Search This Blog

18.4.10

THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS POEM 1-'PERMANENTLY STRANGE'

PERMANENTLY STRANGE




Tales from a frozen foreign land

labyrinthine tourmaline-dreams

of black horses flowing out to sea



told in a strangely twisting tongue

that chords can barely bend to chant

the rime and rhythm in the line.



How fools found gold in streams that curled

and mazed round roots by boggy banks

What are you? Why are you here?



His-story hisses out of flatulent balloons.

and fools all fall about the place

while others look round for helpful signs.



It wasn’t that they didn’t.

It might be that they’ll never.

It might be that it’s permanently strange.

16.4.10

Dominic Gill-A hero for our time!

Adventure Cyclist and film maker Dominic Gill on his Hase Pino Tour Tandem with Ernie, a 75 year old man with Lymphocytic Leukaemia.  Dom and Ernie plan to cycle the Pino across America raising funds for Cancer Research.  The trip has always been a dream of Ernie's and with Dom on the rear it's one he will now achieve.
Dom's last adventure cycling from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego on a tandem and offering random passengers a ride was a great documentary that you can check out at www.takeaseat.org.
Beautiful bike too, provided by Hase Bikes.  Good job guys!





ernie_460.jpg

4.4.10

THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS PROLEGOMENA: MOMENTS OF IMPENDING TRANSFORMATION

A thin whipcord clacks a screech. Nerve-shock and wibble-wobble. He is become a touretted marionette.  A low moan gut-birthing. Shake-handing.  Eyes tear-fill streaming blue as sapphires.   Shoulders up-jumping down-sledding.  A dense weight stone-black and heavy gut-deep and yet deeper. Steady breathing, try to focus, anything, but cannot.   Room-spin. Chair-toppling like a statue on a broken plinth.  How long there?  Moments, houries, yearies.  Incandoes of the Lesser Hell.  Purgatorio that stops all clocks.

Years later he goes to the bedroom where she feigns sleep and pulls on someone’s shorts and trainers and a tee shirt.  As is his way he responds to all vicissitudes by running running  running.
Everything that was familiar, that was home, is now alien-strange.  He is the strangered in a strangely.
He runs down the country lane, past the golf course shameless in its grassy nakedness.  Dead golfers eye him coldly from the hillow-humps.  Clubs resting against their legs descried against the horizon sculpt them into living gallows

Stiff-running.  Heaviness in his gut that seems to include his heart as if the organs have turned to granite or slate perhaps.  Past the graveyard, up a steep little track and into the wood.  The grim, grey dawn slowly jumps up and down on the death’s head nights head beating beating beating until its brains spill grayley onto the fields.  He runs under beech and oak; ash, and clumps of you.  A huge droplet of water drips off a broadleaf and lands with a dull phut on his head.  Up he slowly wends.  Outcrops of limestone yield to him.  

The weighty belly and another limb grown heavy as pitch.
He emerges like a beetle onto a small limestone plateau and the village is spread-eagled and spatch-cocked out below him with its little stone walls and pretty houses of the good folk.  The village is spread out below him but now is like the vilest lie; an insult and an affront.  Does he hate it and all that is in it?  Or, has he always hated it?  All it’s pies and flaunty marrows.  It with it’s giddy reeks and shallows.  It’s shoreline saltmarsh slashed with sinuous rills.  It’s pockmarked limestone sharp against the skin.  It’s limestone sheep hot with ticks and vacant eyed, except for the Leicester Blue prize-winning flock, immense in the morning mist, shrugged from a llama.
And the ubiquitous yew-death tree stooping to conquer, trollopped up with scarlet baubles in it’s greens.

Almost disbelieving his own Self he asks Good to help him.  He does not know if Good exists and even if It did whether It would be listening to him right now.  He guesses that Good, if It did exist, would be incredibly busy, with hardly any time even for Its own family, if It had any.  Good would be an absent parent!  Good probably didn’t exist but, you never know.

‘Please help me Good’ he breathes.  ‘Please.  Please help me.’
He briefly considers flinging himself upon some pointy limestone shard where he can lie impaled like one of the world’s great tragedies, but the height is minimal and that would be absurd.  Even now, he realises that death is not an option, even if he possessed  the gravelly to open such a door.  The existence of somethings will not allow.  

No, it is clear he must live, but how will he live with these two wolves fighting for possession of his juicy bones and grits?  He does not know.  He knows that now which he does not know.  But does he know what he knows?  And how will he know if he does not know?  But what he does know, even now, is…

THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS-RING 1: OF DESPAIR


1.           PROLEGOMENON:  MOMENTS OF IMPENDING TRANSFORMATION                                               
2.           PERMANENTLY STRANGE
3.           STARLIT NIGHT
4.           THE VILEST LIE
5.           THE SLAVE-DREAMS OF CLAUDIUS AND GERTRUDE
6.           TONIGHT YOUR HEAVING HEART…
7.           ARE WE ARIGHT?
8.           WHO KNOWS WHAT LOVE IS?
9.           NOT HANDLING IT
10.         DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BLUES
11.         THE ANGRY FLAGS
12.         SURRENDER
13.         ADVICE TO A WOMAN
14.         THE PALIMPSEST
15.         THE CROOKLAND’S SERIES
16.         PSYCHIC WOUNDS
17.         THE WICKER MAN ATTENDS MEDIATION
18.         BLUE HALLOWEEN
20.         SESTINA OF THE DARK NYMPH
21.         BECAUSE YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL
22.         I WILL NOT BE CAST DOWN
23.         UNSAID



DEDICATION


To Rachel, Gail, and Millie.

Three muses crossed the shadows of my 
sails…

                                            But one remains
The Book Of Three Rings






ooo




                      


3.4.10

DELCIA McNEIL-ARTIST VISIONARY HEALER-LONDON EXHIBITION

I am delighted to invite you to 'Energy Landscapes' - the first solo exhibition of my paintings in London at the highly acclaimed Koukan Gallery,106a Alexander Park Road, London N10 2AE. www.koukangallery.com

The invitation is attached and also posted below.

The invitation to the preview on Tuesday 27th April, 6.30-8.30pm is for you and any friends that you may wish to bring along.

Apart from being at the preview - of course! - I will be at the gallery personally all day on Thursday 29, Friday 30th April (11am-5pm) and Saturday 1st May (11am-3pm).

Bounds Green on the Piccadilly line is the nearest underground station. Free parking is available in nearby residential roads. Alexander Park Road is also a major bus route, including the 102 and the 299.

If you would like you can see my work at my new website www.delciamcneilgallery.turnpiece.net

I look forward to seeing many of you soon!

all good wishes,
Delcia

015395 62420
07515 807366





Invitation for body of email.jpg

1.4.10

The brilliant Tony Judt on the European dilemma with Israel.







Tony Judt puts the Israeli/Palestine issue into a nutshell.  An essential read from the London Review of Books March 2010 (in interview with Kristina Bozic.)


Q:  (Kristina)  It’s been doing this for a long time in the case of Israel and Palestine, expressing disapproval of the occupation but doing almost nothing to bring it to an end. Is there anything Europe can do to exert pressure on Israel?

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time, damaging Palestinians and damaging Israel without running any risk. However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage. If the EU said: ‘So long as you break international laws, you can’t have the privileges of partial economic membership, you can’t have internal trading rights, you can’t be part of the EU market,’ this would be a huge issue in Israel, second only to losing American military aid. We don’t even have to talk about Gaza, just the Occupied Territories.
Why do Europeans not do it? Here, the problem of blackmail is significant. And it is not even active blackmail but self-blackmail. When I talk about these things in Holland or in Germany, people say to me: ‘We couldn’t do that. Don’t forget, we are in Europe. Think of what we did to the Jews. We can’t use economic leverage against Israel. We can’t be a critic of Israel, we can’t use our strength as a huge economic actor to pressure the Jewish state. Why? Because of Auschwitz.’ I understand this argument very well. Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz. However, this is ridiculous. Europe can’t live indefinitely on the credit of someone else’s crimes to justify a state that creates and commits its own crimes. If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: ‘Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse.’ Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, ‘It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you,’ Europe would say: ‘First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders.’ We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing – a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state. It is the European bad conscience that is part of the problem.

SOCIAL WORKERS GET IT IN THE NECK FOR ROONEY INJURY

Social workers blamed for Rooney injury


writes Loof Prial

Thursday 01 April 2010 11:36

Social workers 'should have done more' to prevent Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney injuring his ankle during a recent football match, a critical report has concluded.



The study, by the Centre for Rational Analysis of Practice, found that social workers failed to carry out a proper risk assessment of the footballer's ankle prior to the game against Bayern Munich on Tuesday evening. It also highlights numerous breakdowns in communication and failures in joint working with colleagues in both health and sports management.



One of the report's authors, Dr Rodney Feelgood, said social workers needed more training. "I know more about ankles than most social workers do. What does that say about the profession? Well, what does it say?"



"It doesn't exactly bode well for our World Cup chances in South Africa either. We'll all know who to blame when England don't win though, won't we?"



Arsene Wenger said: "I'm happy to confirm that Arsenal will vigorously defend the social workers involved if there is any suggestion of professional misconduct and would draw attention to Para 5.7 of the GSCC Code which requires social workers to "not put yourself or anyone else at unnecessary risk", clearly something likely to happen if any member of my team (or any social worker) is tackled by Wayne Rooney."

from Community Care website April 1st.