register pt2 Simon Armitage takes us through the mysterious aisles of magic at Poundland: There's a poem in this programme from Simon Armitage called, Poundland. It is quite simply - exquisite. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r0b3n and - Simon Armitage once said someone bought a book of poems by Ezra Pound, in Poundland, for - a pound! There's a poem in... | Facebook
Borders Met and Crossed
AVAILABILITY
Adventures in strong language - performed and from the page - introduced by a master of poetic ceremonies, Paul Farley. Borders - met and crossed - are the theme of the day. The River Styx where the dead arrive and the shape-shifting places where people become other animals are among the subjects. Jo Shapcott, James Lasdun and Simon Armitage come to the edge and shout their poems across. BBC Radio 4 - The Echo Chamber, Borders Met and Crossed
Tone and Persona "If persona is the complex personality implicit in the writing, tone is a web of feelings stretched throughout an essay, feelings from which our sense of the persona emerges. Tone has three main strands: the writer's attitude toward subject, reader, and self.
"Each of these determinants of tone is important, and each has many variations. Writers may be angry about a subject or amused by it or discuss it dispassionately. They may treat readers as intellectual inferiors to be lectured (usually a poor tactic) or as friends with whom they are talking. Themselves they may regard very seriously or with an ironic or an amused detachment (to suggest only three of numerous possibilities). Given all these variables, the possibilities of tone are almost endless.
"Tone, like persona, is unavoidable. You imply it in the words you select and in how you arrange them." (Thomas S. Kane, The New Oxford Guide to Writing. Oxford Univ. Press, 1988)
Tone and Diction "The main factor in tone is diction, the words that the writer chooses. For one kind of writing, an author may choose one type of vocabulary, perhapsslang, and for another the same writer may choose an entirely different set of words. . . .
"Even such small matters as contractions make a difference in tone, the contracted verbs being less formal:
It is strange that the professor had not assigned any papers for three weeks. It's strange that the professor hadn't assigned any papers for three weeks."
(W. Ross Winterowd, The Contemporary Writer: A Practical Rhetoric, 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1981
Sentence Sounds "Robert Frost believed sentence tones (which he called 'sound of sense') are 'already there--living in the cave of the mouth.' He considered them 'real cave things: they were before words were' (Thompson 191). To write a 'vital sentence,' he believed, 'we must write with the ear on the speaking voice' (Thompson 159). 'The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. Eye readers miss the best part. The sentence sound often says more than the words' (Thompson 113). According to Frost:
Only when we are making sentences so shaped [by spoken sentence tones] are we truly writing. A sentence must convey a meaning by tone of voice and it must be the particular meaning the writer intended. The reader must have no choice in the matter. The tone of voice and its meaning must be in black and white on the page. (Thompson 204)
"In writing, we can't indicate body language, but we can control how sentences are heard. And it is through our arrangement of words into sentences, one after another, that we can approximate some of the intonation in speech that tells our readers not only information about the world but also how we feel about it, who we are in relationship to it, and who we think our readers are in relationship to us and the message we want to deliver." (Dona Hickey, Developing a Written Voice. Mayfield, 1993)
language point: if IF..... IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, ' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
David Aaronovitch examines the persistent popularity of 'declinism' - the idea that individuals and society are not as good as they used to be. Why are we so drawn to this idea? Is it a purely negative and pessimistic view of the world or does it perform a valuable function?
A self-confessed optimist and progressive, David meets people with views very different from his own as he explores some of the most important contemporary forms of declinism - from concern about the collapse of British manufacturing and the impact of materialism on the planet to unease about immigration and calls for a return to Victorian economic values.
1 if something used to happen, it happened regularly or all the time in the past, but does not happen now:
He used to go to our school.
We're eating out more often than we used to.
did not use to do something
You didn't use to eat chips when you were younger.
used not to do something British English
You used not to fuss like this.
did somebody use to do something?
Did you use to go to church regularly?
2 if a particular situation used to exist, it existed for a period of time in the past, but does not exist now:
Jimmy used to be a friend of mine.
There used to be a large car park on this site.
did not use to be/do something
Why are you so bad-tempered? You didn't use to be like this.
did somebody/something use to be/do something?
Did this building use to be a hotel?
Where did you use to live before you came to Manchester?
GRAMMAR If you used to do something, you did it regularly or for a period of time in the past• She used to come here (NOT was used to come here) every week.• I used to go to that school.!! Do not say 'be used to'. This has a different meaning - see entry used1.!! Use the infinitive after used to, not the past tense• My dad used to grow vegetables (NOT used to grew vegetables).!! For talking about a present habit, use usually• We usually eat (NOT use to eat) around six.In questions, say did someone use to ...?• Did he use to fight with his brother?In negatives, say didn't/did not use to ...• He didn't use to smoke.You can also say never used to• They never used to ask where I'd been.In formal British English you can also say used not to• Buses used not to stop here.
Nearly a month after the tragic massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the ensuing “debate” over gun control and gun violence still looks less like the exchange of ideas and discussion on systemic violence we need to be having, and more like an absurdist tragicomedy; the latest “act” of which is, of course, the recent “interview” between TV tabloid hack Piers Morgan and conspiranoid* fear-mongering talk radio host Alex Jones. Ostensibly, the two got together in the same room to “debate” each other over gun control. That was how the show was billed, and what appeared on the lower third graphic when the exchange finally aired. And this makes sense: for the last several weeks Morgan has been calling for measures that many — if not most — libertarians and anarchists would no doubt oppose, while Jones is without a doubt one of the the most outspoken (some would say vitriolic) gun rights advocates with access to a microphone and Internet connection. Those who saw the interview know that nothing like a reasonable conversation actually took place. For those who didn’t watch, this short analysis by fellow C4SS writer Jason Lee Byas captures the spirit of the spectacle nicely: “Within two minutes, (Jones) starts screaming. Within five minutes, he challenges Morgan to a boxing match. Towards the end he begins mocking Morgan’s accent.” In other words, viewers of the program were treated to a dramatic teleplay of epically absurd proportions. It’s immediately clear that both players were aware of their assigned roles, and they performed them beautifully. Jones was the court jester (or perhaps a more apt description would be rodeo clown?), responsible for keeping us, the audience, riled up and agitated — and more importantly, entertained; Morgan was the quintessential “straight man,” a stoic voice of reason, remaining steadfast after Jones’ whirlwind of irrationality died down. You can find evidence of this in how Morgan described the interview during an appearance on “CNN Newsroom” early Tuesday: “I can’t think of a better advertisement for gun control than Jones’ interview last night. […] It was startling, it was terrifying in parts, it was completely deluded.” It almost sounds like Morgan was describing a particularly effective horror movie from the 1930s. “You’ll scream! You’ll shake! You’ll come back for more! Witness the horror masterpiece of the century!” you can very nearly hear him exclaim. In fact, the interview is so scary that it compels viewers to swing right back around to a pro-gun stance; as Laissez-Faire Books editor Jeffrey Tucker wrote in a tongue-in-cheek Facebook post, “If we get gun control, what means will the people have to protect themselves against Alex Jones?” Joking aside, what no one — not Jones, not Morgan, not liberals or conservatives, nor (to a lesser extent) libertarians and anarchists — is willing to admit is that the problem of gun violence, and violence in general, is a wicked problem, eluding easy answers completely and teasing more complex ones unfairly. It is, like poverty or climate change, an absurd problem. Liberals want a more powerful regulatory state concerning gun rights. Conservatives and right libertarians oppose this on constitutional grounds, and left-libertarians and anarchists oppose it on the grounds that they don’t want a stronger state, period. Conservatives want a bigger police state with armed guards in every school. Liberals (or, as Roderick Long calls them, the “aristocratic left”) agree with this proposal but disagree on the uniform the guards wear, while libertarians, anarchists and individual progressives (the anti-privilege left) definitively oppose it. Right-libertarians would like to see a less-regulatory state and more guns in the hands of individuals for self-defense, which liberals oppose. Conservatives play lip-service to it but would probably oppose it if it meant the “wrong” people getting their hands on guns. Of course, left-libertarians and anarchists by and large want to dismantle a state that advocates and promotes violence on a systemic scale; this solution is one that liberals and conservatives alike strongly oppose. The possibility no one will admit exists — or, at least, they won’t in any serious sense — is that there may not be a solution to gun violence. For all the good a conversation on systemic violence, state violence, militarism, etc. might do for a small percentage of the population, the fact that at the end of the day, the current state still exists, will serve to nullify that good. People will still deify military service. Children will still be raised to want to be police officers. And the absurd problem will continue on a systemic level. Therefore, we must, as oppositional forces often do, commit to an absurd answer; we must struggle to teach our own children to reject killing, to reject domination over each other, to reject that systemic violence. *(portmanteau of conspiracy theorist and paranoid)
From its very beginning, gun control — the attempt to regulate the possession of means of self-defense by the ordinary populace — has been closely associated with class rule and the class state. In early modern England, regulation of firearm ownership was closely intertwined with the struggle by the landed classes and capitalist agriculture to restrict the laboring classes’ access to independent subsistence from the land. This included enclosure of common woodland, fen and waste — in which landless and land-poor peasants had previously hunted small game — for sheep pasturage or arable land. It also included exclusion of the common people from forests via the Game Laws and restriction of hunting to the gentry. Under the slaveocracy of the American south, firearm ownership was prohibited by Black Codes that regulated free blacks. And after Emancipation, whenever the old landed gentry managed to successfully assert its power against the Reconstruction regime, former slaves were disarmed by house-to-house patrols, either under the Black Codes or by such irregular bodies as the Klan. The same was true of the Civil Rights struggle a century later, after World War II. In areas where armed self-defense efforts by civil rights activists were widespread, they significantly improved the balance of power against the Klan and other racist vigilante movements. Numerous armed self-defense groups — e.g. the Deacons for Defense and Justice, whose members used rifles and shotguns to repel attacks by white vigilantes in Louisiana in the 1960s — helped equalize the correlation of forces between civil rights activists and racists in many small towns throughout the south. Especially notable was Robert Williams, who in 1957 organized an armed defense of the Monroe, NC NAACP chapter president’s home against a Klan raid and sent the vigilantes fleeing for their lives. Williams’s book Negroes With Guns later inspired Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panthers Party. Speaking of the Black Panthers, no discussion of the origins of modern American gun control would be complete without recognizing their role in inspiring the modern right-wing gun control agenda. Foreshadowing current groups like Copwatch and Cop Block, the Panthers in 1966 organized armed patrols of Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns, stopping to witness police interactions with local residents and provide information and offers of legal assistance when necessary. In 1967 Republican state assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland, a vocal enemy of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the Black Panthers, responded with a bill to prohibit publicly carrying firearms in California. The BPP’s Bobby Seale protested the bill by leading a Panther detachment, armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, up the steps of the statehouse (“All right, brothers, we’re going inside”), through its doors, and into the public viewing area. There Seale read a statement denouncing Mulford’s bill as an attempt “at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror and repression of black people,” and warning that “the time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Mulford’s gun control bill was signed into law three months later by Governor Ronald Reagan. Irregular workers’ militias and armed defense formations played a significant role in labor history, both in the US and abroad. During the Copper Wars at the turn of the 20th century, the governors of several Rocky Mountain states instituted martial law — including door-to-door confiscation of firearms from workers’ homes and striker encampments. In some cases, as with the West Virginia Coal Wars and the Homestead strike, workers fought pitched battles against Pinkertons, state militia and sheriffs’ deputies. In Spain it was largely owing to workers’ militias, organized under the auspices of the CNT trade union federation and the parties of the Left, that Franco’s July 1936 coup attempt failed. In the areas of southern and eastern Spain where Franco’s forces failed to carry the day, workers’ militias often played a decisive role. In some areas armed workers drove Franco’s troops back into their barracks after pitched battles and burned them alive inside. From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class and an instrument of armed force by the owners of the means of production, enabling them to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy. Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops. A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control
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in the latest, much of it so fresh it's as-yet-unpublished poetry:
The Body
A
new programme introduced by Paul Farley featuring the best of poetry
now. The first in the series looks at the body in question - the shapes
of poems and the people in them. How does a poet decide on the form of
their poem? What do different poetic forms do the subject of a poem? The
programme travels the country and anatomises its poetic body. With
found poems and field-notes, a diary of failure and success, the sound
of the world being taken down in rhyme, and a look into a hive of dead
bees in midwinter. With new poems from Sean Borodale, Don Paterson, Robin Robertson and
Alice Oswald. Episode 1 of 4
One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides, and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Miguel's patio.
The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, and then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.
An anthology edited by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy recalls each year of the Queen’s reign
This is a high quality carnival, with Robin Roberston’s “The Halving” putting in a good claim for the title of star turn. It’s a poem about being operated on under general anaesthetic, and perhaps if I hadn’t been undergoing a bit of that myself lately I would have hurried on by; but no, Robertson’s language is too vivid to ignore.
General anaesthesia: a median sternotomy
achieved by sternal saw; the ribs
held aghast by retractor [ ... ]
That placement of the word “aghast” is right out of a whole European tradition of the painter at the anatomy school. I had not thought to find anything quite so cutting – if that’s the word we’re looking for – in a book that, at first sight, might look like a toy, one of those little anthologies put together for Queen Mary’s dolls’ house back there in the long ago.
Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop. with lyrics: Billie Holiday - Strange fruit - YouTube
It has become impossible, when discussing his dramas and in particular the last of them,Parsifal, to avoid the topic of Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism and the claim, forcefully advanced by Robert Gutman in 1968, that Wagner was a racist. I do not mean, of course, that these subjects should be ignored. Indeed they deserve to be addressed. What is unfortunate is that discussion of them soon turned into a war of words in which truth was the first casualty.
Given the posthumous association of Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival with Hitler, who was an enthusiast for Wagner's music, and by extension with Nazism it was inevitable that commentators, especially in Germany, would regard Wagner's dramas as tainted by Nazism. In the vanguard of those who attacked Wagner and his heritage in the postwar period was Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, Wagner's dramas were inherently "völkisch". Adorno suggested that some of the characters, such as Mime and Klingsor, were anti-Semitic caricatures. Given Richard Wagner's frequent anti- Semitic remarks, many have found this claim plausible. Recent commentators have built upon Adorno's view of Wagner and his works, some of them (notably Hartmut Zelinsky and Barry Millington) developing ingenious theories about subtly-coded anti-Semitic and racist messages that they allege are cleverly hidden, deep in Wagner's libretti.
He used to go to our school.
