The Right To Write

and read and share over long distances
is something we take for granted.

But it was something that the citizens
sent to the death camps could not imagine,
long before they were arrested in their homes,
along with all their many neighbours-
and given an hour's notice to pack
a suitcase apiece, including the children,
as their sole possessions for the foreseeable future,
about which they had been deceived beyond belief.

Could you put all your life
into a large, strong, shopping bag
-the sort you fill with food every week- 
and leave everything else behind for the unknown?

That is what they did, not knowing how,
if even just a few of them got back,
there would be nothing and nobody left
for them to return to. 

What ever was there when they left
had been either obliterated,
or parcelled out to strangers.

In reality, for several years,
before they were arrested,
their right to think or reason
was slowly being constricted. 
As propaganda and the new laws
hid how between 1935 and 1945,
across Eastern Europe,
the landscape became dotted
with 'work camps', opened by Nazis
and maintained by local collaborators. 

The right to speak and hear about this
was banned back then. It is not banned now.
But those who try to speak out now,
who write, read, and want to hear the stories 
will still find the freeze,
in the old ban from the past
as a living echo inside of them, 
as they make it their duty
to bear witness to what resisted
being born clears witness to before.

How Long Will This Item Take To Sell Out?

Given the message it should be a slow but steady seller
as the self confessed procrastinator puts off
making the purchase until the last minute
in the hope that the item getting cheaper
the longer it remains for sale. 

 

Guns And Drugs

I recently watched a well made BBC documentary
on how North Korea seeks to beat the regime
of sanctions that works against it,
and trade with the world in spite
of it's socioeconomic isolation.

I watched as outsiders from other countries
identified with the outsider country, N. Korea,
and travelled the world meeting wealthy men
who would pay North Korea to make things for them.
What did these wealthy men want? Guns
and illegal drugs, with which to make
even more money, as they denied the values
of the countries named in their many passports.

'How like Northern Ireland' I thought.
In the time of 'the troubles' (1969-1997)
guns and drugs were the shadow economy
that became the currency of popular capitalism,
whatever the shops and the shoppers thought and did.

Beneath the acronyms the paramilitary warlords, 
were all basically the same. They all competed
to lengthen the shadow of the shadow economy,
to the loss of civil society which was in retreat.

When, at last, civil society recovered itself
it found that what weakly bound it together
was what had previously divided it;
a puzzled sense of loss that continues,
though what was lost should be clearer.

We will never know what ordinary North Koreans think,
any more than that country will retrieve a shared sense citizenship.
It's history of hereditary dictatorships-a black hole into which
all power retreats-has removed all sense of citizenship with it,
and the back hole has been deepening by the day-since 1950.  

With Age Comes Increased Respect For Figures From The Past

Though getting there seems quite painful, as we
make the mistakes from which we might learn
without knowing which mistakes are the right ones
for learning from. One of hardest mistakes to recover
from is knowing how a body needs rest with another
but finding the fellow body/person we are comfortable
with, and with which doing nothing seems easy 
for both is a rarer and greater gift than we knew.   

 

Taking The 'Arian' Out Of 'Majoritarianism'*

The pink star is now well known
in the small constellation of coloured stars
that social and racial minorities in Nazi Germany
were labelled with, as whatever the colour
they were packed into trains and despatched
from that country's civil society to the work
/death camps that dotted the German countryside.

Camps that the local population knew about,
but had to deny for the sake of their liberty and sanity.

Pink stood for 'gay', the choice of sexuality
that only in the late twentieth century
in wealthy liberal countries has been accepted
as nearer normal. But what of the other colours?
The yellow (the Jews), the brown (the Roma),
the purple (Jehovah's Witnesses) the blue (emigrants)
the red (political prisoners and the Freemasons)
the green (ordinary criminals), and last
and far from least the black star (the vagrants,
drug addicts, the indolent, and the prostitutes).

What is a society without these choices?
And where are they all in my society?
Why don't they join us in recognition
of their previous loss? Is it still 'too dangerous',
for them to make themselves known
through the commemoration
of their absent forbearers? 

Perhaps many in those groups prefer to side
with the quiet majority and quietly add to the gaiety
of the country they belong to, and let their losses be.
Or let other people account for their history. 

Job done, for this year at least.

*Majoritarianism means majority rule, or a majority monoculture,
in societies where the undeclared aim is a consensus that both
makes minorities vital to the economy and socially invisible,
and does it in ways that said minorities can't resist.
Example; The Jim Crow laws in the USA .   

Fascists both appropriate and dislike majoritarianism.
They will use it for the cover it gives them with the majority
of a given population, but they also know that by definition
they are a minority who should never be naturally popular.
Easy acceptance is against their nature, which is to divide others. 

But still they feel that they are a minority whose destiny
is the right to rule, and majoritarianism is part of the path to power.

The Music Room-A Room Of One's Own

How people arrange their houses matters.
One of my fondest memories as a youth
was discovering that my new friends
refreshed their friendships through
keeping open the physical space
where they shared their interests,
which allowed those interests to change.

I met my earliest friends via my school,
a space where I did as I was bid. I chose little.
Outside the school my friend and I had nothing in common,
but through music we tried to create conviviality. 

I was 20, and mad about music, when I made friends
who would last. They were all just enough older.
They had plenty of evenings for sharing music they liked
and teaching to me why their music was good
after I recovered from being amazed
by the variety of design of the record covers.

Before then I had been starved of such choice.
The family house was set up around the television
and what my father thought were good programmes.
This meant sport and other non-verbal competition,
the communication of which taught me nothing.

Music, even recorded music, meant musicians
agreeing with each other through how they played.
However much music was non-verbal, dad had ears of tin.
The din of hierarchies forming themselves were the key
to how his hearing worked. Dad loved seeing others
make themselves the boss, with no sense of process.

But my friends were different,
hierarchies had to be accidental
and would always be subject
to the great leveller, change.

None of us knew who Virginia Woolf was
but we would have 'got' her 1929 feminist plea
for women to have space and money to be themselves,
rather than be confined within the image of their family.

The best thing about rooms for sharing music
is how the host inspire their guest to create their own.
Whether guest, or host, that is what I did....     

The Tourettes Of Technology

When technology gets us alone,
it always make us ruder
than we can admit that we are,
with other people.

This is not about porn
which most adults know about,
where the secret with it is less
that we know how to find it
and more that what we hide from ourselves
is how our wanting it is proof that we are bored
with the more evasive, but socially acceptable, agendas.

Who knew that boredom multiplied so easily? 

The rudeness I want to point at
is what happens in the home
when the printer wont listen
and obey it's controller, they both act
as if they have had an argument,
and we feel like we are the losers
when we can't print what we want.
They won't listen to us or each other,
that is when the tourettes of technology takes over.

Narcissism And Creativity

It is less that narcissism stymies creativity,
and more that whatever a narcissist sees
happening around them, the more they will 
mistakenly credit themselves for that creativity,
as if it were the centre of everything,
including the creativity of other narcissists 
with whom they share the same condition.

Assuming being the centre of the creations
of other people starts slowly, with flattery
whilst behind the scenes the narcissist
finds cover to hind behind, through which
to take control of what belonged to others
they come to believe was theirs all along. 

For the creative person who gets trapped,
escaping the narcissist gets difficult,
it often means partial permanent surrender
and an income for the controlling figure
that morally the controller does not deserve,
but self centred people have no interest
in morality, unless the argument serves them.

And that is to say nothing
about the overweening control
that multinational corporations
who have more power
over individual consumers
than medium sized countries 
have over their citizens. 

On The Centenary Of The Birth Of Ivor Cutler

 

Ivor Cutler(1923-2006) was  singular talent as a writer and performer who led a singular life. He picked a careful path well away from 'being famous for fame's sake', where he remained popular and consistent with himself, right to the end. He remains the highest profile member of the Noise Abatement Society that the society ever had.

Who's Art (Or Life) Is It Anyway?

One of the lesser known civilities
offered to the detainees of Guantanamo Bay
was, from 2009, giving them art classes 
and materials with which to be creative.
Under Barak Obama they were permitted
to take their art with them when they left,
as innocent men, scarred by incarceration. 

From 2017 Donald Trump's government
released more prisoners, unannounced.
But changed the rules, the prisoners' art
was declared the property of the state,
The detainees could not take it with them.

'That is a small price to pay for being free'
you might say, and yes their liberty
meant more than than what they left without,
but I have to ask 'What measure of pettiness
should such a wealthy western government
be known for, when it disallows departing detainees
the small freedom of choice that was
once permitted to them when confined.

For the full story, please left click here. 
    

Twenty One Years And Counting....

A shade under ten years ago I blogged
this blog entry, a horrific list of neglect
and American state legal avoidance.
Who realises that Guantanamo Bay
was opened 21 years ago yesterday?

Who knew that in that prison
America imprisoned 780 Muslim men,
and not one person of any other faith or gender?

Who knew that nine prisoners died on the site?

Who knew that by detaining them
as 'unlawful combatants' the Bush
administration gave itself exemptions
from all known conventions
on the treatment of combatants in war?

Who realises that even if the last three
living 'unlawful combatants' there were released today,
and the prison camp was empty apart from the staff
then because the camp was created in a legal vacuum,
where so many laws were avoided in it's creation,
the legal process for closing the site down,
and returning it to the Cuban government,
and ending the stain on the American legal system,
would cost more in lawyers fees than it had
when it held prisoners, and be that protracted
that President Joe Biden would be a centenarian
before the process was complete?

Well you know now.....    

Faith In The Future

When ever we hear of some new Jerimiah
who doubts the veracity of our collective morality
we treat their words like those of a doctor
who gives us their honest-but-negative prognosis;
we always want that second opinion to excuse us
from accepting that we really have to change. 

How Awkwardly Do You Exit From Conversations?

The more efficient and socially unacceptable
your choice of exit, the more you will be seen to be
on the socially unacceptable end of the mental health
scale, where your being awkward looks like a life
choice to others. But such awkwardness may well
seem like a series of accidents to the individual
to whom being awkward 'just keeps happening to them'.    

 

The Outsider's Outsider; A Review Of A Modern Biography of Jean Genet.

 As a gay man of a certain age I have become interested in the earliest and oldest, ummm, '20th century gay icons', people who to be even half confident in their identity and choice of relationships had to claim them by the most indirect and convoluted means humanly possible. My four 'gay icons' are Quentin Crisp (born 1908) Jean Genet (born 1910) William Burroughs (born 1917) and Patricia Highsmith (born 1921). Three of the four of them came from family backgrounds that were at best fractured, of the four only Genet came from a background so broken that it beggars belief.

As I read of his birth and of all the different care systems that somehow proved to be the opposite of what was claimed for them I knew I should have counted each system that failed, but that will be done on my second reading. Needless to say the toughest carelessness of all was joining the army and even there he deserted so vehemently that if he had returned they would have court marshalled him for his desertion among many other insubordinations. By then his life training proved stronger than his army training, as he led a life both literally and figuratively underground, with over-ground figures like Jean Cocteau giving him cover. Reed does not have to work hard to lay a foundation for Genet as a man of opposites and paradox who could never overcome how those opposites negated each other. What the French state and society did to the young Jean laid the foundations of the paradoxical opposites of values he adopted as an adult.

With any character who is built on opposites, the way the character is logically explained should flatten and demystify that character, should make plain who the character is by making a consistent narrative of their life, where who they are becomes less surprising the older they become. The character becomes more or less reliably unreliable. This book proves that Jean Genet is an exception to this law of the sharpness being taken out of the character through detailed explanation. The older Genet gets the more he digs into his opposites and clings to them as if they were life itself.

One surprise to me was that Genet started his writing career with poetry. From the cursory knowledge I had of him I knew about two of the plays 'The Balcony' and 'The Maids' and the several books sold as novels which in the English translations became prose so clotted that the unwary reader reels when confronted with the awkward syntax and wayward sentence construction. With these translations the monoglot English reader could never tell whether the clotted prose was a reflection of the original French manuscript, or it was something distinct that happened in the translation of the French into English, and knew nothing about the translations into other languages where the original French was rendered much more fluently.

I was surprised when Jeremy Reed detailed the pressures of life on the underground writer. How the prison life made him want to give everything he had away, how as a thief he was a fine judge of the books he stole and sold on, how he was easily drawn into relationships and even acted in a fatherly manner to the children of his closest friends, and yet in his own sense of being a child he remained isolated and very negatively detached. I did not expect there to be parallels with the American underground writer William Burroughs, but the parallels were there, the drugs use and the way drugs both stretched time and shrank it. Then there was the inability to complete a course of detox because for Genet drugs were vital for putting energy into him, into his writing.

To find energy and ideas for writing through substances is nothing new. The following link

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2...    makes the matter clear enough that. I need not say any more. My only wish was that The Guardian had also put Kierkegaard in the list for the dangerous levels of caffeine he took every morning so that he could scale the heights of philosophy in his writings. I will not list here the drugs Genet took but I will say that his sponsor in literature, Cocteau, was an opium addict and Genet took cheaper drugs than Cocteau which were good for as much as they gave him a start to his writing but bad when they also shorted out his creativity where that matter of finishing a piece of writing was concerned. Burroughs famously said that he broke his addiction to Heroin by himself, in Morocco. What he never said was that after that, and for all of the second half of his life he could not live without methadone. Genet, too, did eventually clear his head of the effects of the cheaper drugs of his relative youth. But then he had the problem of finishing a lot of writing that was only ever half complete, without the energy with which they had been started.

It was Groucho Marx who flippantly said 'I would not be a member of any club that would have me', but it took the deeply paradoxical drive of somebody as driven by childhood neglect as Genet was to live out that maxim to the ultimate degree, particularly when the result went well beyond gallows humour into criminality itself. Genet was gay and knew it, but could not admit it. So he had relationships with male bisexuals, the best of whom saw their attraction to Genet as temporary though without any sense of a fixed term to it. Thus later Genet became 'funny uncle' to the children of his former partners created when they married, and the wife would know Genet as a friend, and that Genet also took care of part of her husband that was never hers to own.

The chapters on his image, and the people who photographed and portrayed him seemed like thin stuff until they proved to be the prelude to descriptions if how physically thin Jean Genet was to become, and how his look became the archetype of 1960's rock rebellion, where the thinness of certain rock stars was due, like Genet's, to the use of recreational drugs. Genet had been there and was still struggling to get out of that cul-de-sac, whilst the young were enjoying their easy small rebellions. The rebellions that Genet went through were much more demanding of him than those of his copyists.

The way he lived and thought became a template for many more people than the young Rolling Stones, he was admired in Japan too. The details of his last creative rally, where he knew he was racing against his declining health to complete a first draft of his final book 'Prisoner of Love' were well written up here. The details of his physical decline astonished me, but I have known how other writers fight illness, to live well enough to complete that last book. Not that many years after Genet did it Patricia Highsmith and William Burroughs would do the same.

In a different context, the story of George Orwell coughing up blood whilst writing '1984', or 'The Last Man in Europe' as it was first titled, on the Isle of Jura in the midst of a harsh 1949 winter is now a well known mental image. Genet may well have been aware of the lineage in which as he was writing, as 'Prisoner of Love' became part of his journey in which he was to become 'The Last Man of (old) Europe' coughing his last words onto the page.

The last chapter details the life of an author's writings after their author has died. With somebody who was made more alive as a writer through the contradictions he lived with, the way Genet was, this chapter had to be written. But what Jeremy Reed declined to comment on was how much writing and the belief in writing as means of transmitting values and ideas practically requires many a writer to be dead for the writing to live, because of the sheer scale of published writing vs the number of present day living writers. Reed made a few salient points about updating translations of works out of their original tongues to generate new readerships for old books, including the old books by Jean Genet. The works of jean Genet need that. What Jeremy Reed does not say (and should have said in my view) is that it is not just new translations of Genet's books that are required, but making space for contradictions of Jean Genet on the internet, in poems that mention him and paintings depicting Genet. Poet, writer and painter Anthony Weir is one of the few to attempt this. Put 'Anthony Weir' and 'Jean Genet' into the search engine and follow the links that appear. I did.

In other words, the paradoxes of Genet need a modern, living, champion for his books and example to gain traction with the public again, however much the living writer who chooses to illustrate the contradictions of Jean Genet is making life difficult for themselves. The contradictions between the life and work of Jean Genet are a difficult act to update, given the bland consistencies of the 21st century.

P.s. there are modern writers who approach Genet through his work online and find something of themselves in his writings follow this link for an example.   

The Winter Sales Are Upon Us

Do think carefully before accepting all the packaging.
What looks cheap and at the right price now may be
sold at the wrong price for the sustainability
of the land mass we live on in future.

 

Are We Being Served?

Did I say I don't like shopping? I meant to...  ...I mean I like shops for the choices they give the customer. Browsing is how we sort 'need' from 'want'. Choice like that is normally a good thing. But I refuse to use the automated tills that are now common in the cheapest shops. That is extending choice too far, and extending credit card living. They remind me too much of the present deadly news cliche 'the cost of living crisis' in which the economy is stuttering and faltering, but without any known cause. Nobody has done anything to cause it to fray from within and break down so badly at the edges. The economy is where buck keeps on going round and round. The buck has nowhere to stop because the lights may be on but there nobody home, and home is a place to be a nobody. Both the customer in the shop and the listener to the news are made to feel like automata, responding to what presents itself as life on autopilot. In these shops the customers feel hemmed in as they queue to pay, because in the narrow aisle they wait in they see all the choices they know they don't want whilst they wait to get away. 

What happened the crisis of cheapness of forty years ago? When so much work that was once skilled, as if skilled work was once valuable, became devalued? When skilled labour became so cheap that it made deskilling and mass unemployment popular with employers? That was a 'cost of living crisis' indeed. Many who endured it would never get jobs, and if they did get a job then it was temporary and unsustainable until nobody cared.

Anyway, I went into this Poundland store in Belfast to see if they had CD cases. I live well behind the trends so I thought they might live there too. They seemed like the right sort of shop for my sort of 'well past it's sell by date' living. Instead of CD cases I found a crosscut hand saw, and decided that was what I really wanted. Mine was old and rusty, and it made hard work of any job I wanted it to do.

I got in the queue and got to where I was going to be the next to be served and stood well back. In front of me was a handsome elegantly dressed woman who happened to be black, she looked particularly splendid wearing an expensive looking grey wool coat. She said nothing to the shop assistant as she timidly handed over a floppy heart shaped foil coloured 'Happy Birthday' balloon. The tired looking shop assistant then had walk past four tills with the balloon, to apply the open end of the balloon to a helium dispenser to fill up the balloon. The machine seemed to take ages. The other customers were glumly submitting their goods to the automatic check outs and paying by card. The beep of the cash machines reminded of the gaming arcades I was never meant to go in as a youth. Suddenly, whilst I was looking at the queues approaching the automatic check outs, the balloon had become taut and beamed 'Happy Birthday' in metallic lettering against a different coloured metallic background to whoever looked at it. 

The balloon now buoyant. The quietly irritated shopping assistant held the balloon in one hand whilst she cut a length of white plastic ribbon with the other. She tied one end of the ribbon to the base of the balloon. With the assistant now holding the balloon by its ribbon, she gestured for the customer to pay. The body language of the silent black woman shrank to that of a large child. Silenced by the tension of feeling made to wait and putting the shop assistant to such trouble without knowing that she was going to do that, she slowed the completion of the transaction down further by opening her wallet and fumbling with putting three different cards, one at a time she tried each of them in the machine. Each time the machine refused to process the transaction. With the fourth card and evidently the right PIN number she managed to get everything right, the payment went through. The shop assistant's pasty face visibly lifted to nearly a smile when she handed the balloon over saw the customer gone.

I stepped up and found to my surprise that the saw cost half what I thought it should cost, I had read the wrong label on the shelf. I fumbled for a lower denomination value bank note than the one I originally meant to offer her. I like cash and dislike cards, though they have their uses. For the British, who knew little of other countries, the queen was the most famous person in the world who did not carry money, and even then we knew she had a retinue behind her who would settle any cash based problem. Had I not seen it for myself I would never have credited how close we have come to similar airs and graces as we have appropriated with the common use of cards.

The visibility and limits of our cash were part of how we knew that we were real, and we were commoners. I still prefer to use cash in shops, just as I like to see human shaped bank tellers, even when what they can say is dictated to them by the contents of the screen they are facing.  

Picture Set Of The Month - January - Painted Doors Of Morocco

Some memories of bright sunshine amid
the present winter chills, pictures taken May/June 2022.   

This was my holiday of a lifetime, being driven around 
Morocco and seeing all the areas where few to no people live.

There are many places in the world where people
react to the light, as if it has a special quality, 
France is one-hence it's reputation for painters.
Morocco is another.   
 

 

Moroccans seems to take great delight in customising
the appearance of the doors to their dwellings,
so that even when the doors are locked
the entrance still seem welcoming.....

It Was Fifty Years Ago This Year