of her rage
She sees her boss�s callous face
It�s the only way that she stays sane
And a part of the human race

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

So through the night she cleans the streets
With untold acts of bravery
And through the day she dusts and cleans
In a life of modern slavery

Her day is harsh and tedious
But every night she feasts her eyes
On games where she can be the one
To take out all the evil guys

�

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

The Power Brokers (song for guitar 13)

Sunday, January 19, 2020

Governments come and governments go

Jumped up puppets in a show

National boundaries soft as chalk

Sovereignty is empty talk

There are those beyond the public gaze

Who know no laws and shape our days

We think we are autonomous

No-one else is quite like us

But we�re controlled by unseen forces

And follow pre-determined courses

There are those beyond the public gaze

Who know no laws and shape our days

Every act and every thought

Changes nothing matters nought

For us it�s Anonymity

The background noise of history

There are those beyond the public gaze

Who know no laws and shape our days

We live and love, we age and die

But never once will we espy

Those beyond the public gaze

Who know o laws and shape our days

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

Passing Through (Song for guitar 12)

Monday, January 6, 2020

There is nothing here left of you

To show that you once passed through

Nothing to show we shared time

No evidence of a crime

No prints where your hands used to touch

No smudges on the rims of cups

No texts on my mobile phone

No photo I might want to own

You�re a mystery wrapped in a cloud

Who I dare not question aloud

I �d be certified if I insisted

That you may once have existed

Is your next lover beside you now

Will he one day question how

You could leave without a clue

No sign that you�d once passed through

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

The Devil�s Handshake (Song for guitar 11)

Friday, December 20, 2019

I am a cold unfeeling phanton

Existing with no flesh and bone

I�ve lost my friends and all my family

A just reward for what I�ve doneI was a family man of virtue

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sown

�Just shake my hand upon our contracT

And bend your knee to my command

And then I�ll make you rich as Croesus

Known across both sea and land�

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sown

Oh I was rich as rich as Midas

All I touched was turned to gold

But my heart once warm and giving

Was now gripped in Satan�s hold

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sown

Now I�m a stranger in a strange land

Ghouls and wraiths for company

I rule this place twixt hell and heaven

I am the Lord of Purgatory

I was a family man of virtue

Until one day I strayed alone

And met the Devil at the crossroads

From that day my seeds were sewn

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

Later a Fox (Song for guitar 9)

Thursday, December 5, 2019

�

Mother and daughter went into the shop

The girl wanted pizza and a bottle of pop

The counter boy gave her the coke and the grub

In a plastic bottle and a plastic tub

Shop pop grub tub shop pop swag bag

�

Daughter and mother went dancing along

Drinking and chewing and humming a song

They dropped their rubbish in a litter bin

Full of paper and plastic and stale food and tins

�

Along song bin tins along song bin tins

�

Later a fox came looking for food

And thought that something smelled really good

He toppled the bin so the rubbish was spread

And ate some crusts of buttery bread

�

Food good spread bread food good spread bread

�

After a while a strong wind came by

And blew pizza wrappings up into the sky

One fluttered about like a kite with no string

And stuck on the head of a gull on the wing

�

By sky string wing by sky string wing

�

The gull was blinded and crashed to the sea

Where the wrapping came off and let her fly free

The plastic sank down like a clear parachute

And a jellyfish thought it might make a cute suit

�

Sea free chute suit sea free chute suit

�

Then a seal gulped the jelly with mouth opened wide

But it wriggled away leaving plastic inside

The seal got sick and washed up on the shore

Where children were eating a pizza for four

�

Wide inside shore four wide inside shore four

�

They called the coastguards but the poor seal had died

So they checked his stomach for what was inside�

There were wrappings from pizzas and chewing gum goo

And horrible stuff people put down the loo

�

Died inside goo loo died inside goo loo

�

The seal was taken and buried at sea

The rubbish was placed in a bin by a tree

Later a fox came looking for food

Knocked over the bin as he smelled something good �

�

Sea tree food good sea tree food good

Later that day a strong wind came by

And cheese pizza wrappings blew into the sky �.

Blue Angel (song for guitar 10)

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Like a bright shooting star
You shone from afar
You colour my night
In Black and White
Your face does not lie
There is truth in your eyes

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

A century ago
Saw Blue Angel on show
Though our times are apart
You captured my heart
But time cannot hide

What I feel here inside

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

I sit here alone
When her movie is shown
I never leave until
The cinema is still
The curtains pulled tight
And turned-up house lights

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

I�m not out of my mind
My heart is not blind
For one day my queen
You�ll step from the screen
And in a hot blooded bliss
You�ll wake to my kiss

Marlene Marlene Marlene O

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

Lilith (Song for guitar 8)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

All you men now heed my warning� � ��

Of what will bring you pain� � � � � � � � � ��

And the demon who will mete out justice��

Well Lilith is her name��

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

You think that Eve was the earliest woman

From Adam�s rib she came

But the first female to give him trouble

O Lilith was her name�

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith was her name

For she refused to lie beneath him

Equality was her aim

So God threw her right out of Eden

O Lilith was her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith was her name

But that made Lilith very angry

Now vengeance was her game

So she became a vigilante

And Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

She roams the night to create mayhem

She offers pleasures untamed

But she�s intent on retribution

For Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

So any man who thinks he�s god

And a woman tries to shame

A she-devil will bring him down�

And Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

She�ll eat his heart she�ll burn his soul

She�ll leave him mad insane

She�ll kill his child to end his bloodline

Yes Lilith is her name

Yes Lilith Lilith Lilith is her name

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

Cracked China (Song for guitar 7)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

I�m old my son so what have I learned?

Now my race is run and my candle is burned

My eyes don�t see what they once did

And my ears don�t hear what I am bid

And sometimes my ears don�t hear what I am bid

Oh the women I�ve known who made my heart flutter

My memories spill over like rain from a gutter

The wins and the losses the joy and the pain

The bodies I�ve known �gainst which I have lain

The bodies I�ve known �gainst which I have lain

I thought through the years how to give this advice

On the meaning of love in your journey through life

But I couldn�t find the words that would make it clear

When I know that the young just don�t want to hear

When I know that the young just don�t want to hear

Please listen my son to my hard won belief

You can�t steal love like a light fingered thief

It has to be given to sweeten your soul

Love is worth nothing if theft is your goal

Love is worth nothing if theft is your goal

Yet the greatest thing I have to share

Is that love�s like china and oft needs repair

But if you mend each crack with melted gold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

Extinction Rebellion ( Song for Guitar 6)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

We�re on the greatest planet in the stars

We orbit between Venus and Mars

We can treat it full of love and grace

Or turn it into trash in space�� � � � � � � � ��

It�s the first, last, best and the most

A Paradise from coast to coast

From oceans deep to mountains high

From desert heat to polar ice

From north to south and east to west

It�s our only world, let�s make it the best

Don�t turn its air into fumes

Don�t build until there�s no more room

Don�t spray with poison to kill the weeds

Don�t dump your rubbish in the seas

It�s the first, last, best and the most

A Paradise from coast to coast

From oceans deep to mountains high

From desert heat to polar ice

From north to south and east to west

It�s our only world, let�s make it the best

Come on we�ve got to work together

Save our planet now or never

Ask yourself deep in the eye

�Will my children live or die?�

It�s the first, last best and the most

A Paradise from coast to coast

Carnivore Coda (Song for guitar 5)

Thursday, March 21, 2019

The curse was scratched upon a wall

In a cave hid from the light

It said, �Beware millennia

Of glut and then of blight��

But we just laughed at the prophecy

In our Paradise delight

On the final day of the thousandth year

A strange old madness showed

We cut the throat of a suckling calf

And we watched its final throes

Indifferent to its reckoning

And its mother�s howls of woe

�They cannot think, they feel no pain,�

We chanted blind with blood,

�Let�s rear them for our pleasure

To be our staple food.�

We turned all land to grazing

Convinced that meat was good

Blinkered to the land�s decay

And the rivers running dry

We sucked the life from Paradise

With countless sheds and sties

So when the new millennium dawned

There was no Paradise

We added to the land�s decay

With mass insecticides

And nitro-phosphates by the ton

Sprayed down from the skies

So in our new millennium

There was no Paradise

A scorched earth, a barren land

A leafless tree of life

A bird-less sky and empty seas

And silent silent nights

Thus began our living death

Our thousand years of blight

Our World (Song for guitar 4)

Friday, March 15, 2019

We�re marching for our futures

We�re marching for our fate

We�re marching for the pl

Before it is too late

Governments say �Go back to school

You do not understand

Stick your noses in your books

We�ve stuck ours in the sand�

We�re marching for our futures

We�re marching for our fate

We�re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

Governments have lost our trust

By sitting on their hands

And allowing greed and avarice

To pollute the sea and land

We�re marching for our futures

We�re marching for our fate

We�re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

Our air is full of toxins

That poison every breath

The old will live a full life span

For us – an early death

We�re marching for our futures

We�re marching for our fate

We�re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

Rebel against the establishment

Rebel against its power

Strip it of authority

And make the planet ours

We�re marching for our futures

We�re marching for our fate

We�re marching for the planet

Before it is too late

Returning Angel (Song for guitar 3)

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

This time it was in a casino bar

There were blue lights on the ceiling

Reflecting on your lam� gown

Neck to waist revealing

With your crimson lips and finger tips

And your pigtailed platinum hair

Your skin as white as sun-bleached bon

And your haughty naughty stare

You wore spike shoes and elbow gloves

And chained bag on your shoulder

With eyes that promised parad

I never acted bolder

I bet my life against the wheel

And watched the ball careering

It spun its arc of destiny

Fate riding on its steering

The final click and it settled down

With the crowd all gasping around me

But all I saw was your nod and smile

As you pushed the prize towards me

And like the son of a seventh son

With brothers six before me

The ball had answered all my pray

And I was rich as royalty

You stared at me as I stood there

I�d visions of our history

Of other lives in other times

When you appeared – to save me

I hoped this time you�d halt the wheel

And make our cycle end

But you turned back to spin the ball

And abandoned me again

(see me perform my songs on YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgODnrWmAYltDbfXCvaEBTw

Dentist Blues (Song for guitar 2)

Friday, October 13, 2017

Lords of Disruption (Song for guitar 1)

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Beware the Lords of Silicon Valley

Who create new worlds in binary code

They�ve convinced themselves they�re freedom fighters

They believe they�re Kerouaks On the Road

They vow to eradicate injustice

They vow to shake the Powerful�s hold

But every act has its consequences

Whose ends can never be foretold

We are on display as algorithms

Our very natures sold and bought

It is the end of incognito

It is the end of private thought

They�re creating tools of mass deception

They�re adding windows� to our souls

Despite the wish to fight for freedom

They�re creating tools for mass control

Beware the Lords of Silicon Valley

Who create new worlds in binary code

They�ve convinced themselves they�re freedom fighters

They believe they�re Kerouaks On the Road

Bobbies on the Beat

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

I lived through the period of bad policing under Thatcher and after. Racism in the Met and beyond, corruption in the West Midlands force etc BUT I have always felt that community policing, sensitively done, with officers of diverse skin colour, religious and social backgrounds, is essential in developing a tolerant, open minded and pluralistic society. More guns and fewer police creates authoritarianism and, eventually, the seeds of dictatorship. It is ironic and devastatingly tragic that, as the government spends more on technological anti-terrorism, those that would cause devastation become anti-tech in their modus operandum. What use is hi-tech against a kitchen knife, a van and implacable psychopathy? Only men and women officers on the ground who care for their fellow beings, can counter such primitivism by being the eyes and ears and shapers of society, fully trusted by the people they work among.

Tags: Police cuts.

OJ Simpson: Made In America and The Keepers

Friday, May 26, 2017

There’s been much made of the changes in viewing habits in the last decade. The move towards box set blow-outs being one of the trends. On the one hand they satisfy an audience’s desire for gorging gratification and on the other they turn a TV series into a vehicle for writers, directors and actors to explore complexity and nuance which might be denied them in a 2 hour film. The two most recent unswitchoffable documentaries to stalk my eyes and adhere me to the late-night sofa are: O J Simpson: Made in America (BBC4 catch-up) and The Keepers on Netflix. Both are documentaries. OJ (you think you know the story – you don’t) tears American so-called democracy into naked strips and hangs them on the line. Race, trial-by-emotion, Shakespearean tragedy, social inequality and the interior landscapes of all the lead players make it a proper Oscar winner. You are left certain of guilt – but it is guilt on a massive, national scale. Meanwhile, The Keepers is a strangely conceived and deeply disturbing investigation into a decades old cold case of a Nun’s death – uncovering a paedophile conspiracy of police, Catholic Church and prominent members of the Baltimore political establishment. The detective work is driven by two unobrusive women who had been children in the school at the time and had no inkling of the obscenities that lay behind the school priests’ doors. Layers are stripped back, appalling suppressed memories are released by victims with a courageous frankness that sears and you are left contemplating darkly about how large a percentage of the world’s (male) population have desire in them to commit acts of such depravity.

Tags: OJ Simpson TV, The Keepers TV

Corbyn’s Terrorism Speech Today

Friday, May 26, 2017

Corbyn will be vilified by the right wing press and politicians for raising a passionate critique of UK foreign policy in the Middle East. It is already being said that he is using the awful and appalling Manchester attack by an Isis-trained killer as a political football. There is absolutely no defence for the bomb, the bomber and the ideology that cares not a jot about innocence and humanity. But if we do not clear our heads and seek reasons from the current and past picture of British foreign policies, then we are cowards and imprisoned in false beliefs about our much vaunted open, democratic society and its ‘British Values’. As I write the people of Yemen, among the poorest in the world, are being bombed to a bloody dust by Saudi-led forces and supported in it by the UK and the US. This follows Cameron’s foray into Libya. And Blair’s in Iraq. The intelligence agencies warned Cameron and Blair that there would be consequences on our own shores.

Tags: Corbyn., UK Foreign Policy, Yemen

The Ballad of Theresa May (The Mary Poppins of Brexit)

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Cynical MPs who piss-take our voters

New laws that further impoverish our sufferers

A Cabinet of ears with nothing between

These are a few of my favourite things

Ever more food banks to feed low paid workers

Concessions to Company high-paid tax shirkers

Houses affordable for those with some bling

These are a few of my favourite things

Leaving the EU with huge unpaid bills

It�s all jam tomorrow plus the ringing of tills

Trolling Claude Juncker cos� I�m hard and right wing

These are a few of my favourite things

But if you doubt me

And say that I am mad

I inanely repeat that I�m stable and strong

And then I don�t feel quite so bad

Thirteen Reasons Why

Monday, May 1, 2017

It�s time to jettison misconceptions � unless you are under 21! The threat to one�s sense of identity as a mature consumer of all things cultural should surely prevent even glancing at the first episode of Netflix�s Thirteen Reasons Why. An American High School setting. Early forays among late adolescents in a world of rocky identity against a volcanic background of sexual awakening does not augur well for box set bulimics. Yet, a glance became a stare and a stare became hours of intensely disturbed concentration. Thirteen episodes of subtly appropriate young adult dialogue in which deep, eternal issues are played out through the behaviour of a brilliant cast, leaves you drained but frighteningly educated. For those parents with teenagers it is a must, a connection with this rapid-filled period of parenting in a world they themselves have never experienced, the centrality of technology in self-identity and the fear of falling foul of others. For non-parents of the age group and the rest of us it is a prism revealing darkness and light, as much a journey into an opaque culture as The Wire. Add to this its moral core against the unrelenting motifs of rape and suicide and you have something very extraordinary.

Europe Farewell?

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

In 2016 the news went fake

The Brexiters were on the make

Politicians lied and more besides

The poor got austerity and the rich got cake

(chorus)

It�s sad to say we are on our way

We won�t be back for many a day

Our hearts are down, our heads spinning around

We�ll need a visa to be Europe bound

They said we wanted no EU law

Despite being forced to clean up our shores

They said we�d have cash for the NHS

And our borders would have signs saying No not Yes

They said we�d be free to trade to excess

And turn the map pink with our exports� success

And we�d all be rich, an easy feat

For the world would want to sit at our feet

—————————-

Now it�s 2026 and we have British laws

Once banned toxins now cover our shores

Hospitals are downsized to A & E

It has to be spent on security

Everywhere you look it�s Social Care

The City of London has a derelict stare

Its ledgers suggest that our GDP

Will not even buy us a cup of tea

Oh we yearn for the days of cheap flights and vacs

With wine in our hands and the sun on our backs

And those friendships made with foreign hosts

Who ignore us now as turncoat ghosts

We left the EU for liberty

With a Church a Crown and democracy

We may have a Third World economy

But there is nothing like feeling proud and free

The history of human vice

Sunday, February 5, 2017

The History of Human Vice

The Brexiteers have blocked from view

Why we should stay in the EU

Which is that a Higher Court of Peers

Can clip the wings of profiteers

Of human shame

Who�d otherwise be free from the blame

Of comforting those regimes

Who use every heinous means

To strip human rights at their very seams

Or downgrade international compassion

As if it was a card to ration

Or appeasing megalomaniacs

Who make all criticism a criminal act

Or succouring Merchants of Misery

In banks, conglomerates and military

The history of human vice has shown

Little virtue comes from going it alone

Leaving Europe

Friday, June 24, 2016

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,–
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,

this LITTLE ENGLAND

Utopia Channel 4

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Thoughts on TV series ‘Utopia’. I’m watching Season 2. Cult status. Critical acclaim. Brilliantly perverse. Mould breaking plot. Seasons 3 and 4 pulled by Channel 4. Why? One suspects the best conspiracy thriller in a decade has fallen foul of conspiracy itself. Weaving fiction with allegations of CIA MI6 dirty deeds involving real time events (assassination of Airey Neave and other politicians across Europe), the Bilderberg group, 3 Mile Island… Utopia plays with history�as science fiction ought. Given that many (Enoch Powell et al) believed MI6 were killing their own for dark political reasons, this bleak comedy pulls no punches. The central moral dilemma – if we kill 95% of the world’s population now with a virus, we’ll actually save the future for humanity – is reasonable and appallingly grotesque in equal parts. Methinks Channel 4 felt the full weight of the Tory establishment and ran screaming to their Deal No Deal bland safety net.
HBO are remaking 1 and 2 and adding 3 and 4. Good for them. Hope the actors are British if only for the regional accents…

The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson

Sunday, November 29, 2015

I’ve just seen ‘The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson’ directed by Julian Temple. The Dr Feelgood guitarist is filmed during a revelatory last year of life as he is given ten months to live from pancreatic cancer; a William Blake ecstasy as all material things come into transcendent existence, from scenes round Canvey Island to monasteries in Japan, from shimmering pavements to majestic trees against the sky. He is an atheist who fears no death. Rock and roll is for many theultimate zen of living-in-the-moment and he discovers and describes what that truly means. Try to see it. You’ll cry but be uplifted. Even changed.

Fargo Season 2

Sunday, November 29, 2015

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The True Cost

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

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Sense8

Friday, September 18, 2015

The Matrix was breakthrough sci fi eye candy with the sufficiently strong philosophical message that we are all dumb sleepwalkers, mere scripts in machine programming. There are philosopher-scientists who believe this could, in fact, be our reality. Anyway, the directors of that film, The Wachowskis, have created a new tv series called Sense8. With the strap line that sense8s are one chromosome different from normal human beings, the 8 are spread across the world; India, South Korea, Kenya, Mexico, US and Iceland and were all born on the same day and month and learn to enter each other�s lives and help each other out in bad times. This Cluster of chromosomally different homo sapiens are hounded by their nemesis who looks alarmingly like a Tory make-over of Jeremy Corbyn. The intermingled 8 story lines have drama and punch and plenty of issues, the on-location filming brings different cultures into vivid juxtaposition, different mores to challenge the viewer. The actors are uniformly good. The gay sex scenes are more natural and fervent than most films have ever managed and the movement in and out of Cluster realities feels innovative. The tension is provided by the question; what�s to become of them? Will normal, nasty, isolated, war-mongering, acquisitive humans find them and exterminate them for being different, X-men style? Back to the Tories and Jeremy Corbyn.

The Mental Traveller

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

New review!

An intriguing exploration of what happens when a writer is disturbed by thoughts of sharing his life with another and faces a choice between the unknown consequences of intimacy against familiar well-ordered solitude. Emerging against a series of digressions and flashbacks, this central concern maintains suspense as the story draws to its conclusion.

Vanessa Ahlberg

You are what you sing

Monday, September 14, 2015

The last refuge of biography in dementia is where musical memory is stored. You are what you have heard, danced to, made love to and sung. The vinyl, the CDs and tapes, the pirate radio stations, the downloads, the shuffles of your chosen greatest hits. Remember this. Document it. For when you are apparently lost to dementia, it is the one thing that will keep your self alive. The brilliant film, �Alive Inside� shows wonderful old people, having not communicated – sometimes for years, faces blank, hands wringing, wheelchair bound, being gently strapped into headphones. The effect! With IPods playing tunes from their histories, their faces light up, their hands dance, their feet tap. It is breathtaking. Then their eyes suddenly clear talk and they talk coherently. Even if you never watch the documentary, remember that this is how you can open a channel of life and light to someone with dementia. One day it could be you.

X + Y

Friday, September 11, 2015

X + Y = A Brilliant Young Mind – a terrific film of depth and perception about a maths genius of a boy�s shut-off, asocial awkwardness as he edges towards warmth and belief in others. It�s extremely funny, tear-jerking, sensitively acted and reminiscent of say, Kes or Billy Elliot. Centred on the British team�s preparation for a �Maths Olympiad� it follows the boy�s attempts to grapple with his mother�s love, his tutor�s brave and balefully funny management of multiple schlerosis, a maths �training camp� in China whose culture and exotic ways comfort him momentarily and the (to him) pain-inducing idea of competition against international peers. Truth is beauty and therefore, QED, maths gives the young man beauty in his isolation. We all feel alien at times in our lives and so it�s no step at all to occupy the shoes of the boy and relive all the emotions to which painful aloneness can give rise. It also reminds us of our responsibilities in our relations with others.

Mr Robot

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Looking for a new box set? Waiting for the experience of an obsessive nightly fix or a gross-out weekend of end-to-end viewing? Fargo Season 2 is on the horizon but a gem lurks and it’s up and running.

Mr. Robot.

It’s brilliantly scripted, wonderfully photographed and unerringly acted – but might not accord with those who steer clear of the picaresque. Drugs and computer coding form a dark wallpaper (the program coding is nailed on by experts to keep geeks happy) against which druggie/idealistic hackers seek to save the world from multinational cyber barons. It raises, in its tense depiction of extremes, the slithering underbelly of modern, technology-dependent life.

Melancholia

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Melancholia (2011): Is it a drama, is it a sci fi, is it a study in psychological depression? One thing is certain, it is a film by Lars von Trier. The studied authorial eye is as beady and detailed as always, as is his drive to subordinate art to a philosophical thesis. Imagine landscape gardening by Capability Brown, aerial shots of country lanes with magnificent galloping horses, mists, a stately pile and the most appalling nouveau riche wedding you might ever encounter and you have the setting. Counterpoise this with a bride�s disintegration into depressive aimlessness and involuntary bursts of escapism and cap it all with the impending arrival inside� Earth�s gravitational field, of a rogue planet, once hiding behind the sun and you have the ingredients of maybe the best von Trier film. Whether you read it as a treatise in individual human fragility in the face of a harsh and pointless existence or an entire race�s collapse in the face of an externally imposed, insuperable finality, the effect is the same. It is disturbing to watch as you realize that Kersten Dunst�s character is not an irritating, self-advertising, selfish melancholic so much as someone�s response to having a clairvoyant�s understanding of impending disaster � so where is the meaning in marriage, above all else?

The film contains one of the most wonderfully constructed scenes in cinema. The approaching planet � the Melancholia of the title � begins to fill the entire horizon. Dunst�s character, until now a black hole of emotion which those around her have tried perpetually and unsuccessfully to fill, takes charge and comforts her sister and her nephew, the only ones remaining in the house with her. She has them build and occupy a magical defence against cosmic annihilation, a skeletal pyramid of sticks. Huddled inside, their hands clasped, they draw succour from Dunst�s nihilistic preparedness to face whatever might come.

Enemy

Saturday, August 15, 2015

I once walked from Bungay to Ditchingham across the Norfolk/Suffolk border by a back road. An old man came down the hill and passed me by. We did not speak. When I looked round a few moments later, he had disappeared. The reason I turned was because he seemed familiar. Too familiar. He was my older self.

The notion of identical selves occupying the same time and space has preoccupied creative minds often enough. The latest film on this theme is Enemy (2013) with Jake Gyllenhaal playing two identical men, one of whom sees an actor in a film and pursues him to discover why they are identical. The feel of the film is of cold war East Europe with its leached browns and yellows, totalitarian architecture and complete absence of human warmth. As the characters and their female companions begin to mesh and grind in a hopeless foursome, the foreboding in the film increases. A small review cannot be a spoiler, so I will only say that Gyllenhaal is remarkably subtle in demarcating the two characters he plays, that a strange, unfathomable symbolism appears and reappears, hanging like a black pall over the city, that there are some disturbing extremes of human behavior and that it ends with a single moment of abject terror.

It has elements of Christopher Nolan, of Wim Wenders and of Michael Haneke but it is also impressively the unique work of its director, Denis Villeneuve.

True Detective 2

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

True Detective 2. A mesmerising mix of Grand Guignol blood and violence and powerful emotional characterisation, Season 2 provokes both bewilderment at sudden, unfathomable plot lines and eyes-on-stalks tension as key events unfold. Fantastic credits with Leonard Cohen’s “Never Mind” growling over industrial decay, a uniformly brilliant evocation of a society whose toxic margins are creeping into the mainstream, excellent and at times sensational acting and a conclusion both better and worse than Season 1. Mullholland Drive married to Infernal Affairs with the occasional glitch of easily editable B movie indulgence. Colin Firth and Rachel McAdams are terrific, the sense of a social world spiralling into moral, environmental and political degradation is unflinching and the risks it takes are sometimes exhilarating. Roll on Season 3.

Of God Particles

Thursday, August 6, 2015

For everyone who wants more from a film, in particular an engagement with that prickly darkness that resides below every day consciousness wherein we dare to question how much freedom we actually have, then �Frequencies� will be a delight.

In a new book of aphorisms I am cooking in the oven there is one that is pertinent to this review:

We exist in a God’s first novel; our lives are full of paradox, blind alleys, weak characterisation and illogical endings

�The feeling that under the deepest scrutiny life just does not add up suddenly grips us from time to time. It can be unsettling and we tend to banish it to the depths and �get on� as best we can knowing full well that we are choosing to gloss over our unrest. Have we free will or are we fated to live our lives according to an opaque grand design? Is there, in physics, perhaps at the quantum level, a code that defines what we are and the limits of what we can do?

Frequencies� is a brilliantly unorthodox film, a perfect other world, a story of code-crossed lovers, of god-creation and of a society where each must play a designed part until �

To be or not to be

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

It�s a pleasure to have a seriously challenging sci fi series on tv. Not the futuristic, philosophically hard-wired, Interstellar-style but creeping, unsettling daily life sci fi. We have two Roombas in this French house. They are programmed to come on and vacuum floors in the period between coffee in bed and being up and about. They speak several languages. We prefer English. One had �her� being reprogrammed by my twenty month old grandson to speak in Spanish and start work at lunchtime. These magnificent non-sentient disks of hard labour are as far removed from sexual appeasement as can be conceived. Not so in Humans Channel 4. The blurred lines between android or �synth� and ourselves cause moral mayhem. Picking up the same theme that is core to the film Ex-Machina, reviewed earlier, the viewer is forced to question whether, if in every possible way except being built of flesh and blood, a synth acts human, then shouldn�t we treat it as such and get on with congenial cohabitation. Humans provides the viewer with a variety of synths upon which to meditate, from lackey to sex worker to the fully conscious (and, in some cases enigmatically seductive).� It is unsettling. You both identify with the faulty, imperfect error-prone human beings and at the same time are drawn into the plight of these newly created creatures with their Munch-like screams of human consciousness locked inside. The plot is great. It�s full of the unpredictable. There are good lines. If you have missed it, watch the re-run or rent the set from Netflix when it arrives.

Under the Skin

Friday, July 3, 2015

Under the Skin, with Scarlett Johanssen in a quease-making central role, underlines one of the age old adages of cinema – first class novels make second class films and vice versa. I’d read the book before seeing the film. The result was curiously schizophrenic. Watching the movie was overlaid by hovering images that had remained with me from the book. These two bands of experience were almost completely different. It was only afterwards that I could tease out one from the other. While the book is a little above average, the film is innovative, shot largely in darkness and with an eerie, neck-tingling soundtrack. Using only a twisted fragment of its source material it creeps insidiously under your guard. It’s great cinema if you want your horror cerebral and you prefer not to be spoon-fed with predictability.

Ex Machina

Friday, July 3, 2015

Would you be happy if your child married an android?

When you meet someone new, your bio-chemistry does an autonomous evaluation: do I fancy her? is there something dangerous about him? will we get on? etc. The overriding sense of the interaction boils down to authenticity. Can I believe this other person enough to trust him or her? Maybe we can be friends – or more. Alan Turing (the subject of The Imitation Game where he is played by the excellent Benedict Cumberbatch) is�a kind of hero in Sci Fi in that he suggested a methodology for testing an android or robot to discover whether or not it is sentient and, therefore, human. Ex Machina is a film which pivots on this methodology. It is a philosophical tale of horror where there are strange inversions of the Beauty and the Beast motif. It calls into question our assumptions and attitudes towards ‘others’. The film, The Matrix, was a winner partially because it is based on what many science-philosophers believe to be a possible reality (that we are just clever scripts in an advanced computer program) and in the same way Ex Machina (like Blade Runner before it) asks us whether, if Turing’s tests for sentience are passed, could we eventually treat androids as fellow humans? The film is a discourse on this enigmatic theme, with enough blood and guts to oil the cogs and wheels of its artificial beings. It’s good. It’s chilling. It makes you wonder about the nature of the species.

Bobby Dazzler

Friday, July 3, 2015

Channeling

Friday, July 3, 2015

The Duke of Burgundy

Friday, July 3, 2015

Our fingerprints, our retinal configuration and all else about us are unique, including our perceptions, dreams and fantasies. Even so we talk about being �normal� as though it is a virtue. Society pressgangs us into conformity. To stray outside the fencing that society erects to herd us along the path of life is to risk certain �vilification.

When I directed a research study many years ago into the behavior of children playing computer games in their homes, an unanticipated by-product of the data gathering was the complete lack of pattern across families� behaviors. 100 families equalled 100 eccentric �cultures�. Once inside the front door of a house rules seem to be invented and invoked, either explicit or implicit, which each family regards as normal and acceptable. It is a conundrum. Society values highly the sacred autonomy of family life but still demands the gloss of public conformity. Only when behaviour spills over into the socially unacceptable are front doors breached. Yet, under the guise of household normality, the bizarre, the strange and the problematic co-exist without constraint. It seemed in our research that no two families were remotely alike. We couldn�t cluster them in categories. Yet, in all their wondrously divergent ways, they created viable and relatively stable habitats, no matter how outlandish they might appear when one examined the detail.

The Duke of Burgundy is a film about intimacy. What is depicted in its slow, erotic flow is a range of behaviours between two women which necessitates keeping the front door firmly shut. They do together what their obsessions demand of them. Their �normality� is not a recognizable one. It has a recurring life cycle, like the butterfly of the film�s title, with alternating phases of sexual dominance and subservience that reach a crescendo before beginning all over again. Wonderfully filmed in deep shadows and claustrophobic rooms, close up and intense, it is a terrific cinema.

We all think we know what love is. We may be daft enough to think that others experience it as we do. The film, like the research mentioned above, suggests otherwise. The love of the two women is unlike anything society might imagine as normal. Yet it is definitely and unequivocally love.

You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone…

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

How much do we sleepwalk through life, imagining that all is fine and it’s a blessing to be in the �free� world? Meanwhile, what we assume to be a ‘democracy’ subtly and inexorably sucks the juice out of our liberties. Whether it be GCHQ mass surveillance a la Snowden, reduction in free legal support for the poor, increasing observation of households through computers in the home, unfettered criminal banking behaviour, the impunity with which the Cabinet Office at Westminster and senior police officers cover up high-level corruption, including paedophilia, the insidious pressure of the multinationals in shaping government policy and deregulating ��red tape� to ensure profit, regardless of the consequences for the environment �

� but this is a blog, not a list�

Three films to watch which will turn the viewer into a radical revolutionary, if he or she can be credited with any critical consciousness at all, are the portrayal of real-life freedom fighters in The Internet�s Own Boy (Aaron Swartz), Citizenfour (Edward Snowden) and Kill the Messenger (Gary Webb). They are unadorned documentaries compiled from footage of interviews, events and documentation. Though ostensibly about unbelievably vicious and unwarranted US government attrition (sadly, largely under the Obama administration) they also point up how freedoms are being eroded by all governments.� Wherever one lives, the films are a testament to the need to arrest sleepwalking.� The brave, central figures in these films wanted to seek the truth, to expose government criminality, corruption or the repressive docking of freedom of expression under the guise of protecting national security, while they were actually serving the profit-motives of the rich and powerful.

Webb and Swartz committed suicide in inexplicable circumstances and Snowden is in hiding in Russia.

It is easy, with elections looming, to believe that life is all about the pound in your pocket or foreigners taking your jobs. It�s not, it�s about the loss of civil liberty, the freedom to speak out against injustice, empathy with others and the will to curb the powerful. Better to be a little poorer in a compassionate society than witness, silently, the draconian laws being passed almost daily by authoritarian, scare-mongering governments.

Marketing – By Royal Appointment

Sunday, January 4, 2015

The gullibility of a population knows no bounds but even then some kind of psychic sea-change may bring down a Tzar, a wall in Berlin or produce a velvet revolution elsewhere in Europe. One day Putin will lose his credibility. He bought it in the first place, his marketing men orchestrating his he-man image, hoisting his half-clad, heroic body on to a photogenic nag. But equally there is a power to dethrone, even in the face of total media control. What is it? It is the ordinary person’s eyes which can suddenly see through the deception of the president’s new clothes. Enough eyes and the veil of seduction and trumpeting propaganda is lifted and it is all change. Glib, self-aggrandizing politicians come to know this at election time. What seems like certain victory becomes a crushing humiliation.

Prince Andrew is today embroiled in allegations of rape. The House of Windsor have categorically denied his culpability. Twice in two days. This tottering institution on its high, ornately fashioned heels, wigs and frock coats has become a skilled master at managing modern marketing ploys. A word here and there in high places, in the ears of police chiefs, newspaper barons, military generals and the lickspittles of Westminster and bad news stories are scuppered before they even tickle the deaf ears of those in the common herd who drool at pomp and ceremony. �And when they do and ears become unblocked, and all hell seems about to pay, the oily palmed machine bursts into full throttle. The manner in which Prince Charles’ and The Family’s treatment of Diana and the elevation of Camilla has been reconfigured as an acceptable royal history is a remarkable feat of social engineering. The royal weddings, the babies, the interminable visits abroad, the New Year Honours, the garden parties, the Princes at war, all go to present a continuous pageant of meticulously manicured superiority. The population pays the royals a queen’s ransom for the honour of being Her Loyal Subjects. The institution is sold, seductively but falsely, as being as good as the Disney corporation in bringing foreigners to the UK to marvel at its archaic spectacles. It provides glamour. It is a current day opiate for the masses.

It is an absurdist theatre, scarcely credible to anyone with a belief in rationality, fairness and equality in all things. It has nothing to do with democracy for it perpetuates the inordinate, selfish power of blood and wealth in a country kept free by the blood-sacrifice of selfless, impecunious ‘subjects’. Robert Graves’ ghostly footage appeared on television today. He was bemoaning the celebration of victory at the end of the Second World War. For him it merely presaged further wars to come. Market the end of war well and people will return to the trenches willingly when the next one comes along. From their run-down urban estates, their agricultural villages, their benefits-reduced poverty, they will heed the call to queen and country. And they will believe it and be proud of it. That’s the power of marketing.

Yet even on the sceptered isle one day the veil will be lifted. Forcing the BBC to pull its documentary on royal media manipulation will not prevent it.

Tags: Royals. Prince Edward. Marketing.

The Times They Are A Changing

Thursday, December 11, 2014

The death of any soldier causes distress. Distress for loved ones, for comrades and for those that are protected by military action. Yet the individual significance of such an end to a life quickly melts into stone, another name inscribed on a monument by a village green, or becomes another ceramic poppy in a gigantic art installation. War is obscene, made more so by soft handed politicians’ callous and hypocritical motivation in sending the young to experience the horrors of killing and maiming, more often for economic gain than anything resembling a universal morality.  Such behaviour is exacerbated further by underwriting, in so-called peace time,  acts of torture that defy the Geneva Convention.

There was a period in the nineteen fifties when, because of the hell of the First and Second World Wars, many of the young (I was a teenager) refused to wear poppies. It was not disrespectful towards the dead but represented a deep antipathy towards what was seen as a glorification of something hideous. There was a feeling that too many had died in vain, that much suffering could and should have been avoided and that war was a crime. It was at the same time that I remember some of us refusing to stand for the national anthem in the theatre or cinema (a ritual at the time) because we associated such needless death with a British establishment whose keystone was the queen. I came to realize in those formative years that death rituals involving carriages and cannon, medals and uniforms, black ties and overcoats, hats with veils and shiny shoes, plumed horses and flag covered coffins were a grand illusion, a deception, a marketing campaign to instill in the bereaved, pride in a family member’s death, a form of mass hypnosis persuading them that to fall in battle represented a supreme act of giving, not losing.

The sixties intensified people’s mixed attitudes to pomp and ceremony. White poppies made an appearance. Vietnam saw flowers in gun barrels. Polished wood gave way to body bags. It became harder for politicians to pull the wool over the people’s eyes. A bishop giving blessing to a nuclear submarine provoked outrage.

Yet there is one thing sure about humanity. It swings on a pendulum. The levers of power will always regain control. Today, marketing is again in overdrive. The townsfolk come in their thousands to pay their last respects. The bereaved show gratitude for the momentary majesty afforded their dead sons and daughters.

And the politicians and the powerful, made up for the occasion, stare soulfully into the cameras and then go about their business.

Tags: War propaganda

The Professional Pyramid: posturing on paedophilia

Thursday, November 20, 2014

 Having spent my working days at every level of education from primary school to PhD supervision, as well as doing five years in intensive residential social work, and finally having spent the latter end of my toils doing research on nationally funded projects, I suppose I feel I have some kind of obligation to tell it how it is. The thesis is this, the higher you go up the career ladder, the easier the work is, whether in health, social work, policing or education. In fact, the better educated and more articulate you are, the more you can slip into senior positions, pick up the lie of the land and spout persuasively about what needs to be done, what lessons ‘need to be learned’ and what strategies should be followed. This applies to every level up to ministerial.

I am reacting to one of the darkest manifestations of human behavior; the rape of young girls and boys by men, whether in gangs drawn from specific social or religious backgrounds through to networks of the most powerful individuals in the country whether they be teachers, celebrities, politicians, senior police officers or army generals. Yet another report released this week, this time by Ofsted, criticizes the lack of cooperation between agencies to protect the young. (Ofsted itself has a deplorable record in uncovering child abuse over the last decade!) Similar reports in the last twenty years have located this lack of integrated work between all relevant agencies as a root cause of the lack of protection. But nothing has changed.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the career of individuals is a greater motivating force than the distress of the young. Careers are made in separate professional worlds, the territories of specific disciplines. They are mini-cultures with their own languages and ways of seeing and doing. In each, defenceless children are their units of currency and they don’t take kindly to passing this currency on to others for fear it might weaken their bargaining power. In effect, each profession builds its empire on the pain and suffering of its young ‘clients’.

The second reason for the complete inadequacy of professional bodies in understanding, empathising and finding ways of assuaging the terrible hurt of the young, thus giving them a chance to break with their troubled pasts and construct better futures, stems from the same source. Working with desperate individuals in the throes of extreme distress is as hard as it gets. To bring about change requires extraordinary skills and aptitudes plus an exceptional emotional stability. Within the career structures of agencies, such people are paid the least and the most is expected of them. The best among them are soon promoted and leave the raw nature of the field. As managers or supervisors they no longer face the vile expressions of inhuman acts every hour of the day. As they become senior managers even less. But the higher the tier, the higher the pay, and the more distant the involvement with on-the-ground staff. Over time they become utterly divorced from the rapidly changing cultures of deprivation and depravity. They have less and less understanding of what constitutes torture in the daily lives of those they are charged to keep from harm. Good current examples are internet-based paedophilia and bullying.

But they are, nevertheless, articulate middle class professionals, well rehearsed in admitting corporate guilt and suggesting what should be done.

Tags: Paedophilia. Ofsted report.

Trolls

Sunday, October 26, 2014

When I was young, trolls used to live under bridges and reach up and grab your ankles and drag you down into their gnashing-toothed depths. A regular song on the wireless ran, “I’m a troll foldy roll…”The symbol of the bridge is significant; a division between two realities, the every day and the otherworldly. Plato theorized about the very same. Do we truly exist in the every day or is life a fantasy and we are mere shadows on a cave wall? Today physicists posit whether we can exist in parallel universes, quantum beings with myriad identities?

Human beings tend to make realities out of their imaginings. We dream, we play with ideas, we invent. If we believe strongly enough in the possibility of something existing then it becomes, to all intents and purposes, real.

The metaphysical battles fought between philosophers over the nature of existence  have paled as your average man and woman have embraced alternative realities. They live shadowy lives in cyber space. Under noms de plume they tweet, blog, buy and sell, and form otherworldly communities of similar taste and inclination from the virtuous to the visceral, from the moral to the perverse, from the mundane to the bizarre. Everything is possible out there in the ether.

The Internet becomes a cosmic therapeutic playground wherein its users enter via an airlock between one reality and another and create new rules and roles to be played out on landscapes as malleable as their earthly one are bound. In their Wonderlands they can unleash what has been repressed in them over time from overseeing parents to the policing of society.

And people believe they exist there with impunity. They become trolls and expect the bridge to protect them from visibility as they let loose their atavistic nastiness on the world that passes overhead.

Tags: psychology, Trolling, Trolls

Trolling

Saturday, October 11, 2014

After last week’s eulogy to the freedom of the Internet and its capacity for anarchy and the puncturing of pomposity (and notwithstanding its propensity for the exposure of lies and tyrannical behaviour of all sorts, its soap box for the disenfranchised, the successful tilting at windmills – for example yesterday’s culmination to the campaign by Greenpeace against the Lego/Shell tie-up – there is another side to the picture. There is always another side of course. There is the dark net, the shrouded world where, we are informed, terrorists, gangsters, sexual predators and the like roam. But in the broad daylight of the everyday, publicly-lit platform for views, comments and opinions, one can find degrees of behaviour that defy one’s instincts for the virtual good of the medium. ‘Trolling’ is central to this disheartening statement on human potential. The other day a woman committed suicide after trolling the mourning McCanns. Her village friends said afterwards she was a wonderful friend and a pillar of the community. She had been outed by a reporter for her bizarre on-line vitriol, accusing the McCanns of murdering their own child. Teenagers have committed suicide all too frequently as a result of trolling from school peers. And at the back of the Internet, where human ants write codes, engineer platforms, create the virtual habitats that we can enter at home, misogyny and sexual harassment rule. It is as though the Internet is sand and people put their heads in it and fantasise, imagining that no-one can see them as the authors, that the medium guarantees anonymity. In today’s Guardian on-line there is an insightful article:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/09/trolls-men-witch-hunt-internet

with the premise that it is mostly men who behave appallingly and that they are so enamoured with their beliefs in the ‘heroes’ of the medium that they refuse to accept any contrary view – resulting in the forms of misogyny mentioned above. If you are fans of Richard Dawkins and Julian Assange, read it to test your credulity.

Tags: Trolling

Mashing it up

Friday, October 3, 2014

In a political world where for centuries the individual had been a statistic, a mere single vote, a consumer of political rhetoric and high street junk, a loyal, unquestioning soldier, a cupcake on a table laden with gastronomic desserts scoffed by the multinationals, the banks, the church, the royal family, the landed classes, the judicial system, Westminster politicians and all the rest that make up the establishment, the elite, suddenly along came the internet, created by hippies on LSD. It looked ripe for a commercial and political killing, the latest invention in the capitalist dream of seduction and control, a way to individualise the clarion call to the cash till and the ballot box. But, built into its DNA, in codes so basic that they hid in broad daylight, conceived and developed on tables heavy with cocaine and whatever else fired the synapses of Silicon Valley, was the Anarchist Gene. The Web, the roaring tiger of universal communication, had a tail so dumbfoundingly capable of transforming the beast into a spitting, unmanageable demon that the once despised and benighted individual could suddenly change the direction of mass markets, expose the pompous face of the rich and the would-be powerful, the duplicitous nature of government actions whether despotic or pseudo-democratic, the obscene exercise of power in all its forms from paedophile priests to preening presidents, secret government agencies to globally corrupt corporations. And with the technology came the individual heroes and heroines, the committed evangelists for a new order, the righteous campaigners, the rule-breakers, the scoffers, those once-humiliated but now retaliating millions of voices. All worms turning. From cassetteboy to Edward Snowden they each have a voice that once would have been muzzled.

(see youtube.com/watch?v=0YBumQHPAeU)

Tags: casseteboy, Edward Snowden

History Homework

Friday, July 25, 2014

Having tried a story in seven tweets once, I quite liked the challenge. So here’s another for your delectation and delight.

1

The Captain was finishing a coloured picture of a new species of fly. His ship rocked gently under a hot sun.

2

As he added the last brush stroke there was a little pop. He was gone. Just like that. It was as if he had never been.

3

A time and a half later a girl called Xanxy was doing some homework with a history hook and line. She twitched it.

4

“Stop that at once,“ said her mother. “That’s your Father’s. It’s not a toy. You can cause all sorts of time knots at your age.”

5

She looked inside Xanxy’s collection tank as a bewildered man in a uniform appeared, carrying easel, brush and inks.

6

“Have I done it right, Mama? It says, Research and illustrate the shipping terms Captain and Shanghaied and present them  to class”

7

“Don’t ask me,” said her Mother. “Just make sure the poor creature goes back where he came from, once you’ve shown him in the lesson.”

Tags: Short story in seven tweets

A Tale in 7 Tweets

Monday, July 21, 2014

I was struck by the notion of David Mitchell’s (not the comedian) attempt to create a seven tweet story. Each tweet the usual 140 characters or less, including spaces. Below is my own foray into the form, the Twitter version of a haiku-like constraint.

1.

“Rainin’ in my heart”: The song bounced off the bone inside his skull in time to the trolley’s squeaking. The drug made it symphonic.

2.

Blurry masked faces. Transparent tubes and steel. A whistling dive into darkness and the grim recall of a somersault into a sycamore’s trunk.

3.

Observing from the ceiling. Heart out.  New heart in. The surgeon’s reddening gloves. The robot’s precise blade.

4.

His body welcoming the flesh and blood prosthesis. A sense of his memories being torn and fluttering.

5.

Wife, children, house, dog, job, university, school, childhood, babyhood are shreds in a storm. New images emerging.

6.

The delight of soil, beetles, worms, fermenting fruit. A leather muzzle. The sweet seduction of truffles.

7.

Whistling back to consciousness. Identity returning.  But something else – an overwhelming craving to root his nose deep into damp earth.

Tags: A story in tweets

Unkind cutting

Saturday, July 5, 2014

I haven’t written a blog for some time and with this one I am breaking my flow of childhood reminiscences.

I was talking on Skype to my son in Japan. I said that once you hit seventy you have a prevailing picture of the Grim Reaper, scythe glittering in the sunshine, walking down a long hill towards you. If you are feeling particularly good in yourself, he recedes up the track to become a dot on the horizon whereas if you feel under the weather in some way he becomes increasingly magnified. The fact of the matter is that, at seventy, you are in his stalking territory for this is the killing field of the Hooded One. Around you friends and acquaintances of approximately your own age are dying with terrible regularity. Cancer and heart attacks. There is a harsh imbalance to it all. Why can’t we all go together in one merry swipe of the blade? Instead we have this haphazard genocide and as much unpredictability as can be squeezed out of what is, of course, the most predictable of our seven ages. It is true, too, as I mentioned in a recent tweet, that you age, usually become somewhat wiser but have less and less time and energy to employ your hard earned wisdom. This vicious irony is further exaggerated by the brain’s consistency, changing from chunky cheddar to holey Emmental so that sagacity deconstructs into quicksilver, sliding away from attempts to focus upon it long enough to communicate it to those around you.

Anyway, I went for knee replacement surgery here in France. The events of that carving and remodelling of some of my body parts are now a surreal dream of lumpy mattresses, debilitating pain, morphine-induced visions, a mad woman screaming through the night, padding nurses carrying hypodermics and pills to thrust into my quivering body at all hours and feats of endurance to get to the toilet and somehow try to evacuate my bowels as a consequence of the plates piled with food that reduce your appetite from minimal to non-existent. And finally the kines, the physiotherapists with their softly growling machines-diaboliques, into which your leg is strapped and which bend the resisting, swollen joints into something vaguely resembling their original right angle, regardless of the pain.

The operation itself was a miracle of modern surgery conducted by a gentle and humane man. Everything now seems straight and true. I now have my own machine on loan at home and am a masochist working my way back to happiness.

Better still, the cowled character on my landscape has retreated far into the mists of my blue-remembered hills.

Tags: knee replacement

I am a Camera

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

I was an advisor to the British Board of Film Classification for ten years, bridging the twentieth and twenty first centuries, a member of a lay panel that debated public concerns regarding children’s viewing habits, trying to establish guidelines that might help parents. Everyone’s life has threads that only become apparent in retrospect. This one began when my parents brought me to England from India where I was born. Apart from losing half of my bilingual skill on the boat trip and having the undoubted trauma of leaving my personal Ayah behind, the equivalent of half a mother, we arrived in a very cold Leeds to stay with my grandmother. The winter was so severe and rationing so limited our ability to heat the house, that I was taken every day to an Odeon cinema to be put next to the hot projector. What did I see, a short-sighted four year old not yet in spectacles? What did I hear? I can’t remember but can only imagine the coloured flickerings and loud, echoing voices and thrilling music. Hot celluloid, occasionally bursting into flame. Oily whirrings. The laying down of a lava bed of dimly-discernible, melding worlds.

Where the thread went next is more clearly caught on the hook of remembrance. My father bought a Rover. It was his pride and joy. It smelled of leather and the scents of the landscape we trundled through. By now we lived near Durham in the north east of England, in a village recorded in these scribblings; Shadforth. Around us were the pit villages above their coalfields. Within twenty miles, a half dozen of these linear developments each boasted a cinema. My father was typical of the ex-military. Austere and unable to show too much emotion except when closeted in the darkness of a Gaumont or an Essoldo where none could see his face. He took us to musicals with Grace Kelly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, films like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and religious epics such as The Robe.

Later again, as a seventeen year old, living six miles from Newcastle now, I took the bus to watch foreign films at The Tatler News Cinema on Northumberland Street. None of my footballing and fishing friends did. I was a Martian to them, a weird otherworldy fellow. I had to walk home along Scotswood Road at 11.00 at night past the yellow-lit, piano sound-tracked, boisterous pubs, disgorging their drunken revelers, my head full of the Nouvelle Vague.

Since then I have gone to cinema to watch everything and anything with any pretension of quality, from the popular to the esoteric. Film has competed with literature all this time. Its encoded realities have taken me into weird and wonderful worlds, into the psyches of strangers, into near-death experiences, into heroism and cowardice, into sentimentality and tragedy. It has always encouraged me to think and go beyond. I am still ready to be as spell-bound as a four year old as the lights go down and the Pearl and Dean jingle swells. 

When I became a research professor, it was little wonder that I directed an early British project about video and computer games in the home. This successful study of the ways families related to each other around their televisions and the cheaply available images, was a tying of knots. It took me to the advisory role at the BBFC.

Tags: Cinema. Childhood.

The Day Trip

Sunday, May 18, 2014

“Oh where are we going,” asked the children, staring wide-eyed at the driver.
“Far, far away,” came his wicked-smiling response.
“Will there be sweeties?” they asked as one.
“Everything you always wanted. Just settle down and don’t ask questions.” With that he turned to the steering wheel and the doors closed with a metallic clang. The vehicle grunted into life and left the village empty of its young, silent save for the call of birds and the bleating and snorting of farmyard beasts. It was the one day in the year that tranquility eddied around their mothers while far below the rumbling tyres their fathers hacked away at black rock, helmet lamps barely piercing the gloom, a life-saving canary warbling dismally in a swinging cage.

The shiny red tube bounced along; out through the meadows and small, golden, cereal-waving fields, under the green gloom of interlaced branches and past the short ribbons of back to back housing. There was a swelling chorus of “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountains” with screeches of laughter and a gasping red-faced halt at the verse, “She’ll be wearing smelly knickers.” Notes were passed among the cargo, not one of whom was under five or over ten. “Will you be my boyfriend?” “Bruce wants to go out with you.” “Jenny says you stink.”

Then, after hillocks and mounds, gorse and broom, the conveyance topped a final rise to screams of, “I can see the sea.” There was a lurching halt in a potholed car park and everyone was made to sit still for a moment. “Make sure you have got everything with you.” Four adults, who seemed to have materialised suddenly at the front, and the driver, dismounted and watched beadily as boys and girls jostled down the aisle, lovingly prepared carrier bags of picnic food, towels and costumes clutched to bosoms. A straggly, jigging line made its way down and on to the sand.

I had no idea who the driver was and had only the barest inkling of the grown-ups. If you had asked me about where we were I would have stared at you in puzzlement. It was immaterial. This was the Miners’ Mystery Trip and its details remain just that, even today. My main memory was padding back from the water’s edge and finding I was lost. I had left my spectacles on my pile of clothes. There were blurred faces all round. A geyser of tears erupted from my eyes. I sobbed wildly, “I want my Mummy” and someone whose face I never saw took my hand and led me across the sand before passing my subsiding form to a life-guard who guided me to the lost children’s hut. Inside there were several children, becalmed. The only sound was the noise of placatory toffees being worked into fudgy balls. The silence, the gravity and the sense of being lost rushed through me again and I burst into more tears. The hut erupted as all the seated occupants started bawling in sympathy and it remained like that until one of the four grown-ups came to claim me and pluck me away from the purgatory.

Tags: 1950s childhood

Looking for Eric

Friday, May 9, 2014

I cannot be compared to Eric Cantona, either as a boy or a man. I would never have progressed beyond the school football team and I never did karate. But I like to think I am a better philosopher. I might even be a better actor. Anyway, bridging to the last blog-post and the search for my former self, it is football and our dissimilarity that concerns me here.

Even in the early nineteen fifties most boys loved football, although few probably had aspirations of playing for their local professional team, in my case Newcastle United. I learned a big lesson from my father, a Captain in the army’s PT corps; practice makes you better at everything and can give a shine even to the most lacklustre of performers. So it was that I practised for hours, days and weeks with balls of all sizes and eventually developed a modicum of trickery. Being tall and liable to be toppled by low-gravity, thickset tanks of miner’s sons was a perennial problem but the plus was that I was never in the last batch to be chosen for the two teams in class games. And being in the middle ground of competence also meant no ridicule and no bullying. Basic acceptance. I could breathe easily.

The culmination of my football talent occurred one day on the sloping field at Blaydon Grammar School in my fifth year. I was playing on the right wing and up against the school’s left back. I received the ball midway in his half, lifted it over his despairing tackle with sumptuous ease and hit it on the half-volley goalwards. It was a screamer. Top corner. Goalkeeper in the mud. The whistle sounded and I turned for plaudits only to see the teacher pointing for a free kick somewhere behind me. He hadn’t seen the goal. He was separating two boys, red in tooth and claw. Nor had anyone else seen it except the goalkeeper and the left back. And they weren’t going to say anything, were they?

Whether that was the source of my recurring, unrequited, fruitless dreams with their unwanted denouements, I don’t know. But when I wake up these dreams often contain the same element; myself as would-be hero, about to wallow in success and approbation but losing it all in a terrible twist of fortune that only a Stephen King or a Maupassant might devise.

This idée fixe now percolates my writing. Everything I do has to have a twist ending, bringing the reader up short with a gasp at a story’s culmination. But not necessarily, I hasten to comfort the prospective follower among you, a twist for the worse.

Tags: Eric Cantona. Blog. Writing.

Autobiography: to have been or not to have been

Thursday, May 1, 2014

I tweeted recently (@profjacksanger) that “The past is but a blank page on which the historian writes fiction.” In many ways, the business of autobiography follows suit. We re-write our histories incrementally as our lives progress so that they fit and augment our circumstances at the time of writing. Whether we recognise it or not, we are the lead players in our histories and everything is refracted through the prism of our reminiscences. If you are an avid reader of people’s reflections on their lives, it is worth remembering that they are always more fiction than fact. The project of trying to reduce their histories and contain them in nutshells is such a preposterous violation of reality that they cannot be claimed to be anything other than some vague after-taste of what might have transpired. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a great piece about the accuracy of maps when representing reality:

On Exactitude in Science

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map
of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

In other words, unless we were mad enough to write everything down as it happens – which means we wouldn’t have time to experience anything and our lives would be stuffed with writing and little else, a diarrhea of words about nothing – we must accept the evils of selection and reductionism.

Here’s a tale. In an early blog I, Jack Sanger, described the change that took place in my psyche at the age of eighteen at college when I decided to take my middle name, Jack, in preference to my name of the previous seventeen plus years, Eric. As in some drama of film or stage, the change was from an introverted, shy individual to an outgoing socialite, actor, scriptwriter, stand-up comic and serial lover of women. I include the latter, not as an attempt to inflate my sexual standing (which, you will have gathered from above, might well be the case) but to reminisce on the effects of this change of name upon my behavior with the said young women.

For some months as I settled uneasily into this new persona, I vacillated between these two characters; the introvert and the extrovert. When I kissed and fondled and was touched in turn, I had the distinct impression that it was not Eric who was enjoying life so royally but the new outer person, Jack. Jack was having all the fun and Eric was a mere onlooker – or, to be more accurate an outlooker.

As time went on it became easier. I was Jack. In the psychic battle between my two selves, Jack subsumed Eric. Where is he now, the old Eric? He is called up by the magic lamp of my keyboard for he is the object of all my autobiographical blogs up to the age of eighteen.

The fruit of knowledge

Friday, April 25, 2014

There are windows in our lives that open momentarily and shut forever. They reveal where we have come from and point to where we will eventually go. Like angels balanced on the points of pins, we are given a gift of knowing and then it is taken away from us. We are young and in our minds there is a maelstrom of memories which jostle, incapable of articulation because the tongue cannot yet act as the brain’s tool. We have just learned the glimmerings of what it is to be alive and the enormity of separateness. Only if some empathetic adult intuits that the window has opened and teases out our pictures, will the revelations pour out before it shuts again.

I was sitting with a tiny girl not yet three years old, at a gathering for a meal. The hubbub acted like an insulation. I asked her about her first memories. No, before that. Before the pram. Before the milk from your mother’s breast. Where did you come from? She sighed and looked at me as though I should know the answer but told me, nevertheless.

I was an apple in an apple tree. The tree stretched up into the night full of stars. One day I fell slowly though the branches. I landed on grass. A man with a beard came with a knife. He wrapped me and gave me to my mother.

The room had gone silent. The magical little vignette hypnotized the guests. Then the little girl’s mother whispered that when she had been born they had used old green towels and the doctor was a bearded man. But, like the rest in the room, she had no explanation for the apple tree and the stars and the velvet night.

Tags: Early speech. Memories. Before birth.

Sanity not vanity in the author

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Ok, think about a bordello. Think about one of its rooms. Think about what happens inside it in microscopic detail. There is a sperm with its single imperative. Where’s the egg? Oh there it is. Isn’t it huge? Like a sun about to supernova. It must beat its tail harder. It’s a marathon and a sprint and millions of others are in a line. Just one effort and a scream of abracadabra and the portal will open and it will enter and achieve singularity and meltdown.

The bordello is the world of publishing. The egg is the publishing house. The sperm is the writer. The medium in which they all exist is the literary landscape.

What, on this landscape, apart from competition with other sperm, complicates and exaggerates the quest to penetrate the egg? Well, there is a lack of signposting. Gone is the well-trodden relay of readers and editors giving thought to every well turned phrase, sifting out the most fertile tail that wags its owner. Instead there is a new kind of eugenics. The traditional primitive, lusty, organic coupling has given way to a laboratory wherein the sperm are spun through the centrifuge of a literary agent’s subjective criteria to separate strong from weak. The DNA is configured so that the egg will allow it to break through its semi- impermeable shell. The ovum prefers this outsourced, artificial determinism and waits in a kind of languor for the fission of new fiction.

The other way to achieve conception is to swim in different waters in another room. It is a laboratory in which there is no eugenic differentiation. Eggs are as abundant as sperm. Every sperm can find fusion. Here e-publishers make the latter-day supernovae look like mere candles in the cosmos. This is the black hole of e-publishing. No-one ascertains the vigour of the wagging tail or the profile of the DNA inside it. It is a compressed Darwinism. Millions of couplings. Millions of births, all but a very few strong enough to survive for more than days or weeks. Yet every snuffed out spark of life has still contributed to the egg increasing in size and being greedy for more fertilisation.

There is a third way.

Create your own laboratory with your own eggs and sperm derived from your own stem cells. Couple them. Nurture your self-propagated offspring and let them live in this world you have conceived. Let them be promiscuous with strangers. Allow them in turn to be intimate with your creations and, as before, enjoy an earthy, lustful unpredictable intimacy. Then, as they leave the bordello, they can place on the bedside table a payment for what the experience was worth.

Tags: Writing. Self-publishing. Sex.

A Room With Two Views

Friday, April 11, 2014

I’m in Soho, London. The sun is bright but does nothing to mask the purgatory of the city’s coagulated humanity. I know that I must be seeing it like a Martian because I have been a mountain man for months. I have overwintered beside a wood burning stove as the snow piled ever higher on Mount Canigou above my house.  I’ve shut the shutters each evening as the early dark approached, hiding within the four walls in semi-hibernation. The physicality of tending to flame has given way to the passivity of  a hotel’s central heating, the shutters to double glazing, the vistas of successive ridges in their lines of ever-darkening blue to rearing concrete and brick cliffs pressing against my chest, blocking sight lines, cramping my breath. People sacrifice their bodies to be here. They relegate their needs. They promote their wants. Rats fight to the death when their living space edges towards point zero. It feels like that here. The oppressiveness is only driven back into the shadows by tantalising artificial rainbows with their lure of crocks of gold and better times ahead.

I sit on my bed and look out of the window but, as in the short tale on this website, I don’t see the street and the tops of determined human voyagers but a corner shop at the end of a village green, at a t-junction. I see through time’s window, scales fallen from my eyes. There are no cars on the road. I swing round and round a lamppost and fall, breaking my arm, and sprawl on to the stone-chip tarmac, perfectly safe, crying for my mother. I stumble into a bush of deadly nightshade and spend the night, imagining I am going to die. I plodge in the stream knowing there is a troll under the bridge. I see ghosts dancing on my moonlit bedroom walls. I hack at a y-shaped branch, perfect for a catapult and gouge a hunk of flesh from my thumb.

But, counteracting all such traumas and fearful visions, I walk on my own to Cissie Joyce’s shop with a ration coupon in my hand. I buy a bulls-eye, so big my cheeks ache accommodating the rough, sugar coated ball, tongue just free enough to lick its sweet surface, smoothing it and by doing so changing its colour and reducing its size. I go to the farm shop to buy home made dandelion and burdock and to the house that, in autumn, sells bags of robin pears. At five years old I am free to do as I wish, go where I please, and like my hero William, be an incorrigible boy far away from his parents’ gaze.

The scene fades and now, below my London bed, I see uniformed children returning from school, hands firmly grasped in those of anxious adults, unseeing, deaf, marching parallel to the growling traffic and the horns, through the obstacle course of swinging briefcases, protruding umbrellas, puncturing stiletto heels and home to the sanctuary of bespoke bedrooms, televisions and games consoles. Far away from their parents’ gaze.

This little site of mine …long may it shine

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

I sometimes believe in reincarnation. I look at a tree and think, “That’s a bit like me,” that mountain ash. Or, imagining my future self as a hawk. Or experiencing the conundrum of seeing myself suddenly as another human being; precipitated by a child’s eyes or bearing. A life lived can often result in these momentary refractions of wonder about what might come next when all is over. New lamps for old is a theme I often write about. And so to this website. It is another stage. Another me. Another incarnation.

It proposes an unusual thesis; take the act of consumerism and turn it on its head. Let the reader enjoy (or otherwise) the product and then decide what he or she is going to pay for it, if anything. � Thus, its brief is to remove all the marketplace trappings between the reader and the writer. No need to wander around a bookshop or a library armed with the latest reviews. No need to choose by dustjacket and blurb or a sly riffle through pages to try to gauge style. No jumping on the bandwagons of Waterstone’s or Amazon’s hit lists. No, the responsibility � is merely to exist in that narrowed gap between conjured text and scanning eye.

Writing is done in the isolation of mind over matter. When it is finished the result is inverted and becomes matter over mind in that a story now takes up a space in the world and occupies the thoughts of its readership. Every tale takes days, weeks or years to make. What results takes a fraction of that time to absorb. There has always been this barter, the alchemical trade between storyteller and audience, since those days of being illuminated by a fire in a cave to today’s backlighting of an e-reader or the collection of bound leaves in the hand. At the beginning, as the raconteur finished a tale, there would be an immediate reaction of approbation or otherwise. Today, on this new website, response is not physical but virtual. A few words from the reader to the storyteller to say he or she has entered and left the author’s world.

A Peeping Tom and War Poetry

Friday, January 24, 2014

Tags: Autobiography: concert parties, rationing and childhood intimacies

Father and Son: an end to certainty

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Tags: Religious certainty

Slates, frozen milk and green woodpeckers

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Slates, frozen milk and green woodpeckers

My slate was a rectangle, big enough it seemed to my small hands. It was bordered with wood, maybe pine but probably beech. The writing implement, my stylus, was not chalk but a smooth cylinder of slate, too. I have no memory of  the holders. They were probably owned by the children of families whose parents used something similar for cigarettes …! My parents, who both smoked at the time, certainly never provided them. Cigarettes in our house came in soft, colourful packets.

There were two school rooms and a small kitchen. The bigger room also contained the hall and was used by the five to eight year olds while the smaller one was for the older children on their way to the eleven plus. When school milk arrived it was put in the kitchen. In winter the milk was frozen in the bottles and had to be thawed out. As I write this I have an involuntary recoil at the memory of over-heated milk. Cold milk with a shake of icy creamy froth on top, was perfect. Older children thawed out the bottles. The little kitchen was also used for monitorial purposes. Apart from my sister, when she was three, I must have helped teach many children to read and write.

I remember being caned by the class teacher for laughing too much; that involuntary, impossible to stop, eye-watering laughter that feeds itself and those around. The caning was administered with a four foot, unwieldy garden cane. The teacher was not adept at sadism and every time she tried to lift and bring it down upon my hand, it caught the table and went askew. This fuelled more side-splitting laughter and led to less punishment.

An inspector came to the school and looked at all the children’s work. He singled out a composition of mine because I wrote that King Alfred’s ships were like swans in the bay. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy from that moment. A later teacher, at grammar school, scrubbed out my word ‘nadir’ and said the word did not exist.

I was somewhat proficient at art and had pictures displayed on the wall. I painted or crayoned birds and football teams. There was a strong thread of shimmer in them. I liked the clashes of green on red in a woodpecker and my teams also had green and red stripes, though no such strip existed.

My two bibles then and later were the Observer Book of Birds – I learned to recognize every species together with the patterns on their eggs – and an annual three inch square book of the previous season’s football recorded in tiny print with results and tables throughout the season.  I had a favourite team for every division and knew the home strips of all teams in all divisions.

As I have said in a recent post, colour dominated my life, as though it depended upon it. Later, much later, in my fifties, I discovered that I had a genetic abnormality, one which made me both short-sighted and vulnerable to retinal detachment.

Tags: autobiography: 1950s schooling

Distance lends confusion

Friday, December 13, 2013

Tags: Autobiography: reclaiming the past, Childhood memory, where are they now?.

The Fields of Dreams

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Tags: Autobiography Morte D'Arthur. Fantasy and dreams., Memories. Childhood

Intimations of Mortality

Friday, December 6, 2013

Tags: Autobiography. Death and the boy., Mortality

The Colour of Memory

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Tags: Autobiography. Colour. Chiuldhood spirituality., Memory. Childhood.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Tags: Autobiography: being a male child

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Tags: Autobiography. Childhood memories.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Tags: Autobiography Abandoned child.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Tags: Autobiography. Memory.

In an autobiography, a thousand memories must begin with one

Monday, November 18, 2013

Tags: Autobiography. The beginning. India and after., Deceitful memories

Ghosts in the Machine

Monday, September 9, 2013

Tags: Memories and the self, Rupture. Ghosts. Old movies. Writing.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Tags: Azimuth reviews.

Monday, August 26, 2013

–>

Tags: Nuns. Visitations. Delusions. Visions

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Tags: Death. Mystery. Being prepared.

Friday, August 9, 2013

Tags: Exorcism. Mystery.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

–>

Tags: Faith. Skepticism. The trials of a nun.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Hail Stones In the Pyrenees

Thought I’d digress from the current flow and describe an event, yesterday. Imagine the scene: sunshine, reading Montaigne on the recliner, rearing cliffs behind me with crows and woodpeckers creating a drum rhythm. A blackbird chortling solos above my head on the pear tree. All hot and humid and very south of France. Ten minutes later a towering black cloud breasts the peak of Canigou. Indoors I wander, taking stuff from the washing line on my way. Ten minutes more and hell unleashes its fury and a Mordor darkness descends. Giant hailstones crash and crush, stripping the fruit trees and the tomato plants, holing the parasol canopy, dimpling the metal on the car roof and bonnet, destroying the plastic laundry basket. A great brown river rushes down the road past the house carrying stones and tree branches. Everywhere is covered in white cobblestones.

Later I hear that cars have been junked, Velux roof lights shattered and bedrooms filled with ice.

Here’s a bit of doggerel on the event:

Twas a normal day in Ol’ Casteil
The sun it was a shining
Then all went black
The lightning crack’d
And crumbled heaven’s lining…

www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Tags: Hailstones in the Pyrenees.

Friday, July 19, 2013

–>

Tags: #Dreams.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Tags: Mysterious connections. Synchronicity. Other-worldliness.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Tags: Occult. Synchronicity. Biography.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Tags: #Writing. Portents. #DawnFrench. Mystery.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Tags: The #author and existing.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Tags: #Ghana and #synchronicity #Jung

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Tags: #Sex, Bakewell, convention., Montaigne

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Tags: #Lionel #Shriver. Obesity. Fashion. Food neurosis.

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Tags: Dirty justice., Montaogne, Sarah Bakewell

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Monday, May 27, 2013

Tags: Christ unbearded. The early Christian art of advertising.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Tags: Death of a soldier. Media coverage. Woolwich.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Tags: #Writing. Superheroes. Genre fiction.

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Tags: Superheroes. #Writing.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Tags: Thatcher. Thatcherism.

Monday, April 1, 2013

Tags: #Azimuth. reviews. Jack Sanger.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Tags: #Ghana. Water. Africa.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Tags: Of flying horses and thwarted lions

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Tags: Making dogs invulnerable. Accra #Ghana. The old ways.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

 

New Gods for old

Further conversation with a young Ghanaian male about his unshakeable belief in Christianity provides insights into cultural dissonance. That is, between him and me and between him and his traditions. There is little doubt in my mind that one of the reasons why Africans take to Christianity with a fundamentalist zeal is that its rituals are sacrificial and mysterious. His blood. His flesh. There is also the Old Testament with its patriarchal, forbidding and vengeful God. Since the white man brought ‘the book’, the new religion had the effect of breaking down social infrastructures within tribes. Where once women ran commerce and saw to the delicate business of maintaining the balance between labour and survival, the imperialist empire builders, brandishing their words from God, would only deal with males. Rupture followed. We see the consequences today, everywhere. And now the men have guns and women and children become ever more vulnerable.

Fortunately, for the time being, Ghana is peaceful and there are strong remnants of the old world co-existing with the new. Women choose tribal chiefs. Land is still passed down the female line. But the traditions are being eroded by land registry and other western business practices which tend to discriminate against women.

Back to my young Ghanaian friend, the one who laughs hysterically at the notion that I might not believe in ANY god! In northern Ghana, he tells me, The crocodile Chief in the river has a ‘red cap’. He will not kill humans. You can sit on him. He is a kind of godly manifestation in the water. But kill any of his tribe and humans will die as a consequence. He tells me another story. The tribal custom is to bury the umbilical cord of every human birth in a particular spot. The Chief travelled to the US and married a white woman whom he brought back. She set about, in a western health and safety kind of way, clearing up this site of decomposition. Once cleared the Chief’s body underwent encroaching paralysis; hands, arms, legs…. A further myth or traditional reality is that before you die you must be ‘instructed’. If this happens then you can communicate with the living and vice versa.

He tells me these stories with a curious reticence which gives way to enthusiasm as I don’t deride them like the Christian priests do. Pagan black magic. It reminds me of the extraordinary nature of churches all over the UK. The believers stand, sit, kneel and pay their respects to the One God and all around them are symbols of pre-Christianity. The Green Man. Fornication. Images of Lilith who preceded Eve. Bestiality. Christianity was the progenitor of imperialist (and capitalist) subjugation of the old traditions. And it is still doing it consummately well, here in Ghana.

www.chronometerpublications.me

Tags: The repression of tradition and the imperialism of religion.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Tags: #Ghana. Religion. Closed minds.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Tags: #Policeing. #Ghana. #Corruption.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Tags: #©hana. Cultural dissonance. Deprivation and opportunity.

Friday, February 8, 2013

–>

Tags: #Dying for a better funeral. The end of days.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Tags: #Dying art. Presenting death.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Tags: #Death rituals and beliefs.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Tags: #Funerals, Dying wishes. Living will.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Tags: #Dying. Cultural norms in Ghana. Preparing for death via a novella.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Tags: Free drugs. Marketing the mediocre.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Tags: False Consciousness

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Tags: #Writing: A short short #story.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Tags: #writing: you are what you write. Yes or no?

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Tags: #Writing: the structure of a trilogy. Tarot and zen.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Friday, December 7, 2012

Tags: #Writing: gullibility and being human

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Tags: #Writing: Art and morality. Love not me, love my work.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Tags: #Writing: The Visionary - a free short story

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Tags: Leveson

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Tags: The Rolling Stones. Ageism. Conformity.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Tags: #Writing: the problem of being literal

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Tags: #Writing: exposing yourself

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Tags: #Writing about death

Friday, November 9, 2012

Tags: Language and meaning.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Tags: #writing: global ex[posure and the end of privacy

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Tags: #Writing: Creating false worlds and living in them.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Tags: #Writing: leaving a egacy

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Tags: #Writing: organic ploits. The writer as reader.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Tags: #Writing: a new start.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Tags: Death and health

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Tags: #Writing a dull script. The art of the mundane.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Tags: #Writing: Purpose and resistance.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Tags: #Wriing; plagiarism and memory

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Tags: Killing them softly: the poetry and prose of incidental death

Friday, September 21, 2012

Tags: #Writing: space, time and meaning

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Tags: #Writing: tinkering forever.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Tags: #Writing: Forensics. The first case.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Tags: Films and #writing

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Tags: #Writing: a short short short story. Art and life.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Tags: #writing: empathy and reality

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Tags: #Writing. Art and life. Shaman and sham. Unconscious knowledge.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Tags: #Writing: life and art and synchronicity.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Tags: #Writing: mastery of the concise. Tweeting.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Tags: #Writing and objectivity

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Tags: #Wriing and Jung

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Tags: #Writing: Khayyam. We are what we write.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Tags: #Writing: an example of a research-free imagination

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Tags: #Writing: the novella.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Tags: #Writing and deferred gratification.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 2

Here’s the view from my window as I write this. As you can see I am not in a bordello.

Part One, if you remember, advanced the notion that the business of writing contains within it an almost mystical reward. For a man it is his, admittedly minor, sublimation for not being able to give birth, in the real sense. For a woman who is childless, maybe the same, I have no idea. For a woman who has been fruitful in flesh and blood terms, maybe it acts as a delightful coda. Perhaps someone could enlighten me!

Part Two is a bit of a hazy ramble I am beginning to feel. One or two friends have written asking me whether my ebooks are half as successful as 50 Shades of Grey has been. I feel confused at what my response might be. Do I just say no!, truculently, and forget it? Do I enter into a disquisition on how I am pursuing the noble, artier end of writing not the seamier end? (This is a dodgy response since sex plays a key role in two of my books under the name of Eric le Sange, an appellation which separates my genre writing from my heroic (!) offering, Azimuth!) Do I just say that I don’t need to write a bonkbuster for I can get by in my garret here in the Pyrenees on a modest pension and my reason to be cheerful has already been covered in Part One. Maybe I could say that my offspring (curious how some of the progeny of sixties hippiesque creatures like myself are a bit coy and defensive if their father writes any sex scenes at all) would find it difficult to have a father renowned for his prurient pen wielding.

The sins of the father have probably been bad enough without that. So, taking immense pleasure in the act of writing is sufficient, even though having a much greater audience for it would be, as we used to say, a real turn-on!

Tags: #Writing. 50 Shades of Grey. Prurience in the literary endeavour.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Tags: Writing stimulus. Inspiration. The Dead talk.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Tags: #Writing to be cheerful. Legacies and ambitions.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Tags: #Writing: a rose under any other name, alias. pseudonym, pen name

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Tags: Writing - from the heart

Monday, June 25, 2012

Tags: #Writing. Renaissance man. A creative minor character.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Tags: #Writing. #Cookery. Minor characters. The head cook.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Tags: #Writing. Minor characters. Back story of #sex #slaves.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Tags: Writing. Minor characters. Back story of the assistant librarian.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Tags: The Scientist., Writing: back stories from Azimuth

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Tags: Writing: the psychotic brother

Monday, June 18, 2012

Minor Keys No.9

Late on in the first book, the Magus, now beginning to really question his role as a warrior who kills, sets out a strategy to encourage villagers to protect themselves. He teaches the art of bow making and offers a reward to the best bow-maker;

-Who made this? No-one stepped forward, –I repeat, who made this? It has a balance that sets it apart. A girl, new to womanhood, stepped forward. Some men allowed their indignation to show.

-I did not speak at first for I thought you were about to mock me.

He smiled at her, -It has a special quality. He took an arrow and notched it. When he released it, it flew over the heads of the circle of watchers and embedded itself in the centre of a tree. He spoke loudly, -She found wood such as we brought back for drying. She has cut it well so that the balance graces the hand. It is small but carries the power of many a larger weapon. He gave it back to her and offered her one of his arrows. She aimed at the same tree and the missile struck it just below his own. There was a shout of approval from the villagers so that her face reddened.

-You have a choice of reward, he said, –I have face colourings from alchemists far away in the east or a bow maker’s knife, crafted by metal workers in the City in the Mountain.

-I will take the knife! 

There are many instances in the Azimuth trilogy where women’s roles are questioned and plenty where women’s traditional roles are reversed. It is one of the pleasures of writing that you can question current mores and, being a management consultant for so long, in this case explore the ‘glass ceiling’ preventing women’s advancement in allegorical forms. The Magus has now developed a consciousness where he sees no difference in the capabilities of men and women in many arenas and insists upon their equality therein. As you can see, a warrior female from a peasant background creates cognitive dissonance among her male peers.

So why was she so different? And what happened to her after the Magus left the village? I suspect the following is true. She was secretive and somewhat androgynous, if not in physical attributes, at least in her psychology. From a child she harboured both female and male aspirations. She wanted to be a mother but she did not want the skivvy drudgery of being the marital slave of a village man. She did not like the boys, nor the men around her, including her father whom she had to avoid because of his prying eyes and obvious intent. She would take herself off into the fields and practise physical movements which, she imagined, would serve her well in battle. She stole a knife from a boy bully and learned to throw it with accuracy despite it being not constructed for this purpose. A little while before the Magus came to save the village from mercenary soldiers her father trapped her in her bed. In an instant her knife was at his throat, making a neat superficial incision. She enjoyed his jabbering apologies as he fell off her and then stumbled out into the darkness. Her mother scolded her saying that a daughter was her father’s first to take and her husband’s second, everyone knew that.

As happened to many who were affected by the Magus’ calm, unemotional convictions about respect and harmony, she resolved to leave the village and seek her future elsewhere. Her story had a happy ending unlike so many recounted in these ‘extra pages’ of Azimuth. She came across a merchant who travelled with a small band of guards to bring chinaware from the south in exchange for northern mountain wool. Her female nature meant that she could dress as his wife and enter the halls of the rich where his armed guards could not accompany him. On the occasion that would have brought his death, her knife throwing saved his life. His smouldering interest in her blew up into a raging flame and he pleaded with her to become his third wife. She agreed and became his favourite from that day on. She taught her children, three girls, the arts of knife and bow and then her grandchildren.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle books at Amazon)

All works by this author at www.chronometerpublications.me

Tags: Minor characters. The female village warrior

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Tags: Minor characters: The massive guard.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Tags: Writing: minor characters; the envoy

Friday, June 15, 2012

Tags: Writing: minor characters. The Spice Twins.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Tags: Writing. Minor characters. The royal barber.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Tags: Writing: minor characters. The excluding element in narrative.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Tags: Writing: minor characters. Azimuth Trilogy.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Tags: Writing: filling in the blanks. Biography.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Tags: Writing. Bytes. New technologies. The word.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Tags: Writing: time you were aware

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Tags: Writing: playwriting to sharpen dialogue

Friday, June 1, 2012

Tags: Writing: the Jungian experience

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Tags: Writing:attending to personal weakness

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Tags: the intellectual and the creative, Writing: ego and criticism

Monday, May 28, 2012

Tags: Writing:creating a writer as a character

Friday, May 25, 2012

Tags: Writing: writer as researcher

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Tags: Writing: reading other authors

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Tags: Writing; the problem of stereotypes

Friday, May 18, 2012

Tags: Writing: anachronisms and datedness

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Tags: Writing: unravelling a beginning.

Monday, May 14, 2012

Tags: Writing: repretition could kill your novel

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Tags: Writiung: dominoes of logic

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Tags: Writing; death scenes

Friday, May 11, 2012

Tags: Writing: key plot turns

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Tags: Writing: Plotting your ideas.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Tags: Writing: ebooks

Monday, May 7, 2012

Tags: Writing; trusting your imagination.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Tags: Writing: endings

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Tags: Writing: themes and a novel's quality.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Tags: Writing. Gender issues and stereotyping.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Tags: Thoughts on writing. The need for strong themes.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Tags: Writing; negotiating a personal biography. The search for independent characters.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Art of Writing No. 26

Many people reading this will be from the new medium of e-book writing. Given the extraordinary sales of e-readers over the last couple of years, it is obvious that this medium is going to be the main outlet for creative writing in the future. The previous blogs seem to me to be equally appropriate for physical and virtual books but there are notable differences that are worth a note or two.

Producing your book for Kindle, IPad or Sony (apart from a reliance on teckie knowhow, yours or an agency’s, to translate your book into an acceptable format) gives you a great deal of power over your finished product. It is you who decides how pages look, what font, what glyphs (symbols that act as dividers within chapters) and what cover. In other words you become a designer-writer. Some of you will baulk at the very notion, preferring to stick to what you think you know best but others may find this previously barricaded world, worth breaching. I read a friend’s new book this year and the cover looked as though it had been designed by an android. It had nothing to recommend it. Remember that a great percentage of buyers in bookshops buy books after being attracted by their covers. Now, when you buy e-books, you also have a facsimile cover to help persuade you.

My three recent books (five if you split Azimuth into its three volumes) gave me a great deal of pleasure in the formative stages of designing their covers. In two cases I gave the book to a designer to read and also outlined a rough brief. She (Hollie Etheridge www.holsterdesign.com) offered a variety of interpretations for me to look at. I chose what was nearest to my projected vision and suggested amendments and then, through this iterative process, all was accomplished, a JPeg was sen to me and I uploaded it in the relevant area of the site.

The front cover has to grab. Since Azimuth is a multi-layered, historical fable, the cover had to represent mystery, Tale-telling and adventure set in a Persian empire. Hollie produced the following:

In The Strange Attractor, a crime novel with echoes of Raymond Chandler, the aim was to have that nourish, amoral feel to it, harking back to the forties and fifties:

With Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Romance, I worked with my wife who is excellent at PhotoShop. This probably allowed even more hands-on decision making. The aim was to represent a novella which tells a tale about rupture in family life and which explores the capacity of the mind to deceive and inveigle:

So, you see, creating a book can be extended by new technologies and the author can have an even greater sense of omnipotence over his or her world!

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon

Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Romance

Tags: Writing hints: telling a book by its cover. E-book design.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Tags: Writing. Depth of character.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Tags: Writing tips. Getting tense in your writing? First vs third person narratives.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Tags: Writing tips. Minor characters.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Tags: Writing. The first step to style.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Tags: Writing dialogue to differentiate characters.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Tags: Writing. Beating the banal. New ways of seeing.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Tags: Writing. Purple prose. Discipline.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Tags: Writing. The alers list.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Tags: Writing. Formula or organic? Keeping a grip on continuity.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Tags: Writing. Character depth and plot line.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Tags: Writing. Rounded characters. Messy profiles.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Tags: Writing. Complexity of characters

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Tags: Writing. Dying to please.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Tags: Better writing. Avoiding bad sex scenes.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Tags: How to write a novel: descriptions of sex

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Tags: Writing techniques. Plot

Monday, April 9, 2012

Tags: Writing tips. Big writers' blocks

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Tags: Writing tips. Writer's block.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Tags: Writing. Choosing names of characters.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Tags: Writing hints. Dialogue.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Tags: Writing. Creating an environment.

Saturday, March 31, 2012

Tags: Writing hints. Spartan expression.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Tags: Writing. First three chapters

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Tags: Writing novels. First sentences.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Tags: The art of writing. Insights into producing novels.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Tags: Better writing, lessons. style

Saturday, February 11, 2012

testing ping

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Tags: Doomsday. Failed prophecy.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Tags: Mortality test. Science innovation.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Tags: Black holes. Obama. Bin Laden. Democracy. Assassination.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011