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Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Tuesday, 30 August 2011
English Riots: just a walk in the park?
I think his name was Jeff Glynn. Jeff, if you’re out there I dedicate this piece to you in thanks for the memory...
I was a naive English Literature undergraduate, straight and vanilla as one can be (secondary school educated, simple soul, late into uni) when Jeff unexpectedly came into our very... proper tutorial on Emily Bronte. Our usual lecturer was absent for some reason or other and in bounded Jeff, looking suitably disreputable and talking about how “Wuthering Heights” was about the suppression of sexual energy expressed in the imagery of the orifice.
Shocked and stunned to the core, I learned about Heathcliffe’s entries... usually through windows and (MOST shamefully) the occasional back door... violently coming to sounds of breaking glass. I...was...SCANDALISED. No way would Emily Bronte seek to corrupt her dear readers (oops, sorry for the error in form, wrong century but you get the idea).
I think I may have confronted Jeff about his interpretation. I seem to remember a self-satisfied grin, in hindsight aimed at a fairly sad, superficial, aspiring intellectual and self-righteous moron whom he had totally flabbergasted. And of course he was probably right. Heathcliffe did indeed make every one of those violent entries. I know now that Wuthering Heights was never really a mere gothic romance but also a study in abusive, co-dependent relationships. The former worked for me for a while – until I grew up to also understand that Bronte may or may not have understood the power of her symbolism but despite her claustrophobic and isolated upbringing the need to express herself was gloriously fulfilled in her creative imagination. Had it not been for Jeff, my addiction to the simplistic assertion could have resulted in lifelong crassness.
Mind you, one can take an interpretation too far. Fast forward 10 years to my second teaching job in inner-city Leeds and to a boy called Joseph. We were looking at a fairly trite poem about a walk in a park for GCE (no, not GCSE. This was in the “time before...”). I remember asking for comments and soon after was brought full circle back to Jeff. “Miss, I think this is about sex. The woman is walking down a path and is careful not to tread outside of it or she would have to deal with the ‘rough mown grass’ (see I said it was trite) and the sexual problems she may find there. The ‘rose arbour’ (I kid you not) she is going under symbolises her sexual awakening and may even be (he blushed), her vagina”.
Absolute flabbergasted silence. What to do? Clearly I had to give credence to this interpretation if nothing else to consolidate the victory he had over his classmates, being probably the first one in their experience to mention the word ‘vagina’ in class and to a teacher at that. But it was definitely a pudding well over-egged, an interpretation of a piece of mid-Victorian romantic schmaltz that bore no resemblance to anything remotely sexual and would certainly result in a disastrous fail if this was somehow horribly transmogrified into an examination response. Or was this just me? Again. Had I just never shaken off my reluctance to dig a bit deeper into my sexual psyche and so to properly engage in the symbolism of sex . In the silence that encompassed Joseph’s interpretation, I did think about this even then (such was the power of Glynn). But in the end...“No, Joseph”, I said gently. “I think this is just about a walk in the park”.
And so we fast forward another 20 years and to a country that seemingly went mad. And I’m finding myself thinking again of Jeff Glynn. We have been given another narrative to interrogate; another piece of real-life ‘text’ to interpret and contextualise. We’ve heard of people inciting riot on social media, kids strapping hammers to their legs, men getting mowed down in full public view for protecting their property. Businesses burned, flats gutted and people made homeless. The recent trouble on our streets has been interpreted in many ways. “It’s the cuts... it’s the police... it’s the consequences of deprivation” .
Although no doubt the reasons stem from a cocktail of circumstances one thing is certain: if we get it wrong... if our interpretation is too surface then we are sure to get reactions that are equally extreme, equally mindless.
Jeff, I think you should visit our estimable, Eton education Prime Minister because in the heat of everything he has managed to come up with just that. A surface and completely inadequate interpretation in the oxymoron of: “Criminality: pure and simple”. He could do with your piercing, deprecating look as you survey yet another sad, superficial, self-righteous moron and say, “No David. This is not just about a walk in the park.”
*************************************************************************
ADDENDUM: Having written the above whilst on holiday and being so isolated am without a signal to upload it onto this Blogspot (in time for it to have any relevance) I see that I can claim some foresight. Whose crass mindlessness is it that would believe that stopping benefits and evicting innocent families because of aberrant offspring would solve anything? I suppose this is an easier question to answer: they are those who are not interested in seeking resolution but are native dwellers in that timezone known as The Age of Stupid.
I was a naive English Literature undergraduate, straight and vanilla as one can be (secondary school educated, simple soul, late into uni) when Jeff unexpectedly came into our very... proper tutorial on Emily Bronte. Our usual lecturer was absent for some reason or other and in bounded Jeff, looking suitably disreputable and talking about how “Wuthering Heights” was about the suppression of sexual energy expressed in the imagery of the orifice.
Shocked and stunned to the core, I learned about Heathcliffe’s entries... usually through windows and (MOST shamefully) the occasional back door... violently coming to sounds of breaking glass. I...was...SCANDALISED. No way would Emily Bronte seek to corrupt her dear readers (oops, sorry for the error in form, wrong century but you get the idea).
I think I may have confronted Jeff about his interpretation. I seem to remember a self-satisfied grin, in hindsight aimed at a fairly sad, superficial, aspiring intellectual and self-righteous moron whom he had totally flabbergasted. And of course he was probably right. Heathcliffe did indeed make every one of those violent entries. I know now that Wuthering Heights was never really a mere gothic romance but also a study in abusive, co-dependent relationships. The former worked for me for a while – until I grew up to also understand that Bronte may or may not have understood the power of her symbolism but despite her claustrophobic and isolated upbringing the need to express herself was gloriously fulfilled in her creative imagination. Had it not been for Jeff, my addiction to the simplistic assertion could have resulted in lifelong crassness.
Mind you, one can take an interpretation too far. Fast forward 10 years to my second teaching job in inner-city Leeds and to a boy called Joseph. We were looking at a fairly trite poem about a walk in a park for GCE (no, not GCSE. This was in the “time before...”). I remember asking for comments and soon after was brought full circle back to Jeff. “Miss, I think this is about sex. The woman is walking down a path and is careful not to tread outside of it or she would have to deal with the ‘rough mown grass’ (see I said it was trite) and the sexual problems she may find there. The ‘rose arbour’ (I kid you not) she is going under symbolises her sexual awakening and may even be (he blushed), her vagina”.
Absolute flabbergasted silence. What to do? Clearly I had to give credence to this interpretation if nothing else to consolidate the victory he had over his classmates, being probably the first one in their experience to mention the word ‘vagina’ in class and to a teacher at that. But it was definitely a pudding well over-egged, an interpretation of a piece of mid-Victorian romantic schmaltz that bore no resemblance to anything remotely sexual and would certainly result in a disastrous fail if this was somehow horribly transmogrified into an examination response. Or was this just me? Again. Had I just never shaken off my reluctance to dig a bit deeper into my sexual psyche and so to properly engage in the symbolism of sex . In the silence that encompassed Joseph’s interpretation, I did think about this even then (such was the power of Glynn). But in the end...“No, Joseph”, I said gently. “I think this is just about a walk in the park”.
And so we fast forward another 20 years and to a country that seemingly went mad. And I’m finding myself thinking again of Jeff Glynn. We have been given another narrative to interrogate; another piece of real-life ‘text’ to interpret and contextualise. We’ve heard of people inciting riot on social media, kids strapping hammers to their legs, men getting mowed down in full public view for protecting their property. Businesses burned, flats gutted and people made homeless. The recent trouble on our streets has been interpreted in many ways. “It’s the cuts... it’s the police... it’s the consequences of deprivation” .
Although no doubt the reasons stem from a cocktail of circumstances one thing is certain: if we get it wrong... if our interpretation is too surface then we are sure to get reactions that are equally extreme, equally mindless.
Jeff, I think you should visit our estimable, Eton education Prime Minister because in the heat of everything he has managed to come up with just that. A surface and completely inadequate interpretation in the oxymoron of: “Criminality: pure and simple”. He could do with your piercing, deprecating look as you survey yet another sad, superficial, self-righteous moron and say, “No David. This is not just about a walk in the park.”
*************************************************************************
ADDENDUM: Having written the above whilst on holiday and being so isolated am without a signal to upload it onto this Blogspot (in time for it to have any relevance) I see that I can claim some foresight. Whose crass mindlessness is it that would believe that stopping benefits and evicting innocent families because of aberrant offspring would solve anything? I suppose this is an easier question to answer: they are those who are not interested in seeking resolution but are native dwellers in that timezone known as The Age of Stupid.
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Are we really plundering the planet?
Its 3 in the morning. What a time to explore an epiphany. Here goes...
The answer to the question is well obviously...yes. It's not only oil that's getting harder to extract but now scarcity of rare earth metals is threatening to make our mobile phones and laptops more pricey. Bad news for green bloggers and twitterers everywhere.
But hang on. The answer to the question is also... no... based on an objection to the word 'plunder'. It bears closer scrutiny if we are to properly move on the issues in this peak everything world and by this to put into context the scale of the big ask... which is to stop 'plundering'.
The green movement like many, adopts emotive language as the best way by far to persuade lots of people to listen to a given message. Often fear is the emotion of choice and 'plundering' in this context, suggests reckless endangerment of the planet's resources in order selfishly serve the development of the human race. This against the need for the planet and its myriad other communities of creatures and organisms to continue to exist and develop in their own right albeit side by side with humans. Trouble is emotive forms can backfire as seen in the dubbed "vile eco-terrorism" of the government-backed bedtime story advert on climate change, which had the paralytic effect on some of its watchers of 'whats-the-point-in-doing-anything-if-its-going-to-happen-anyway' Or worse this reaction by a certain Barking Spider
It was after listening to Melvyn Bragg last week on radio 4 - about the Minoans - that got me thinking. The Minoans were a Bronze Age people. We had Stone Age people, we also had Iron Age people. Later there was the age of steam then the age of silicon and here we are: big-boobed and laptopped.
The point is that taking stuff is hardwired into what we are. It is what we have always done. We name our ages after minerals! (mental note, not sure that stone is a mineral) It is as useless to tell us to stop using the earth's resources as it is to train a gorilla to stop using grass stalks to get at an ant colony. No way. Not going to happen. Humans are constructors. They 'make' their ideas real through using all available resources and will continue to do so else risk being less than human.
So what's to be done?
Well there are other resources that can be 'plundered', or exploited, used, mined, utilized... Not so much earth, now, but certainly fire (the sun), air (wind power)and water. But there is one other. We have created the biggest resource of them all. Thousands of years of human development has got us to the stage when we have refined our individual and collective endeavours such that we now have another resource. Knowledge. Unlike our earth's resources, it is infinitely expandable in the sense that the more we use it the greater is its store. Moreover, we have used our knowledge to develop immediate means by which we can share it and 'know' it. Our Knowledge is evolving to understand itself and the impact of our existence and co-existence and further... it is a fully mineable thing-in-itself: a phenomenon.
Interestingly, we have to continue to plunder our mine of Knowledge in order to stop the plunder. This mining process means that we need to get even more creative; more visionary and develop further our intellectual imaginations and cognitive sensibilities. This is not the time to curb the activity of the human race. In one sense it is the time to accelerate it.
I'm trying to find the right nomenclature that sums it up but nothing scans (still too early in the morning and need to go to bed. Am posting anyway in the certain Knowledge I'll be rewriting it later).
The Age of... any (constructive) ideas?
The answer to the question is well obviously...yes. It's not only oil that's getting harder to extract but now scarcity of rare earth metals is threatening to make our mobile phones and laptops more pricey. Bad news for green bloggers and twitterers everywhere.
But hang on. The answer to the question is also... no... based on an objection to the word 'plunder'. It bears closer scrutiny if we are to properly move on the issues in this peak everything world and by this to put into context the scale of the big ask... which is to stop 'plundering'.
The green movement like many, adopts emotive language as the best way by far to persuade lots of people to listen to a given message. Often fear is the emotion of choice and 'plundering' in this context, suggests reckless endangerment of the planet's resources in order selfishly serve the development of the human race. This against the need for the planet and its myriad other communities of creatures and organisms to continue to exist and develop in their own right albeit side by side with humans. Trouble is emotive forms can backfire as seen in the dubbed "vile eco-terrorism" of the government-backed bedtime story advert on climate change, which had the paralytic effect on some of its watchers of 'whats-the-point-in-doing-anything-if-its-going-to-happen-anyway' Or worse this reaction by a certain Barking Spider
It was after listening to Melvyn Bragg last week on radio 4 - about the Minoans - that got me thinking. The Minoans were a Bronze Age people. We had Stone Age people, we also had Iron Age people. Later there was the age of steam then the age of silicon and here we are: big-boobed and laptopped.
The point is that taking stuff is hardwired into what we are. It is what we have always done. We name our ages after minerals! (mental note, not sure that stone is a mineral) It is as useless to tell us to stop using the earth's resources as it is to train a gorilla to stop using grass stalks to get at an ant colony. No way. Not going to happen. Humans are constructors. They 'make' their ideas real through using all available resources and will continue to do so else risk being less than human.
So what's to be done?
Well there are other resources that can be 'plundered', or exploited, used, mined, utilized... Not so much earth, now, but certainly fire (the sun), air (wind power)and water. But there is one other. We have created the biggest resource of them all. Thousands of years of human development has got us to the stage when we have refined our individual and collective endeavours such that we now have another resource. Knowledge. Unlike our earth's resources, it is infinitely expandable in the sense that the more we use it the greater is its store. Moreover, we have used our knowledge to develop immediate means by which we can share it and 'know' it. Our Knowledge is evolving to understand itself and the impact of our existence and co-existence and further... it is a fully mineable thing-in-itself: a phenomenon.
Interestingly, we have to continue to plunder our mine of Knowledge in order to stop the plunder. This mining process means that we need to get even more creative; more visionary and develop further our intellectual imaginations and cognitive sensibilities. This is not the time to curb the activity of the human race. In one sense it is the time to accelerate it.
I'm trying to find the right nomenclature that sums it up but nothing scans (still too early in the morning and need to go to bed. Am posting anyway in the certain Knowledge I'll be rewriting it later).
The Age of... any (constructive) ideas?
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
The Greecey Pole
Don't do it Greece. Don't take the money. You can't afford what you've been lent already and you won't be able to afford the next lot either. It's just a way the western bankers and their political cronies have of indebting you even further so that you can privatise your services - to them... and sell off your heritage - to them!
Call it what you will - restructure, reschedule... default is the only way forward for you. Sure it will cause banking chaos, but isn't it right that the bankers should pay for the crisis they caused in the first place? Sure it will cost us in the short term - may even trigger another banking crisis as people see the writing on the wall and run on the banks you are most indebted to. It is these same banks that don't seem to have learned from their earlier lesson in macro finance so a repeat is probably the only way to consolidate their learning curve.
For you it will be really tough. But listen to your people - they don't want to see their country sold on the altar of western capitalism and phoney 'eurofamilias'. They know you have huge resources. Sun, sea, food, tourism, and willing workers. Let's face it, your situation would never be worse than Cuba when it circled the wagons after the west cut it off and, relying on its own resources, grew one of the best health services in the world and fed its people from kerbside gardens. It attracts huge revenue from hordes of admiring eco-tourists hell-bent on securing Plan B (or is it C?) for when the planet hots up (but that's for another blog, I guess).
Who would you trust now? Bankers whose only interest in your country is that accrued from the debt they are forcing upon you? Or your own people who would rather be temporarily impoverished masters of their own universe rather than slaves to broken fiscal policies dreamed up by unimaginative automatons that know only about creating the future on the bankrupt ideas of the past. I know who I'd listen to...
Call it what you will - restructure, reschedule... default is the only way forward for you. Sure it will cause banking chaos, but isn't it right that the bankers should pay for the crisis they caused in the first place? Sure it will cost us in the short term - may even trigger another banking crisis as people see the writing on the wall and run on the banks you are most indebted to. It is these same banks that don't seem to have learned from their earlier lesson in macro finance so a repeat is probably the only way to consolidate their learning curve.
For you it will be really tough. But listen to your people - they don't want to see their country sold on the altar of western capitalism and phoney 'eurofamilias'. They know you have huge resources. Sun, sea, food, tourism, and willing workers. Let's face it, your situation would never be worse than Cuba when it circled the wagons after the west cut it off and, relying on its own resources, grew one of the best health services in the world and fed its people from kerbside gardens. It attracts huge revenue from hordes of admiring eco-tourists hell-bent on securing Plan B (or is it C?) for when the planet hots up (but that's for another blog, I guess).
Who would you trust now? Bankers whose only interest in your country is that accrued from the debt they are forcing upon you? Or your own people who would rather be temporarily impoverished masters of their own universe rather than slaves to broken fiscal policies dreamed up by unimaginative automatons that know only about creating the future on the bankrupt ideas of the past. I know who I'd listen to...
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