I guess anyone born much before the mid-50s is going to have trouble with the early years, says Jim. You don't know the half of it. I was born in 1960, and I've really struggled with anything before 1966. I like Rubber Soul well enough, and I think Another side of Bob Dylan is a really important album, but there's no comparison with how strongly I feel about most of the later choices.

So my list starts in 1966 - around the time the clock stopped on popular music. Most of these are, in my opinion, seriously great albums; several of them are so great they've pushed out other great albums (Screamadelica, The Queen is Dead and the Beta Band's 3 EPs are just some of the albums that surprised me by not making the list, not to mention anything by Robyn Hitchcock).

Share and enjoy. I think any three of these would give you a pretty good view of my mental soundworld, should you be interested in it.

Once Blair et al dreamed of a hegemonic project that would dominate the centre left for decades. At this rate they’ll be lucky to salvage anything from the wreckage.

Which reminded me of something I wrote for Casablanca (anyone else remember Casablanca?) in October 1994. To set the scene, John Major's Conservative government had been re-elected two years earlier; John Smith had died in May; Tony Blair (the then Shadow Home Secretary) had been elected to lead the Labour Party in July; Melanie Phillips was still writing for the Observer; and Barry Norman presented Film 94. I don't understand the bit about Bill Clinton.

A gloom of one's own

Just what is it that makes today's Left so different, so depressing?

When I was an infantile leftist there were two main groups on the Left, the Campaigners and the Believers. (Three, if you count the Labour Party Members). The best kind of Campaigning, it was generally agreed, was going on strike. The rest of the Left would immediately rally round and offer comradely advice - to stay out for as long as it took (the Trots), to stay out forever and picket everyone in the world until they came out too (the anarchists), to make the rich pay for the crisis (the RCPB(M-L)). Campaigning by leafletting, blocking the traffic and so on was not so good: this made you a Single-Issue Campaigner, and you would usually only be allowed into the Left after most people had gone. (Being on the Left means knowing all the Issues). And if you Campaigned by harbouring foxes and releasing chickens nobody would even talk to you except the anarchists, but that didn't matter because it's about something much bigger than just like politics, right.

Like many people, I rapidly graduated from Campaigning to Believing. This is considerably less strenuous, as it consists mainly of (a) finding the right Line and (b) recruiting more Believers. The idea is to ensure that, come the inevitable collision with History, you will be equipped with (a) clean ideological underwear and (b) plenty of witnesses. Being a Believer isn't a bad way of meeting people and it does get you out of the house (usually on Tuesday evenings, for some reason - so three proletarian cheers to the BBC for moving Barry Norman to Mondays). On the other hand, it is fairly pointless. Realising this, many Believers gravitate towards Campaigning organisations, sometimes in quite large and organised groups. Others attempt to unite the Left, presumably on the basis that if you assemble a large enough group of Believers it will automatically turn into a Campaign. The only problem with this strategy is that the idea of uniting the Left is in fact a Line in its own right and thus only attracts its own Believers - just another strand in the Left's great dayschool.

About the Labour Party Members there isn't much I can say, never having shared their belief in the capacity of a Labour government to enact socialism - I suppose every movement needs its dreamers. Actually the rest of us always tacitly relied on the Labour Party. The way it worked was that the press and the BBC would attack Labour for being left-wing - or praise them for being left-wing, it didn't really matter - and we would attack them for not being left-wing enough. Even the anarchists used to join in, attacking Labour as a way of getting at the Left as a whole. It was quite a good recruiting tactic, while it lasted.

That was how I used to see things - I'm less optimistic nowadays. Most of the Believers have never quite recovered from the end of actually existing Stalinism - arguing about whether Cuba is a deformed workers' state just isn't the same somehow. You don't get the same class of Believers these days, anyway - whatever happened to Red Flame? or Big Stripe? These days there's hardly anyone doing any Campaigning, either, apart from those young people who sit down in front of trees, play didgeridoos and tell us they won't get fooled like we did. (They call themselves 'zippies', apparently - I grow old, I grow old). Good luck to them, anyway - they'll need it, now that the Labour Party thinks the Criminal Justice Bill isn't such a bad idea.

Ah yes, the Labour Party. It's not Labour's abstaining on the Criminal Justice Bill that bothers me, or their refusal to support the signal workers; it's not all the weird stuff which Tony Blair apparently believes (cannabis should stay illegal, the electoral system couldn't be better and the middle class bore the brunt of the recession - Dan Quayle eat your heart out). It's true that Tony Blair went to a minor public school, but then so did Prince Charles, and look how well he's turned out. It's not fair to attack Blair for coming across as smug, ugly and dull, either - put next to John Major, who wouldn't?

What bothers me (and I'm amazed it doesn't bother more people - that's depressing in itself) is Tony Blair's obvious intention of redefining Labour as a kind of Socially Responsible Mildly Reactionary Party, somewhere between the Right of the Liberal Democrats and the Left of Melanie Phillips. If he succeeds (which means winning two elections - look at Bill Clinton) Labour will have ceased to exist as a party of the Left. If he fails (which seems highly likely - look at Bill Clinton) Labour will probably just cease to exist. Either way it means that, for the first time since the Labour Party was founded, there's no party worth voting for with any kind of commitment to the Left - which is an uncomfortable prospect for Believers and Campaigners alike.

What makes it even worse is the odd references to 'socialism' from Blair's direction - a 'socialism' which, for the first time in history, says nothing about either collective rights (except those of 'society') or individual freedoms (except the freedom to 'achieve'). It's as if they'd realised that the Left could never be completely defeated while we still had a language to call our own. (We've still got 'Comrade', I suppose, and 'Point of order, Chair', but that's about it).

It's almost enough to make you envy the Greens. But not quite.

What I didn't consider was what would happen if Blair and his acolytes succeeded and then failed, by failing to sort out the succession. Or succeeded and then washed their hands of the whole thing, for that matter. Essentially, Blair's done to Labour what Thatcher did to the Tories. Leaving... what? Will:

There was always the risk that New Labour was an ironic echo of a former political era. The commitment to the original values of Labour, but without the policies of Labour, always teetered on the edge of farce. The language of 'tackling poverty', 'democratic empowerment', being 'progressive' was not invented, but borrowed from the initial tragedy of failed socialist ambitions. ... But to take that socialist vocabulary, then to marry it to Thatcherism, was to invite failure for a second time as farce. Should we be all that surprised that inequality is rising as fast as it is?

But then again, maybe New Labour was the tragedy, because if one thing is certain it's that it's about to be followed by a farce. ... Within two years, the country will have elected a new government on the basis of no policies whatsoever, and which we have so little confidence in that the honesty or otherwise of their claims is no longer even discussed. The Conservative Party have succeeded in losing all of their unpleasant political baggage by dumping any form of baggage whatsoever.

Q1. How would you define "atheism"?

The dogmatic certainty that God does not exist, and that His non-existence really matters. Like Paulie, I prefer 'agnostic' as a label.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

Church of England; I described it here. We were quite big on the story about feeding the hungry and freeing the prisoners, and the one about the woman taken in adultery, and the bit with the money-changers in the Temple. We weren't particularly bothered about what happens when you die - or even, really, about what happened when Jesus died.

Q3. How would you describe "Intelligent Design", using only one word?

Dishonest. (What's the point of this question? It'd be far more interesting to write a paragraph, or even a sentence.)

Q4. What scientific endeavour really excites you?

Anything to do with history, up to and including palaeontology. But science has a lot to offer our understanding of even quite recent periods. Get a load of this, from a recent LRB:

In 1998, Michael Bennett revealed that a badly burned charter in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and their male descent. This declaration was never made public, and it was quite unclear that a king had any right to regulate the succession in this way. If valid, it made John of Gaunt, and Henry after him, heirs to the throne should Richard, the son of Edward’s eldest son, the Black Prince, die childless, and excluded the March line, whose royal blood came through Edward’s granddaughter. The declaration was probably made at Gaunt’s prompting and must have been known to Henry at an early point, and to Richard too.

New discoveries from fourteenth-century manuscripts - that's exciting.

(The space programme was fantastic, too.)

Q5. If you could change one thing about the "atheist community", what would it be and why?

What: its arrogant condescension towards the rest of the world. Why: because it's not a good way to relate to people. Marxists feel quite certain that they (or rather we) have got the key to human history, but we also believe that everyone else needs to get it for themselves. Freudians feel similarly confident that they (or we) have got the psyche down pat - but, again, we don't go around pouring scorn on the unanalysed masses. Neither group would dream of claiming that our particular brand of enlightenment had dibs on the word 'bright'. I'd like to see some humility from atheists - some acknowledgment that it's possible to learn from people whose mental universes strike you as daft.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said "I’m joining the clergy", what would be your first response?

I'd be both disappointed and pleased, which would probably necessitate quite a long conversation. My children are both personally tolerant, politically liberal and intellectually curious; I've known clergy who were all three, so let's assume that, in this scenario, these character traits haven't changed. But I'd still be disappointed, since I don't think belief in a personal saviour who forgives sins and guarantees admission to Heaven is particularly healthy. Admittedly, when I was growing up (as I said above) we got along fine in the Church of England without bothering much about that end of things, but I think it'd be hard to pull this off while actually wearing a dogcollar. I'd be pleased, at the same time, because I think that - even taking into account their role in fostering supernaturalist illusions - most clergy do more good than harm. (I'd certainly rather that than they went into advertising.)

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

If I went in for this sort of thing, it'd be the First Cause. I tried to refute it in a rather simple-minded church youth group once, many years ago, using an insanely complex theory which I'd got from Isaac Asimov - there was a singularity before the Big Bang, and then there was also a singularity of anti-matter, and there was a Big Bang in the anti-matter universe too - only it was more complicated than that because there was another singularity... no, right, there was another pair of singularities, that's right, only when these two singularities had their Big Bangs they were actually going backwards in time... and the thing is, right, before the Big Bang all these singularities cancelled each other out, right, which meant that actually nothingness could turn into four separate singularities at any moment, so like it could be happening all the time...

A much better answer, I think, is we don't know. We don't know, but we - collectively, as a species - are trying to find out. Isn't that exciting? (History again, you see.)

Q8. What’s your most "controversial" (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?

As far as capital-A atheists go, see above, QQ1 and 5, and below, Q9. (We Guardian-reading live-and-let-live agnostics don't really have the kind of orthodoxy this question implies.)

Q9. Of the "Four Horsemen" (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

None of the above. Both Dawkins and Dennett would be good on their own territory, if only they'd stick to it. I went off Dawkins when I first read about memes, which is some time ago now. Dennett these days is quite openly an evangelist, and I don't trust evangelists. Hitchens has very little to offer in this area; I haven't seen much by Sam Harris, but what I have seen suggests that he's a twit. The only self-proclaimed atheist writer I've got any time for is Philip Pullman; he takes religion seriously as part of real, intellligent people's lives.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?

Ian Paisley, just to see what would happen. But I don't believe in persuading people to abandon their beliefs - for atheism as for Marx or Freud, people need to see that it works when you use it and then realise that it would work for them. Or not - it's up to them.

And I tag... you, dear (presumptively atheist) reader. Or not - it's up to you.

I’d tend to the view that it is difficult to see how 26 countries won’t move forward. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no advantage to the status quo.
...
I was once, in a fairly received way, quite wedded to the federal model. Result? Supportive of the EU. But now I’ve shifted much more to an intergovernmental viewpoint. Result? Critically supportive of the EU, and consequently a Yes vote yesterday. The thing is that I’m simply not concerned about issues of ‘democratic’ legitimation that seems to exercise federalists, or the more starry eyed on the No side. ... So, while an EU wide vote on a Treaty is a great idea on one level, I simply don’t believe it will happen, that there is any political or popular will for it and therefore have put it out of my mind.

In similar vein, my old Socialist Society comrade John Palmer comments at CLR:

The best way forward would be for the other 26 Member States to complete ratification (18 already have). Then the Irish government should agree to the provision which allows the treaty to come into force if there is at least two thirds in favour. Dublin could volunteer to resile temporarily from involvement in those areas of decision directly affected by the Lisbon Treaty provisions at least while a solution is found within Ireland itself. I acknowledge this will not be simple. But this would be better than an Irish veto (made possible by c100,000 Irish voters) which prevents all the rest of the European Union (250 million people) going ahead. It should be remembered that the peoples of Spain and Luxembourg have already voted in referendums to ratify the original Constitutional Treaty but there votes now count for nothing.

What seems to emerge from these arguments - perhaps more clearly from WbS's post than John's comment - is an assumption that the project represented by the Lisbon Treaty is good in and of itself, whatever the actual people of Europe may think about it. Without some such assumption, John's comment doesn't make much sense - apart from anything else, it's not at all obvious to me why the Irish No vote should be seen as any more trifling numerically, or any less valid politically, than the Luxembourg Yes vote. If you do make that assumption, on the other hand, the Irish plebiscite is an embarrassment twice over: you don't want the Irish to say No, but on the other hand you don't really want them to think you need them to say Yes. In this sense the EU project isn't so much undemocratic as anti-democratic. I don't think 'inter-governmental' is the word: the EU's long gone beyond de Gaullean intergovernmentality to build its own European governing institutions and its own European bureaucracy, which have developed very largely in their own sphere, with their own rules and under their own momentum. Endorsement from below is an optional extra; it's nice to have, but not getting it shouldn't slow things down too much. (Consider John's 'best way forward'. If the rules under which the project is currently working say that 100% consent is required for ratification, and if 100% consent has become impossible, surely any best way forward has to begin by acknowledging that ratification isn't going to happen?)

As progressive as EU influence on Britain has sometimes been, I find it very hard to see EU integration in terms of Jacques Delors vs UKIP. Socially progressive it may be in some respects, but economically the EU's centre of gravity is well over on the Right. (Flash back to an old Communist couple I bumped into in Croydon some time in the 70s. We got talking about the EEC, as it then was, and I mumbled something about how I was concerned that it was better for, er, business interests... than it was for, er, the trade unions... The old bloke cut me off - "Well, it's a capitalist club, isn't it?" Yup - capitalist, that's the word I was looking for. It's a good word.) More to the point, the main polarisation that seems to be emerging isn't between Left and Right, but between a pro-EU establishment and a large proportion of the people they purport to represent - and the issue on which it's emerging is, precisely, representation. On one side, WbS (I’m simply not concerned about issues of ‘democratic’ legitimation that seems to exercise federalists, or the more starry eyed on the No side). On the other, Splintered Sunrise:

The Lisbon Treaty may not be quite definitively sunk – these Euro-treaties have a habit of coming back from the dead – but yes, it’s definitely holed beneath the waterline, thanks to the one EU state where the constitution requires the plebs to have their say, much to the frustration of both the Eurocrats and the Dublin political class. This is all to the good.

And my new favourite political blog, Obsolete:

primarily it was a vote against something which only judges, bureaucrats and lawyers can understand and a vote against the politicians who didn't even attempt to help those voting understand. ... If you don't understand it, vote no. Who could possibly argue with such basic logic, or blame them for doing so?

Something similar seems to be happening around David Davis. My immediate reaction, before I'd seen the next day's press, was:

Given that it’s a safe Tory seat, it puts Labour in a very difficult position. If they don’t stand a candidate, Davis will win the argument. If they treat it like a normal by-election, they’ll get flattened and Davis will win the argument. If they fight really hard and dirty - painting Davis as soft on Al Qaeda & essentially going for the core Tory authoritarian vote - they’ve got a chance of getting a respectable vote, but they’ll alienate historic Labour voters still more. And shaking up the Labour vote is always a good tactic for the Tories - it’d be nice to think all those people would either stay loyal or wait for a socialist party to come over the horizon, but they’re more likely to drift over to the Tories on the general principle of giving the other lot a chance. (I wonder if Davis would have had this idea if it hadn’t been for Crewe & Nantwich.)

It’s good tactics in support of a sound political principle, and a timely challenge to a tired and arrogant regime propped up by a whipped majority. Just a shame it’s a Tory who’s doing it, really.

So I was a bit shocked by the press reaction (Obsolete again there) - repeatedly shocked, in fact ("I guess the Graun's a bit New Labour, but surely they'll... oh. The Telegraph's made it lead story, and they're Tories, they're bound to... oh. What about the Indie, they're pretty sound on civil liberties, surely they'll... oh.") Shocked all over again - and dismayed - by the Labour Party's intention not to stand a candidate, and more particularly by their apparent determination to brazen it out on the grounds that... actually, what were the grounds again, other than not wanting to have the argument? WorldbyStorm puts it well, again - in a post which I'm afraid takes the anti-democratic side of the argument, again:

Well, that it would be - if anyone turned up. But there in lies the rub. No one appears to want to. After all, why try to contest a safe Conservative constituency? What political percentage is there in that. So the Liberal Democrats have announced they’re not in the running, while giving rhetorical support for his stance, and Labour will presumably follow suit - without the support rhetorical or otherwise.

Fight a by-election? What political percentage is there in that? To say I don't often agree with Bloggers4Labour would be an understatement - I don't think it's ever happened before - but I thought this post was excellent:

If initial reactions are anything to go by, Labour's big guns are going to take a depressingly contemptuous line ... Equally tawdry, I feel, would be the decision not to field a Labour candidate at the forthcoming Haltemprice and Howden by-election. That would be a decision bound to salt the earth for the local CLP and the PPC, who might well pay the price at a local level for years to come. Whatever our individual views, Labour, nationally, has made its decision, and so it must stick up for its policy, whether that allows it to hold its vote, or costs it a deposit. The Lib Dems are entitled not to stand if they fully support the Conservatives, but Labour can't withdraw too, leaving one side of the argument/electorate with no (mainstream) representative.

Labour may not have many supporters in David Davis's constituency, but there are some. What are they supposed to do, abstain? The Labour Party - a Labour government, as Neil Kinnock might say - advising its supporters not to vote? As with the Lisbon Treaty, what seems to emerge here is an instrumental attitude to democracy - democratic accountability as a means to an end, or rather one of a number of possible means to an end - which is ultimately rather hard to distinguish from simply not believing in democracy. And, as with the Lisbon Treaty, I suspect that the establishment which believes it can substitute assumed consent for democratic endorsement has misjudged the public mood: many of those whose consent is being assumed may feel inclined to withhold it, or at least to be given the option to do so. (A particularly scummy aspect of Labour's strategy is that it'll be hard to count a Davis vote as a vote against Labour if Labour don't stand.) As with Lisbon, finally, we can look to see this by-election producing some strange bedfellows.

It's true that Davis doesn't have anything to teach the Left about civil liberties, but that's not really the point - the lesson isn't in the importance of civil liberties but in the fact that people value them, and it's not the Left that needs to learn it. And I suppose it's true that there's something backward-looking, even vaguely Norman Yoke-ish, about upholding the common law rights of the freeborn Briton against managerialist incursions, from London or Brussels. But that's not really the point either: if a bad law is passed, giving the state still more power or still less accountability, thinking we were better off before that law was passed doesn't make you a reactionary.

Would I vote No to Lisbon? Like a shot - as I wrote somewhere else, "any time those people give us a vote I’d be inclined to vote No - particularly in a case where the vote’s called to ratify decisions that have already been made without any real attempt to explain their implications, let alone to allow input from below". Would I vote for Davis? That's a bit harder - I vote Green, I've voted Lib Dem in the past (I was young), and I can imagine myself voting Plaid Cymru, but if I've kept anything from my Labour upbringing it's a conviction that you don't vote Tory. Let's just say that I believe, with B4L, that we should battle illiberal and conservative ideas and values, with liberal, cooperative, and socialist ones - and that, on that basis, I'd very much welcome the opportunity to vote against Labour.

Update 16/6 The response to the 42 days proposal by the soft-left Compass group caused a bit of a storm: the group campaigned against, but then both Jon Trickett and Jon Cruddas, its parliamentary spokesperson and leading figurehead respectively, voted in favour. Trickett has since resigned his position, albeit with a remarkably bad grace. Emily Thornberry has been cited as a Compass MP who voted against, and as a potential future leader of the parliamentary group. So who's this

lectur[ing] us that:
• The Irish didn't really mean resounding ‘no’ (didn't understand what they were doing, poor loves) delivered to the EU treaty last week and that Europe should find their way round this inconvenient legal fact.

• That it is impossible that an MP might put his career on the line, resign and seek re-election on an issue like civil liberties on principle.

Why, it’s Emily Thornberry.

Back in my Socialist Society days I once suggested to a friend that the Society ought to line up with the soft Left - which back then meant the likes of Robin Cook and Clare Short, ILP, the pre-Twigg LCER and maybe Chartist at a pinch. My friend demurred & said the trouble with the soft Left was that, like other soft things, they were liable to get squashed. OK, it's not Oscar Wilde, but I think there was a lot of truth in it.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

(Parenthetically, seven's rather a lot, isn't it? One of the reasons I haven't been blogging much recently is that I can't seem to get a blog post finished in less than an hour - and the thought that I'm going to be working on a blog post for the next hour doesn't often lift the spirits. But let's see how it goes.)

(Five minutes already. Damn!)

(Update 6/6/08 The other thing I dislike about blogging - at least, the way I do it - is the amount of time I end up spending on edits and updates after a post is published. I hate that.)

Shirley Collins, Fare thee well my dearest dear
I'm immersed in Amaranth at the moment; it's a late-70s album by Shirley Collins which I bought for my mother a long time ago, and it's quite wonderful. Side one consists of traditional material recorded with the Albion Band; mostly fairly conventional stuff from the folkier end of seventies folk-rock, with a few odd-sounding instruments thrown in. Side two was recorded eight years earlier and features Dolly Collins on pipe organ and what I think is an earlier, or prototype, Albion Band; the instrumentation's heavy on recorders and sackbuts. Shirley Collins' voice is thin and wavery, and on this track in particular (which opens side one) she's battling with a fiddly arrangement over a big lumbering rock 4:4, but still: there's something utterly unencumbered and direct about the songs themselves, and about the joys and sorrows they describe. It's unforgettably moving, this music; it'll give you emotional earworms. Incidentally, this song was collected in 1904 by Vaughan Williams; a very similar song was a popular broadside ballad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It makes me slightly dizzy thinking about it.

Scott Walker, The old man's back again
An extraordinary song from Scott Four, which I was introduced to recently by the medium of the Earlies' "Secret Broadcast" mix series. This song stops time: over a relentless, quietly urgent drumbeat there's a film-score orchestral backing so sparse it hardly seems to be there, and over it all Scott's immense voice hangs like banners. I'm not sure what's more remarkable - that he should have been inspired to write about Brezhnev replacing Khrushchev, or that he should have done it in this bizarre, hyperreal way, outdoing "Blues for Ceausescu" 25 years early: And ‘entrez vie!’ he cries, with eyes that ring like chimes/His anti-worlds go spinning through his head. A strange, still track.

John Kelly, Spencer the Rover
More folk, but this time from a contemporary album. John's been performing for 40 years and has got quite good at it - as well as singing he plays harmonium, guitar, cittern, whistle and (I've been told) fiddle. This album (his first, bizarrely enough) is mainly John with harmonium and guitar. His voice is expressive and flexible enough to carry a traditional song unaccompanied - the words don't just hang on the tune like washing on a line; on the songs he plays on harmonium, in particular, the accompaniment adds a whole extra dimension. But judge for yourself - you can here this song here.

the Dandy Warhols, Love is the new feel awful
I loved Welcome to the monkey house, but fought shy of Odditorium... when I saw what bad reviews it was getting. I finally got it (reduced) a few weeks back, and I can see why people didn't like it. Give it time, though, and it gets through to you. The thing to remember about the Dandys is that they are the coolest band in the world - at least, that's the principle they work on, and it makes it easier to get into their music if you give them the benefit of the doubt. The concept for this album is essentially "the coolest band in the world jam aimlessly in the studio, and it still works!" - and it nearly does. What's interesting about this song is what happens when a band start playing, and become so convinced they're doing something amazing that they just keep on at it. What you end up with, among other things, is a lot of feedback - it becomes an instrument in its own right by the end of the track. In other words, it's not so much rock'n'roll as the noise of rock'n'roll - the sound rock'n'roll makes. It's actually quite radical stuff - with the right editing it could be on the Faust tapes. Speaking of which...

Faust, J'ai mal aux dents
What can I say, my son was practising his French vocab the other day, I taught him how to say "My teeth ache and so do my feet", and then I thought I should just check the source... Just wonderful. It's a driving rock track, only with these words that don't seem to make any sense and don't quite seem to be in English and they repeat oddly, and they don't seem to make any sense and they repeat oddly, and the drummer doesn't quite sound like a rock drummer and there's this odd little synthesised bzzzt! on every other third beat, and after seven minutes or so the keyboard player holds the bzzzt until it swamps the entire song, and then, and then... It's wonderful stuff - deeply experimental and viscerally accessible at the same time. I got this album when I was 12, would you believe. (My son's into Scouting for Girls. Where's the young Richard Branson when you need him?)

Nic Jones, the Outlandish Knight
More folk. One man, his guitar and a Child ballad. A strange tune (mostly traditional), that seems to go off somewhere unexpected and loop back on itself, and some very strange lyrics (boy meets girl, boy attempts to kill girl, girl kills boy, girl meets parrot...) The singing's strong and melodic, although the voicing is rather of its time (early 1970s) - ve-ry ex-press-ive in a bloke-y sort of way - and the guitar playing's terrific. Nic Jones's accident was a dreadful blow for music as well as for Nic himself.

Flying Saucer Attack, At night
Update Off with you. Last night I forgot about a much more suitable candidate:
Beth Orton, Heartland truckstop
I loved Beth Orton's first album, liked the second and was very bored by the third, so it took a record shop sale (see under Dandy Warhols) to get me to buy her fourth, Comfort of Strangers. I'm glad I did, and glad I persisted with it - musically and lyrically it's easily the best thing she's done since that first album. For that I think we can thank Jim O'Rourke, who worked with her on the album (at the time of the third album she was working with Ryan Adams). On the other hand, O'Rourke has to take some of the blame for the inconsequential, second-runthrough arrangements - these are short songs, often because they get to the end of the lyrics and then stop - and in particular the awful, murky production. It's the opposite of a Kieran Hebden production, where you feel like everything's playing at once about two inches from your head - it sounds like real instruments being played in real time, but in another room. Even the titles seem designed to repel boarders - Beth Orton's written some terrific lines in these songs, but almost none of them make it into a song title (or a chorus). From this song:

We're all bridgebuilders' daughters, with incestuous dreams
Confidentially speaking, things are as they seem

It's good stuff - murky and refrain-free, but good stuff.

Seven songs, then. (66 minutes - I knew it.) I won't nominate anyone - tig me in comments if you want to do it next.

Παραθέτω το δικό μου χειρόγραφο μήνυμα. Poetry is made of simple men (nuff said)....

Ευχαριστώ τον φίλο μου Ζήση για την πρόσκληση...

http://autographcollectors.blogspot.com/

I love reading about tragic figures who confound the shallow mediocrity of the middle class, go mad with paranoia, and then deliver dramatic monologues before being dragged off stage. Sometimes they actually "win," but usually they don't, and that's just fine. The act of defiance is what matters. Anarchists are like performance artists, living out their art despite boredom, bafflement, and catcalls from the audience. [That's also a fair description of blogging, by the way.]

It's kind of a bizarre fascination that's hard to explain to normal people, but it's somehow fundamental to my psychology. Perhaps it's fundamentally immature, but I consider myself lucky to have been able to interview some of these anarchists and even live out some of their scenarios. That is also why I count as some of the high points of my life the times when I first read Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Büchner, Robert Anton Wilson, Jacques Ellul, and the four gospels of Jesus Christ.

Which, interestingly enough, brings me to this blog entry by Greg Boyd, former pastor to Theodore Beale:

A Call to Christian Anarchy

The Kingdom Jesus established is anarchistic in that it recognizes God alone as the arche (supreme power). It thus lives free from all other powers (an-arche [anarchy] means without authority). Governments are part of the fallen, oppressed world system that has been done away with in Christ.

In Ellul's estimation, it's not appropriate for Kingdom people to either support or revolt against governments. This gives them too much credit. Rather, following the example of Jesus, we should ignore them as much as possible, put up with them as much as we need to, and stay focused on living out the radical Kingdom. If we do this, then we, like Jesus, will find ourselves revolting against the government (and culture). We are, most fundamentally, called to be non-conformists. Our service to the world is the way our counter-cultural lives expose the invalidity of all forms of government by manifesting the reign of God.

I saw this on a blog somewhere years ago - apologies if it was yours. I tried it but didn't blog the output, because at the time it seemed too obvious; the idea that it might change over time hadn't occurred to me.

Anyway, here's my list, excluding any letters for which no blog home pages came up (visits to specific posts don't count).

A is for Aaronovitch Watch
B is for Blood & Treasure
C is for The Cedar Lounge Revolution
D is for Dave's Part closely followed by Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
E is for Eine Kleine Nichtmusik
G is for The Gaping Silence (fortunately)
I is for Idle Words
K is for The Early Days of a Better Nation
L is for Mac Uaid
N is for The Quiet Road
P is for Private Secret Diary
Q is for qwghlm
S is for Socialist Unity, Splintered Sunrise, Stumbling and Mumbling and Smokewriting in that order
V is for The Virtual Stoa
Y is for Alternate Seat of TYR

And I nominate... anyone who wants to put themselves through all that. I have to confess, as an exercise it was rather less interesting than I'd hoped. But it'll be a good one to revisit in a year or two, if I'm still blogging by then.

Over to you, if you feel like it.

Spread The Word!!

Εκείνη τη στιγμή, το μικρό κορίτσι, η Ρομπέρτα, γύρισε απότομα το κεφάλι του και του έριξε ένα βλέμμα απόλυτης αγριάδας. "Εσύ!" του είπε, με φωνή σφυριχτή και παγωμένη σαν το κροτάλισμα ενός φιδιού.

"Λάρι!" πετάχτηκε ο Γουίλμπερτ Φρέισερ. "Μην γυρνάς το κεφάλι σου! Μην ταράζεις την ισορροπία!"

Να ευχαριστήσω τους Zissis και Dunno..

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?

Wrapping paper. Bags are for bottles of wine.

2. Real tree or artificial?

We switched to real trees a few years ago. This year was our first dead tree stuck in a bit of wood; it dried out quite a lot over the twelve days, and shed prodigiously when we took it out, but actually stayed greener than last year's (purportedly) live tree in a tub.

3. When do you put up the tree?

Last weekend but one before Christmas.

4. When do you take the tree down?

January 6th. Obviously.

5. Do you like egg nog?

I think I've only had it once. It was OK. Like Rob, I'll take mulled wine (or Glühwein) any day.

6. Favourite gift received as a child?

Depends what you mean by 'child'. I've got very fond memories of the thing I got one Christmas to go with my Matchbox car track thing whose name I forget no not Hot Wheels... If you put in two D batteries, it would accelerate your cars to enormous speeds, without the need to clip the track on to the side of a table. I was mildly disappointed to see that the dials on the side were painted on, but despite that it was a present and a half (machinery! speed! noise!)

When I was much, much older, I told my parents where they could get Soft Machine's Third at a 10% discount; since CBS had already cut the price to £2.83 (for a double album), this was quite a bargain. It's pretty challenging music and I didn't get it straight away, but that Christmas I really enjoyed not getting it - it had the two great attractions of seeming extremely grown-up and extremely unlike anything my parents would listen to.

7. Do you have a nativity scene?

Yes; it's plastic and forty or fifty years old. It came from my wife's mother's house, when she moved into a home.

8. Hardest person to buy for?

I'll pass on that one.

9. Easiest person to buy for?

And that one, although it does bring back a memory of when my daughter was quite small. We asked her what she wanted for Christmas; she thought for a while, then said, "A present."

10. Mail or email Christmas cards?

Physical cards, definitely.

11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?

Again, I'll pass on the details, but it was one that made me think I thought they'd know I'm not like that! Closely followed by Do I look like I'm like that? Am I like that?

12. Favorite Christmas movie?

I'm male, I'm married, I've got kids, I worked for many years at jobs I didn't like, so it has to be It's a wonderful life. Closely followed by Muppet Christmas Carol. This year we also saw Pulp fiction; that was good, too.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?

It gets later and later.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?

Certainly not.

15. Favorite thing to eat/drink at Christmas?

More wine than usual. Posh beer, earlier in the day than usual. I particularly like strong, 'fruity' beers at this time of year. I put 'fruity' in quotes here because of a beer I saw in a supermarket recently, advertised as made with plums and pudding spices. Not the point at all - your ideal winter beer tastes like Christmas pudding, but also tastes like beer. (See also Orval - my favourite Trappist ale - which somehow tastes exactly like a) marmalade b) very dark plain chocolate and c) beer.)

Cheese straws. Stollen. Lebkuchen. And fruit cake, of course. The runaway winner used to be my mother's rum cake (a fridge cake, made with (or rather consisting of) sponge fingers, coffee buttercream icing and rum); I must see if I can find the recipe.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree?

One string of each.

17. Favourite Christmas song?

"In the bleak midwinter", or "O come all ye faithful" (especially on the day, with the Special Christmas Day Verse - for a moment I can almost believe it again). "I wish it could be Christmas every day" (for a few years in the 1970s, Roy Wood was untouchable) or "Have yourself a merry little Christmas" (the original, sad version). It's the season for a sentimental pig-out, basically.

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?

I used to go to my parents'. (For several years the other half and I used to go to our separate parents'; it worked for us.) Then we stayed at home for Christmas and all went to my mother's for New Year. Then my mother died. So it's home, these days.

19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer?

If there's anything I hate more than Clement Moore's ghastly poem it's that bloody awful song about the stupid bloody reindeer with the luminous nose.

Yes, I can name all nine of them.

20. Angel on the tree top or a star?

We alternate.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning of Christmas?

Christmas morning - after breakfast, when we're all together. This was a very big deal when I was a kid (I was one of five); we'd assemble round the dining table, each with a pile of parcels in front of us, and have a kind of diplomatically synchronised unwrapping session. These days it happens on the living-room floor and we let the kids go first, but it's still a big deal. It's Christmas, after all.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of year?

I think this year I'd nominate Sainsbury's Stilton promotion. They bought it in by the ton - with a view to piling high and selling cheap - with the result that what they got was far too young: it was soft, crumbly and clean-tasting instead of solid, waxy and sour. Being young, it also didn't keep, but went smelly within a fortnight. Bah, supermarkets.

23. Favourite ornament theme or colour?

Not really. We usually buy a new tree ornament every year.

24. Favourite for Christmas dinner?

Well, er, turkey. Followed by Christmas pudding. In flames.

25. What do you want for Christmas this year?

Bit late for that.

28. Shopping...Mall or on-line?

I try to avoid both, although it gets harder every year.

29. Do you decorate outside for Christmas or just inside (or at all?)

Just inside.

There's a lot of my own childhood in the way I think about Christmas, and a lot of change and loss. Perhaps that's part of what we do when we celebrate the longest night, in among the crackers and the mince pies ("Absent friends!"). Then Christmas passes, the days grow longer and the year turns.

Old Christmas is past
Twelfth Night is the last
And we bid you Adieu
Great joy to the new

Anyway, you could be forgiven for thinking that this blog was going the same way, or had already gone; come to that, it would be the obvious conclusion for me to draw myself. Call me Bartleby, but I prefer not to: I'm not closing this blog, and will post again. Admittedly, posting is likely to remain fairly sparse; I've been a bit busy lately, and can't see the situation changing in the next couple of months. But I've got something to say about Graham Greene and Corvo, and something slightly less dated about Decent comment on the de Menezes shooting, and something about French supermarkets, and I had this great idea about Bowie's sax-playing and Kazuo Ishiguro, and I really ought to say something about what I've been doing these last few months... Terrors of the earth, I'm telling you. Stand by.

Oh, and a Happy New Year to all my reathe reader of these words. (I'm assuming a solitary reader; I suppose someone could be reading this over your shoulder, in which case the word is 'readers'.) ¡Hasta luego!

Unlike Liam and Andy, I am not now and have never been a member of RESPECT. Like Liam and Andy, I've been paying a lot of attention to the fallout within RESPECT from George Galloway's August letter. I think there are some genuinely hopeful developments taking place, in among the backbiting and abuse: a renewed RESPECT could be the socialist-friendly left-of-Labour electoral party England has been crying out for. (Could be - we're not there yet by any means.)

Here are some of my comments from Andy's blog. My thoughts on all this have developed over time, but I've only edited for clarity, brevity and anonymity.

1st September:

I’ve never liked George Galloway, but I’m pleasantly surprised by the clarity & cogency of this analysis. Yes, it is all about organisational structure, but structure can be very important in deciding what gets done and what doesn’t - and how the membership is involved in those decisions, both before and after they’re made.

You could object that Galloway’s line (and/or my take on it) is naive, inasmuch as there are solid political factors underlying the organisational sclerosis of RESPECT (reasons having to do with the death-grip of the SWP), and he clearly doesn’t address those. I think that would be to underestimate Galloway’s critique (which does after all propose leading roles for Yaqoob and even Thornett). I also think that a lot of the problems with the SWP itself are ultimately organisational - the weird stop/start blend of caution, opportunism and control freakery that the SWP has brought to RESPECT is a culture with quite deep roots in the party itself, and it’s not good for the internal life of the SWP any more than it’s been good for RESPECT. Viewed in this light, I think Galloway’s aim is to stir things up within the SWP, perhaps with the longer-term aim of splitting the party and expelling part of it from the New Model RESPECT. How it pans out will depend on how much discontent there is within the SWP, and how deep the divisions within the leadership run - is anyone sufficiently fed up to want to either break with RESPECT or split the party?

13th September:

There’s something Kremlinological about the lines being drawn - nobody really thinks Galloway is standing up for party democracy, or that the SWP Central Committee wants to eradicate any hint of communalism. As far as I can see the competing lines essentially boil down to “build a weak and diffuse coalition as an element in the SWP’s longer-term socialist programme” and “build a weak and diffuse coalition without preconditions, but in the hope that it will eventually become less weak and diffuse”. The CC line sounds more socialist, but I think in practice it’s less constructive.

22nd September:

I don’t think anyone’s saying “SWP out of RESPECT” - just that the relationship between the two needs to change. If that line prevails and the SWP responds by flouncing out… well, it’ll be a gamble, but I think it’s one worth taking. (Hopefully some of the better SWP/RESPECT comrades would jump the right way.) In any case [if] RESPECT is currently only kept going by the SWP machine, would it really be worth having on that basis?

3rd October:

There’s strong evidence, in some towns at least, that RESPECT has quite consciously targeted Muslim areas. Building on the massive mobilisation against the war isn’t a bad idea, but it depends how it’s done. I’ve seen RESPECT campaign material which focused exclusively on causes of interest to British Muslims. That’s not to say they were causes I wouldn’t support (Iraq, Palestine, anti-racism…) but that the list didn’t include anything calculated to appeal to non-Muslim working-class voters, or for that matter to Muslim voters who saw themselves primarily as working-class.

What does need to be dealt with quite openly is the difference between the type of approach I’m describing and the allegations of ‘personalist and clientelist’ organising. If that’s happened, it’s a disgrace and should be rooted out. But at the moment it’s unclear a lot of the time whether ‘communalism’ refers to this kind of corrupt practice or simply focusing on the Muslim vote - a legitimate approach, albeit one I disagree with on political grounds.

Ultimately I think the approach RESPECT took is a tragically missed opportunity. They could have gone a lot harder at the outset on class perspectives and on potentially divisive issues such as feminism and LGBT; the result would have been a smaller organisation in the early days, perhaps, but a much more coherent one. Instead we get socialist principle wheeled out as a factional weapon within the party, at a time when most of the early successes have been dissipated.

15th October:

Kevin Ovenden and Rob Hoverman expelled for working with Galloway; Nick Wrack expelled for standing for the Organiser post, whose creation Rees & German had agreed to… I can’t see that any of it makes any sense unless the SWP leadership is determined to a) leave RESPECT b) split RESPECT c) wreck RESPECT or d) some combination of the above. These certainly don’t look like the actions of an organisation preparing to operate as a minority current within a broader party - or even preparing to operate within a broader party on terms which might at some point in the future reduce them to a minority current.

There’s a much bigger question than the relative merits of RESPECT and the Labour Left, which is what happens if RESPECT goes under. To put it another way, which is the worse outcome for the Left in England - successful RESPECT or failed RESPECT? I think for the project to fail now would be bad news for all of us. But I think there’s a chance that what comes out of the current crisis will be a more coherent organisation with a clearer identity, not to mention a healthier relationship with the SWP and other groups. I think that possibility and that danger are far more important than anything that can be said about Galloway. (Whom I dislike, distrust and have very little faith in. Makes a good speech, mind.)

23rd October:

even if we take the SWP leadership at their word and assume they have adopted the vision of a more explicitly socialist RESPECT, vision and strategy aren’t the same thing. I believe RESPECT has the potential to become a coherent left-wing electoral party with an active socialist minority, which is rather more than it is now - but I don’t believe it can realise that potential by allowing the SWP leadership to control it. Anyone who wants to see RESPECT thrive and survive should welcome the critique being voiced by Galloway, Yaqoob, Wrack, Francis et al.

24th October:

a lot of the initial policy compromises have evidently been unmade in the course of the last four years, possibly thanks to the influence of principled leftists within RESPECT. The opposition to the SWP leadership within RESPECT isn't a monolithic bloc, and they certainly don’t all dance to Galloway’s tune. There’s a left and a right within the Galloway/Yaqoob/Francis/Socialist Resistance wing of RESPECT, in other words, and I’m confident that the left will counter any attempt to push the project to the right. At the risk of offering hostages to fortune, RESPECT isn’t over yet; it may just be getting going.

30th October:

It all started, it seems to me, with a power-play by Galloway. If it was implemented unchanged, Galloway’s original proposal would have created a rival to John Rees’s position within RESPECT, with a power base among Galloway’s allies and a focus on electoral success (bearing in mind that we all thought there was an election coming up at the time). As such, the proposal obviously wasn’t welcome to Rees & his allies, and it called for some hard bargaining and careful management. What couldn’t be done was to kick it into touch, because it expressed more than just Galloway’s political self-interest and his belief that a party that stands candidates in elections ought to try and win them. RESPECT hadn’t flourished under the stewardship of Rees & co, and significant groups & individuals within the coalition had some genuine concerns about the way things were going. Galloway’s letter gave a voice to those concerns and put names to some of the people expressing them. It meant that the SWP’s leadership role in RESPECT would never be unchallenged again.

Rees and friends could have bargained and managed the situation; they could have accepted a collegiate leadership; they might well have re-emerged as ‘first among equals’ further down the line. Instead of which they declared war on Galloway - and, by extension, on anyone aligned with him, whether for reasons of principle or convenience.

I said at the time of Hoveman and Ovenden’s expulsions that the SWP leadership’s actions were incomprehensible unless they wanted to leave, split or destroy RESPECT, or some combination of the three. I don’t take any satisfaction in having, apparently, been proved right.

1st November:

for the SWP to pull out of RESPECT tomorrow, taking every dual member with it, would be disastrous for RESPECT. For Linda Smith & her allies to witch-hunt the SWP out of the organisation would be to saw off the branch they’re sitting on; tactically it would be crazy, stupid or sectarian to the point of obsessiveness. I don’t believe they’re any of those things.

So what is going on? I think it’s important to draw two distinctions: between reducing someone’s power and reducing it to nothing; and between long-term and short-term. The first is the difference between Edward Heath’s approach to the Left and the unions and Thatcher’s; the second is the difference between Thatcher and Pinochet. The Smith/Yaqoob/Galloway side of the argument are agreed that the SWP’s formal power within RESPECT needs to be reduced. There are people on that side of the argument (possibly Galloway himself) who believe that in the longer term it should be reduced to nothing. There isn’t anybody, as far as I can tell, who believe that it should be reduced to nothing immediately - that the SWP should be chased out of RESPECT.

The SWP leadership are doubly to blame for the escalation of this dispute, it seems to me: they’ve interpreted a demand for reduction of their power as an all-out threat to their position, then interpreted that as an immediate threat. In the process they’ve created that confrontation. It's true to say that some, at least, of the SWP leadership’s critics have taken a position of “if you want a fight, you can have it” - and this is regrettable. But when concessions are exploited, well-intentioned criticisms are dismissed unread and challenges are met with strident denunciation and refusal to debate, it does tend to try one’s patience.

(Part of the problem, of course, is that you don’t start a position war with the SWP with much hope of winning - SWP cadre do tend to be very good at this stuff. It’s just not the stuff that’s needed right now.)

Having said all that, it’d be nice to think that the RESPECT which comes out of all this would include some SWP members. (Even now, the RESPECT-loyalists don’t seem to have any political quarrel with the SWP-loyalists - and that goes double for someone like Lavalette, whose work is a model of what RESPECT should be doing.)

2nd November:

I don't think there's any mystery around why Linda Smith & her allies don’t want to see the conference go ahead. They've stated their reasons - they’ve been comprehensively outmanoeuvred, out-organised and out-mobilised, by both fair means and foul. As a result, the legitimacy of the organisational structures of the coalition itself have been brought into dispute - but, as part of the same process, internal democracy has been boxed off to the point where that dispute can’t take place. In this situation, a pause for thought is the only option - ‘full speed ahead’ equals ’self-destruct’.

With two conferences now scheduled for 17th November, this last comment needs some expansion. By pressing ahead with organising for the planned conference, without addressing any of the issues raised by Smith & Yaqoob, the SWP put the 'renewal' camp in an impossible position. Turn up at the conference and they'd almost certainly be outvoted and outmanoeuvred; stay away and they'd lose by default. Worse, organising their own event at a later date would risk organised intervention by SWP partisans. (Before anyone cries paranoia, I've been in conferences where the SWP wanted to make sure that a mildly critical point of view got across; it's not pretty. The 'single transferable speech' is one word for the tactic (In response to the last speaker, I'd just like to say that one of the earlier speakers raised a crucial question...)) Holding their own event on the same day was really the only option.

That said, it would be good if a split could be avoided; I was particularly glad to see that Michael Lavalette had been willing to share a platform with Galloway and Yaqoob (Andy has photographic evidence). The game is clearly not over yet. (Although after this post I'll probably go back to the usual mixture of political philosophy, popular singing groups and miscellaneous geekage.)

Republicans will reel in the libertarians later in the campaign by tapping into the fear of a communist/gay/multiculti/abortionette Hilary Monster; Democrats will reel in their own fringe by invoking the fascist/racist/patriarchal Flying Theocracy Monster.

I like your blog and I feel we share sufficient common ground for a link to each others blogs to be mutually beneficial.If you agree to link then please contact me at ‘An Unrepentant Communist’

http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/

on the commments page of the current post,and I will immediately link your blog to mine.Looking forward to hearing from you.
Gabriel in County Kerry Ireland

Gabriel, for the love of Marx, give it a rest.

Incidentally, can anyone tell me what's at http://urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=222492? There's a link to this blog there, apparently, but not having an Urban 75 account I can't tell what it is.

Total number of books owned

About 1500, although my wife has just pointed out that many of them aren't actually mine as such. (I had a big clearout a while back. If you've followed that link, I should point out that I do still own two biographies of Ezra Pound.)

Last book bought

Probably Busman's Honeymoon; I had a Wimsey spree a while back. After that I very nearly bought Last Tango In Aberystwyth, but wiser counsels prevailed and I got it from the library. (Malcolm Pryce is good, but not that good. Besides, I'm economising.)

Last book read

Last one completed: When we were Romans by Matthew Kneale. Starts out very much sub-Dog in the Night-time (or sub-Walker Hamilton, of whom I was reminded when reading it) but develops into something sadder and darker. Last but one: Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Fun, but I felt it was done a bit too much for effect - effortful where it should have been playful.

Currently reading: no fiction, unless you count re-reading the A Series of Unfortunate Events books while reading them aloud to my daughter. (I tend to latch on to whatever someone else in the family is reading, as in the case of the last two.) I am reading Bryan Talbot's beauteous phantasmagoria Alice in Sunderland, as well as Jean-Louis Briquet's Mafia, justice et politique en Italie: L’affaire Andreotti dans la crise de la République (1992-2004), which I agreed to review in an optimistic moment. (I am reading it - just not quite as quickly as I'd anticipated.)

Five books that mean a lot to you

Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni (eds), L'orda d'oro: 1968-1977. La grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale
Worth learning Italian for. The subtitle says it all. (The main title means 'The Golden Horde'; I was about halfway through the book before I realised it means that, rather than (for instance) 'the golden turd'. It didn't matter.)

Walker Hamilton, All the little animals
A novel which I borrowed, more than once, from Laugharne Library in 1973 and haven't seen since. I see from ABE Books that it's been reprinted - unlike Hamilton's only other novel A Dragon's Life, which will still set you back £30 or more.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The unconsoled
What a novel. I read The remains of the day, but I only got properly into Ishiguro when I read When we were orphans. I worked back to The unconsoled, which blew me away. A novel to get lost in. (But if you don't like what you're reading by the end of the second chapter, give up.)

Tom Phillips, A humument
Tom Phillips's work has been a constant in my life for over 30 years. A humument is a touchstone for me - that's how to do it. (Never mind what 'it' is.)

The Internationale Situationniste anthology.
After months poring over an old copy borrowed from a friend, I can still remember the thrill of getting hold of the reprint - all the more so when I found that the new edition included Debord's notes on the Hamburg Theses!!!1!!1!! (OK, so it's a minority taste. It's my blog.)

As for tagging anyone else - well, I know I've done it before, but I can't remember who else has. So I'll take the easy way out and say that if you want it, you can take it - but leave a comment here so I know you've got it from me.

PS How did I do? One slightly different question - the number of books I've owned hasn't changed much over two years. The Italians and the Sits were there in 2005, but along with Berger, Williams and Thompson instead of a couple of novelists and a painter (although, to be fair, I did give Phillips an hon mensh). I guess some years are more The unconsoled than The foot of Clive.

Jim Khambatta
Douglas Reed

Yes, this blog is your number 1 source of "Jim Khambatta" "Douglas Reed" information. Best "Jim Khambatta" "Douglas Reed" site on the Web. Accept no substitute.

As for the person who came here looking for "Phil Edwards" "Socialist Society", yes, that's me. Hi. Drop me an email, why don't you. (Gmail account, three guesses.)

A closer look at the search terms people have been using to find my blog revealed the following gems:

• "How to be a nazgul"--Well, first you take a ring of power from a dark overlord. Then you fall in shadow and after that it's really just an eternity of screeching and chasing after short people with jewelry.
• "Corona research biased"--We're either talking about beer or the auroras and either way I have no idea what this searcher is actually looking for.
• "Slave girl/Orion slave girl (s)"--A very persistent search term. Guys, just go buy yourselves some Boris Vallejo calendars and call it good.
• "A good cheerleading method"--Rah, rah, boom, bah?
• "Banner administrative software bad"--Won't be getting any arguement from me.
• "Motivational/Motivational poster"--You won't be finding any motivation around here, people.
• "Cat bonzai"--You let your cat prune your bonsai by having them sharpen their claws on it?

Ah, it's good to be back.

Registering with Feedburner and adding the necessary text widget wasn't hard. I followed the instructions in the WordPress FAQ (look under E-mail). I did have to fiddle a bit with my widgets so that everything I've gotten accustomed to seeing in the sidebar would show up though.

While I was looking through the Web 2.0 Awards list, I was pleased to see that Whole Wheat Radio, a folk music Webcast service out of Talkeetna, got an honorable mention. Go Alaskans! Click here to visit their wiki page. If you go over to the Quick Links section of the sidebar, you can listen to a sample of their live broadcast.