Dr Who: silence in the library

In an eerily deserted library that stocked every known book in the universe in a galaxy far far away (along with a script written by Steven Moffat) our intrepid Dr and his trusty sidekick Donna stumble on a group of space suited scientists (including the bloke from The League of Gentlemen and the woman from ER) who are on a mission to find out what happened to the people who disappeared in the library years ago, and what is meant by, “keep out of the shadows”…

And no, it is nowt to do with inter-galactic budget cuts either…

Will the Dr and the space suits be able to outwit and outmanoeuvre the fleshing eating shadows, Vashta Nerada? Will we find out how the woman professor knows our illustrious Dr? What has happened to Donna? Who is the young girl and how does she know about the events in the library? Why did Doctor Moon tell the girl to believe her nightmares? What has happened to Donna? And why, oh why, don’t people listen to SOS especially ones which say, “keep out of the shadows”… Clue, you skeddaddle as fast as possible. Did nobody watch Alien? Oh, and have I asked about what’s happened to Donna, are we bovvered? Tune in next week……

So far so clever and look forward to next week’s episode. I liked the storyline, the merging of different time lines and the collision of past, present and future (similar to the Blink plot). Substitute scary statues for flesh eating shadows. And substitute the prophetic instructive warning: “blink and you’re dead” to “keep out of the shadows”.

And the whole Cartesian philosophy of consciousness, including mixing the imprinting of thoughts along with a residue of consciousness at the time of death: “I think therefore I am” as opposed to “being determines consciousness”… Hey I know, it’s fiction…but all the same…

The pic is from Blink.

The Apprentice: who’ll win it…?

So which of the backstabbing conniving corporate capitalist wannabes will be taken under suralan’s wing and earn a 6 figure salary..? I admit to watching this and at 9pm every (Wednesday…Tuesday this week). When I hear the start of the classical theme tune to the programme I drop everything to watch as I desperately need my sugar fix. I am addicted. Why? Pure fascination, enjoyment at watching the bunch of witless wannabes organise together to sell products and emulate suralan’s business style. And the language is risible along with the desperation (the guy who said that the “L word” wasn’t in in his vocabulary…).

They all come from the private sector (finance, banking, marketing and “sales”) and dream of becoming the apprentice to Sugar’s Merlin. It is an obvious tactic (well, to me…and I am lowly public sector worker) that if a group is to win the task then at the core of this is the art of dividing up the tasks, working together collectively and equally. Not the usual spats about supermacy, plots to usurp the “task leader” and individualism that have a tendency to spiral out of control and leading up to the inevitable “you’re fired”!

One of the reasons why Michael was fired on Wednesday, other than being disorganised he went off to do his thing in selling flash cars with his “hard sale” pitch that pissed people off (same with his cake selling tactics that pissed off potential buyers). Chasing people down the street just aint gonna work. I’m amazed he wasn’t fired weeks ago.

Though doubtless to say (could be wrong) that none of these “bright sparks” have picked up a copy of Communist Manifesto and/or ventured past the first page of Capital. Or involved in building trade unionism in the private sector. Their blinkered ideology is based on individualism, classic dog-eat-dog tactics and making loadsa cash.  I would love to see them organise a paper sale on a Saturday morning……

My low-paid salary is on Claire to win. She is a kinda carbon copy of Ruth Badger (who woz robbed of the title in the 2nd series) though Sirulan does have a tendency to choose non-entities who don’t seem able to cut the corporate capitalist mustard, case in point is last year’s winner, Simon (according to suralan, Simon is doing “ok”…). Whose knowledge of suralan’s history boarded on stalker obsession along with his need to wear yellow socks. But won he did over the more pragmatic and organised Christina.

But to put the pantomime theatrics to one side, it gives a brutal inside glimpse of the “kiss up kick down” strategies of corporate capitalism, equal opportunities being trashed (sexist double-standards with women being interrogated about their childcare responsibilities BUT not the men with kids…and the usual power relationships between the men and women wannabees), bullying behaviour.  The behaviour and language of suralan has seeped into the real life lexicon of corporate bosses (increase in employment tribunals). Yeah, I can hear you all chorusing, “but are you surprised by these practices”? No, I am not but it is still shocking how people treat each other to get on to make a fast buck…

But hey, they all make up with a group hug……………

Why am I bovvered? Again, my defence and am sticking to it, m’lud, is that it is fascinating to watch especially as it is a very popular show. The Big Brother of sales and marketing. And like all social phenomena it needs to be analysed and this zeitgeisty show along with its popularity has to be studied.

But if anyone can give me useful and practical ways in ending my Apprentice addiction, it will be appreciated…..

Before entering rehab, who is gonna win..?

Pauline Campbell’s funeral

I attended the funeral today of Pauline Campbell at Whitchurch, Shropshire. And I was able to put names to faces as many have commented on this blog and to say hello. Special thanks to Nikki, Hannah, Emilia and the two Johns. Sorry I couldn’t stay to raise a toast in celebration and in rememberance of Pauline’s life.

There were tributes from her friends and organisations like Howard League’s Frances Crook, INQUEST and from Eric Allison who wrote the obituary to Pauline in the Guardian. Eric made the point that we have a duty to carry on highlighting and campaigning around deaths of women in prison. The criminal justice system has to stop sending vulnerable and damaged women to prison. Pauline was described as a suffragette of penal reform and that is a fitting description.

I saw Pauline’s friend, Joan, who accompanied her to the pre-trial review in March and where I met her. She is a heroic and brave woman in her own right and was glad to see her. It was sad and poignant day. I knew Pauline for only a short time yet she made an impact on my life. I admired her tenacity and bravery. My feelings are best summed up by the words on the banner at the top of this post.

The reality of NL’s authoritarian policies have caused so much grief and misery, which have led to the deaths of a woman and her daughter. I agree with Eric, we need to carry on the campaign for Pauline’s sake and for the women who have died in the “care” of the state. We need to carry on highlighting and campaigning about these hidden injustices.

Prison Justice Day is on the 10th August - It is a day in which those in prison can have a day of mourning and rememberance for others who have died while locked in prison. History of the day can be found here.

No More Prison campaign are asking for activists to show solidarity outside Styal Prison with the women locked up inside and to remember those who have died in women’s prisons all over the country. It will also be a tribute to Pauline.

The demo will start at 1pm outside the gates of the prison. Please show your support and solidarity.

Banned, gagged and Mary Whitehouse

I found this while perusing Belledame’s blog and it seems to be doing the rounds on the blogosphere as well. Kinda fascinating as well. This list has developed over the years especially over different social and political periods. Shows the shifts and changing patterns as well in society. Yes…it is the top 110 banned books. And there are a variety of reasons why they were banned (sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, violence, sexuality, bigotry, sexism, racism, class and more….)

Here is the shocking list in its entirety:

1 The Bible
2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4 The Koran
5 Arabian Nights
6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25 Ulysses by James Joyce
26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29 Candide by Voltaire
30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31 Analects by Confucius
32 Dubliners by James Joyce
33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
36 Capital by Karl Marx
37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69 The Talmud
70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78 Popol Vuh
79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80 Satyricon by Petronius
81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
103 Nana by Émile Zola
104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

When I was around 14-15 years old, I started reading James Baldwin, George Orwell, Karl Marx and so on (I seem to have read more books by men at that period). The books actually opened and developed my mind. Indeed, raised my political consciousness around sexuality, racism, class and sexism. It actually liberated my repressed mind from years of religious beliefs. My politics evolved and I became an irreconcilable atheist, and a socialist feminist who supported (and still does) Trotskyist ideas.

But I also remember of that time was that my old school library stocked Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange but refused to stock, Lady Chattersley Lover by DH Lawrence. With all the hype and hyperbole added to the illicitness of reading something you shouldn’t the result was a real anticlimax. I was disappointment after reading Lady Chattersley, as I was expecting ….something more shocking. Was I corrupted reading these books? No, like I said before, books enriched my life and developed my thinking.

Actually, talking of schools, my second claim to fame of the week (on a roll comrades) is that I attended the same school as Julie Walters, she went there when it was an all girls grammar school. I attended when it was a mixed comprehensive though still acted internally like a grammar achool with all the setting and streaming…. And last night she was playing Mary Whitehouse on BBC2. Whitehouse the doyen of fighting filth, moral degeneracy, decay and subversion. Her early clean up campaign was dramatised last night focusing on her battle with, BBC director- general, Hugh Greene (not Hughie Green…).

It was sympathetic and a rather soft depiction of her campaign. Maybe they wanted to humanise her. Though I did like the portrayal of seemingly “perfect” family units but by looking closer by scratching the surface you are witness to the brutal realities of family life. I don’t know what made Whitehouse”tick” but her obsession with this moral crusade was paramount to her. There was this emotional outcry from her and that it was somehow shameful and disgusting to show anything to do with sex and sexuality. Or anything ouside the parameters of “christian decendecy”. Freedom of expression was not in Whitehouse’s lexicon.

Unfortunately, the programme did not show Whitehouse and her supporters at their most reactionary bigoted nadir culminating in suing Gay News, in 1977, using the blasphemy law (now consigned to the dustbin of history) over the publication of the gay poem, The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name by James Kirkup.

Denis Lemon, editor of Gay News, was found guilty. A preposterous outcome and an injustice. A sorry sad day for freedom of speech and of expression. Questioning the received wisdom of Christianity and the sexuality of Christ got you a suspended prison sentence! She tried the same tactic against the play Romans in Britain using obscenity laws but lost.

Whitehouse, similar to the reasons for many of the above books being banned, imposed her own morality, religious dogmatism and values on everyone else. Subjectively, she didn’t like it, we shouldn’t like it. Whitehouse, along with the other upholders of morality and decency coulda just simply switched off the telly or just not read the book. But where’s the fun in that, not being able to foist your own censorious views on everyone else.

Death Proof: misogyny unbound..?

Zenobia @ The Scary Door has a very useful and interesting post on the Grindhouse double-feature (Death Proof). I agree with a lot of what she writes especially about the pickets of Death Proof. I also wrote posts on the two films, including Planet Terror,  here and here.

I still think B. Ruby Rich makes a good observation about Tarantino…

“Quentin Tarantino makes guy movies, and great ones at that. He’s a lad’s lad, a cinephile’s cinephile, a geek’s geek, the thinking man’s actioneer… who usually, it must be said, has very little on offer for any woman who happens to find herself in his cinematic space”. ( B.Ruby Rich, “Day of the Woman” – Sight and Sound, June 2004)

Personal is the political…..

Well, my claim to fame about ‘1968 and all that’ was that I was in the same LPYS as Alain Krivine’s niece. Oh, those were heady and explosive times, apparently (I was born at the end of ‘69). But, joking aside, the social and political movements of that period was a catalyst for change and bringing about second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement. Three socialist feminists who are getting back together for one night only (and have had a profound influence on me) are Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright (see advertisement below).

Rowbotham and Segal have written their own autobiographies of the time (Lynne Segal was involved in the leftie counter-culture in Sydney, Australia while Sheila Rowbotham was an IS (precursor for the SWP) member in London immersed in political activism and writing for Black Dwarf…and involvement in the burgeoning women’s liberation movement (I still think her resignation letter to the male dominated editorial board was excellent).

Both guide us through these challenging, politically momentus and pivotal changes esp. on sexual politics and women taking control. It will be interesting to hear their recollections 40 years on next month….

———–

ROWBOTHAM, SEGAL AND WAINWRIGHT REUNITED AT LONG HOT SUMMER 1968  PARTY
Co-authors of Beyond the Fragments, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and
Hilary Wainwright are reunited at the  ‘Long Hot Summer Night of 1968
Inspiration’  party  to revisit the birth of a revived womens’
liberation movement and social movements of protest that was such a
major part of 1968.

The party takes place on Friday 13 June at the superb bar and gallery
space provided at Offside, 271 City Road, London EC1, see
www.offsidebar.com.

Nearest tube is The Angel, 5 minutes walk.

The night’s amazing line up also includes:
Music from former Clash sidekick and 1960s squatting activist Tymon
Dogg and the Quikening ( see www.myspace.com/tymondoggandthequikening)

Poetry from one of the stars of the performance poetry circuit, Polar
Bear (see www.myspace.com/polarbearspoken).

Joined by one of the legends of 1968 poetry, shadow laureate, Adrian MItchell DJ ‘Rockin the Barricades’ set from former Clash Tour DJ, the legendary

Scratchy ( see www.scratchysounds.co.uk)

plus DJ Aretha in support

Exhibition all the way from San Francisco, and designers of the party
poster, the extraordinary silk-screen posters made famous by their work for Jello Biafra and others,the Firehouse Kusto Rockart Company ,see

ww.myspace.com/ukrockposterexplosiontour

Roundtable with Mike Marqusee, (see www.mikemarqusee.com), Guardian
columnist and Newsnight Review regular John Harris and Aisha Maniar of
the  London Guantanamo Campaign (see www.guantanamo.org.uk)
Visuals by Simon Green (see www.eventful.org.uk)

The party is organised by Philosophy Football in association with Red
Pepper magazine (see www.redpepper.org.uk) and the Fire Brigades Union
(see www.fbu.org.uk)

Advance booking essential.  Tickets cost just £5.90, which will be
refunded in full if you buy a T-shirt from us on the night, making the
party in effect FREE!

To book your place visit
www.philosophyfootball.com and click on ‘events’ or call us on 020 8802 3499

To book a table of 5 or more and take advantage of the bulk
discount on tickets of £1 off per head, £4.90 instead of the usual
£5.90

Further shafting of Labour’s core voters…

How far does NL intend to go alienating their core voters? As far as they can….

Oh well, they are probably seen as politically expendable. The latest myopic proposals come from the Social Security Advisory Committee’s consultation on reducing the time period for claiming backdating of pension credit, housing benefit and council tax benefit. At the moment the housing benefit/council tax backdating period is 12mths, NL want to slash this period to 3 mths (“with good cause”). NL tried to push this through in 2000 but met so much opposition that they backed down.

NL are engaging in the “pay Peter to pay Paul” as it is all about improving pension credit. So NL are solving this financial conundrum by slashing the backdating period of HB/CTB to 3 mths. This will have an impact on claimants who are 60 years or over and claimants of working age.

As Citizens Advice argue these measures will have a severe impact on some of the most vulnerable claimants such as people with mental health problems, which could lead to homelessness.

Citizens Advice warns that being able to backdate housing benefit up to 12 months is vital to prevent eviction and homelessness by enabling tenants to pay off rent arrears which are often caused in the first place by problems with a housing benefit claim.  

Because claimants must show ‘good cause’ for not having made their claim earlier, backdating is targeted only on the most vulnerable claimants who most need personal support to help them cope, for example those with serious mental health problems.

Dollhouse: Joss Whedon is back…..

Wiped memories, manipulation, psychological imprinting, hired assassins, illegal ops, stunts galore, rogue baddies, ass kicking women and explosions.

I am talking about Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse. Unfortunately, we won’t get to see until sometime in 2009. It stars baddie Buffy slayer turned kinda good, Faith, (Eliza Dushku) as the one of the “Actives” in the Dollhouse, Echo (and they are, apparently, ”programmed” to  romantically and chemically fall in love if necessary for an assignment). It also stars Olivia Williams as a probable baddie. The premise of the series seems to be about Echo regaining her identity.

Personally, I can see elements of the Bourne series, Philip K. Dick and The Matrix.  But hey, what the hell, it is Joss Whedon.

Oh, and you can view the trailer at the F Word….

How do you solve a problem like Gordon…?

Well, it is publically “eveything is ok” stance but privately it’s Machiavellian pistols at dawn. The scent of blood and the likes of Straw, Miliband and Purnell are lurking in the background ready for the kill. And the leftie Jon Cruddas has kinda ruled himself out of a contest.

I would dearly like to see Gordon Brown go but the contest would be pretty much identical to the farcical leadership contest last year where it was the inevitable undemocratic coronation of one man. And the spineless PLP capitulated which meant a real socialist challenger like John McDonnell couldn’t get on the ballot form. Even if Brown is deposed it may be a change of person but it will be a NL apparatchik clutching a  neo-liberal agenda. An agenda that NL has been pursuing since 1997. Different person same politics (“triangulation, triangulation, triangulation”).

As John McDonnell rightly says: “It is pointless changing leader without changing policies. And it is pointless supporting a coalition to depose the existing leader which comprises all those who have consistently supported the New Labour policies which have brought this crisis upon us. I’m calling upon the Party to unite around an open policy debate, rather than this swamp of conspiracy and plotting. People should think in the long-term interests of the Party and our supporters, rather than short-term personal gain.”

NL are incurring losses at a massive rate and while many NLites are publically minimising these defeats, it is plain to see that the NL agenda is running out of steam. NL orchestrated a surreal election campaign in Crewe and Nantwich that can be best sumarised as “yobs and toffs”. It did not relate to working class people especially basing the campaign on insulting stereotypes.

NL are up against a new invigorated Tory party and their victory in Crewe will inject more confidence in their political approach. NL have created mass misery and anger at an accumulation of appalling policies from futile wars, which people demonstrated against, in Afghanistan and Iraq, 10p tax band, ID cards, privatisation, housing crisis, below inflation wage increases and so on. Brown’s government (including Blair) is remote from the people, it operates with non-elected “advisors” who work in private equity and corporate capitalism, and also at the behest of the US foreign policy.

This style of politics echoes an 18th century understanding of political parties where groupings of the ruling class were looser and informal. Unlike modern day political parties, the 18th century style of governance was much more fluid and made up of coalitions of individual members of the ruling class. They were closed off from and not amenable to ordinary people.

The massive uphill struggle NL face is that it has shafted its core voters unlike the Tories who have never attacked their own class and hegemony. Labour core voters damaged NL where it hurts most and that’s in the ballot box.

And at the core is the economy and NL has an out-of-control market driven monster. A neo-liberalist economic system that relies on high levels of exploitation combined with issuing mountains of credit that leads to massive personal debt. And one of the side-effects is creating a bubble in the housing market that has led to people on average earnings being priced out and the overall lack of social housing. What will Brown do with the economy is anyone’s guess but I daresay it will be more of the same (more neo-liberalism, “reforming” public services, renewed authoritarianism and screwing the poor i.e. people who are electorally expendable).

There won’t be any swings to the left it will be veering ever more to the right with a devil-may-care attitude as Brown knows his political days are numbered. And that means bad news for anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.

Here’s to the fightback comrades……

Boot camps: Tories short, sharp, shock for the poor

And now we have the battle of the right-wing ideologues or to simplify it, “anything you can do, I can do better”. The Tories whose new, improved, lovable, fluffy wuffy demeanour has slipped again to show they are still the vile scumbags of old. This time it’s on sending the unemployed to “boot camps”, cos it is all about discipline and if they refuse they will lose their benefits. And privately run companies like the Australian based, Work Directions, will possibly get first refusal (and they are lousy on pay and conditions).

“The measures should cut crime because people would not be hanging around with nothing to do, Grayling will say. For those who decided to embark on a life of crime because they would not work and could not get benefit, there would be “zero tolerance from the criminal justice system”.

How myopic, stereotypical and reactionary. It won’t cut crime probably increase it. Treating people in a dehumanising way will only alienate further. But this populist measure will have support amongst the right-wing voters and that is deeply troubling.

But hey, NL has kept shtum because they too have their own right-wing ideological agenda to screw the poor with. And with all the losses NL has incurred over the weeks instead of rethinking their right-wing strategy and veering “left”, they will plot a course that goes “right”, “right” .

Though if the Tories are elected in 2 years time then their right-wing attacks and ideology will be far more turbo-charged than NL and will be brutal to the core. If you think NL are bad then you aint seen nothing yet!

Thanks to Frenetic as well for bringing it to my attention…