Notes from a Silo Nation
For localism has a dark side. As well as Prince Charles’s babble about British cheese subsidies and supermarket regulation it has produced a fierce hostility to migrants. People think of economics as zero sum. Let too many migrants into the UK, they reason, and soon there won’t be enough food or money for the rest of us. If a migrant gets a job, someone else must lose theirs. If a migrant applies for housing benefit, it goes straight out of your paycheque. It is fair to say that loathing of immigrants has become a national pathology.
Max Dunbar reviews Philippe Legrain‘s Aftershock.
Ten Tip Top Tips to Becoming a Writer
Do not, under any circumstances, attend a creative writing course, retreat, or evening class. These are for mentally disturbed people, whose close proximity may cause you to become depressed… Read like a mother-fucker. Anything from advanced Arithmetic to Astrophysics. Read all the greats of literature as they will teach you a good deal. Do not read any current bestsellers. This type of book can do serious damage to the creative soul of any budding artist… Live a little. Travel the world, get out of the comfort zone, take a trip to the edge, shoot a man in reno, consume a mountain of drugs, get boozy all the time, as drink brings luck to a writer, take part in an orgy, fuck both sexes in the arse, howl at the moon, one arm waving free, the other holding a bottle of wine, swim naked in the ocean, go dancing, sleep out under the stars, go a wandering, climb a volcano, sing rebel songs into the long-lost night, watch a sunrise, sunset, cloud view…
By Joseph Ridgwell.
3:AM Reloaded
What you (may have) missed on 3:AM this week: Non-fiction: ‘Obscenity is Whatever Gives a Judge an Erection’, Charlotte Young on the Semina book launch; ‘Syntheses of Resistance & Transformation’, John-Patrick Ayson on Joseph Beuys’ I Love America.. & Harold Jaffe’s Jesus Coyote Reviewed: Cathi Unsworth on Barry Miles’ London Calling: A Countercultural History of […]