British Bombs are Holy
-30 September 09 - 07:04
Does anyone notice that the same lies which massaged the legislatures and the foolable public into supporting the illegal destruction of Iraq are now being projected in relation to Iran? Does anyone remember Colin Powell standing up in the UN and lying? Does anyone give a damn? Are all those demonstrators in the streets of Tehran now to be saved by being bombed into oblivion? Probably, yes, after a long period of degradation of any defensive capacity. It is the modern capitalist way. !Make war, and feel good! The state, as serial killer. The UK has tonnes of nuclear warheads, all ready to go at the drop of a hat, right here where I am sitting, on the Clyde River. The mountains of Scotland are holed with secret nuclear bunkers and missiles. We are living on an arms-dump. Macbeth had nothing on this! Can we see some satellite photos of Scotland, please, on the front pages of our 'liberal' newspapers? No? Oh, it's an Official Secret, is it? ... (more)
Bankrupt Book Cartels
-29 September 09 - 19:48
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/aug/31/james-kelman-scottish-literature?commentpage=1
The de facto, albeit barely conscious, censorship which is the normative paradigm of haute bourgeois ‘literary’ London is simply a manifestation in the world of information of which creative writing forms a numinous part, of power politics, of war by other means. The elevation of ‘genre’, in purely financial, rather than aesthetic, terms, is the result of the dominance of the theologies of marketing/ PR above all other philosophical systems. There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ or ‘inferior’ with genre’ – I, one of those ‘angry, experimental, less easily marketable writers whom Alan Bissett mentions in his 'Guardian' article – have written a genre novel, albeit an ... (more)
To the World of the Rat
-12 September 09 - 13:20
This exemplifies everything to do with idiot reviewers (It's a couplet by Don Paterson, and was sent to me by Sharon Blackie of Two Ravens Press): For all the craft and clever-clever
You did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.
I love Reviewers, but wish that some of them would drop a little LSD
-12 September 09 - 06:30
'Joseph's Box' has had some wonderful reviews - in The Sunday Herald, The Herald, Scotland-on-Sunday and the British Journal of General Practice, to name but three. Then there have been some which have seemed puzzled but fair - Libas magazine, for example. Of course, as predicted on the Homepage of the 'Joseph's Box' website (www.josephsbox.co.uk), there have been a few reviewers who really haven't got it, who, like William Jefferson Clinton, perhaps never actually inhaled. But there is a deeper dynamic here.
It's interesting that when I wrote 'Psychoraag', no-one in literary
London was the least bit interested. Now, suddenly, it's a symbol of my
literary prowess and along with the works of Scottish writers, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Janice Galloway - writers whom I know and respect - is used
against me in relation to 'Joseph's Box'! Then, people complained that they
couldn't understand the Scots-Asian neologisms, etc. and why hadn't I
written the book in Standard English? ...
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T.E. Lawrence lives on, and on...
-05 September 09 - 16:13
I have long ago ceased to bother that my books consistently and
studiously have been blacklisted-through-omission by (with the
exception of one honourable individual) the mainstream England-based
press and England-based private-sector literary 'scene' (festivals,
etc.; and please note that when I use the term, 'England', I mean,
'England' and not 'Britain'), which, while aggressively and
self-righteously sporting the aesthetic couture of liberalism, freedom
of expression and multiculturalism, essentially are the sustainers of
corporate and racist imperial dominance in the world of information of
which fiction is a numinous part. Essentially, what we are dealing with
here is T. E. Lawrence with an i-pod.
The struggle continues.
The truth and nothing but...
-04 September 09 - 21:43
The only faultlines of any significance in the UK - and this includes, and indeed is most exemplified by, the arts - are class, economics and race. These are the emperor's new (actually very, very old) clothes and they are mixed and matched in myriad ways. Yet still, like death they are invisible.
More on silly debates
-04 September 09 - 21:36
Oh well, okay, here is the pointless cogitation (or possibly, fruitless
regurgitation) on an irrelevant, and typically hysterical, literary
debate: With regards to the recent furore over James Kelman's alleged
statements regarding genre fiction, made at the Edinburgh Book
Festival, which, as I understand it, may have run along the lines of,
'genre
... Read morewriting
is lazy writing and risks stereotyping Scotland', may I say that none
of it - neither the alleged statement nor the collective riposte -
really bothers me, in fact it does not concern me one iota. I am not
writing for, about or to, Scotland or any other polity, the material
which I have penned bears no significance in relation to Scottish or
any other literature, nor is my work a part of any canon or school. ... (more)
Kelman debate et al
-03 September 09 - 18:22
With regards to the recent furore over James Kelman's alleged statements regarding genre writing at the Edinburgh Book Festival, which, as I understand it, may have run along the lines of, 'genre writing is lazy writing', may I say that none of it really bothers me, in fact it does not concern me one iota. I am not writing for, about or to, Scotland or any other entity, the material which I have penned bears no significance in relation to Scottish or any other literature, nor is my work a part of any canon or school. In the Ogham tablatures of the history of this sceptred isle, I am simply a Paki who got uppity. Silence will be my testament.
London Review of Books
-22 August 09 - 10:12
I've just spent a dispiriting evening yesterday attending a party at the
Edinburgh Internationl Book Festival thrown by the 'London Review of Books', a
magazine which, in my opinion, would be better entitled, 'The Review of
London Books'. Somehow, I'd got onto their e-mailing list. Whenever I
go to these things (not often, and now, this morning, I remember just
why that is), it makes me realise just how impossible it would be for
someone like me even for a moment to break over the consciousness of
those people and their institutions. To them, my voice is no more than
that of a barking dog in a distant street.
But I'd rather be a barking dog in the street than a silent mouse in the house.
Darius Guppy
-08 August 09 - 20:11
Dear Editor,
In his introduction to Darius Guppy's article
(7/8/09), Chris Green attempts to delegitimise Guppy's stance by
inferring his disloyalty to the UK state. In a conjunction of multiple
ironies, Guppy appears now to be assuming an anti-colonial stance and
berating the destructive 'bread and circus' culture through which
capitalist imperialism continues to be instrumentalised globally -
though of course Western European systematic 'rape and pillage' long
pre-dated the dominance of secular liberalism. While one may take issue
with Guppy's naive view of the current Iranian regime and his (still)
exaggerated comparison of the UK with a police state, as well as with
his blanket condemnation of the 'Godless Enlightenment', it is
important that one does not allow such necessary 'rhetoric of
opposites' to obscure his very precise depiction of the modus operandi
and rank hypocrisies of neocolonial power. ...
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