Vox Populi, Vox Dei: Trapped Like A Rat in Dave’s Big Society
Jones makes a convincing case that what happened over the thirty years of doctrinaire monetarism was not just ideology, or the tide of economics, but actual class war. In Britain manufacturing disappeared faster than in any Western country at that time. We know from the Ridley memo of the early eighties that the government stockpiled coal so that it could kill the mining union, the great symbolic hub of working class power. Anyone who protested was character assassinated in Thatcher’s client media, and beaten up by a politicised police force on limitless overtime. As Baldwin said: ‘The Conservatives can’t talk of class war. They started it.’
Max Dunbar reviews Owen Jones‘s Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.
Maintenant #64: Željko Mitić
In Serbia the premium has always been placed on the past than the future. It is a conservative, patriarchal, homophobic environment. Reformers in every area, including literature, have never been met with enthusiasm. That is why a lot of poets and prose writers have been marginalized over the years. The aforementioned surrealists were spat at and slapped on the streets of Belgrade between two world wars, and the most significant Serbian prose writers, as a rule, ended up either in prison or emigration. That is, in a way, part of our tradition. If you stand head above the rest, if you are ahead of your time, if you pose a threat to the status quo — prepare to be overlooked, put aside. But, that doesn’t demoralize me. I mind my own business, I write when I have something to say. I feel a part of the literary scene, and at the same time I don’t. To be honest, things have started to change a bit. A new generation of Serbian poets is trying to bring necessary changes into the established canon of Serbian poetry which was dominant in 1990’s…
In the 64th of the Maintenant series SJ Fowler interviews the Serbian poet Željko Mitić.
Twelve Poems
The asphalt tonight
is smoked glass
maybe footsteps can tell the way.
I missed it once long ago.
And again that teenage
flame catches up with me
and again that
feeling of flesh on bone.
At Time Caf é
where it all began
high school dreams
and slim joints made of sighs.
My gaze on the moon’s skin
makes another bloodless
groove…
By Željko Mitić.