A SPARK

A wonderful thing happens in this first post on new NUFC blog Eyes on Ashley:

Without sufficient proof of his company’s employment record and a PhD in international law there is unfortunately nothing we can do. The degree of the crimes are substantially different and we are in no way comparing the lack of signings with child labour. The problem is that it is the same man who oversaw both organisations and did so with complete self-interest and without a degree of care for the people affected.

When an otherwise ordinary, apolitical demographic links popular culture to an international pattern of exploitation, we should be incredibly hopeful.

In a significant sense, all we're allowed now is pop culture. Our conscious collective existence is limited largely to football, pop music, TV talent shows, high street chain-store scrimmages. As such it seems inevitable that the first glimmer of an organised oppositional response to neoliberalism in the UK will occur on these sites, when even the bread and circuses are popularly deemed to be thoroughly disease-ridden.

It will happen, you know.

WHERE WATERFALLS AROUND IT LEAP FOREVER

This is us.

Might, failure, oblivion.

The last days of Rome, Michelangelo's Medici tomb, Cage's silence.

Consumer immersion and its dying fall.

Vertigo maw. A pummeling in the stomach. Cliché of Absence.

The guts of an Aztec pyramid. Our Crystal Palace.

Sleekness of Speer. The New Corporate Gothic Minimalism of the public sphere:

Names carved in fire.

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

In the gift shop afterward, you twig that soon, when the gold streams run out, the meres will be drained, the jets switched off

This is us. Eulogising transience.

The slightest monument in history.

POPULAR MODERNISM

The artwork Richard Hamilton designed from the University of Newcastle art department in 1964-5 for two editions of Basil Bunting's poetry. Bunting was in his mid-sixties, and The Spoils was, astonishingly, the first book of his to be published in the UK.

Well done Richard Hamilton for your part, and godspeed. How many modernist artists are struggling in the desert right now without the help of people like you?

WAVE COMP: TWO

The second issue of Wave Composition is out and it's predictably crammed with essential reading.

Especially worthy of attention is Ed Sugden's Tree of Life review, which mounts a fervently savvy defence of this divisive film (Ed: "undoubtedly the most important cinematic work of the early century"). I defy anyone to grumble about Malick's "intellectualism" after reading this piece.

Also indispensable is the interview with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman. Particularly trenchant on latter-day publishing contexts:

One of the problematic aspects of that type of interpretation ... is that Kathy [Acker] and Burroughs—and you can go back to Kerouac—all engage literature as being one with trade publishing. And that trade publishing represents access to a mass audience. Whereas historically the poem—and Pound’s almost the exception here, compared to the people who are not as famous as Pound, starting with William Carlos Williams—operate in very different economies through small presses and self-publishing. It’s not an accident that Whitman was a self-publisher, and Gertrude Stein was a self-publisher, and that George Oppen set up a press, and all of those people were doing those kind of things because they were working on a different kind of scale, getting the work out to the right people. The numbers of the right people being very different in that approach than in the approach of the novel. One of the problems with the novel is that it never was free of publishing as a phenomenon. As a result, always subject to the laws of the marketplace in its worst terms. Kathy was one of the bravest artists imaginable in terms of casting and recasting her work and asking the most basic questions about what is the nature of fiction, what is the fictive, what is its relationship to the body and the person and the self. And yet, at the same time the economy of what she was then doing was using it to reach almost a rock ‘n’ roll audience through large publishers that left her on the one hand able to eke out a living from her writing, and at the same time left her so vulnerable that when she came down with cancer she didn’t have health insurance, which is what killed her, the American medical system.

EVERYMAN OF NEWTON AYCLIFFE

Really cracking first post from Dave Lichfield at his new Work Trials blog.

I've been a keen follower of Dave's alternately tragic/ mundane/ heroic/ inspiring Everyman facebook status updates recently, and the expansion into blog format is a very welcome development, especially at a time when everyone seems to be migrating the other way.

Time drones on in the flattest fashion possible with barely anything to punctuate the sickly whirr of its moronic acceleration into an abyssal state of shit-all. The fear of missing out on key life events (jobs, driving lessons, girlfriends, holidays, engagements, iPads, festivals, mortgages, promotions, pension plans, marriages, ankle-biter spawning, B&Q on Sunday, being able to pay for your own funeral). The feeling that life is something that goes on elsewhere. The feeling of estrangement. The feeling you deserve it all. Being away from your family, and you can't afford to move back, because you can't get a job. The whole days, weeks and months procrastinating in front of a screen, watching snapshots of other people's lives. No idea if things will ever improve or just continue to insult you on an ever-increasing basis.

This'll be one of the most worthwhile things you read all day, I promise.

FLAUBERT IS MINT, ISN'T HE?

"Earth, mingled with stones, fell onto the coffin; and the world would never mention him again".

- Sentimental Education

OXFORD ZERO LECTURE SERIES, 2011-12

A lecture series will take place next academic year at Oxford showcasing forthcoming or recently published Zero texts. The first session is on October 18th, 2011. Chris Bateman is speaking.

Blog here.

Spread the word.

And if you're travelling from elsewhere, lemme know and you can kip on my floor.

NE PASSAGE: VOL 2

Sorry this slipped me mind ...

The 2nd issue of North-East Passage is avaliable (once again, for absolutely NOWT) via the magisterial Tom Astley. Just send your postal address to thenortheastpassage@hotmail.co.uk, and the man himself will send you a copy.

The issue is called "Photographs" and features essays, short stories, and err photographs. I've got a couple of pretty decent poems in there too.

THE TWO BEST RESPONSES TO THE RIOTS ...

... I've read are Owen's CiF piece on the unbelievable plans to evict rioters' families (the brilliant first two paragraphs say it all), and Wayne's extended, coruscating post of yesterday: "Say Hi To The Bad Guy".

I realise in saying this I'm sorta replicating one of Wayne's major gripes (namely, the intra-congratulatory nature of the left-blogosphere), but fuck it. Passages like the following cut right to the bone:

After all, a mental disorder we all share is chronic narcissism. It's the ideological oxygen component of the neoliberal air we breathe (however toxic that air has become). Particularly when we are presented with a flattering youthful mirror image. The voices of protestors last year were given the respect and space (a key word here) rarely accorded to the (supposedly) less educated rioters of last week. Was it due to the recent uprising being unlikely to share your language? Even if it did: Could it be the niggling possibility that rioters were saying something you were reluctant to hear? It's funny how I rarely heard the word "solidarity" this time round; being quietly brushed aside for the time being. 

 ...

Also apparent in much Left commentary was adherence to party lines, ongoing hobby-horses, career interests, interpersonal loyalties, or if discussed in more mainstream media channels: mandatory lip-service to condemning "violence". The last was pretty much across the board if discussed in newspapers or on British TV.

I couldn't really agree more with this, though I feel a desperate need to append this question to Wayne's lacerating negative critique: just what is to be done about this? How can we re-suture the two halves of the country separated by Wayne's "huge dividing line"?

For myself I feel the pressure of a daily struggle not to get sucked into the world of a "volatile housing/education market and a monotonous, but no less rabid, media". Even with blogging (or perhaps especially blogging) we run the risk of inhaling big gulps of the chronic narcissism with every sentence. Just how the fuck do you escape from this trap? How can the left-intelligentsia cross over into meaningful, truly grassroots territory? Where's the fantastic hope in all of this? What can we do?

FOOTY SEASON SPECIAL

Piece by me in the Guardian on football supporters' trusts (squeezing a huge issue into a tight space I'm afraid, but hopefully the main point comes across).

Having my photo published alongside KK's is one of the very proudest moments of my life.

Here's another classic image of the great man: