Cameron = Misogyny

As so often in life, I have found myself copying Stephen Fry by listening to audiobooks on the iPod while going for long walks around my realm . Currently I'm on 'God is not Great' by Christopher Hitchens . This morning I was listening to a section where C-Hitch talks about the pernicious role played in the Catholic church's campaign to stop the government of the Republic of Ireland liberalising its divorce laws by the late and, alas, far-too-lamented Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Hitchens characterises her position as being willing, because of her ideology, to support a state of affairs in which 'an Irishwoman married to a wife-beating, incestuous drunk would have no means of escape.'

Divorce is sometimes necessary. When people can't live together properly anymore, they need to move away from each other, for their own sake, and for that of any children involved. To think otherwise, purely because of an ill-thought-out ideology, is to support the imprisonment of men, women and children in circumstances that turn a home into a hell , and to connive in the emotional mutilation of thousands of people.

But guess which blue-sky-thinking Old Etonian thinks differently?

Who we've lost in the past 12 months:

John Updike

David Foster Wallace

JG Ballard

Isaac Hayes

David Carradine

David Eddings

James Kirkup

Dom Deluise

Farrah Fawcett

And now, of course, Michael Jackson ...

...and yet Thatcher still lives?

There is no justice.

(oh, and a note for all you wannabe Paedofinders out there: Margaret Thatcher is worse than Michael Jackson, even if all the allegations are true. Michael Jackson was acquited of fucking some kids; Margaret Thatcher is guilty of fucking an entire country. Swivel.)

Kafka at the Airbase

I try to avoid posting my poems on this blog, largely because I feel that they deserve to be seen or heard in other places, while this is more of a space for ancillary writing. But - in the hopes that it might send you to check out Kate Fox's 'Poetry as it Happens' blog , where much of the work is better than this, I present below my effort (tweaked slightly) for yesterday's 'Write a Poem About the News Day.'

Kafka at the Airbase

It's education they're engaging in at Bagram:
teaching Afghans it's not 'Kafkaesque' but 'Kafkan'
when they pull you in and strip you of your kaftan,

stress-position you and ask you what you have planned
in a language that you barely understand;
when the evidence from you that they demand

is never really properly explained;
when they never tell you why you've been detained,
and you never get the chance to be arraigned;

no jury, no defence, will be arranged,
even though the C-i-C's been changed:
the guards change, but the Castle stays the same.

Relax People,

I have found the next Pope . Catholicism can now be considered fixed.

Racist Scum

Here is a cartoon of a gypsy that the Daily Mail printed , in the same week that has seen a series of despicable attacks on Romanian gypsies in Northern Ireland.

Anyone who reads the Mail and claims it isn't a racist paper can, as of this point, suck an unpleasant part of my body.

So...that would make me...part-French?

In addition to the LRB links below, here's an interesting piece from the LRB blog about how an awful lot of British electricity users are subsidising (albeit to a very small degree) the government of France .

C'est tres interessant, non?

LRB Links

From The London Review of Books, two very fine links: Iain Sinclair takes a trip up the Thames, inspired by Peter Ackroyd and the late JG Ballard; and a book review so disturbing I think it can be considered an exercise in psychological horror. Which I do mean in a good way, of course.