Poems Of The Week

A couple of poems by Ezra Pound , an American poet, who lived o London between 1908 - 1920 , moved to Paris and then It lay before fimally returning to the States in 1945.

Ezra Pound - A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast -
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

Ezra Pound - Ancient Music

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm.
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.

Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.

Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.

Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

To A Dear Overseas Friend (although We Have Never Met).

Life can sometimes through bricks at yu in unexpected ways. It is something that seems to dog us struggling to survive in this cruel world and hence all my sympathies go out to a_phoenixdragon whose hubby and herself are out of work again , and just before Xmas as well. It also makes me very angry at the situation.

Having to be at the begging mercy of temping agencies, and such like, and finding steady work being such a struggle. I really do feel for them. She is putting a brave face on it, but i know, it must hurt, So guuys and gals any help you can give will be gratefully received.

Love and hugs.

A Disillusioned Tory

The Conservatives were never a "one nation" party as this young Tory who has left the fold now realizes.

Why I Have Left the Tory Party

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/charlie-evans/tax-credits-conservative-party_b_8417678.html

Book 65 - Tracy Thorn "Bedsit Disco Queen"

Tracy Thorn "Bedsit Disco Queen : How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star" (Virago)




An utterly delightful memoir by Tracey Thorn, the lead singer of Everything But The Girl. Tracey has always presented an opaque, cool front to the world, letting her song lyrics hint at her life but here she takes us back to the teenager growing up in suburban Hertfordshire, needing to become involved in the post-punk music scene in London but unsure of how to go about it. Gaining some indie success as part of The Marine Girls, Tracey went to study at Hull University and within a few hours of arriving had met fellow-record label artist Ben Watt. They bonded over music and started the band Everything But The Girl (taking the name from a local shop) and were soon gaining mainstream success while still at University.

Tracey shares the successes the band achieved but also the quandary of how to keep both afloat in the never-constant flow of the pop world while staying true to your vision. EBTG had highs, they had lows but more through happenstance than design kept finding opportunities for success. Thorn also shares her offstage life with Ben Watt and the awful experience in the 1990s when Ben was crippled with an illness that left them facing an unknown future.

Warm, involving, insightful and full of humour, Tracey's book is one of the best autobiographies of recent years.

Contemptible Tories

Jeremy Corbyn Accuses David Cameron Of Showing 'Contempt For Human Rights'

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/04/jeremy-corbyn-accuses-david-cameron-of-showing-contempt-for-human-rights_n_8471070.html?1446639464

Trashy Tories

Tax Credit Cuts Are Not Funny Mr. Cameron says Corbyn at PMQ's.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/04/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-tories-jeers_n_8471426.html?1446643172

Pride

Last night watched this excellent indie film Pride based on a true story during the Miner's Strike in the early eighties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(2014_film)



Based on a true story, the film depicts a group of lesbian and gay activists who raised money to help families affected by the British miners' strike in 1984, at the outset of what would become the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign.
The National Union of Mineworkers was reluctant to accept the group's support due to the union's public relations' worries about being openly associated with a gay group, so the activists instead decided to take their donations directly to Onllwyn, a small mining village in Wales, resulting in an alliance between the two communities. The alliance was unlike any seen before and was ultimately successful.

Book 66 - Paul Berman "Terror And Liberalism"

Paul Berman "Terror And Liberalism" (W.W. Norton and Co.)






This is one of the most idiosyncratic, short, but compelling studies of the topic available. This is an original contribution to an overlooked connection between violence and fanaticism, along with an insightful study of terrorists amongst the Islamists. Berman postulates that a war against liberalism, the classical bulwark against barbarism is a century-old battle waged in the world. The Islamists and contemporary liberals are engaged in an ideological conflict against 19th Liberalism.

Berman writes:

[Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. It was submission to the kind of authority that liberal civilization had slowly undermined, and which the new movements wished to reestablish on a novel basis. It was the ideal of the one, instead of the many. The ideal of something godlike. The total state, the total doctrine, the total movement. "Totalitarian" was Mussolini's word; and Mussolini spoke for all.

The death cult infected the French Revolution and found its resurgence with the Western totalitarian death movements of the early 20th Century such as Nazism.

Moreover, Berman notes that the death cult migrated to the Arab Middle East as well. Berman sees Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer executed in 1966, as one of the most important influences on the modern Islamic world.

These suicide bombers are part of a profound pathology within the Arab world, a chiliastic movement, where death is glory.

Also, Berman does not fail to criticise American foreign policy when it's needed (he understands the current administration foreign policy strategy better than most other people); and it does not fail to criticise the failure of liberalism when they happen ("the totalitarian movements arise because of failures in the liberal civilisation"). These people were protesting the very existence of liberalism. These people were fanatics.

A thought provoking book.