Morph

Why Bolero of all things?

Using lists

Perusing the list of BNP members induced a mixture of emotions. Schadenfreude, because I detest them and all they stand for, and it was an odd sort of poetic justice to see them exposed like that. Ridicule that they'd let it happen. Shame, because however awful they are, ordinary members deserve their privacy. Anxiety that I might find someone I know there, or someone from my own village. Revulsion at the large numbers of people from the same family, again and again, with teenagers signed up to the youth group. A grudging respect for all the volunteering that it represented: every one of those thousands of entries had been compiled by someone knocking on a door, filling in a form, and someone else collating it.

I wasn't looking at the original file, but one that someone else had copied and posted up, so there was minimal formatting, no tablulation. But it was clear that there were fields for title, first name, surname, qualifications, address, and comments. These last were pathetically illuminating:

Accountancy skills
Activist (discretion requested)
Activist. Ex-Independent candidate (General Election May 05). Good networker
Activist. Former Lib Dem agent. Change of address 21/3/07
Activist. Letter sent re. temporary activity ban (Southampton area) of six months
Activist. Previously listed as Alfred
Activist. Upgrade from Standard to Gold m/ship 3/4/07
Aged 17 (06). Change of address 18/6/07
Body piercer/retailer (self-employed). BA (Hons) Business Enterprise. City & Guilds Adult Teaching Cert. Diplomas in Aromatherapy/Reflexology. Former nurse. Hobbies: dancing, swimming, walking, caravanning
Borough councillor.
Bounced cheque: membership cancelled 4/11/05.
Business owner
Candidate
Candidate willing
Candidate willing Has meeting venue available
Carpenter/builder
Cert Ed. (Law/Accounting). Hobbies: researcher/writer modern philosophy & pre-historic mysteries. Poetry. Yoga, martial arts, body-building (former competitor). Occasional martial arts/fitness instructor
Chartered town planner
Civil servant
Commercial artist.
Company director
Composer/musician/lecurer. Doctor of Philosophy (Composition) PhD. Cert. ED:FE, BA (Hons), BTEC computer software. Soundtrack writer, ethnomusicologist. Hobbies: music (performance), rambling/hiking, ornithology, history, poetry
Computer skills (web design)
Computer skills (web design)
Director (small company). ANZIQS, NZATC, NZCQS, NZCB. Hobbies: lay-reading (C of E)
Director a tatoo [sic] & body piercing studio. Qualified mountaineering instructor (AMI). Hobbies: DIY
Donation £35 (07). Original birth cert returned 29/3/07
Donation £5 (07)
Engineer. City & Guilds (motor engineering).
Ex-serviceman (Army). Hobbies DIY, dogs
Experience of legal, constitutional & european law. Publishing skills
Ex-serviceman (MoD Police). Abex
Ex-serviceman. Hobbies: woodwork/metalwork. Proof-reader
Ex-serviceman. Retired docker
Ex-serviceman. Retired lecturer. Abex
Factory manager
Family: (name). Comps slip: gold/family membership
Film maker (amateur) with own recording studio
Fluent French/Dutch
Fluent German
Former Conservative councillor (13 years).
Former police/prison officer
Former policeman (international security/counter terrorism)
Gold badge not received - replacement sent 12/2/07
Graphic design/desktop publishing
Housewife. Hobbies: walking, water colour painting
Illustrator/graphic designer (professional)
IT experience
Jobbing builder, cabinet maker, boat builder, restorer. Hobbies: boating, fishing
Joiner (placards/boards etc.). Security
Joiner. Slater. Tiler (self-employed). Hobbies: fishing, darts, pool
Law graduate. Teacher (English literature)
Locksmith/carpenter
Manager (building site). City & Guilds (plastering, floor laying). Hobbies: karate (2nd Dan instructor), clay pidgeon[sic] shooting. Lead singer/drummer with band
Manager (senior)
Manufacturing company owner
Marketing skills
Mechanic/manufacturing engineer (self-employed)
Military/social historian
Mobile DJ with singing partner, snakes & spiders
Musician (professional)
Nick's double
Office manager
Parish councillor
Party chairman
Pilot (helicopter/aeroplane)
Plumber/gas engineer
Printing company owner
Refrigeration and air conditioning engineer
Resigned 02/06/04. Will not be renewing 07 (unhappy with his reception within the Party - reports not published, etc.) Journalist
Retired clerical worker/fireman on British Railways. Hobbies: railways
Retired fitter
Retired Head of Mathematics
Retired male nurse
Retired martial arts instructor. Plasterer
Retired primary teacher. Cert. Ed/Teaching. Hobbies: knitting, walking
Retired R & D engineer. Former chief engineer &; consultant (engineering/environmental). BSc Mechanical Engineering. Hobbies: archaeology, English history/literature
Sales/marketing
Security officer
Self-employed
Senior citizen: paid full rate
Serviceman
Serviceman (Army)
Singer/musician (English Folk)
Site manager (construction)
Teacher (secondary school) (discretion requested)
Teacher. Cert. Ed. Hobbies: astronomy, wildlife, ancient history, handwriting
Video editing equipment
Will not be renewing 07 (took offence to newspaper reports about the Party)
Will not be renewing. Now supporting UKIP
Will not be renewing 07 (court case pending)
Will not be renewing 07 (emigrating)

By contrast, I learn from Huffington Post that Obama's team emailed everyone on their campaign list on Monday:

The campaign was letting me know that barackobama.com was directing visitors to volunteer for -- or donate to -- relief efforts to aid the victims of the Southern California fires.

Huffington adds:

There are, of course, some on the political fringes already mounting their pushback, as Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia did, comparing Obama's call for national service to "what Hitler did in Nazi Germany" and "what the Soviet Union did." Jonah Goldberg likened it to "slavery" (of course, Goldberg's latest advice on dealing with the financial meltdown is for Obama to do nothing).

Perhaps one good thing that will come out of the hard times will be a collective willingness to ignore such bleating -- and to do what so clearly needs to be done to ameliorate the human suffering those hard times have brought.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Galveston

This song has been on my mind. I last heard it in the 60s, and didn't know then that it was more than a love song. And all I could remember of it lately was the refrain, that half sob in the voice. It was a shock to hear it now, with all that cheesy backing that the memory had edited out.

The media over here has gone a bit quiet on what's happening over there. I haven't seen any appeals for help, but there must be people out there who have lost everything. I hope other people are around to pick them up.

And the first shall be last

Just one of the brief essays on underside of Vulcan fuselage.

Methuen's Anthology of Modern Verse

I've just been indulging myself with An Anthology of Modern Verse (Methuen, 1921). My Oxfam copy is from 1940, the 30th edition. Staggering to think of how popular it must have been. It's full of the famous: Chesterton and Belloc, Kipling, Hardy, Thomas. And people I've never heard of - and on this meagre evidence, rightly so: Fyleman, Hopewood, Turner. This anthology, obviously enormously popular, has one striking omission: Housman. It is curious but oddly satisfying to see Eliot, Hopkins, Graves, Lawrence, Hardy, Owen, Thomas, Yeats rubbing shoulders with Kipling, Masefield, Stevenson. But why no Housman? His work was current, hugely popular.

92 poets, of whom there are 14 women, most of whom are justly neglected - as indeed, are most of the men.

Chapeau

Was in Ribérac, down a back street. The shop was shut, with its grille down - you can see it in the photograph, along with the reflection of the wall opposite. The model is in a dream within a dream: she's not real; she's in a shop; the shop is closed. She is beyond reach, and from another time.

Tuscan whole milk

It's good milk if you drink it right away, but I'm only giving it one star because it spoiled when I left it [on] the counter when I went away for the weekend. They really should put this in the description. I've bought a lot of products from Amazon (books, CD's, etc.) and I've never had this problem with anything else.

Human creativity knows no bounds. Any new technology will quickly attract populations to exploit it beyond its original purpose, whether they use it to sell things, to rob people blind, to perform new acts of vandalism, or simply to have fun. While facebook attracts its share of spammers, spivs and satirists, it's heartening to know that the wilder reaches of amazon.com have their own colony of creative writers squatting in Gourmet Food.

I was in two minds blogging about it - it's like a small microclimate one hesitates to disturb by sending tourists trampling over it. I've hardly begun to explore its wilder reaches myself yet, but I love the way people adapt creatively to hostile environments. A quick google reveals that I'm late to the party as usual: Boing Boing blogged about it nearly two years ago.

perms

Why isn't it simple? Why can't I just write a straight sheaf of addresses off the stack, and bung the same things into each envelope? Indeed, why do I have to write the addresses by hand - surely any competent organisation would have them on the computer?

Um. I do have them on the computer.
But.

Well. There are contributors. They get first crack of the whip. With a light heart, I start sending mags out to the valiant souls who make it happen. I am glad to, and very grateful to them. And to you, with your sparky poems, and to you and your lightsome reviews.

Then there are the contributors who are also subscribers (less than a handful) - and subscribers are our lifeblood - and they get an extra copy, which is a different postal rate. Then there is the contributor who is also a subscriber whose sub is up for renewal, who gets a reminder because I am hardnosed like that. Then there are the contributors who live abroad, and you have to queue up to get it weighed, and does the scrawled comps slip mean that it no longer counts as 'printed matter'?

And indeed, there are the contributors who are subscribers whose subs lapsed with the last issue, but whom (for obvious reasons) I don't want to let go, so I have a special letter to send to them.

And the impecunious contributors who are also subscribers who prefer not to have a second copy of the mag but to roll over their sub to the next issue. I don't like to think about what this tells me about how they value this particular issue.

And then there are the subscribers, the vast majority of course, who fit into none of those categories. Including those whose subs are due, and those whose subs have lapsed. And those in each category who live abroad.

There are 16 permutations...

And then there are the inserts. Do I send them willy nilly to everyone, including the subscriber who asked me to include them, and who probably has inserts up the ying-yang? And to those abroad? (Well, not if it tips it into a different price band.) Do I send Soundblast Performance Poetry flyers to Mrs Trellis of North Wales?

Is it even worth my time wondering about such things?

Flogo

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG posts about the nascent ability to print clouds – using a buoyant "mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium" to create logos and messages that float like clouds across the sky until they disintegrate up to an hour later. Geoff, creative optimist that he is, writes:

there is an obvious (and, frankly, rather uninteresting) reaction to all this – i.e. please save us from yet another form of corporate advertising, we don't need logos in the sky – but there are also artistic, and even literary, implications here that go beyond mere outrage

before proceeding to riff on the glorious possibilities.

Me, I'm down there with the obvious and frankly uninteresting, trying to console myself that there will be parts of the sky unflogoed so long as there are parts of the world insufficiently inhabited and/or rich and/or influential. There are times when I even resent vapour trails. Don't get me wrong, I love the built environment, but I am cynical about what money does.

Actually, BLDGBLOG is one of my favourites, and I love Geoff's thought experiments. Many of his commenters take him to task on practicalities while ignoring the principle he's exploring. I'm guilty of this myself, here.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Factoid

H drew to my attention a recent (31 March) letter in the FT. In response to some bad press about Icelandic banks, Sigrún Davídsdóttir makes the point that Icelanders are a very homogenous and small community with a mostly shared experience and outlook. She says: "It is easy to lie with statistics, but difficult to tell the truth without them."
And then the money quote:

It is dangerous to extrapolate from statistics: an Icelandic poet can count on selling 500 copies of his book of poetry in Iceland - although the ratio of English inhabitants to Icelandic is 200:1, an English poet cannot expect to sell 100,000 copies.

Davídsdóttir is a novelist and woman of letters as well as an economist, so that may be one reason she used that particular example. But 500 books! to 313,000 people! 500 copies is a good number for an English poet to sell, unless they are really famous. Curiosity led me to this article (from 1996, when the population was smaller):

With the multiple and seemingly inexhaustible blandishments of the electronic age, poetry still holds pride of place among the seven arts with close to a hundred collections of poems published annually -- in a population of just over 260,000. Poetry may not be as politically potent today as it was during the struggle for independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nor is it as commonly quoted in everyday conversation as it used to be, yet it is very much a living part of our existence, both at home and at public gatherings. `The President never makes a speech without quoting copiously from poems old and new, nor does a politician worth his salt ever deliver a festive talk without rich poetic ingredients. At private parties, on the radio (or even television), and in the press there are not infrequently poetic contests eliciting interest from all classes and categories of society.

Why all this interest in poetry? Attempts at explication should be made. The tradition is very old and very strong. Some of the most engrossing visions of Iceland, both past and future, have been expressed in lyric form. The natural scenery is imposing and lends itself easily to poetic descriptions. The language is sonorous, flexible and highly translucent, making it a supple instrument for poetry.

I've heard that in Korea, poetry books sell as fast as cookery books. (Co-incidentally, another very homogenous society. And there again, poems about the seasons and the weather are very popular.) Are there other places in the world where poetry sells as well?

Blimp

Already sounds like a word from a poem by Edwin Morgan. I love this idea. Never mind the impracticality of pumping water. Let gravity take care of sewage. Electricity will be conducted by astonishingly fine, astonishingly conductive rare metals. Winds will blow, and people will talk nostalgically of being grounded.

Cantuar

It's not clear from the press what Dr Williams had in mind, but it won't be the sort of thing the mad dogs have been howling over. There is no way even he, with his knees on a hassock and head in the clouds, could seriously suggest applying sharia law to anyone who doesn't consent. So it couldn't apply in matrimonial cases (children to consider, even if women can be assumed to be giving free consent) or family inheritance cases (what about potential beneficiaries who don't consent to the sharia court?) let alone in criminal cases.

There may - just - be an argument for using a sharia court as an agreed arbitrator in contract cases, much as one might have the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors written into a contract as arbiter for development disputes. Consenting adults should be able to decide how to settle their disputes. However, this would be fair only between bargainers of equal bargaining power. And even then, just imagine the hoohah when someone appeals against the decision of such a sharia court because it's partial (judges related to plaintiff), incompetent (judges comatose) or capricious (judges didn't consider evidence), just to take three examples that might happen in any tribunal. In such a case, the appeal would lie to the civil courts in the usual way. "English Law Overrules Sharia!" "English Rules OK!" Just imagine. And heaven forfend that it's a Jewish judge in the Appeal Court.

The prelate espouses a misguided pluralism, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, it doesn't take too much imagination to foresee this as encouragement and sanction for enclaves of sharia law in the sort of place where young men like Abu Izzadeen can say to the Home Secretary: "How dare you come here, to a Muslim area, after you have arrested Muslims..." It's already happening informally. There are tribal areas in New Zealand which apply tribal law with the consent of the state, and I believe there are many other places around the world with such enclaves, where colonisers have exempted certain areas from application of their Law. Should it make any difference whether such enclaves are indigenous or immigrant? Personally, I deplore that sort of separation whatever its genesis, but then I'd do away with faith schools and the established church and -- don't get me started. Let's keep one law for all, please.


Update
Here's what he said.

Rant

On one of the forums where I lurk, someone is complaining that the editors of a magazine suggested changes to their submission which would have radically altered the poem, nay changed the whole tenor. The poster adds that they never had much faith in those editors' judgement anyway.

So why are they sending their poems there?

It is easy to get enraged over exchanges like this, so I won't. It can be very dodgy offering unsolicited crit. Some people are adult enough to welcome it, but others are prickly as hell. Why do they send stuff in the first place if they don't value the editor's judgement?

As for solicited crit, you know it's going to be a disaster from the off. Anyone who needs to ask isn't going to like what you're going to say. Anyone with an ounce of sense knows that editors won't have time to write a word more than they have to unless they want to. It takes too long to work out a tactful way to tell someone their work is crap. Or just boring.

Some would-be contributors have an attitude problem: they seem to think that there's a kind of bar of general competence they have to clear.
Er, NO.
They have to write a poem that the editor thinks other people are prepared to pay money to read.

Plus, that poem has to fit in with the other poems on the shortlist. So the ten millionth brilliant poem about Alzheimer's probably ain't going to cut it.

The editor's judgement may be a bit idiosyncratic, but the editor's best placed to know the sort of people lined up prepared to pay for poems in that particular magazine, and how far to push their tolerance - so like it or not, the would-be contributor has got to accept that judgement. Anyway, why are they sending their precious poems there in the first place if they don't?

I'm well into my second year editing at Seam. It feels like a hundred. When I started out, I was more liberal with my comments than I am now. One classic response was from a man who wrote that he'd taken on board my suggestions, and had sent his revised poem to a competition where it had won a prize... (Thanks, mate, you're welcome.)

I don't know about other editors, but the biog is the last thing I read. And I'm trying to draft a catch-all rejection slip that is somewhat more gracious than the one I got from Brando's Hat, years ago, after about six months. We are sorry you have not been successful - a thin line of type crudely scissored from thirtynine identical others on a page of A4.

E J Thribb writes

So hello then 2008.
What will you bring? I can hardly wait
As Greenland doffs its ice-cap to the sea.