Two Poems
A letter in the post
Such a transportive thing to
days and years way back:
good for the reactionary
in you. But no then you
saved yourself, tactful and
clever, you big Guardian Reader.
We live in flat times?
No I shouldn’t think so.
Our music of another age
transports us out of Iraq
and such sad tragic realities
as art for the masses.
By John Holten.
“Everything is becoming science fiction.”
JG Ballard, 1930-2009. Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper…there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet. Related: review of Kingdom Come.
Chess: The Sixty Four Stratagems
I like to play chess; rather, I like to imagine playing chess, without pieces. Not manoeuvring physical pieces with my hands or viewing them as a section of material, instead I try and picture the pieces as levels of society, groups of individuals binding together to fight a common enemy; a collection of like-minded ideas. But If I simply walk away from the game…Nothing will happen but the mundane boredom that comes without passion, and the cold stagnant time that passes with out a conscience to occupy it. A thin slice of space and time, without the love, or even an over the shoulder look, from a god who got sick of all this madness a long, long time ago.
By Benjamin Smith.
Liquidating May 1968
Mass opposition to Sarkozy is under way, from workers, intellectuals, and students. Led by democratic parties and unions who spend a lot of their time engaged in that mystifying democratic process. We do not need to be amused any longer by Badiou or others’ hysterical hyperbole. As unrest spreads in Europe we, in each country, need to act: not to stew in this warmed-up dish of puerile rancour. All of which amounts to less than a hill of haricots blancs. Badiou has none of Bourdieu’s seriousness and clear objectives (directed at preventing backward looking neo-liberal ‘reforms’). Is there anything of comparable urgency on offer here? No.
Andrew Coates is far from impressed with Alain Badiou‘s study of Sarkozy’s journey from Neuilly to the Elys ée.
Van Gogh’s Ear III – Mayakovsky Lives!
Writers are given to writing manifestos in bars and garrets, heady with wine and death or glory. It’s the dynamic force in art. Mayakovsky and his fellow upstarts would defile their temples and their relics. Set themselves up as barbarians at the gates. It is every radical artist’s role from the poetes maudits to the punks, to attack all but the outlaws of their parent’s generation. What faster track to greatness than to slay some giants?
Darran Anderson unearths the working class hero Vladimir Mayakovsky and the real Lost Generation.