A 9/11 Poem

Soon came the structure for remembrance,

Videos and journals, brick and steel work:

The half-naked Cell-Phone Jumper,

The Waving Woman in the afterlife-window,

Descending from different heights, sing-u-lar-ly,

Almost alone.

The Falling Man became a book; brave distillation.

There were other men and women. They held hands,
Leaping and clenching,
Their slow limbs (makeshift bungee-ropes, orange-black, failing)
Almost still.

Most of the dying was less spectacular,
Invisibly done,
Almost condemned to silence
By siren, heat, debris, pavement screaming.
All of this,
But a solidarity of the last telephoned words of that world,
For those who could still part lips:

I love you.

(Where were you when...?)
I was leaving school.

During English, my brother caught the second hit,
As it happened, that swell of extinction.

My no-bullshit grandmother,

A different evacuee, overlapping centuries,

Had telephoned my mother to say:

'You should turn on the television,
I think history is taking place.'

Bookmarks are for Narcissists

Exhausted in text?
Shut the book, put it down, go for a walk.
When later you finger, open her,
Curiosity, gravity and chance at hand,
She will face you with the thought you were thinking you had lost,
The page you loved,
Won with your eyes.

Unknowing fascism: The rioters and their apologists.

If the riots are not considered to be apolitical, then they must be fascistic. The people whose jobs and homes have been wrecked as a result are predominantly working class. No attacks have (yet) been carried out on government buildings or officials. To use the word 'protest' now would be to show a very poor understanding of the English language.

The only people who do not seem to be furious, or at least ironic, about what is happening and spreading as I am writing this, are a clutch of middle class students and the rioters themselves.

The social networking response from most 'friends' has been witty or summary; from a minority, many of whom are postgraduates, there have been morally weird and logically blank status updates and links, loaded with conspiracy innuendo. (I can only assume those reading this will have a similar home feed right now.) The first thing to notice about the riots, wherever you stand (or sit) politically is surely the following; there is no connection, moral or logical, from the statement - Society has let us down - to the action of indiscriminately wrecking other people's lives. To suggest that there is a motive to the mayhem, despite the evidence of what has been ruined, not to mention the runaway silence of the perpetrators, requires complete intellectual dishonesty.

To complain about the statements made by police, council leaders or politicans - that, for instance, they have been reductive and unhelpful - is a self-abnegating position for any educated student to take. Maybe more people around the country would be enlightened if Boris Johnson began referencing Derrida or Marx to describe the looting. No - no, they wouldn't. But perhaps the longer a coward is educated at second-tier universities for (mine include Leeds and Sussex), the more right-wing and apologetic he or she becomes under left-wing banners of rhetoric. If you try to reason with these people - the rioters or the apologists - using facts, the response is either a fingers-in-ears or middle-fingers-up jump into a get-away-car of despair censorship. According to these people,I am a fascist, or merely a conservative, for condemning the riots. I think, pointing at history, I can safely reverse the accusation.

So why are young people blindly adhering to anything anti-Western (not necessarily anti-establishment - remember they don't like the BNP)? I used to be, roughly speaking, of this ilk: so I think I can try for an answer. It is far too easy to devote a paragraph of any essay, a chapter of any book, to Freudian interpretations of human affairs. However in the case of the new left wing, including many people who have a blind spot to the Caliphate-nostalgic, female circumsision and suicide-bombing corporations, usurpation of illusory authority and ignorance of far away Big Brother types seems to be a valid theory. I can't help but think that on some level my briefly lived vitriol against the 'fascistic' United States of America (scroll down Joey Barton's Twitter for help) was born out of a churlish reaction to authority of any kind, no matter how unintrusive, provident and nourishing. On authority, George Orwell in Inside the Whale is tutelary in a way I have quoted before on this blog:

People can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything other than liberalism.

I'm no expert on political history, nor do I mean to condescend, but the Labour movement has achieved so much for an oppressed working class since the nineteenth century. It has been betrayed in recent years, usually by white middle-class postmodernists who, when for instance thinking about our role overseas, are more concerned about oil and profit than the issue of psychopathic crime families enslaving their populations, or powerful figureheads of apocalyptic cults stoning or genitally mutiliating heretic women. Meanwhile secular socialists - true socialists - are desperately struggling for emancipation. As long as the record is anti-Western, young people who sell the Social Worker in the twenty-first century want it to play, preferably on their iPods.

There have been no demands made by any spokespeople. This is bankrupt terrorism, and now the indie flock are bound to start flinging the word 'Orwellian', incidentally without fear, all over the internet during the upcoming investigations. There is no redemption for those who torch innocent people's property - leaving it to brave firefighters - in a society which guarantees freedom of speech, benefits, healthcare, multiculturalism and human rights. The free Blackberry Messenger conversations and swanky videos being enjoyed at this very moment by the criminals are proof in more than one sense. It may be a cutesy cliche to refer to starving children in Africa. But consider that currently there is the worst drought in that continent in half a century: 10.7 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance and 25% of the Somalian population alone has been displaced. Meanwhile, however underpriveleged, hundreds of young people here are looting shops for gin and sound systems. Maybe I'm being harsh. Perhaps all they're looking for is the Les Miserables soundtrack.

Form is T, Class is KP

The T20 format boasts big-hitting entertainment and big hand-outs. Its broadcasters have worked hard at throwing paint over the honest summary: that a game of just twenty overs a side, defined by sixes and low-full-toss bowlers, is usually just a game of chance; an optical illusion in its resemblance to cricket. Still, it can be good fun if there's enough beer on tap. Furthermore it  is far from superstitious nonsense to say that 20/20 has bolstered Test cricket as a dramatic spectacle. We are getting more results, far more value, as it were, for our time.

In many ways, Kevin Pietersen is made for 20/20. On his website he devotes a chapter to his sponsors, all six of them. And his body language is the give away. I've spoken to people who have noticed, as I have, that many a delivery in the field KP can be seen walking in close enough to the action so that he can look up and check himself out on the big screen, as though not yet bored of his own recurring photograph after almost a decade of fame. (However I am yet to meet a woman who finds him attractive.) As for the cricket, Pietersen's aggressive batting, with broad stance and enormous backlift to go, plus his drab off-spin, are ideal for the shortest form of the game. Anyway, the South African emigrant has a Test average of 48.16. He has scored eighteen Test centuries. He has represented England in three winning Ashes teams, having played only four Ashes series. These are the briefs that really matter.

His interviews may be ridiculous, his patriotism embarrassingly ornate, but he can bat (in fact, he can bat blindfolded) and he should by now have enough experience to make the most of his latest claim to a revival: an unbeaten 202 in the Lord's Test against India. It was a knock full of fight and patience, confirmed by a modest strike rate of 61.96.

At the Oval in 2005, a more dramatic Test century by Pietersen, and his first, culminated the greatest Ashes series in history. For this reason, it will remain his most popular among fans. The eventual dismissal by Glenn McGrath was as typical of Pietersen as the thunder-and-lightning innings itself, interrupting commentator Richie Benaud's dignified farwell to English cricket, before the camp bully took off his helmet, got out the yellow mohawk and waved his unorthodox cricket bat for the length of a Meat Loaf song. Fair enough.

iCharlatans

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

-Confucius, Analects

Lately I have been troubled by a cliché or misconception in anthropology. It is taken for granted, at least in middle class circles, washed through young minds and there retained for a lifetime: Successful individuals have either reaped the rewards of hard work, or are gifted with extraordinary ability, or both. The former assumption - the work-horse animal - is the label with which we prejudice, earnestly nodding our heads in a hurry. It is this former assumption and its discrepant narrative to which I think people should show more hostility. In spite of fortitude, is it not the case that hard work can, in many cases, exist as a euphemism for cock-sucking? Or, bearing in mind feminists, cunt-slurping?

In this desensitized, digitized (and so on) age, there are, of course, successful anonymous professionals, or students, who are brilliantly sycophantic, extraordinary at ‘networking’ (at convincing strangers of strangers), apolitical, nice, up to date (what does that even mean?), and robotic when they tick off items of landscape or culture as what they have ‘done’, not living for where taste leads. Vanity, the boring kind. Lots of saracsm. No irony.

Thus spake the moron: “It’s ok man, it’s postmodern, indie, surreal” etc. They take themselves (but never their words) seriously and, when in danger of being found out, resort to performing silences of pseudo wisdom - a romantic stare, eyebrows a curve, lips pursed. And when, eventually, they are found out, there is a wounded face currying apology, so that the whole masochistic thing can begin again, the object of Jarvis Cocker satire. Many young readers will know the kind of dick I am referring to.

These are morally and intellectually repulsive people we are talking about here. But because of the recycled first assumption - the hard work that implies courage - these people do, however, check into the popular conscious as morally and intellectually normal (or better). Probably the worst culprits are those who pretend to be gifted with extraordinary ability despite merely working hard on their digital-preoccupation existence. (By this I don’t mean someone who takes a calculator into an office or an exam.) This is the only stereotype of human being on whom I would ever cast the fragile, overused and hence fractured insult: pretentious. This sort, peddling illusion, could only be considered at the most quasi-religious. If a religious person pretends to know what can not possibly be known, then surely a pretentious person is someone who masquerades as knowing what is in truth understood by less superficial, rival primates. I think "pretentious" inferior to religious, since its essence defies either compassion or any system of ethics, prescribed or still evolving.

In other words, this well-rehearsed saga, reducing the human being to either a technically or mentally strong footballer in an early console game, has nothing to do with merit. It makes for a far easier life, outside of the brain, to push beyond the point of extinction the meaning of real narcissism and of ‘real’ fraudulence so that we might avoid the reversal of such accusations.

This is vulgar, hardly revelatory, thinking on my part. Perhaps it invites suspicion of lazy or traumatised writing. Or, that it is not on my part, and that I have borrowed, non-specifically and without a great deal of disguise, from authors I especially admire: namely Sigmund Freud, George Orwell, Milan Kundera, Bret Easton Ellis and Christopher Hitchens. Really what it comes down to is the word nice: another prepubescent infection, determined to stay. Nice, as distinguished from loving, generous or courageous. But in order to break off entirely, I have to stop weighing everything as carrots at the self-checkout in Sainsburys, and, for now at least, work harder.

Neymar to Ganso, Modric et al, through the Window

                           Jonathan Wilson: 'And then sign Ganso (above) as well'

      Rarely is an individual player the privileged subject of a one-line, Jonathan Wilson paragraph. There are few football writers in the English language as widely syndicated in separate chunks of the globe, or as envied by bibliophobic peers in their hundreds, as Wilson, author of Inverting the Pyramid. His pen is renowned for drawing tactical systems, or at least for committing these traces in history to crisp prose on the page. The privileged individual is Ganso, 21 years of age and - at over six feet tall - a potentially powerful (remember a skinny [Cristiano] Ronaldo?) advanced playmaker. The article in mention was a report on the second leg of the Copa Libertadores final: Ganso and Pele's club, Santos, winning (2-0 on aggregate) for the first time since 1963. There to see this, an 'emotional' Pele was looking down not only at a new chapter of history, but also at the promise shown by striker Neymar. His match winning performance is the latest trailer for yet another national abreaction on the grandest stage: of the prodigy in movie gold, ready to lift the World Cup.

The video is now a year out of date (...more have been added since); it is a sloppily assembled best-of package from the 09/10 season, in other words before Ganso earned his first cap for Brazil and fulfilled a best-supporting-actor role in the South American Champions League final. Zonal Marking describes Ganso's performance as at once intelligent and mobile:

impressive, escaping the attention of Peñarol’s midfield duo by coming deep and turning, then running at the ball with speed, also encouraging Elano forward to the right – his comparative width forced Aguiar and Freitas to adjust their positions and move towards their left.

The title of the video clip, "The New Zidane" - watch it for yourself, and I shall edit out all superlatives - is ludicrous; certainly it is unsurprising given its bogus youtube gift wrap. Then again, Zizou never scored more than ten goals in any league campaign. For an advanced playmaker (or a #10 regista: if pointless, at least a welcome break from the "false nine" trope which has dominated recent tactical discourse), Ganso's young CV - 26 goals in 110 professional games (0.24) - matters before and after the seduction of the scout. It is an especially impressive beginning if one considers the recent increase in the number of highly capped South American defenders choosing to return home, with plenty of seasons still left in the tank, to where they began their careers. This may have as much to do with the decline of Serie A as with the persisting and understandable fear of, or resentment towards, the Premiership imbued in these players. And now they go back to a Latin culture which remains gilded with an eccentricity and liberty (translated, tactically, in Italian: libero / sweeper / free role in defence) incongruous with the current footballscape of Central and Western Europe. Furthermore, it's a Latin culture that pays more nowadays. Dario Rodriguez, the Uruguayan international for instance, faced Ganso in last month's final.

Common sense, or a Wiki-moment's fact-checking, would vindicate any assertion that goalscoring midfielders are essential to successful teams. I have no doubt that although Harry Redknapp recently dismissed Chelsea's £23 million bid for Luka Modric as derisory (Redknapp rightly pointed out that footballers going for similar amounts of money - presumably he means the mediocre England Under 21 player, Jordan Henderson - "aren't fit to lace Luka's boots"), clubs interested in Modric are bound to use the ball-carrier's woeful goalscoring record as a self-deprecating bargaining chip. Abysmally, the Croat netted only three times last season, squandering chances throughout Tottenham's defence of 4th place. These will not be heard described as guilt-edged chances, since it is inconceivable for Modric to attract bad press, what with him being such a gifted little player. (Of course he's a fine technician and most people reading this would agree that his passing vision is as far-reaching as his coveted ability. But this wet, gifted little player sycophancy somewhat undermines St Boot-It-Long George's accusation that melodramatic foreigners who require protection are ruining our football "culture".) Any other player on a six-year contract angry at his chairman, delusional enough to describe Chelsea FC - historically and aesthetically an insignficant club, captained by Jihad-celebrating, disabled-parking-space thief, extramarital shark, brave John Terry, a fanbase famous for its anti-semitic core, a club only recently successful because of its There Will Be Blood, Cold War loser of a hero - as somewhere that every footballer "dreams of playing", would be ridiculed by at least one thinking person in the media.

After the last twelve months, in which the Premiership's newest Big Four have gambled with incomparable success on Javier Hernandez, Fernando Torres, Edin Dzeko and Marouakh Chamakh, it makes indefatigable sense to draw attention away from Neymar to his teammate, Ganso. Chelsea and Manchester United's midfields are both in need of a glamorous reboot. Manchester City, despite signing David Silva, were accused at times last season of lacking subtlety in a midfield thoroughly augmented by ivory, and by concrete in reserve: Yaya Toure, Nigel De Jong, Gareth Barry, James Milner, Patrick Vieira and so on. Meanwhile Sandro, Tom Huddlestone and Rafael Van der Vaart each offer surprise and artistry in abundance, so Luka Modric's absence would do little to impoverish the aesthetic expected at White Hart Lane. Cesc Fabregas, of course, could go. If he is not replaced, then Jonathan Wilson or another member of the press might well inquire into the potential cultural ramifications. Would the Spaniard's, and possibly the Croat's, departure signal a victory for clout in the Premier League, leaving the likes of Raul Moreiles, Park Ji-Sung and Samir Nasri - let's lump and gulp them down as gifted little players - in a strange and permanent frost? Dominic Fitfield made a similar point this weekend in the Guardian (a newspaper borrowing throughout this News of the World debacle, Harry Redknapp's post-match interview soundbite on loop: I know what the people want... If it wasn't for me... Look at what a job I've done...). Regrettably Fitfield is, as I had been during the last World Cup, much too generous to Joe Cole, the Liverpool substitute whose largely uneventful career is slowly eating itself.


The things a small, 'family' club can do for lucky men...

The banality of the transfer window and an even broader, matchday boringness are why English football would be privileged by the import of a talent such as Ganso, on whom it is worth keeping an eye and pinning a hope.

Polem

"They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything other than liberalism."
-- George Orwell, Inside the Whale, 1940

Folded thin, the moon
as
sheets of straw
Through a pale blue shelter.
It is five in(to) the morning, end of June.
Two unfinished paperbacks and a lager,
So little is there to tell of this, or summer.
And while the narrator may,
Given the hot history of your address bar,
Seem unenviable,
I know of no gloom in candor.

This is my making it onto the page.

A gull coughs, hardly worth reporting.
And clouds bring rain.
What other than third-rate minutiae goes on here?

Instead should I rhyme consistently,
Or pun with fingers in my ears?
Don't think I'll battle a trope
Then smile if you begin privately -
Words as snowballs
(Critical distance, dialectic, avant garde)
- What I want no part in.

I cannot pretend I am speaking to another,
Listened to,
Unless I leave the house.

The arms of critical theory are glued, folded:
These strange gods, who command strangeness,
Who cannot say Bonjour without blushing,
Are half-musing, unrepulsed,
The hue of acid through the unveiled lips of women,
The mass in the mass grave. How strange!,
You chin-scratch.

If the race (to the straw moon) survives this leg,
Another outstretched hand, a new nonsense,
Will write a fist and run the show.

We know you can beat the odds

Blog Update

Dear Reader,

You might have noticed I haven't posted much this year, while my Twitter account, RobbieJones1987 (I think?) is a boring blurb-book I choose, and would advise, not to indulge in. Dividing my time between academic and paid work has left no spare moment. Unfortunately, inevitably, the result is that my viewing count has fallen as sharply as if I'd begun to condone horrible acts of torture on here. (Although perhaps that would have had the opposite effect?) As the MA trudges to a conclusion, I will not be blogging regularly again until September, though no doubt I'll post a sample of frank, Mr-Shankly-terrible verse, or of transfer-window horseshit inspired by Tony Gale.

In the meantime, here is what I can remember from the Spring (encompassing Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, Catalan-passmaster history, psychobabble and Hitchslapping), some of which has informed my essay and dissertation writing, and plenty of which I would recommend:


Recently Read

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward **
Roberto Bolano, 2666 *****
Jimmy Burns, Barca: A People's Passion ***
Don DeLillo, The Body Artist ****
..., Falling Man *****
Michael Foucault, What is an Author? ****
Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters ****
Krishan Kumar, Utopianism ***
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits ****
Vicky Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows ***
Naomi Mandell (ed.), Bret Easton Ellis: Essays on American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park ****
Ian McEwan, Solar ***
William Morris, News From Nowhere **
George Orwell, Essays *****
..., Homage to Catalonia ****
HG Wells, The Time Machine ***
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We *****
Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's "Lost Highway"  ****


Recently Viewed

Michael Apted, Enigma ***
Frank Darabont, The Walking Dead (TV) ****
Michael Haneke, Funny Games (US, II) ****
..., The Piano Teacher ****
..., The Seventh Continent ****
Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds *****
..., Rear Window *****
..., Rope ***
..., Saboteur ***
..., Shadow of a Doubt ****
..., The 39 Steps ****
..., The Trouble with Harry ***
..., Vertigo *****
Armando Ianucci, The Thick of It (TV) ****
David Lynch, Blue Velvet ****
..., The Elephant Man *****
..., Lost Highway ****
... et al, Twin Peaks (TV) *****
..., Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me ****

D. B. Weiss et al, Game of Thrones (TV) ****

Recent Blogs

Michael Cox et al, Zonal Marking

Laura Gadsden, Gin in Literary Tea Cups

Daily Hitchens

Dear Mr Levy

Rachel Silverlight, Gulls of Brighton

Jonathan Wilson, Guardian Football

Elvis

Seated pigeon-proud,
Then prostrate,
Now hunched for hours,

He does his desperate best
To outshit the beer-warped sprawl in his songbook,
Open and held in fat hands.
A Citizen Kane rosebud would do it.

A woman's parasol leans against the oak-veneered door,
By chance creating a triangle shelled by leopard spots,
Reeking of tobacco and Yves Saint Lauren:
Sopping, it is the one audible tap in this bathroom panic.
True pathetic fallacy consolidates rainfall
As a souvenir: a passed, tense force.

He imagined he would receive a letter the following morning - the reply he had been waiting for - from Emil Sinclair. He was sure that the words would rise from the paper, magical, unctuous and serious:

"I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, completely unreserved music, the kind that makes you feel that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I believe I love that kind of music because it is amoral. Everything else is so moral that I'm looking for something that isn't. Morality has always seemed so insufferable. I can't express it very well. Do you know there must be a god who is both god and devil at one and the same time? There is supposed to have been one once. I heard about it."

With a groaning squeeze (which itself rises doomed as rumour exaggerated from without)

The capillaries of his existence yell forth names,
At the temple or on the pinna,
Like a hammer of wind through a tree house.
Peer-pressure music-tastes jostle for timber and echo.

Ashamed and obligated to respond,
He sings in borrowed melody:
This is one damn good failure.
It was as though all his life's words had been about cake.

Already he had glanced overboard.
Now he happened, from the edge of plankdom,
To be looking at rough colourless footwear.
Despair is an oceanic invitation
To shit and move and love.



Quotation borrowed from H. Hesse. M. Roloff (tr.). M. Lebeck (tr.). Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 84.