Lyrics to my song 'We will not be cast down'

We will not be cast down!

We will not be cast down

Oppressed or overwhelmed

 By all this tragedy

We will not lose our light

In this sea of swirl and trouble

We need our light to see by!

We'll not be screwed by fear

 Into a knuckle

Hard and dense with doubt

We will not lose our hearts

In this cold cold wind

We need our hearts to love with!

We will not unbelievers be

Amid these spirals of divinity

Nor fear the heart of darkness

We will not lose our sense of Self

At these gates of transformation

We need our Selves to live in!

We need our light to see by!

We need our hearts to love with!

We need our Selves to live in!

March Diary

From an OU creative writing course:

Character Exercise

This time you should also make your character desire something, and make the desire their driving force. It will work best if you make whatever the character desires desirable in the reader’s eyes too. Think about why they can never have what they want. ‘Three Hours Between Planes’ is a good example of this. (Bizarre Short Story by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

By giving your character desires and disappointments you will see how this quickly develops potential stories.

Ian had been told that desire dies in your sixties.  A therapist had told him that.  A harsh featured middle aged woman with flat eyes and a fiercely hooked nose.  Harsh featured Miriam-she of the great certainty.

‘One writer spoke of it as riding the wild stallion which is then tamed in later life.  He spoke of it as a great relief.’  She opined.

‘It sounds to me like loss.  The death of something.  I would regret that.’

‘Yet here you are seeking an answer?’

‘Well explanation possibly…’

‘What then is it that you want of me Ian?’

For the first time he noted with some admiration the fierce outline of her breasts, her tight looked after body, her knees pressed together modestly.  Her hands, he also noted, were shapely, the nails unpainted but carefully manicured.  Her ears too were small, like pressed flowers.  A forty something woman with a tight fit body and a harsh face with cold green eyes.

‘Well perhaps I should ask what you can offer me?’

She shifted in her chair-a slight discomfort appeared to have brushed her like a chill breeze.  She cradled her chin, somewhat hastily, and then dropped her hand back into her lap.

‘Who was the writer, the one that said that about the stallion?’

'I’m afraid I can’t remember’ Miriam said, ‘sorry.’

4.3.20:  From blurb on the next Paris Review publication:  Ideas of transformation, death, and the taboo appear again and again in this issue, from Senaa Ahmad’s electrifying take on the death of Anne Boleyn in “Let’s Play Dead” to the literal transmogrification in Jesse Ball’s “Diary of a Country Mouse” and Jayanta Mahapatra and Billy Collins’s respective poems on the deaths of friends, “After the Death of a Friend” and “On the Deaths of Friends.”

The video game creations of Hideo Kojima and the nature of his new game ‘Death Stranding.’  (Stranding derived from mass whale stranding incidents and their inherent mystery.)  Ref:  ‘A mind forever voyaging’ by Dylan Holmes/  ‘Hamlet on the holodeck’ by Janet Holmes.  Article by Andrew Chen  NY Times briefing.

• The new cookbook for Diana Henry ‘From the oven to the Table’.  Chicken Thighs Forever.  The actual sub-title of one of the chapters!

• The Fibonacci sequence.  Explore the inherent nature of symmetry and the Golden Mean.

• Coronavirus provides respite for the planet from ceaseless human-bullshit producing activity.  Mobility is bad (except for me)

• QUOTE:  This is so true!

We know how much we don’t know

• Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? If you haven’t come across the term before, you have definitely experienced the principle. It’s a psychological rule that states; it’s the most incompetent who are the most confident, while the intelligent ones doubt their own abilities. Put simply, dumb people are too dumb to know how dumb they are. Smart people are clever enough to know how much they don’t know. British philosopher Bertrand Russell who first laid out the idea perhaps summed it up best: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Basically, all of us have a pretty lousy grasp of the limits of our own competence one way or another.

• Hopper, Elizabeth. "What Is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?" ThoughtCo, Feb. 11, 2020, thoughtco.com/dunning-kruger-effect-4157431.

Anne Lamott (From the Brainpickings Website) On Writer's Purpose:  'We try to help where we can, and try to survive our own trials and stresses, illnesses and elections. We work really hard at not being driven crazy by noise and speed and extremely annoying people, whose names we are too polite to mention. We try not to be tripped up by major global sadness, difficulties in our families or the death of old pets…

We work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes…

We’re social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.

And then there’s a mass shooting, a nuclear plant melts down, just as a niece is born, or as you find love. The world is coming to an end. I hate that. In environmental ways, it’s true, and in existential ways, it has been since the day each of us was born.'

WHAT MUSIC AM I LISTENING TO?:  'Become Desert'  John Luther Adams  (Lovely ambient bellscape-excellent for writing to!)  Persuasive evidence for Biophilia.

BLOG OF THE MONTH:  Tyler Cowen  'Conversations with Tyler'  Mercator Centre.  The best interviewer I've heard across a staggering range of subjects.  Always considered, intelligent and challenging.  Also see his sonnet-like turn at the end of his interview on The Tim Ferris Show recently.

READING:  'Arctic Dreams' by Barry Lopez  Poetic.  Passionate.  Tremendously moving writing on the nature of the Arctic World.  Its animals, people, interlopers, abusive extractors and its meaning with its mystical magical wind sculpted ice-scape.  Outstanding!

FINNEGAN'S WAKE by James Joyce:  Has got me again!  Diving in from Mon 16th March.  Maybe away for a while!  I will be posting updates.

TED GIOIA:  Gentle reader if you have any desire to educate yourself truly in the ways of music then please absorb the contents of the wonderful Ted Gioia's blog post on The Best Music of 2019  http://www.tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2019.html    This is a true gift from Ted to the World, and will furnish your musical education for the next 12 months and beyond!

FROM THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS BY ABRAXAS MELONJACKER:

She seizes him in her white arms!

Her breasts are stirred and flecked!

She lands on him like Zeus on Leda!

The red skeins in her hair weave tales

of wildness and of chaos.

The sea is sounding in his shell!

THE FEBRUARY FLOODS-A WARNING FROM GEORGE MONBIOT

Washout

Posted: 15 Feb 2020 05:05 AM PST

Despite growing awareness, our government still allows landowners to help flood the homes of people living downstream.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12^th February 2020


On Friday, campaigners in Calderdale, West Yorkshire issued an urgent warning. The peat bogs in the hills that drain into their valley were burning. The fires had been set by gamekeepers working for a grouse shooting estate. Burning peatlands, research suggests, is likely to exacerbate floods downstream. Towns in the Calder Valley, such as Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd have been flooded repeatedly, partly, local people argue, because the upper catchment is able to hold back little of the rain that falls on it. On Sunday, Storm Ciara landed in the UK. The River Calder rose higher than it had ever done before, and Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd duly flooded.
The following day, the UK’s diaphanous environment secretary, Theresa Villiers, made a statement in the House of Commons expressing her “support and sympathy to all those whose homes or businesses have been flooded over the weekend.” She assured the house that “every effort is being made to keep people safe”. But she said nothing about the land management that might have caused the flood.
Last year, a paper published in the Journal of Hydrology X reported experiments conducted in another part of the Pennines, the range in which Calderdale is located. It found that when peat bogs are restored, deep vegetation is allowed to recover and erosion gullies are blocked, water is held back for longer in the hills, and peak flows in the streams draining them are reduced. Broadly speaking, the rougher the surface, the less flooding downstream. Burning moorland for grouse shooting reduces roughness and increases erosion.
In October the government announced that, as landowners had failed to stop burning their peatlands voluntarily, it would introduce legislation to ban the practice “in due course”. Since then, there has been not a squeak. As Villiers dispensed sympathy on Monday, she failed to mention it.
There’s a long and bizarre history here. The fires recorded by the Calder Valley campaigners on Friday were burning on Walshaw Moor, a 6500-acre grouse shooting estate that belongs to the well-connected inheritor of a retail empire, Richard Bannister. After he bought it, burning and draining on the moor intensified. Burning and draining raise the abundance of red grouse, while reducing the abundance of many other species. Shooting grouse is one of the world’s most exclusive bloodsports: where their numbers are high, very rich people pay thousands of pounds a day to kill them.
In 2011, the government agency Natural England launched an almost unprecedented prosecution. It charged the Walshaw Moor estate with 45 offences relating to its intensification of management for grouse shooting (the estate denied them). Natural England spent £1 million on the case, then suddenly dropped it. Instead, it channelled £2.5 million of enhanced farm subsidies to the estate. Freedom of information requests were refused, so we have no means of understanding this decision. The burning continues, regardless of the warnings of those downstream. When I phoned Bannister’s office to ask about these issues, I was told: “We don’t wish to comment.”
Since 2014, when I first wrote about how government policies exacerbate flooding, there has been a major shift in awareness. In and out of government, there’s a growing realisation that impeding the flow of water off the land, de-synchronising flood peaks in the tributaries and slowing a river’s pace can reduce flooding downstream, saving lives, homes and infrastructure. Not every experiment in natural flood management succeeds. The evidence base is still small. More research is needed to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. But, in some circumstances, ecological restoration can make a major difference, at a fraction of the cost of hard engineering.
One paper suggests that reforesting between 20 and 40% of a catchment can reduce the height of floods by 19%. Leaky wooden dams embedded in streams, and other low-tech measures, appear to have prevented disasters at Pickering in North Yorkshire and Bossington and Allerford in Somerset. It’s even cheaper if you use non-human labour. Where beavers are reintroduced, their dams slow the flow and trap sediments.
But in most parts of the country, the First World War mentality – sustaining the policy even when it proves disastrous – prevails. In some places, water flows are controlled by bodies called Internal Drainage Boards. Though these are official agencies, they don’t appear to be answerable to any government department. While largely funded by council tax payers, they tend to be dominated by landowners. Some members appear to have inherited their positions from their fathers and grandfathers. Many of these boards seem interested only in speeding water off farmland (including farmland belonging to their members), regardless of the impact on urban pinchpoints downstream. They dredge, straighten and embank rivers, trashing wildlife and rushing water towards cities lower in the catchment. Any government that takes flooding seriously would immediately dissolve these boards and replace them with accountable bodies.
Every year, Network Rail spends £200 million on hard engineering to protect its lines. When I suggested it might pay farmers to invest in natural flood management in the surrounding hills, it told me, “we are unable to strike deals with farmers or land owners, to pay for work to be undertaken on 3rd party property”. Shouldn’t changing this policy be an urgent priority?
Power relations in the British countryside are still almost feudal. Vast tracts of land are owned by small numbers of people, who are permitted to manage it with little regard for the lives and homes of the less elevated people downstream. The environment secretary, a scion of one of Britain’s grandest landed families, offers her thoughts and prayers. I’m sure they are appreciated. But we need action.
www.monbiot.com

Go Forth Child of Marx and consider well: THE 2019 UK ELECTION: THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA By Tony Dougan

Go Forth Child of Marx and consider well:  THE 2019 UK ELECTION: THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA By Anthony Dougan

If the 2019 UK Election taught us anything about British Politics it is that mutton is being continually dressed as lamb and the British system leads to the unlikeliest of bedfellows.

We have four main political parties masquerading as two, with hollowed out cores and sworn enemies on each wing.  Enemies within, enemies without.

Stewart Lee’s piece in The Guardian, ‘Only Aamon the demon is fit to replace Jeremy Corbyn’ put it succinctly in terms of the current hybrid monstrosity that is the Labour Party:…

“A Frankenstein assembled from leftover body parts attractive both to the wine-quaffing, avocado-crushing, lentil-souffle-nibbling, champagne-socialist hypocrites of Hackney and the chip-butty-gobbling, fish-gut-snuffling, raw-offal-scoffing racist troglodytes of Hull will never fly,…

And yet the Labour party thinks it needs to unite these two incompatible, and quite frankly vile and unacceptable, stereotypes.”

For myself I might add the Frankenstinian equivalent on the Tory side is the unholy unity of the monocled Rees-Moogian Borisian bum-boy self-entitled fox-hunting Islam-hating public school-chumming Etonian bullingdon-clubbing let-them-eat-grass neo-liberal nationalistic little-englander scum on the one hand and the faintly desiccated hush puppy wearing technocratic opera-going upper class twatting posh-lunching vile ancien-regime empire-longing monarchy-loving hedge-funding arse-slapping aristos of the Soft Conservative ‘left’ that are also stitched together in a system bereft of intelligence and howled on by a rabid audience of insult-spewing mutually-monsterising haters twitterising their vile filth on their keyboards 12 hours a day. No wonder the country can’t get anything done!

Frankly vile and unacceptable stereotypes indeed Stewart.

In politics never say never is a good slogan but, in truth, I can never see a Socialist Government in power in the UK in my lifetime.

Let’s say I give myself twenty years?

The only really popular Labour government in recent years was that led by Tony Blair with a Labour Party draped in the silk stockings of soft Conservatism that continued the Thatcherite Project with swivel-eyed enthusiasm and we now look back upon the antics of that War Criminal and his half-witted crew of technocrats with cringing horror.

It may well be that popular socialism with its credo of public ownership, collective action, strong state, high taxation, anti-monarchical, Big-Unions and comprehensive education for all, belief-system, may be a thing of the past. It may not be fit for the purposes of the 21st Century. Its vision may be a historical curiosity.

And yet we tremble and resist letting go of treasured beliefs even despite the continual evidence that they have become irrelevant.

The fact remains that the discounting of the leave vote was strategically suicidal on the part of the Labour leadership and Keir Starmer, now mooted as the new leader, had a role in forcing Corbyn to that artless strategy.  Whatever our view on the brainless simplicity of Cameron’s breathtakingly inept 2016 EU Referendum, it was a vote to leave and it could not be discounted without significantly alienating a swathe of the population, many in Labour’s heartlands.

But the question now, as we stand stunned, at the prospect of a revitalised and supremely powerful Conservative Party, under the leadership of an old Etonian Toff who offers no evidence that he possesses even the illusion of moral character, or commitment to any service other than to himself, the question surely, for all those supporters of Jeremy Corbyn must be-If I have got it so wrong then what must this teach me? What do I need to reflect on? Is my understanding sufficient to the times? Are the reasons why I present myself as a leftwinger sufficiently coherent? Have I read and studied enough?

Have I reflected sufficiently on the views of those I profoundly disagree with?

Do I understand Politics at all? Do I understand how Politics in the UK intersects with International Relations?

And most fundamentally, what do I now do to serve my country and my community and my own higher purpose?

Go forth Child of Marx and consider well.

And keep off Twitter!

 1.  Just as an aside Stewart Lee also refers in his article to the summoning of Aamon the demon by Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers, Head of the Golden Dawn, who is described as the acolyte of Aleister Crowley, the infamous Thelemite Magician and drug addled clown.  In fact it was Crowley who was the acolyte of Mathers prior to their huge falling out.  Each then spent years attempting to obtain the others toenail clippings and semen for the purposes of magical warfare.  It would make a fine film script.

REVIEW OF 2019

MY WORD OF 2019  RE-BALANCE

BOOKS READ IN 2019  

FOCUS:  THE SCIENCE FICTION OF H G WELLS

H G WELLS-  THE TIME MACHINE/  THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON/  WAR OF THE WORLDS/  THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU

CAPITALIST REALISM- Mark Fisher

THE OVERSTORY- Richard Powers

THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM- Shoshanna Zuboff

HOW MUSIC WORKS-  David Byrne

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER- Kevin Barry

SONG AND DANCE MAN-Michael Gray

TEAM HUMAN- Douglas Rushkoff

NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU- Miranda July

ON FIRE- Naomi Klein

WILLIAM BLAKE NOW- John Higgs

WHO IS THAT MAN?- David Dalton

BOB DYLAN:  BEHIND THE SHADES TAKE 2- Clinton Heylin 

REVOLUTION IN THE HEAD- Ian MacDonald

A FABULOUS CREATION- David Hepworth

CHRONICLES- Bob Dylan

STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE- Donna J Haraway

CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE- Paul Mason

THIN AIR- Richard Morgan

POSTER BOY- N.J. Crossley

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH- David Wallace-Wells

THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE- Margaret MacMillan

I AM DYNAMITE  A LIFE OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE- Sue Prideaux

SILENT SPRING- Rachel Carson

THE VORRH- B. Catling

MY RE-READS

OLAF STAPLEDON- Last and First Men

HOMER  THE ODYSSEY  (Emily Wilson’s Trans)

OSCAR WILDE  LETTERS AND ESSAYS  (Vol 3 Folio Collected Works)

THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES-  Arthur Conan Doyle

THE SONNETS- William Shakespeare

MUSIC OF 2019 

FOCUS: THE REDISCOVERY OF BOB DYLAN

HIGHLIGHTS

BOB DYLAN

THE MOBILE FIDELITY REMASTER OF BLOOD ON THE TRACKS  LIMITED EDITION

THE MOBILE FIDELITY REMASTER OF BLONDE ON BLONDE  LIMITED EDITION

NEW MORNING (Mobile Fidlity)

TIME OUT OF MIND

MODERN TIMES

MORE BLOOD MORE TRACKS

OH MERCY

LOVE AND THEFT

TRAVELLIN’ THRU

THE BEATLES

THE BEATLES  5OTH ANNIVERSARY RE-ISSUE  ABBEY ROAD

ANGEL OHLSON 

ALL MIRRORS

NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS 

GHOSTEEN

BRIAN ENO AND DAVID BYRNE

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS  ENO AND DAVID BYRNE

MY PODCAST OF 2019  

HOW’S IT ROLLING BOB?

MY GREATEST TRIUMPHS OF 2019  

·       I WROTE MY FIRST SCREENPLAY AFTER COMPLETING A SCREENWRITING COURSE  (BUT SEE GREATEST REGRET)

·       I wrote an entire training programme for social workers working with Looked After Children and personally delivered it.

·       I successfully interviewed for a position with the Social Work Regulator for England

MY GREATEST REGRET OF 2019  

NOT FINISHING A SINGLE PIECE OF WRITING

MY BIGGEST LEARNINGS OF 2019  

·       THE UTTER USELESSNESS OF BINARY POLITICS.  Politically, 2019 was a monstrosity of division. There appeared to me to be a complete lack of any sense of respectful discourse or willingness to listen to different views.  This boorishness was echoed by social media and reflected in politician’s behaviour with the single honourable exception of Jeremy Corbyn who, whatever your political views about him might be, behaved with courtesy and grace throughout, while being subjected to the most vicious and vitriolic lies and accusations, I have ever seen.  The entire media were a disgrace.  The publically funded BBC came across as biased and in the service of the right wing of the UK.  There should be an enquiry into its behaviour and its leadership.

·       The growth of far right nationalism and the increasingly open behaviour of racist thugs in our society is a warning from history.  An Islamophobe is now our Prime Minister who has openly insulted Muslim women.

·       If democracy is only as good as our education system, then our education system must be broken.

·       THE IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGY TO EVERYTHING.  There has to be a better way to do this.  It begins with the study of history, particularly military history.  How to make the best decisions in extreme circumstances is an essential skill.  Decision making in war is the example.  We are not seeing any world leaders with a strategic mindset.  Possibly with the exception of Jacintha in New Zealand.  But there is also AOC and Bernie in the US and Gina Miller.  There’s Edward Luttwak. 

·       MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH IS LIKE A GARDEN; YOU MUST TEND THEM!

MY MAN OF 2019 

JEREMY CORBYN

 

MY WOMAN OF 2019 

GRETA THUNBERG.  
 
But also a shout out for AOC who has burst into the US Congress like a stunningly beautiful thunderbolt.

MY FOCUS FOR 2020

STRATEGY/ MILITARY HISTORY/  NAPOLEON/ POLITICAL THEORY/ CHESS/  GUITAR/  SOCIAL WORK THEORY AND STRATEGY/  LEADERSHIP/ PHYSICAL FITNESS/ CYCLING ON THE BROMPTON-WHAT IS POSSIBLE?/MORE BOB DYLAN/ THE ISSUE OF ISRAEL

MY RELATIONSHIPS WITH MY WIFE AND CHILDREN AND FRIENDS

CONTACT

MONEY
ONE WRITING PROJECT A MONTH - MINIMUM-COMPLETED AND SENT OFF

MAY 2020 BE A YEAR OF PEACE AND JOY FOR YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES