decca muldowney

the map is not the territory

2011-12-22T11:19:00.000-08:00

I should have guessed:
the map is not the territory -
what can't be known must be felt,
must be lived in vivid shades.

but what of this darkness?
it must be faced blind and
raw as a red baby, it must
be touched by skinned hands
and mortal years.

do all of us go by the same road?
for all our armour, do we sleep
with equal innocence, and fight
for our small corners
with the same animal surety?

pain travels under so many names:
a universal unknowable - it
cannot be borne, cannot be
translated, carried each to each,
across all those human borders.

preda tory years

2011-12-22T10:51:00.001-08:00

I found a notebook from my second year of university. I went through all the notes I'd made and scrawled over in angry pencil marks. Back then I didn't think the words were good enough, but now I look through them with the precision we had as we scoured the banks of the Thames yesterday looking for relics of ordinary lives.

Here are some lines I found. At the time I thought they were ideas that didn't go anywhere but now I think I can let them stand alone.

.......................

Stand back.

I don’t want your

blood on my hands.

………….

I don't sleep for fear

I will wake too soon.

...........

I shall fight a war for independence &

my weapons shall be words.

................

Cards down. Lights out. All in.

Darlin'.

............

On the coldest night of my life

we woke up to find

England, dressed in white.

..............

In times to come we will laugh about all this.

No defeat is so final that we cannot rebuild.

You said you feel like a post-war city, grey,

all weakness burned away.

............

'a real human being and a real hero'

2011-09-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

one amongst us is missing.

one amongst us has left his clothes on the shore.

one amongst us is absent in our laughter,

one less shadow like a slow disaster

one less voice leaves us briefly silent;

deaf after the explosion

numb after the exposure

five senses and a loss

of one shade in the spectrum.

one amongst us has left his boots at the door,

and taken naked barefoot to that wild.

the first poem i've written since moving back to london.

2011-09-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

I feel life starting like waves crashing on the shore in recurring dreams

east end streets crowded in the evenings with the energy of elsewhere

ramadan passing outside barber shops and boys who are all talk on the corner

offer me drugs on saturday night after work. now I finally understand the weekend,

I suppose this is adulthood. well, didn’t it just slip in through the back door?

not far between cambridge and cambridge heath but don’t the nights smell different,

with the rain falling on cable street the day after blackshirts in wifebeaters

tried their luck a second time. the words don’t come easily to me like they did -

that’s a kind of innocence, I traded it for that easy confidence you buy with

weekly essays and white stones. circling back to the place I was born I find it foreign,

circling back to the old words I find they’re coming unbidden like sickness or passion

they pass just as fast. walking the ditches and fields of the city like ley lines that might lead

to some essential truth, brushing cold shoulders with the suits that seem unburdened

by the history lying grave deep beneath us, I remember we promised to live on for

those we left in the earth, to feel life crashing like the waves, retreating only to return.

Winter's Bone

2011-08-17T06:17:00.001-07:00

It's been a while. Here's a review I wrote earlier in the year for Varsity. I find it more exciting to review films that I love. And I really loved Winter's Bone. I gave it 5 stars.

Ree Dolly is teaching her little brother to skin a squirrel. Pulling out the guts and innards, he looks up at his sister and asks, ‘Do we eat these?’ She pauses. ‘Not yet.’ It is a rare moment of dark humour in the otherwise heart-breaking Winter’s Bone.

Set deep in the backcountry of rural Missouri, this exquisite film is a devastating portrait of a forgotten America plagued by poverty and running on a black market of crystal meth.

Ree’s father Jessop is a meth ‘cook’, recently arrested and now missing. Jessop has put up the family’s house and surrounding wood-land as collateral for his bail and Ree must find him before it is seized and her mentally-ill mother and two young siblings are thrown out to ‘live like dogs in the field’. She embarks on a journey that takes her deeper into the harsh landscape of the Ozark mountains and its cattle markets, hill-billy bars, burnt-out meth labs and bare frozen forests. Her determination and fortitude against mafia-like silence and startling violence eventually lead her to the darkest depths of her community in the film’s genuinely shocking climax.

Ree Dolly is played with extraordinary skill by twenty-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, who has even been tipped for an Oscar for her performance. Ree’s raw strength and resolute spirit makes her perhaps one of the most arresting female characters in recent American film.

Winter’s Bone has already received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. I can only add my voice to the chorus of praise. This is an unforgettably haunting film and, despite all its bleakness, contains moments of incredible beauty. The final shots of Ree with her younger brother and sister echo Dorothea Lange’s famous portrait of a migrant woman and her children in the Dust Bowl.

Winter’s Bone is finally a story of survival and dignity in the face of poverty and struggle. Like Lange’s photographs, it belongs to a poignant tradition of alternative histories of the United States and is a testament to the indomitable strength of the human spirit.

................

'I will die, but Palestine will live.'

2011-04-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem after attending the funeral of Juliano Mer Khamis in Haifa. Everywhere I travelled in the West Bank I found people grieving for him, even those who had never met him. I found his face stencilled on walls, his plays showing in Ramallah, his posters flying above young men occupying their town squares and calling for unity. Whilst it was a baptism of fire into the region and its politics for me, his death was one among so many for the Palestinians I met. Watching the faces of the children and young people from the Freedom Theatre at the side of Juliano's grave, I could not imagine the challenge of staying human and struggling for freedom in such a place. Only a few days later Vittorio Arrigoni, another man who devoted his life to Palestinian freedom, was murdered in Gaza. This poem is named for him.

................................

Staying human

Go forth now hardened hearts –

hearing that strange word murder

attached to bodies we have loved.

How can we let them rest?

These restless hearts go forth

to bodies we have yet to love.

Under steep red clay earth,

on disputed hills, in guarded houses;

hardened eyes avoid the horizon.

Restless children have seen horror

attached to bodies they have loved,

tied endlessly to that word murder.

We cannot let you harden.

Leaving flowers here on red clay earth,

love rages in these restless hearts.

.....................................................

Leave No Trace - Short Story

2011-03-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

In case you've been living in a cupboard under the stairs for the last few years you've probably realised that vampires are pretty popular. Now, I liked vampires before they were cool. I was into vampires when Buffy was on BBC 2 at 6.45pm after school. I had a poster of Spike on my wall. I was a teenage goth. Aside from a few worthy exceptions (like this and this) vampires these days seem sterile. They are all good looks and no substance. We seem to have forgotten the very sinister fact that vampires are actually dead bodies walking among us with the potential to maim and kill. I think we need to put some of the threat back into these creatures. With that in my mind I wrote this short story. It's called, 'Leave No Trace'.

Leave No Trace

He is on the floor spitting blood like a dog that has been kicked in the mouth. They are all like this at first. It lasts a long time. With the right attention, the right training, the process might be quicker. But as far as he is concerned he is alone. My presence in this room is of no consequence. I am one of the many lengthening shadows of this summer evening.

I wonder how old he was. It is hard for me to tell anymore, there is so little difference between the young ones.

He is dying.

It takes much longer than you might imagine.

Usually it is different. On any other day his body would have been dry and in pieces by this time.

That is what they always get so wrong in all those books, all those moving pictures. How strange an idea it is that we would ever leave a body behind, when the blood is only the first step. The blood is a rush, a clamouring in the ears, like a plunge into dark water from a great height. It is almost terrible, almost sickening, almost unbearable. But it dries up fast and then the real work starts. The flesh and the organs and finally the bone marrow. The real energy. The substances we need to continue.

A true kill is a rare thing. A single body can last us a long time.

Imagine the panic if it was not so. If the gutters were filled with corpses come each morning. Even the thought is ludicrous. Perhaps such ideas are easier to accept than the truth. The truth is not so romantic. Not the pale master half-bent over a languishing bed but the pure animal fact. Like the hunter of any other species we consume in entirety, leaving nothing to waste.

That is not to say that we are uncivilised, that we go without any ritual at all. Ours is also an existence bound by law.

By the one rule obeyed above all. Leave No Trace.

Our numbers must be kept as they are. Too many and all of us are in danger. Only if one is lost can one be made. There are no exceptions. Everything must be done as it has been done before.

Except this time, it seems.

He is lying doubled up on the floor. He has stopped moving. The room seems so much quieter without his heartbeat. His muscles are beginning to stiffen. Soon they will be hard. The cells in his eyes are beginning to die. When he opens them at first he will be almost blind.

Some of us can never discern colour in quite the same way again.

So it is in the beginning. Our first movements must be violent. We must force an unwilling body into action, a body that has come to its natural conclusion. Everything must be relearned. Propelled by pure hunger back into the world.

Lifeless hair is ripped away from the scalp, yellowing skin clawed clean, blackened nails pulled out. The traces of death itch. They demand removal.

Our bodies have no history, no name, no families. By the time we have learned enough to understand these words, to understand the world they come from, to be even slightly curious about these adornments of life, they are gone.

The vocal chords take the longest to regain their strength. Speech is a last straw. Community the most unpleasant side-effect.

Because of course there are others. And you will always be found. They will sniff you out. They will seek the signs you take care to disguise. The packs that move together, hunt together, kill together. Sticking close to the edges, dependent on the margins, on the human waste of the cities.

The Missing. The Disappeared. The Illegal. The Dispossessed. They are ours. Fake addresses, fake identities. The blind spot in the security systems. The loophole in the law. The ones you never wanted anyway.

Like this one. This man. This dead man. This dead man about to awake.

No one wants this one. He belongs on neither side. And that is why he and I are together here. We will save each other. We are two of a kind.

In a matter of hours they will be here. Who knows how many. They will sense this room, my presence here and the emergence of something new. And they will know something is amiss, something is broken and must be fixed. Something cannot be allowed to stand.

He will need to eat soon.

The first moments are empty of sensation. Fried nerves and automatic reflexes. He is wild now. A mess of instinct with no meaning. When are first made we are nothing. It is only when we kill that we start to exist.

Just like your children we must be taught our manners, how to conduct ourselves, sustain ourselves. There is no time now. Someone else will have to do this work, to be patient but hard, to get him in line. How could I be the one to act as mentor? After all that I have said and done, how could teach another to play by the rules without shame? But it will not be a problem. He is not mine to keep.

Already they are coming. I feel it like a tremble of feet, like the scatter of leaves in the distance, like the fall of rain in the mountains. Not here yet but coming without question.

A true loss is a rare thing. We have already died and it is not easy to do so again. We kill and are not killed. There is no predator to threaten us, no virus to decimate us, to weapon to damage us. The world turns and we remain.

A true loss is a rare thing but not unknown. There is a silent history of transgression. And always the laws are obeyed. The debts are collected.

Leave No Trace.

He is growling quietly. He cannot hear himself, but perhaps he can feel the vibrations in his throat. Perhaps it is a comfort to him now, newborn and vicious.

I am old and unfeeling. This is a dying world. Rubble, ash and wasteland. Nothing is gradual for me. Your destruction does not come in drips. It flows smoothly. You are a species grown too large in its greed.

More and more flesh tastes of poison.

I have walked in nuclear dawns where no sun rises. All of you, all of you are lucky. You will all be gone before the worst of it. And when you are gone we will be left. And not what of us knows what such a thing would mean.

Undying in an empty world. Reduced to the bare bones of what we are. A half-life in the half-life.

The pack is almost here. They come with the rush and roar of the group. They are coming to claim a new child. A child that should not be, whose making is my unmaking.

His hands are opening and closing, clenching at the floor, at the wall. He is pulling himself upright. Like a foal his limbs are unsteady. He tries to stand and falls. He kneels. The lacrimal fluid, the last left in his body, is seeping from the tear ducts. He looks almost human. But it is only the last of his biology, abandoning its host.

When they get here what will they do? Only what must be done as it has always been done. Only if one is lost can one be made. There will have to be a choice between the two bodies in this room. This anomaly must be undone.

For once, this man, this dead man who has just awoken, will be wanted. He will be chosen. He will be revered. He will be the first newborn that most can remember.

He will be the last thing I see before they rip me limb from limb.

Leave No Trace.

Gender Agenda

2011-02-14T06:45:00.000-08:00

A little post to mark my birthday. I recently had some poems published in Gender Agenda , a fantastic feminist magazine and blog. I wanted to write something positive about female sexuality, and even promiscuity. I came up with this.

sitting in a room opposite a man I slept with but

our bodies are not what they were.

we have new nails, new hair, new skin.

our bodies existing only in the present

have no memory of the act,

they do not retain, but flow

never the same twice again

sure only of moments in their moment:

nothing of us recalls the other.

we are free.

James Ellroy

2010-12-15T06:22:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me well will know how much I love crime fiction. So imagine how excited I was when earlier in the year I interviewed James Ellroy, author of L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia. Between you and me he didn't come across as the nicest man and insisted on telling me all about his faith in the Pax America and Israel and the United States defending the world against the 'barbarians'. For more information on how that is not a good thing check this out . I think he was just trying to get a rise out of a young blonde girl. Anyway, here's the interview, first published in Varsity.

The first thing James Ellroy asks me is, "Have you read my book? Do you hate me yet?"

It’s hard to say.

Known for his bestsellers L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia, Ellroy has been called "the demon dog of America crime fiction". His latest autobiographical work, The Hilliker Curse, takes as its starting point the events leading up to his mother’s murder in 1958. Ellroy issued the curse of the title when he wished his mother dead during an argument three months before she was killed. Her murderer was never found and he has been haunted by guilt ever since.

As a young man Ellroy turned to drugs, drink and petty crime, breaking into women’s houses in his native Los Angeles and stealing their underwear. It was not until he was in his thirties, sober and working as a golf-caddy that he wrote his first novel Brown’s Requiem. His work often returns to 1950s and 60s Los Angeles at the height of noir. He tells me his male protagonists are "men who want things and who become so utterly exhausted with their own essential maleness that they are only teachable by women. And I’ve been that way my entire life."

The Hilliker Curse is a departure from fiction and a companion piece to Ellroy’s 1995 memoir My Dark Places, which details his inconclusive attempt, with the help of a detective, to solve his mother’s murder. It was written following the dissolution of his marriage and a nervous breakdown.

Realising that he and his mother "comprised a love story rather than a crime story," he saw at last that the "‘primary journey’ of his life had been women."

Ellroy has been a life-long, self-proclaimed obsessive pursuer of women. He claims that the new book attempts to grant each of the major women in his life a "separate and distinct selfhood, whilst acknowledging that this drive has rendered all of them a blur," adding, "There are faces that I can recall of women glimpsed in train stations fifty years ago who I think of on a daily basis."

Is The Hilliker Curse really about women at all? It reads more like an exploration of Ellroy’s own psyche. He admits that this might be the case, telling me, "It’s about the notion in the abstract of formative trauma as progenitor of sexuality and romantic ardour. I am formed in trauma."

Don’t read The Hilliker Curse looking for a love story: more than a romance, it is a dark and disturbing chronicle of one man’s fixation.

Interview with Ronald Harwood

2010-11-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to visit screenwriter and playwright Ronald Harwood, author of The Pianist, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Dresser and An English Tragedy, at his home in London. He was an extremely welcoming and engaging man. It was probably the most enjoyable interview I've ever done. He offered me countless cigarettes and cups of coffee and we talked for more than two hours. Sadly, I couldn't include half of the stories he told me. But here's the final interview I wrote up for Varsity.

Student activism then and now: an interview with Ian Patterson

2010-09-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I interviewed Ian Patterson, a fellow of Queen's College Cambridge about his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s as a student. Very kindly, my friends over at The Great Unrest published it. If you don't already read this blog religiously then please start. It's fantastic. Anyway, here it is:

Student activism then and now: an interview with Ian Patterson

The following interview with Cambridge academic Ian Patterson was conducted in the Autumn of 2008 by Ben Pritchett and Decca Muldowney for the second issue of the radical magazine Impropaganda which, in the event, never appeared. We publish it here because it might be of interest to student activists interested in the parallels, or lack of parallels, between campus politics now and how it was in the late 60s/early 70s. It is considerably longer than most posts on the blog, but is published as an interesting in-depth personal reflection on student politics.

Decca Muldowney: Our theme is student activism then and now. When did you come to Cambridge?

Ian Patterson: I was here from ’66 to ’69, and I stayed till ’71. So I was around for five years. Nothing much happened in Cambridge in ’68, mostly what happened here was a little bit later – in ’69, and in the early ‘70s.

DM: In hindsight we can look at ’68 and see what was happening in Prague, in Mexico, in France, in Britain, in America, and all over the world. Were you aware of those things at the time? Did it seem like it was joined up internationally?

IP: Globalisation has happened since then, and that’s a big difference from when we were here. The sheer volume of information that we know now – we simply didn’t have the same rapidity of information, the same sense of what was going on in different parts of the world that we automatically get now, even though there were many more foreign correspondents then than there are now. There were only three channels on the television.

In 1968 itself, although me and my friends were vaguely aware of what was going on in Paris, and although I knew one or two people who’d gone there, it wasn’t on the top of our agenda.

Jon Chadwick, who is a theatre director still, wrote and directed a play which he took to Edinburgh in the summer of ’69, about Jan Palach and Prague, which I reviewed for Varsity. He was one of the agit-prop type experimental playwrights. And that was quite good, that indicates that we were thinking at least about the Prague Spring and the aftermath of the repression again there. I don’t think anybody was much aware of what was going on in Mexico – or in Italy either, because that’s a bit later. We had a certain distaste for the rather militarised demonstrating style of the Germans, with their helmets and staves…

Rudi Dutschke was meant to come to Cambridge, in the Autumn of ’69, and Reginald Maudling, the home secretary, refused to give him a visa. I remember Jeremy Prynne writing a letter and trying to get a campaign to allow him to come, but that didn’t come to anything. So I don’t know how much one thought of oneself as part of anything that you could call a movement, but certainly thought of lots of like-minded people in different parts of the world.

You have to remember, that at the same time, as usual, lots of silliness was going on, because it was Cambridge, and the silliness was getting as much press as anything else. So we did feel ourselves to be a minority interest – not a majority at all. I can hardly think of anybody else in Pembroke who had the slightest interest in these things. The friends I had in Pembroke, were mostly uninterested or apolitical, and I think that’s probably true of 90% of the people, at least, at university then.

DM: I’m glad that you’re saying that because people paint it as a time when everyone was involved and it was just incredible, and no-one ever felt as though they were struggling against a mass, a wave of apathy.

IP: I don’t know very much about the hard left and the Communist party left in Cambridge in that period, I don’t know what they were doing. I have an idea that the Communist party was probably selling the Morning Star outside the PYE factory, and International Socialists (IS) was moving towards student politics more and setting up their Vietnam solidarity campaign. Student politics in Cambridge tended to be dominated by IS in those days, which was what became the SWP, so there was quite a lot of getting up early and going out to factory gates, and perhaps a distaste for involvement with students in 1967-68.

I knew one or two people who were involved in that sort of thing and it always seemed to me to be a strange choice and not one that I understood. I hadn’t read Marx then, it was not until ’68-’69 that I began to get involved in that sort of thing. So, it made an impact, but not a very direct one.

I wasn’t aware of any of that myself, I was much more, well, (a) I was much more Situationist/anarchistical, and (b) I was approaching it all via poetry. It was a period of intellectual ferment for me, as I guess people’s second and third years at Cambridge quite often are, but it all seemed to tie in much better with the world than it often has at other times.

I was involved mostly in poetry and English faculty stuff. There was dissent in the English faculty, and everywhere else at that time, and there were a series of open meetings in the faculty of lecturers and students. At the end of ’68, probably, I jumped up and ran down to the front because I suddenly had this epiphanic realisation that there was nobody with a gun making you take exams. I said, ‘you realise, we don’t have to take exams? If anybody’s interested in not taking exams, can they stay behind and see me afterwards’. A little nucleus of people stayed behind and we set up this group. We used to meet quite regularly. The group was called X17, because it met in room X17 in King’s, the rooms of somebody called Steve Vahrman. (He did a column in King’s Parade, a year or two ago, in which he recalled that time.) We wanted to abolish exams. There were always interesting people hanging around, and people visited from Essex and LSE, and we got together huge quantities of material about assessment all over English faculties in America and England, and we presented all this stuff to the faculty… and nothing much happened but we were allowed to take books into the Tragedy paper. That’s all. But there was a committee set up, of course. And then there was a sub-committee of that committee to look at exams.

Raymond Williams said to me and my friend Nick Totton as we were walking along King’s Parade after the first meeting, ‘I wouldn’t expect much to happen from this meeting, the university has been quite adept at fighting off change for 800 years, I don’t think you’re going to make a big impact on it now’. Which was true.

By the summer, by the time that the LSE events had been happening, and there’d been a certain amount of interchange, various groups were set up so that in Cambridge then there was a small group of the Radical Socialist Students Federation (RSSF), and there were a few people who thought of themselves as Situationists.There was a group of people in ’68-’69 which split off from the X17 group called the ‘Academic Cripples’, and there was a march which was quite well attended through the centre of town with a banner saying ‘Academic Cripples – Abolish Exams’.

There was certainly quite a lot to complain about and the syllabuses were, certainly in the humanities, academic and unable to cope, both in their teaching methods, and in their subject matter, with things that we wanted to know more about. In the English faculty, for example, we weren’t allowed to study Marx or Freud, which we obviously wanted to do. That changed quite rapidly in the aftermath of ’68. There was a ‘free’ university set up (it wasn’t really a free university or an alternative university) which put on certain events – I remember going to hear a talk on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Ben Brewster, which we thought was tremendously exciting. The place was absolutely crowded with people listening to this – it was actually rather dry, academic stuff, but it was the sort of thing that we’d never come into contact with before. In the ’68-’69 year, the English society or club ran a series of alternative seminars on Marx and on Freud. The Freud seminar, a sort of reading group, was led by a graduate student from Columbia. We read through the New Introductory Lectures and it was genuinely inspiring and educational.

In the end of ’68 there was a sit-in at the Senate House. I wasn’t there – I was ill. I can’t remember now what the main issues were, but perhaps there was something to do with the restrictive regulations we lived under, and with the admission of women? There wasn’t very much personal freedom. It was still the days when colleges were locked at 10 or 11, and there were a lot of petty restrictions, and people could be sent down for having people to stay in their rooms at night and so on, rather strange to think of, but… When people were forced out after two days, on Senate House lawn there were all lines of hunting and rowing people from Magdalen and Trinity, with whips, baying for blood. Coming out of the Senate House the people were hit and swung at by this gauntlet of aristos and hunters and unpleasant people in tweeds, and people who wanted to be like that. So there was a certain amount of violence, mostly from the right, though I don’t think that that meant there was a huge polarisation in the university between left and right.

The other important feature of student politics from that time was The Shilling Paper, the alternative to Varsity. It was the left-wing newspaper that was deliberately set up to be based in the town not in the university. It covered town and university issues impartially. It was printed by what was then the new printing process, offset litho, so it didn’t have to use all the old fashioned newspaper print technology which Varsity used. Some of the people who were involved in starting that were around IS, but there were anarchists and there were Situationist-type people, and a lot of good unaligned lefties. The Shilling Paper covered strikes, and any kind of political unrest and tried to explain the university to the town, the town to the university. It was jolly good – a bit expensive actually – a shilling was as much as you would want to pay for a paper, so there was a slight element of good will in buying it. But it was an institution for some years. There may be copies in the Cambridge collection in the university library.

Later on there was the Garden House affair. That’s 1970 I think. The Greek Junta was in power, and the Garden House Hotel in collaboration with a local travel agent, was promoting Greece as a holiday destination, and the Greek embassy was collaborating with them. Because nothing else much was going on, and because this was a way of demonstrating against the Junta, there was a big demonstration, and it got violent. I think it was provoked, to some extent, by the police. Nothing very much in the way of damage happened on this occasion, I think mostly it was broken glass. When you look back on it, it was a time of extraordinary repression, when they came to court. The people who were arrested came up against Lord Justice Melford Stevenson, who was also the judge in the Angry Brigade trial, and who was incredibly right wing – he lived in a house called ‘Truncheons’… For students to get up to 18 months in prison was really quite extraordinary. The arrests were pretty indiscriminate. Lord Eatwell, the current President of Queens’, was originally arrested, and then released for lack of evidence; he was described by the judge as ‘an evil influence’.

But back to the late sixties. There was some quite wild and liberational drama going on. Bruce Birchall at Peterhouse, with his mass of flowing curly hair, did a great version of The Bacchae in Peterhouse gardens, experimental, avant-garde and political, with audience involvement and (I think) music, maybe from Henry Cow, with Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. The other student newspaper thing was called Broadsheet, a listings mag started by a guy called Mike Sparrow (who went on to work for BBC London). It came out as a single or double sheet, and it listed everything that was on that week. It was a wonderful thing, it was the first time there’d ever been one, I think it even predated, or certainly was at the same time as Time Out. And that became quite important for people, it brought people together, allowed people to advertise events. These were pre-mobile phone days of course, pre-phone – nobody had a phone in their room, so if you wanted to telephone somebody up, you couldn’t – you could ring people from a phonebox, that was about it. If you wanted to get in touch with somebody, either you went round to their room, or you sent them a letter. And dropped a note off in their pigeon-hole, that was the only way of doing it. Or you hoped to see them. So, meeting people at places like Sidgwick, or King’s Bar, was much more important – most colleges didn’t have bars in those days, certainly my college, Pembroke, didn’t have a bar.

I think it was much easier also – although this may just have been a sign of our shallowness – to recognise sympathetic people by what they looked like. People were certainly defined much more by their exteriors, by the kind of clothes they wore and how long their hair was. By whether they had beards or not. If you went into a space and there was a group of people with hair on their shoulders, and floppy bell-bottomed trousers, and tie-dyed t-shirts, then you made a bee-line for them, rather than the people in tweed jackets and grey flannels. It hadn’t reached a point where fashion had taken over identity, so there was still an element of protest in the way you dressed. But there was also of course a lot of dressing up in the usual sort of way, so sometimes I looked like the sort of person that I would make a bee-line for, other times I was wearing a three-piece demob suit and fair isle jersey. When I was pretending to be a ‘30s poet. Also, I mostly wore bare feet, which was another thing that people did.

DM: That’s still the height of protest in King’s, people not wearing shoes. People have not moved on greatly.

IP: It’s a strange kind of protest, an uncomfortable one too…

As far as I was concerned, and as far as a lot of people were concerned, there wasn’t much of a distinction between the artistic avant-garde and the political avant-garde; they were much closer. So from my point of view, as poet, my involvement in this was first of all discovering the whole hinterland of social anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis and realising that this fantastic literature of thinking about the stuff I wanted to think about had been going on for a hundred years without my knowing about it. This was most excitingly being dealt with by the experimental writers that I was just discovering, partly people like Ed Dorn and Charles Olson, J.H. Prynne, partly writers like Brecht, and Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg and Pete Brown. So there were two kinds of things which were meeting also in music, which also linked in with soft drugs. But too much dope tended to lead to people lying around, and too little tended to people being too straight, so there was a balance to be struck.

The first consciously ‘alternative’ poetry readings in Cambridge, took place in King’s cellar, where it had just been opened as the cellar bar in 1967-’68 probably or autumn of ’69, with Nick Totton I think, or maybe David Shapiro, and me. The other influence on us was from America, particularly with affiliated students and post-graduate students, some of whom were draft dodging, by being post-graduate students. And there were two ways in which they were influential: one, there was a group of American post-graduate students who ran an LSD making lab in their house, which was quite important for some people – though not for me – but the acid culture came through that, but also there were people who’d been involved in SDS, Students for a Democratic Society…

The Americans, most of them postgraduate students so a bit older, had experience of what was going on in the States, and particularly in the West coast, in Berkeley, and so on, and also people from Columbia who’d been working in poetry with Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery, and were introducing us to all that kind of stuff. So a whole new kind of poetry was coming in, at the same time of course as rock music was the accompaniment to all this, because all the great rock music was happening at that time.

Ben Pritchett: How might somebody take the experience of that period and translate it into something that might be helpful for us today?

IP: One of the things I think that’s important is linking things together, linking different aspects of one’s life up. Something that was really attractive to me about reading Marcuse, who was a very influential figure on my thinking then, particularly reading Eros and Civilization, was the idea that having fun was part of revolution. A social order that didn’t allow varieties of sexual pleasure, and varieties of entertaining intellectual experience, theatre and painting, as important parts of how you made sense of life, was not a social order to be supported.

Of course, part of the sexual energy that fuelled the stuff in universities, particularly universities like Cambridge, was to do with the fact that there was a ratio of ten to one between men and women. So the idea that it might be better must have been a factor, though we weren’t actively, on the whole, campaigning for that in Cambridge at the time – it wasn’t at the top of our list. Although there were lots of enjoyable things to do, and one had lots of nice relationships, the idea that it could be represented by the sort of thing that you get from a picture of a rock festival – all these images that you get of the ‘summer of love’ – is quite wrong. There simply were, in the streets and everywhere else, or at lectures, overwhelmingly, men, and in colleges, overwhelmingly men. Girls walked through, or walked in, or were guests, or were visitors, and then disappeared again. So there’s an element of fantasy in most people’s recollection of Cambridge.

But to get back to your question, I think we were motivated by the idea that something desperately bad had happened as a consequence of capitalism and the division of labour, and we’d lost touch with all sorts of potential, how life ought to be, and were living in a grey, half useless world, leaving half of us unstimulated, unused, and unexplored. The sense of discovery was partly from discovering that there was more to you yourself than you had thought there was, and there could be more to everybody.

BP: People might argue that one difference today is that this pleasure principle has been co-opted into capitalism – which makes it more difficult to have desire driving your protest…

IP: Absolutely. I still think it’s important to do it, and to try and reclaim it from the advertisers and the merchandisers, and to say that the sheerest form of happiness is not a new six hundred pound bag. The Situationists have got all this sussed in the fifties really, I think that Debord and Vaneigem are much the most interesting of the theorists to come out of that period, and reading Marcuse now, he looks rather clunky, in lots of ways.

BP: You translated Raoul Vaneigem?

IP: Yes – but that was much later on, in the ’80s, or even the ’90s, when that came out, and that’s sort of academic work… But I did do, just for local consumption, some Situationist translation at the time, and some Lacan. That was mainly for my own interest, and to share around with some other people. I don’t think any of that ever saw the light of day anywhere. I still think it’s worth insisting on thinking about the various vectors and trajectories of desire, as Lacan does – Lacan’s no revolutionary, but there are things that can be thought through his thought.

BP: Deleuze and Guattari take up Lacan too…

IP: Particularly Deleuze, yes. But we were reading all this stuff at a time when it was stringently outside the academic framework – we couldn’t write essays on it, we couldn’t go to lectures on it, none of the books was in the libraries, this was an alternative thing. It didn’t last like that, by ’70 or so, people were staying on doing PhDs, and all the people who are now the professors around the land, started using this stuff. But just for the year or two, when Nick Totton and I were editing our poetry magazine, it seemed that universities were not the place to be. Which was one of the reasons why it took me 22 years to come back and do a PhD, because we thought it was quite important that what we were hanging on to should be outside the university structure, and we wanted to try and make intellectual careers outside the co-optive structure of the university.

In the wake of May ’68 there was a new interest in French structuralism, and this is one of the things that was the most intellectually energising and divisive, which became political in Cambridge from sort of ’69-’70 until the end of the MacCabe affair in the late ‘70s. In fact until the rejection of the move to give Derrida an honorary degree. I wasn’t in Cambridge then, so I can only tell you at second hand. But Colin MacCabe was a junior lecturer in the English Faculty, and he was, along with Stephen Heath and Chris Prendergast, responsible for enthusiastic propagation of structuralist ideas; they published a very interesting selection of texts under the title of Signs of the Times, which must have inspired a lot of people.

DM: Do you think the student body is more apathetic than it used to be? If so, is that because the world’s changed, or because students have changed?

IP: Probably demonstrations are smaller when there are demonstrations, and there isn’t the same interest in mass political movements as there has been at certain points. The stop the war moment didn’t get as much support in Cambridge as it did nationally. Things go up and down; the Vietnam war was the focus in the late 60s, and the CND and END were the focus in the mid, early eighties, National Abortion Campaign in the mid-to-late seventies.

BP: Why do you think the CND campaign isn’t so popular anymore, even though there are plans to replace Trident?

IP: There’s an interesting article in the latest issue of New Left Review by Susan Watkins about this, calling for some new updated CND campaigns. I’m very sympathetic to this, CND is where my political engagement began when I was a schoolboy, CND and anti-apartheid, and those were the things that I did in the ‘60s before I came to Cambridge, and didn’t do much of while I was at Cambridge, and then did again in the ’70s, and ’80s. I think that CND is very important, now, I think it’s crucial.

I think partly that there’s a very strong sense that America is so powerful that there is no alternative and how do you set about demanding that America reduce its nuclear arsenal? It’s not a question of the world being about to implode and destroy itself in a conflict between superpowers, at least not at the moment, but who knows what might happen in the future.

Students have far more work to do now than they had in the sixties. I certainly didn’t feel stressed about the amount of time I had for reading. Though to tell you the truth, I didn’t go to any supervisions for my last year and a bit, so I was free to choose how to spend my time. But as far as I can remember, when I was working for Part I, I had plenty of free time. I only had to write one essay a week and I could usually do it in a day or two. I don’t think the conditions are comparable.

The other key thing to remember is that we benefited from free education. Everybody had their fees paid, and there were (means-tested) maintenance grants. We had grants. Nobody I knew really worried about jobs, either; some people who were passionate about a certain career, but mostly assumed they would be able to get into it without too much difficulty. Quite a high proportion of English students still went into teaching, people went into social work, there were a lot of people who were committed to being altruistic members of society. And the growing importance of ‘the alternative’ , of alternative and utopian ways of living, changed the way many of us thought about the future. I didn’t know many people who became bankers or lawyers, though of course some people did.

DM: Whereas now English graduates are targeted by investment banks, and law firms and things. From the day you arrive, you know you’re going to come out twenty thousand pounds in debt. It’s a taxation on the fact that you’ll get a better job – the point is, that means you’re not going to work in the voluntary or public sector or as a teacher.

IP: Because you can’t. And it’s hard enough if you’re going to work in publishing or something because you’ve got to do a year or two as an intern without pay.

DM: It just perpetuates people from Oxford and Cambridge going into very similar types of jobs.

IP: There’s been a huge increase in materialism. That is undeniable. In unthinking materialism – the idea that materialism is the only way of thinking. The idea that the government justifies university education because it improves your earning prospects would have been unthinkable, laughable in the sixties. Or the fifties, I think. And in the early sixties, there were more students in Cambridge from working class homes than there are now, because of the scholarship system. If you did get a scholarship then you were completely paid for. You might not be as rich as some people, but you came out with no financial worries. That was really important. And the loss of that is phenomenally important. The fact that the demonstration against top-up fees last week, or the week before, attracted about a hundred people from four universities seems to me a commentary on the difficulty of getting back to the – you can’t get back to that stage – but getting through the sense that this is not a necessary way of doing it. It’s almost impossible for people to think that it’s not a sensible thing to do to charge fees.

DM: I don’t know whether it’s really short memory on the part of students because the turnover of students is so high. If you have to pay, you just think that this is something I have to pay for – not a public good, not a public service, unlike primary and secondary education.

IP: It’s partly because of expansion of tertiary education since the sixties, which is partly one of the consequences of the sixties. There were 10% of the number of people in higher education then, than there are now. An extra factor of nine extra, makes it that much more expensive – plus everything else is more expensive. Plus the whole notion of ‘expensive’ is different, because accountancy has changed completely. Everything has to be accounted for now, has to have a notional cost. So the whole business of what things cost is a different conceptual area.

BP: Do you think the financial crisis at the moment is going to have an effect on how this plays out?

IP: I was surprised in a way, that there doesn’t seem to have been a very widespread resurgence of Marxist thinking, nobody much seems to suggest that there might be an alternative to capitalism.

DM: Although the word ‘capitalism’ has come back into public discourse, and the word ‘socialism’. At the moment the word ‘socialism’ is being defined by people who are not socialists, like the Republicans who are calling Obama socialist –

IP: Or Bush socialist for –

DM: – or Bush socialist, which I never thought I’d live to see. The danger is that the word gets defined by people who are in no way invested in having it defined as what it is. As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve only ever read a criticism of capitalism in a book, I’ve never seen it on the television. But I think it’s really good that the words are back.

IP: Yes it good. The Historical Materialism conference, which I didn’t go to, at the beginning of November, in London, I’ve been told had a lot of very good analyses. But it’s all very well having a fine critical analysis of something, if nobody takes any notice of it, or if nobody can do anything with it. All that happens is that the truth of it gets taken out and used to advantage by those who can. And things go on the same.

DM: These things come and go. In a time, like now, so many people think that the situation that we are in will never change, and that we have come to the end of history and the pinnacle of civilization, and that it cannot get any better or worse… but in ten years or five years… I think in ’67 or at the beginning of ’68, De Gaulle made a speech where he said ‘I look at the next year with hope of stability and security’ and he was almost completely toppled within the next year. So things change really fast, and I guess we’ve just got to be ready.

IP: After I left Cambridge, and got a job teaching in a further education college in London, I got involved in much more conventional politics and trade union politics, and I joined the International Socialists, and I founded and edited Tech Teacher, the Rank and File paper in the A.T.T.I (further education and higher education trade union), and I did that sort of thing quite intensively for some time… Until I ran out of – well until it ran out of enthusiasm for me, actually, I was expelled from IS – but I was being oppositional, and getting fed up with economism, and the lack of general openness and spark and variety, zaniness.

DM: Had it become the SWP by then?

IP: No, but it was just beginning to think about it and I thought this was foolish and deluded.

DM: A lot of what you’ve just said about IS, people are still saying about the SWP…

IP: Once you get that kind of thing, something that hands down a line, and that claims to run from democratic centralism, it thinks it has the answer, and becomes inflexible and authoritarian.

Carson McCullers - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

2010-07-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

I can't tell you how much I love Carson McCullers. Well, actually I can. Even after studying English Literature for 4 years, I still think The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is one the most wonderful books I've ever read.

Nicola Beauman & Persephone Books

2010-04-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview with Nicola Beauman founder of Persephone Books, that I did with Emma Hogan. We were both working on Varsity at the time. I had a great time drinking tea and writing this up with Emma from the comfort of my bedroom floor.

we woke up in a white world.

2010-03-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

in between snowball fights
we talked about the
wildcat strikes
about the old world
melting now as fast as
the ice beneath our feet.
in bed we talked about
civil unrest
tried to second-guess the next
ten years.
knowing only that
we will be young
in dark times
looking hard to find another day
as beautiful as this.

Salmon Creek

2010-02-01T18:09:00.001-08:00

On the beach we found three bodies
coughed up by the ocean,
guts open to the sky.

Two seals and something like a dog.
The little girl poked at their skins
with driftwood.

I thought I could taste the rot in my mouth.
There was something sick in the twist
of their white spines made by the sea.

Around the corpses the seaweed was
thick as a man’s neck and long as rope,
curled and prehistoric, tough as sinew.

They lay exposed on the long stretch
Of sand like a warning. Like the whales on the
west coast, swimming too close to ships,
breeding too close to land.

Like the sea itself sending out signals
of hardship. ‘It’s a bad sign’ he says, ‘and
we have lost our reading eyes.’

Found Magazine

2010-01-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

In October I interviewed the guys from Found Magazine. They were touring England with a sword swallower and a DJ and they were fantastic. I was incredibly excited since I've been fan of Found Magazine since I first picked up a copy when I was 15. Talk about meeting your idols.

Foals Interview

2009-08-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

Here's another interview I did, with the band Foals. It was orginanly published in Varsity.

London look upon me

2009-07-04T11:15:00.001-07:00

1.

Wisk this mixture of skylights up
over houses and gardens,
blend acid drops and the rot of summer heat
bake, smell rain rising from asphalt streets,
like steam, a lucid dream,
find this red brick, this brown stone,
this not-quite-nearly-almost home.

2.

The sun sets gold over this city
buildings silver in the soft light
glitter over train tracks,
Police kettle heart attacks on
streets that never caught alight.

Tonight I’ll paint the town red
with my old-found friends,
making plans, graffiti gangs
climbing on roofs over bombsites
alive in white nights that never end.

3.

These canals like veins breathe on summer days
graffiti names and vows of love scrawled under bridges
the sunset’s haze burns behind desolate factories as
skeletal gasworks tower over half-built frames of offices and
the gentle sway of boats soften the sound of a radio’s half-buzz.
We snake our way from wealth through forgotten gardens
barred windows and stray footballs, from landscaped lawns
to half-wild embankment, tracing the remnants
of great urban plans, the dreams of architects and the lives
of unseen strangers, the marks left by use and love, by misuse
and distrust, looking for a code in the chaos, finding only your
hand in mine, light projected in the water, the city in our hearts.

Halfway Hall

2009-07-04T11:10:00.001-07:00

And what will become of us after all this?
Which of us will live on, names on stones or monuments,
names on cheques and contracts, awards on the
brutal white boards outside Senate House; the
arbitrary judgement of eight hundred years of scholarship?

Here, walking between white stone buildings and
expansive lawns, through medieval courts and
gothic windows to the edge of the river full of
half-submerged dangers, over incomplete bridges
through all this, we carve out spaces only briefly unique,

only briefly ours at all. The printed words of men in
countless books, the unconquerable canon, the legacy
of a culture vast and unforgiving. The piercing gaze in
half-domestic rooms, hastily written essays structured from
thoughts laden still with the anxieties of first loves, late nights,
the detritus of childhood dreams and adult desires, we construct

new identities, new humanities, struggling with injustices printed
loud and large in headlines, grand old narratives, intensely part
of this world and yet cradled in the safety of sonorous lectures,
quiet libraries, purely rhetorical debates, the
argument more important than what is said,
the sentence so much more than the meaning.

Here, half-finished, and I can be nothing more.

When All This Is Over

2009-06-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

I recently had a couple of poems published in The Hill Magazine. You can even look at the latest issue online here. Here's one of the poems.

When All This Is Over

When all this is over we can go back to the towns

we were born in. Those unchanged streets will

welcome us, the glass in the windows intact,

our nicknames on the lips of strangers and

familiar faces on every corner.

When all this is over.

When all this is over we can go back to our

childhood rooms. The beds will

shelter us, the clothes will grow to fit,

we will shrink backwards down the pencil marks

on the door frame.

When all this is over.

When all this is over we can back to where

we were happiest. Children will play outside

until the sun rises, the cafes will stay open all night,

the drugs will make people kind and the news on the

radio will make us laugh.

When all this is over.

When all this is over our mothers’ hair will turn from grey

to brown and our fathers will come home early. The rolled

dice will land a six and the swallows will fly North

in the winter.

When all this is over.

When all this is over the heartbreaks will be forgotten,

the world will not defeat us so often. We can go back to

the beds we never shared with the people we

had no chance to love.

We will be able to say sorry

truthfully. To say goodbye,

ruthlessly. To move forward

beautifully.

When all this is over.

Bits and Bobs

2009-05-17T09:36:00.000-07:00

Little bits from Varsity

2009-04-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

This house always catches my eye on the train from university back to London. So I wrote this.

Along the train tracks
Houses with their backs turned
To Finsbury Park Station
Bear the white graffiti scars:
NHS, POLL TAX.

Outside King’s Cross underground
On the temporary white of a scaffold wall
An unseen hand has scrawled an elegy to
Council housing. Capital letters seem to speak in
A lonely pleading voice:
THEY CAN’T EVICT US ALL.

A week later the wall is blank again,
The paint still drying on an industrial canvas.
So it seems in these secret corners
Only the searching eye can find the
Fleeting marks of our resistance.

2009-03-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

Tell me it’s true.

Tell me every defeat is only
A new beginning.

Tell me no loss is so final
That we cannot rebuild.

Tell me about all the small victories.

Tell me we are part of something
Bigger than ourselves.

Tell me not to give up.

Don’t lie to me.
Tell me things as they are.

Don’t lie to me.
Tell me things as they can be.

Putney

2009-02-16T05:29:00.000-08:00

Something I wrote when I went back home.

Standing in St Mary’s, on the same stones
That echoed out those long debates,
That Leveller green a shadow on these
New glass walls.

The radio plays Ever Fallen In Love With Someone
Drowning out the tinny recording of
Rainsborough’s poorest he,
And Cromwell lies dismembered somewhere.

The Thames rolls low and cold as it ever did
As two women at the bus stop argue in Polish
By the riverbank clean and cleared of graves,
Nothing now save coloured plastic where children play.

Every time I come back
More shops have closed down and
The weather seems colder.
There’s something older in my parent’s eyes
And in mine.

Walking through the underpass that, on match days,
Is full of bodies, noise and talk,
Black and white strip, cigarettes,
Tattooed knuckles. Today everything is quiet.

Sitting in the Italian greasy spoon,
I am the only woman surrounded by
Bus drivers and cabbies. On the white-tiled walls
Saturated photographs of half-forgotten beaches
Remind me, amongst cheap tea and steamed windows,
That we have always wanted to escape,
That we have always known:
There is no place like home.

An American Dream

2009-01-19T15:41:00.000-08:00

For Christmas
My mother gave me a pillow
Sewn from a tea towel, showing
An illustrated map of
California.
Looking at it,
At the orange blue green
Painted names the
Childish waves where
The sea should be
I remembered:

Santa Barbara,
Where the dolphins leap in the bay,
San Diego,
Where Mara went to college,
Death Valley,
Huge, where it rained grey
Though they said it never would,
Big Sur,
Where we walked on cliffs, almost
Stepped on a rattlesnake,
Hollywood,
The palm trees, the Spanish villas,
No centre and no water,
White people in cars and
Mexicans waiting for the bus
Brett,
Picking up a crucifix on Venice Beach,
Listening to ‘I want you’ by Dylan on the way back,
Thinking for the first time
That I might want to be wanted.
He put his hat on his knee and smiling said to me,
‘This is Hollywood, kid, and its where
the American Dream comes to die.’

But mine was just being born.

Yosemite,
Pine cones on the ground,
Tahoe,
Swimming in the lake, reading Nancy Drew,
Taste of Jello in my mouth,
San Francisco,
Valencia Street, deals done cheap,
Alive with violence and rum
Dollar stores and beating sun,
Oakland,
The sound of the train whistle
Setting out across the country
Reverse pilgrimages, west to east.
Cheques cashed here, loitering on the street corners
I worked in a summer camp, slicing plums,
Teaching kids to paint.
Davis,
Went to a school that changed its named to Cesar Chavez,
Wore shorts, lived in a house with chickens,
Learned to ride a bicycle with scraped knees,
Spelling bees, birthday cake, bubblegum and lemonade.
Sonoma,
The valley of the moon, vineyards and glaring heat
Sebastopol
The Russian river rushing its whispers
Bodega
No name beach where we built fires,
Where the mist clouds the pacific,
Where I walked with my face to the wind and a broken heart
Nights in the darkroom watching
My friends’ faces bloom beautiful under red light

The Sierra Nevadas
Mountains covered in snow,
Gold in the hills and ice on the ground
Chains on the wheels as we crossed over old trails
Where pioneers turned cannibal
Mount Shasta,
Where the police pulled us over,
Where Mary read my future from the cards,
On a cheap hotel bed and told me
To keep my secrets to myself.
The Redwood Empire,
Felt like the oldest place in the world,
The tallest trees there are,
One so big you could drive right through it,
Since they were seeds I thought
Of the things those trees have seen
If they could see
If they could speak
The stories they could tell

But until then only I can remember:
California
Between the desert and the sea
When I sleep on that pillow,
Only I can dream you,
My America.

Isle of Tears

2009-01-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

BELARUS

1.
Grey apartment blocks and grey skies,
over railways lines and wasted lives,
a newspaper dances on the wind,
and a man stares eye to eye with
the bottom of his bottle.
If you close your eyes, you'll hear;
the death of great ideas,
the end of empires,
and close: the memory of a war,
that we were not around to fight for.
In the theatres, on the stages,
inside books, on printed pages,
the fighting spirit finds a place to live.
‘A gift given with a pure heart’:
I had to come so far to learn
what I left behind.
The faces of weeping women on
black stone statues confirm what
I have long suspected:
grief is the same in every language.

The Channel

2009-01-16T08:04:00.001-08:00

Woke up with my throat sore
From screaming for joy
Like a child.

Live wild and free
You said to me
Each day is a trial.

You will be find lacking
You will be found worthy
You will be found empty
You will be found perfect.

I’m certain
Of nothing
But sensation.

Love is the Devil.

2009-01-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

A short story I wrote for Halloween based on this song:

The old man was drunk. He was holding on to the bar for dear life and talking to himself. He smelt of yesterday’s gin. Jack looked at the door. She isn’t here yet.

‘Son,’ said the old man, feet slipping across the floor, ‘Son, I am going to tell you a story the like of which nobody has ever heard. It’s about my meeting with the Devil.’ Oh Jesus. Humour him. ‘Look at me. Do I look like a liar? What I am going to tell you is the truth.’ The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yeah right. Where is she? ‘The Devil doesn’t look like the Devil, you see. That’s not his way. He comes in many guises. The Devil can look like anyone. Like you or I.’ Jack looked at the old man who was trying to light a cigarette. His hands were shaking. Jack took the lighter from him and lit the cigarette.

‘You’re a good lad,’ the man said, ‘that’s why I’m telling you this. You have a good face. I don’t want you to get into trouble like me.’ You don’t know the half of it. ‘Sometimes he looks ugly. He’s visited me in many forms. He tried to rob me outside the bus station. He chased me through the streets in a gang of kids. He even looked at me through my mother’s eyes.’ That doesn’t surprise me. Why is she so late? Maybe she’s not coming. ‘Sometimes the Devil can be beautiful. I’ve seen him in the park, selling ice cream to children. Our eyes met and we both knew. He’s waiting for me. He’s taking his time.’ Jack looked at his watch. One hour and seven minutes late. The old man had tears in his eyes. ‘He follows me. Sometimes he speaks to me. Every time I turn a corner, I know he’s somewhere on the other side.’ I can’t wait any longer. This will kill me. She will kill me.

The old man coughed and spluttered. He wiped his eyes dry with the back of his sleeve. Jack finished his beer. ‘He’s always waiting.’ The old man looked Jack straight in the face. ‘I’m always waiting too you see. That’s his way. The worst times are when I don’t see him. When I know he’s out there, but I don’t know where. When I don’t know what to expect or what trick he’s going to play next. That’s when it really kills me.’ Jack pressed a fiver into the man’s hand. The man looked down at it. ‘I like you, son. That’s why I’m telling you this. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you.’ This will kill me. She will kill me. Outside the night was cold. The Devil comes in many guises? You don’t know the half of it.

‘Remember rusts, forever fades..'

2009-01-14T08:20:00.000-08:00

What is good and what is great?
I was born too late to know your God.
We are all marked men, walking from our fallen,
And we are more for it.
In the midst of tragedy we are actors still
In a play with no direction.
Yes, I read my part aloud, stood still and assumed a pose.
Heaven knows, there’s no heaven I will ever know.

' a gift to the gutter, a gift to the city.'

2009-01-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

LONDON

Tell me what you want and I’ll take you there:
Drugs, Sex, Blood, you can buy it all here.
For the price of a packet of fags you can
Lose your mind for a while.
At least for a little while.
I’d like to show you where I was born,
But its not there anymore.

I’d like to show you London, in all its brutal glory.

First we’ll have to start back at mine,
Suburban paradise, a cottage on the green, pretty even if
You don’t ignore the needles in the street and the sirens scream,
It’s just like everywhere, they put the poor and the rich
Shoulder to shoulder and let the sparks fly.

It’ll take a while but we’ll get the bus to the station,
The same route I took to school. We’ll wait on the rainy platform,
Share a cup of tea, our breath like steam in the air.

I’ll show you the sights from the train windows, along the graffitied tracks,
The rows of red brick roofs and chimneys through Clapham,
The MI5 building in Vauxhall, where we ensure our own security
With a roof crowded with satellites, listening, listening and watching.

We’ll get off at Waterloo and get lost in the crowd streaming in from the
South Bank.
We’ll take a walk a long the river and I’ll show you the theatre where
I played between the aisles while my mother directed. A Stage Manager took
Me on the roof and we looked out over it all. We went beach combing here, and
I found a horse’s tooth and a cracked clay pipe, but I was expecting bones.

We’ll cross the bridge and find ourselves in the West End tourist traps,
Covent Garden and Drury Lane, where we’ll never see our names in lights,
But it doesn’t matter, up, up, and up to Charing Cross Road and the Seven Dials.
Under the streets here there are hidden rivers and plague graves, the tubes
Curve to avoid them. If you stop and concentrate you can almost feel those
Sadnesses that are too old, are too old now to ever wash away. I don’t know
Much history but I’ll tell you it all.

As long as you’ll stay for a while.

At least for a little while.

I’ll take you over London Bridge, looking one side at Tower Hill,
And the Gherkin, the glittering City, and up, through the flow of
Suits and briefcases, to Fenchurch Street Station. Every weekend of
This last year I caught the train here into Essex, towards the sea,
The Thames Estuary, where the boats lie stranded on miles of sand,
And my philosophy teacher lives in a big house that echoes with grief.

But we won’t stop; we’ll keep walking East, up to Aldgate,
And Brick Lane, covered in its colourful stencils, clubs in
Old factories next to Indian restaurants just trying to make an
Honest living, all the way to Old Street, where your haircut can
Make or break you and the fashion students dance their sorrows away
To dirty beats, with the help of horse tranquillizers.

I could walk you down gaudy shopping streets
Near red-brick buildings where I got my education,
All the way to Soho, run by the Chinese gangs,
Where red lights flash from the windows,
And men shelter from the rain next to
Glowing neon doors that promise Girls Cheap.

They moved the drugs North, but I can show you where
Hooded kids from whisper in your ears as you pass
By the muddy canal, under the overpass.

Up to Primrose Hill, we could watch the sun rise
Making the silver buildings glitter and the great
Grey river sparkle, then zip down South on the
Northern Line, away from the big houses that were never
Bombed to Clapham, Brixton, Peckham, run by the yardies.
Here the mad people on the bus preach and rave and the
Factories shares ground with African churches and starving artists.

I’ll show you the school where I spent four years
Staring from windows watching the seasons change
Writing my name on walls and wishing,
Shaking off childhood and whiling away misery
Until I walked out one day in June lighter and heavier,
Older and wiser, colder and harder and weaker than ever.

London was good to me then. The city nursed me and showed me
Her secrets, like a sister she let me borrow her best clothes,
Like a brother, she whispered obscenities, challenged me to adventures,
Dared me to follow even into the dark. Like a mother she saved me,
And hid me and sheltered me until I was grown, then she let me go.
And now like a lover she calls to me across continents and leaves me
Lost but loathe to return.

Like a scorned lover, she knows I can’t leave her.

I’ll teach you the difference between North and South,
Who controls what and where, what streets you can’t walk down.
I’ll teach you the slang. I’ll call you buff and you won’t blush.
We’ll buy a bottle in a brown paper bag and sit at the bus stop
To listen to the rude girls chatting shit, gold hoops
Shining in the darkness. I’ll show you the shortcuts,
I’ll teach you to drop your t’s and h’s, develop a diphthong,

As long as you’ll stay for a while.

At least for a little while.

We’ll come in a circle back to where we began, to where I began
In a room in a hospital that isn’t there anymore, before the End of History,
Before the mobile phone.

Just a sentence in the story of the city.

Marrakesh

2009-01-12T04:07:00.000-08:00

Marrakesh, on 30th December 2008, on the fourth day of Israeli air raids on Gaza.

The Red City. Red walls. Red dust in the back of your throat. The noise. Shouting, drilling, drumming, kids screaming, men arguing, mopeds, the call to prayer echoing out over the whole city. Dissonant sounds of the snake charmers pipes in the square. The smell of meat cooking, exhaust fumes, shit, frankincense, gutters, bread, oranges. The sound of Arabic harsh and beautiful. The streets. Tall and narrow, no windows in the houses. Everything hidden and private, like womens' hair and bodies, secreted away. Barbers, lamps, the radio on loud echoing through the street and the only word I can understand is Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. Men smoking in cafes at night, drinking mint tea, hot and sweet, poured high. Birds flying swooping, cooing. Washing hanging out to dry over the roofs, over rubble and broken birdcages. The colours of everything. Red, ochre, flash of blue. The souk. Huge cones of spice, red, yellow, pink. Smell of leather. Sandals in every colour. Men at stalls shouting, sewing, dyeing. Tiny children sitting out all night in the square selling macaroons, younger than my cousins. Women with their faces covered, tubes of henna, reading out with cards to tell your fortune. Monkeys on the end of chains, blind story-tellers, potion men with a cure for everything, a stall full of false teeth. The eyes of young men watching me, whispering as I walk past, comment ca va, gazelle, enchante. A look in their eyes I can’t name. And suddenly, around a corner, hundreds of kids and teenagers, a boy on the shoulders of the crowd shouting, fists raised in the air. All their voices raised on the air. Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. Chanting, screaming, girls and boys and children, and flashes of colour red white and green, the colours of Palestine. And there was a look in their eyes I can’t name. And echoing out over it all the call to prayer five times a day, sounding like the oldest thing in the world, calling out over the Red City, calling boys from the street, calling men from their work, calling the dead to the living, long and lamenting, heavy with sadness, pleading and crying, calling children in from the dark, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza echoing in my head.

London Burning

2009-01-11T12:57:00.000-08:00

Some pages from the 'zine 'London Burning' I made with Lucy Nurnberg for the 2008 London Zine Symposium.

In the city where I was born

2009-01-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

In the city where I was born
The streets are narrow and twisting
Built hundreds of years ago,
Bending over hidden rivers and
Around plague graves.

In the city where I was born
They built grey high rise estates
Next to wealthy homes and now
The rich and the poor brush shoulders
With cold English hostility.

In the city where I was born
I did not walk alone on the street
Until I was ten years old and
Even then I kept my eyes peeled
And never stepped on the cracks.

In the city where I was born
I went to four different schools,
Lived in three houses,
Caught a thousands trains, tubes and
Buses, cried, laughed, coughed
and blinked a million times.

In the city where I was born
I got my education the hard way
Not in the red brick schools but
From the disappointment in the street
The strains of fading Empire,
The dissonance of a lost class war.

What next for the green movement?

2008-10-28T04:10:00.000-07:00

Here's an article I wrote for Impropaganda about my experiences at Climate Camp in 2008. Many of my opinions have been re-argued, changed and re-thought since then, but it seems worth posting it now, if only to track my thinking over the last few years. In the long-run some of my arguments here were proved wrong. The actions taken by activists at Kingsnorth led to the halt of further development at the site, and the connections between campaigners no doubt contributed to the occupation of Vestas on the Isle of Whight. At the end of this artible I called for such coalitions between different groups of activists to take place. They have and they continue to do so. It's important to remember, as one older activist told me, that it's a thousand year struggle, and things can't happen overnight.

However, this was my first attempt at serious, political writing and debate and seems worth including here.

...........................................................

Picture this. Handing out porridge to people on a barricade at six in the morning confronted with a violent police invasion. Watching two guys taking turns at doing political performance poetry. An American environmentalist with tears in his eyes as people sitting in front of riot police took turns at telling their stories and explaining why they were there. Drinking cheap wine in the evening and talking about revolution. Picture leaving and walking away from it all with a sinking feeling in your stomach.

Climate Camp this year changed my mind about a lot of things, sometimes in ways I did not like. I’ll try to explain why as honestly as I can.

The camp was on the top of a hill looking over Kingsnorth in the distance. It looked like a smaller, cleaner version of any festival. There were white marquees for discussion and debates, big tents for meetings, banners and decorations, bonfires, kitchens, children’s play areas, a solar-powered cinema and paths made with wooden boards. Everything was powered by wind turbines and solar panels. Water was filtered through grey-water systems mysteriously involving bathtubs and hay bales. The compost toilets were surprisingly pleasant. No one was 'in charge' at the camp but the atmosphere was busy.

The camp was curious mix. At one end of the scale were black-bloc anarchists, who spent most of their time shouting at police with their faces covered. At the other end were middle-class people, and Green Party MEPs wearing skirt suits and wellies and talking about fair-trade and energy-efficient light bulbs. Despite all sharing a belief that something must be done about the environment, it was hard to see what ideas these people could have in common. There was also a sense amongst younger people that the camp was a place to see people and be seen. There was something trendy about being there, something downright cool about being a green radical. Direct action can seem pretty exciting but is increasingly socially acceptable. There is even a character on ‘The Archers’ whose parents are worried she may attempt to shut down a power station.

“What’s wrong with middle and upper-class people protesting against climate change?” you might ask, “After all it affects everyone.” There is nothing wrong with it, except that the class demographic of the camp means that there is a reluctance to accept the possibility of a class-based transformation of society. Let me illustrate my point. During a discussion organised by Worker’s Climate Action about the link between capitalism and climate change and the necessity of making links with trade unions and reaching out to workers in the power sector, a member of the crowd got up and announced that the discussion was a waste of time. “I don’t understand why you socialists are here hijacking this event. There is not enough time for this kind of debate. We need to do something about climate change now.” She sat down and the majority of the audience applauded.

I felt my stomach sink. This is naivety of the most dangerous kind. Some elements of the camp seem to be advocating a complete back–to-land retreat into primitivism. However, running off to the countryside to live on your own sustainable farm with chickens and an organic vegetable garden may sound like a morally superior way out, but it does little good to help anyone except yourself. It is also a choice that only the better off can make. “Setting a good example” or “making people feel guilty” are not effective ways of building a movement. Withdrawing from the problem does not mean we are part of the solution.

The danger is that our resistance becomes more anti-technological than anti-capitalist. We have invented our way into this problem, and perhaps we can invent our way out of it. The technological solutions to climate change must be progressive and not regressive. Right now, money is not flowing to the engineers, designers and workers capable of inventing and producing these technologies and it never will under this economic system. It might save the planet and humanity, but it would be too unprofitable. The system needs to change and we need to find the most effective way to do it. Climate change is inextricably linked to capitalism and its constant need for growth, for new markets and for new resources. It is a system reliant on exploitation and profit. A capitalist is not interested in a making a truly renewable product and he never will be. There are no “market-solutions” to this; we are not going to be able to buy our way out of it. Ethical consumption is never going to be anything more than a drop in the ocean.

There is an idea among those involved in the camp that direct action protest is the solution. “If the suffragettes had not chained themselves to railings,” they say, “Women wouldn’t have got the vote.” True, these actions were an important part of the movement, but were backed up by a lot of less exciting, day to day hard work done by a lot of people for a long time. Gluing yourself to a bank for the day is an effective symbolic gesture, but it is in danger of being only that. The direct action at the end of the camp which aimed to “Shut down Kingsnorth. Permanently!” cannot be judged as anything but a very valiant failure. Fifty-five people were arrested and the station was barely inconvenienced.

So, how could we really prevent another coal-fired power station being built? How could we ensure Kingsnorth is redesigned to produce renewable technology?

Picture this. It might be hard to imagine, but suspend your disbelief with me. Thousands of protestors approaching Kingsnorth with their banners and flags and songs. Riot police on all sides looking anxious, and unwilling. The protestors approach the front gates of the power station, excitement swelling. As they walk up they are greeted with sight of people emerging from inside. The workers are walking out. The two sides meet and shake hands. What are we seeing? A situation it might be difficult to imagine. Hard. Challenging. Necessary. A real mass movement. A climate revolution.

Europe's Last Dictatorship

2008-08-12T03:55:00.000-07:00

Here's an article I wrote for the May Week edition of Varsity in 2008. I was given the theme of writing about a 'summer holiday'.

Europe’s last dictatorship. An outpost of tyranny. These phrases echoed in my mind as the plane circled the airport in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in the heat of a summer night. I was visiting my then boyfriend, Nikolay.

Belarus did not promise to be much of a summer holiday. But the longer and more complicated the visa process became, the more determined I was to go. The government is suspicious of Westerners, fearing they might be human rights activists or reporters revealing the rigged elections that have seen President Lukashenko re-elected time after time.

Minsk is the perfect Soviet city. At the end of the Second World War it was razed and rebuilt as a Stalinist model. Everyone lives in identical apartment buildings, often topped by huge letters spelling out, ‘Working Classes of the World Unite!’

Living in Nik's tiny flat for three weeks I met many Belarussians of my own age. There was Dimitri, a 19-year-old orphan working full time in a BMW factory for $200 dollars a month. No Belarusian can afford to buy a BMW but they do good trade to rich Russians coming over the border. Dimtri will never earn enough money to get out of Belarus. ‘I’m going to get married, settle down, and make the best of it,’ he told me.

Then there was Kostya, an active campaigner for Lukashenko’s opposition rival, Alaksandar Milinkievi. He is on the run from the police, moving from house to house sleeping on people’s floors.‘Do you know any Irish rebel songs?' he asked me. I was sad that I did not.

Some wanted to see a regime change similar to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Others distrusted all Western interference. I met far-right nationalists who rejected the old ideas of Communism, the new ideas of capitalism and any dealings with Russia. They were the neo-fascists who wore black and greeted each other with Hitler salutes. In a country where the Nazis wiped out a quarter of the population I found these hard-faced boys impossible to understand. I saw only anger, hopelessness and desperation in their eyes.

Despite the local pharmacy containing nothing but a pack of paracetemol, my vodka-fuelled hangovers and the constant threatening police presence, Minsk was not all grim. I went to the country and drank a fierce home-brewed alcohol called Samagon. I rode on the Ferris Wheel in Gorki Park. I witnessed the endless parade of newly-weds having their pictures taken next to all the city’s war memorials . And I went out into the dense and beautiful forests.

A boy called Dima showed me traces of partisan trenches. They still find bullets and skulls there, and no one knows how many partisans died fighting. He said young people were quick to forget the lessons of the past. I thought of the fascist youths and agreed. But young Belarussians face a difficult dilemma. They must at once remember the legacies of past struggles, and forget enough of the past to move on. Dima and I sat for a long time in the silence, thinking of all the fallen youth in that sweeping waste.‘Let’s go.’ he said eventually, ‘Let’s leave them to sleep.’

No, Belarus was not much of a summer holiday. But I learnt more than I ever imagined . Perhaps it is true that Belarus is the page in the Soviet History book that Europe forgot. But I will always remember it, and the lesson in humility it taught me.

The final time I saw Kostya, the fugitive, he left with a smile on his tired face. ‘ I am glad you like Minsk,' he said. 'I hope when you come back it is a better time.'

I hope so too.