I remember the 1960s

as noisy and intimidating.
The post-war bubble of frugal smugness
was burst by baby-boomer adolescents,
who found themselves inside a new bubble
of getting and spending and ego,
of freedom from everything except desire,
a bubble of the home-destroying
goggle-box, and Lego® -
a bubble in which Yeats was
eclipsed by the Beats and the Liverpool Poets,
football turned from game to a sport,
Bach was compared with the Beatles
and found wanting by juvenile minds,
Bonnard gave way to Auerbach,
and Pisarro
lost out to Warhol and Picasso.

Thus the mummy-cloth of history unwinds.

Thin septuagenarian takes up pipe-smoking again after 30 years.

Now they're trying to stop people
smoking in their homes because
it damages children's health.
As ever, no mention of the mutilation
performed on children's brains
by compulsory education.

The Visigoths

swept down Western France
and right down Spain
but gave no words to us
that I'm aware of.

The Franks
pushed into North and Eastern France
and gave us: frankly,
France, French,
Francis (and Franciscan),
frankness, franchise,
franklin, franking,
Frankfurt (but not frankfurters),
franc (the coin) and frankincense.

It was the Frenchified Norsemen
from Normandy who brought
these and many Franko-French
words into otherwise
Germanic English -

and hardly a trace remains of Visigothish.

The measure

of the alienating effect
and unnaturalness of our culture
is the despairing self-destruction
of "aboriginal" peoples
by pharmaceuticals,
other drugs, and alcohol.

Welcome back

O
faithful
follower
in
Hungary !

Come back

O
faithful
follower
in
Lower
Saxony !

Agents of Alteration

(from mushrooms to ketamine)

Those who try to efface
the cruel absurdity of life
by altering the unstable
chemistry of their brains
are criminalised
as if they were an 'inferior race'
by those who make the world
an ever more absurd, cruel
and, ultimately, empty place.

© Ivan Solyaev

If ever people are allowed

to realise
(in the lands of free speech and information)
that financial and Futures
speculators are far greater
criminals
than suicide-bombers,
serial killers, war-lords,
NATO generals and drug-barons,
they will open the prisons -

except...

I love the strange

non-words
that Google asks us to copy,
to verify that we're not robots.
My favourite (to date) is
Flergawats...

But seriously
let's put the record straight
when the multiple
history books come to be written
I guess I'm kind of
you know
to be honest
sort of
in a different ball-park
on a daily basis
in my DNA
at the epicentre
going ballistic
for a nanosecond
one of a vast
overwhelming
majority
of Loved Ones
the litmus test
at the dawn of time
when the shit hits the fan
to the Nth degree
on a regular basis
but the jury's still out
in the last analysis
the bottom line
when push comes to shove
in this iconic
day and age:
it takes two to tango
all it takes is love...

Universal Humour (?)

Is there anybody in the world
apart from monotheistic fundamentalists
who would not find this snapshot funny
- or at least amusing ?















click the photo to enlarge

A family

can be anything you like,
dislike, or find...

Oh,
the merry-go-round of the gonads!
Oh,
the blind man's buff of the mind!

Springtime in Ireland

and the country folk
are out motor-mowing
the plastic-encrusted roadsides,
to ensure that there will be
even fewer flowers and insects
in Erin's cultural and agricultural blight.

I'm off to flowery South-west France
on the next Aer Lingus flight.

Every shore is Entropy.

History is full
of stupid leaders
who have no
sense of history.

My New Best Internet Friend

Our other appendix

shrivelled and easily-infected:
emotional intelligence.

Hollywood

Jews brought with them from the
lands of klesmer and the waltz
the word to describe
the cinema that they created:
Schmaltz.

The Dystopic Authors

got it wrong. There is no need
for mass control and servitude
North-Korean-style, nor for
genetic cloning and manipulation.
Every system of education
now manufactures
living robots programmed by
employment, competitiveness, greed.

Nations used to be

aggressive or defensive
fictions,
but are now pathetic lies
because there is only one nation:
money.

What 'free choice' is there

in populations conned
and 'educated' out of
the ability to judge and choose
- let alone refuse ?

Facts

are just some of the ammunition
that journalists use
in their endless battle
with the truth.

I must be barking mad.

I'm actually happy
after seventy years
surrounded
yet hardly damaged
by my vicious species
in this crudely-manufactured
vale of tears.

What is culture ?

Impedimenta: clocks,
blackmail, secrets, locks,
the dishonesty of art,
and terror of the power
of cunts and cocks.

Of a Beautiful World.

They say that we are much less aggressive
than we used to be - oh -
several thousand years ago.
Language allowed us, on the one hand,
to be more co-operative
within the small group or band,
but, on the other, separated us
from other groups which we perceived
as alien, foreign competitors. So,
having invented the word 'enemy'
we cut off 'enemy' heads
and scooped out the brains
into antique skull-bowls
and dined with due ritual.
This was our humanity.

But go far enough back,
and we must have been no more aggressive
than our cousins the chimpanzees
(who are not noted for their genocidal,
speciecidal tendencies)
even if males sometimes kill
other males' babies.

So, in order to get back where we started
we will have have had to erect all this,
and yet more, social structure;
institute a million institutions, write
a billion Wikipedia pages, invent
millions of gadgets and tools,
create all the stuff and data we're choked by;
pillage the planet until there are
no other animals left but our only
now-moderately-murderous species.

What a waste of A Beautiful World!

"Off in the darkness hourses moved restlessly"

— a typographical error in Clifford Simak's
A Heritage of Stars

Professor Goldbarth said that at first
he believed they were horses,
but after much time in the stable of Muses
came to decide they were hours everlasting.
They were, of course, nothing so timeless,
but horses for courses,
dragging old hearses
stuffed with dead, hoary houris
and hoarse speaking clocks
from houses to graveyards
where pimply boys' bourses
bounced behind poisonous yew-trees
and odorous bushes of box.

Art, truth and bafflement -

my latest web-page:
www.beyond-the-pale.co.uk/art

'Nil Carborundum !'

Quite apart from war, starvation,
loss of parents, limbs and sight,
child labour, pogroms, rape and deportation,
there are so many other things to blight
a human life from birth until it ends:
school, parents, spouse, sex, hate,
offspring, job, genes, accident, fate
- and friends.

Good Minds

Getting rarer.
Soon will be extinct.

The Mammoth in the Room

The medical-industrial complex
is hell-bent on extending
the lives of, and increasing,
the harried human population
of a catastrophically
overpopulated world
thus doomed to famines, wars
and conflagrations.
This is why I got myself
vasectomised.
I hope I'll have the backbone to refuse
all life-extending operations.

You can't eat liberty

or a statue.
Freedom for many in 'The Developed World'
is just the freedom to complain
about the freedom to be crushed
in the not-so- free-for-all,
to be abandoned, to be homeless, to starve,
and to live in constant existential pain.

Five ways of saying six words

(which are the title of an account
of a journalist's interrogation
in an Iranian prison):

Now they are coming for me.
Now they are coming for me.
Now they are coming for me.
Now they are coming for me.
Now they are coming for me.

UROVISION

Forget mass-murder,
torture and mayhem in Syria!
Forget the daily strafing of the Gaza Strip!
Forget the razzmatazz of tawdry royal jubilee
and sickening pseudo-olympics in Tycoon City!
The greatest event of the year (though
not for Armenians) will be the Buranovskiye Babushki
from the Udmurt 'Republic' of the Russian 'Federation'
(whose language is on UNESCO's 'endangered' list),
doing their fake-folksy can-can
at the Eurovision Song Contest
in the oil-rich dictatorship of Azerbaijan.

Elephants are the kindest creatures.

Rhinos love to have their bellies rubbed
and grunt happily, with their legs in the air.
The unkindest species was expelled from Paradise
because it was totally absorbed
by arrogance and avarice.

Zarathustra, he say

It's not what you know
it's the way that you know it...

Revolutions (or 'insurgencies')

are never fomented
by the needy,
but (you've guessed it)
by the greedy
discontented.

It is difficult to write

about human beings
doing appalling things to animals
and each other.

It is difficult to show
the blind human mind its ugliness,
make it look in the mirror
without resorting to
despairing anger and invective.

In any case, in telling truth to power,
only power can be effective.

Well over a hundred years

of toothpaste-tubes -
and so few designed to stand up
on their caps...

Take this Apple

There is surely no religion
whose priests and elders refused themselves
privileged sexual, often secret
access to the shameful joys
so easily available from pre-pubescent
girls and boys.




















The earliest censure of Christian priestly pædophilia was at the beginning of the fourth century.

Humanitarian Aid for America

How many voice-coaches
must the world send to the USA
to gentle the snarl
from their women's voices ?

Prizes

are offered in
various sizes
from Darwin
(whose namesake
was not offered one)
to Dakar,
and Dneprodzerzhinsk
to Devizes...

But nobody anywhere now
offers a throne - or a crumb - to Isis.

Updating the Categories

Pædophiles are the new witches*
'Gays' are the new Jews
Women are the new men
Israelis are the new vampires
America is the new Iran


*the difference being
that the 'witches' were burned by the Catholic church
whereas a high proportion of pædophiles
are part of, and sheltered by, the Catholic church.

Jesus and

Walt Whitman said
that the rich should become poor.
The Christians say
that the poor will become rich.
Capitalism makes sure
that the poor become more and poorer
so the rich can get richer,
meaner and dourer.

Two thoughts of an infrequent masturbator

1. The only drawback
of masturbation
is that there is no-one
on whom to project
the fantasy of melting
emotional communion and respect.

2. It is better to make love well
- even with oneself -
than to make love often.
And better not at all
than badly.

Whenever

you hear the phrase
"At all costs..."
RUN - but not at all costs.

Thoughts on The New Literacy

or, The English Language changes faster than Others.

Less has beaten fewer to a pulp.
Multiple has liquidated many, several and a lot.
Summonsed is summoned up instead of summoned.
Turds have been infantilised to poo.
Papers are now rifled and not riffled
proffer is offered instead of offer -
I don't know about you,
but it seems to me that verbal
accuracy has gone to pot,
and the language is turning into goo.

A devout Christian's attack on Capitalism

"Glory be to God for...
...All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how ?)
With swift, slow, sweet, sour; adazzle, dim...."

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

― Gerard Manley Hopkins




















Sculpture by Rowan Gillespie

In an egalitarian society

excellence would be its own reward.
The reward of excellence
is the greatest source of injustice
and imbalance.

'Original Sin'

was just one word:
the Pandora-question
WHY ?

The curse of Western consciousness

especially the Great White Male Mind,
is compartmentalisation.
The result is a world full
of broken pieces, broken people,
tunnel-vision,
suffering and need,
united only by the toxic slime
of continuing colonial greed.

Moonwalker

One small step for a man;
one lunatic leap
for a psychopathic species.

A NEW

PAGE OF THE MONTH
has been posted on my
website.

Dawkins fails to attack the right target.

It's not the comfortingly-infantile mumbo-jumbo
of dominant religions that has caused world-grief,
but the colonial slaughters that they frequently commit
in the name of 'faith', in the name of 'belief'.