cloudsoup

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

Lyrics: Eric Idle

On a recent weekend trip to the Lake District I read Martin Amis’s ‘Korba the Dread’, a sobering exploration of the free pass given to the Soviet Union for far too long by the West’s Intelligentsia , especially during Stalin’s long dictatorship.

Amis tops and tails his vignettes of starvation, torture and death with personal reflections which include a memory of his father’s early membership, and later rejection, of the British Communist Party, and with an evident bafflement that it should have taken so long for Robert Conquest‘s research, published as The Great Terror, to be accepted. Amis tells the story of Conquest’s publishers who requested a new title when a revised edition was planned after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The supposed suggestion of, ‘I told you so, you fucking fools‘, turns out to have been a Kingsley Amis joke.

The indulgence of Stalinism continues, it seems. This is an Early Day Motion tabled in Parliament

That this House commends the achievements of Fidel Castro in securing first-class free healthcare and education provision for the people of Cuba despite the 44 year illegal US embargo of the Cuban economy; notes the great strides Cuba has taken during this period in many fields such as biotechnology and sport in both of which Cuba is a world leader; acknowledges the esteem in which Castro is held by the people and leaders of Africa, Asia and Latin America for leading the calls for emancipation of the world’s poorest people from slavery, hunger and the denial of human rights such as the right to life, the right to shelter, the right to healthcare and basic medicines and the right to education; welcomes the EU statement that constructive engagement with Cuba at this time is the most responsible course of action; and calls upon the Government to respect Cuba’s right to self-determination and resist the aggressive forces within the US Administration who are openly planning their own illegal transition in Cuba.

If one of the fools who sigened this is your MP why not write to them, or email them, to tell you just what you think of their support for a dictator whose undemocratic rule over half a century has seen thousands of political executions, imprisonments for trying to promote democracy , restricted access to independent information sources and Castro’s suggestion of a first-strike during the missile crisis.

Interesting fact: fully one-fifth of Cubans are emigres.

 Here are the signatories:

• Trickett, Jon
• Cruddas, Jon
• Gibson, Ian
• Clapham, Michael
• Mudie, George
• Hopkins, Kelvin
• McDonnell, John
• Cryer, Ann
• Abbott, Diane
• Taylor, David
• Riordan, Linda
• Price, Adam
• Skinner, Dennis
• Heyes, David
• Iddon, Brian
• Jones, Lynne
• Llwyd, Elfyn
• O’Hara, Edward
• Campbell, Ronnie
• Caton, Martin
• Corbyn, Jeremy
• Dismore, Andrew
• Flynn, Paul
• Francis, Hywel
• Hamilton, David
• Battle, John
• Clark, Katy
• Devine, Jim
• Prentice, Gordon
• Purchase, Ken
• Sheridan, Jim
• Singh, Marsha
• Holmes, Paul
• Hood, Jim
• Hoyle, Lindsay
• Humble, Joan
• Lepper, David
• Murphy, Denis
• Owen, Albert
• Cohen, Harry
• Crausby, David
• Dean, Janet
• Dobbin, Jim
• Drew, David
• Efford, Clive
• Etherington, Bill
• Grogan, John
• Hamilton, Fabian
• Austin, John
• Begg, Anne
• Taylor, Dari
• Wood, Mike
• Anderson, David
• Davies, Dai
• Buck, Karen
• Caborn, Richard
• Challen, Colin
• Cook, Frank
• Sharma, Virendra Kumar
• Simpson, Alan
• Havard, Dai
• Kilfoyle, Peter
• Mackinlay, Andrew
• Mitchell, Austin
• Chaytor, David
• Davidson, Ian
• Galloway, George
• Turner, Desmond
• Salter, Martin
• Vis, Rudi
• Slaughter, Andy

After I found an excerpt from Jean-Phillippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes I played it repeatedly for several days until Helen bought the DVDs of the William Christie-directed production by Les Arts Florissants. Patricia Petibon is magnetic in the Fourth Entree, Les Sauvages; what a voice.

I read an suggestion that the depiction of the ‘savages’, Les Indes, was somehow racist.  That’s an obtusely achronistic objection to an early 18th-century ‘Opera-Ballet’ – but even on its own terms it’s way off the mark in this very funny reminder of how baffled and  amused a French audience  would have been by American exoticana. Although Rousseau’s misplaced romantic propaganda would come slightly later, the Noble Savage was already a trope.  It was a century before de Tocqueville surveyed American society; the Enlightment hadn’t yet got a full head of steam.This was another age.

Petibon’s chicken dance, corn-cob pipe in mouth, seems a perfect contemporary translation of the garbled travellers’ tales and cod cultural anthropology that would have informed a 1735 European’s view of Native American habits.

Christie’s production  brilliantly recaptures the remote, unfamiliar and somewhat enviable edges of the known World that would have made such an impressive spectacle for audiences nearly 300 years ago.

Unmissable.

I think there’s a strong strain within British liberal thinking, which sees muslims, darkly, through a bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight. They think of muslims as noble savages, and applaud when they find one who is ‘semi-civilised’. Because that’s their conception of muslims, they only really recognise people who meet that stereotype as ‘authentic’. Muslim liberals are just dismissed as ‘unrepresentative’ or Uncle Toms.

Comment by David T, Harry’s Place

…As I like to call it. We’re off down to London again to see the winners of Digital Camera Magazine‘s Photographer of the Year competition. Helen’s photo of Coventry Cathedral’s Baptistry Window, which she entered on spec, got a highly commended and so is on display at the Mall Galleries, home of the Federation of British Artists.

At last, she has the excuse to swap her Nikon D80 for a D300…

Ben Hammersley links to his mate a random bloke, Adam Greenfield:

This goes back to the joke I always make about opening a chain of coffeehouses called Faraday’s: under the condition of ambient informatics, we will need to consciously create platforms for the specific kind of conviviality we recognize as animating our “third places,” and we will generally have to do this by physically denying, buffering or mitigating the Hertzian overlay

A paragraph surely generated from the Postmodern Essay Generator and an unsubtle joke from the probably unreal Mr Hammersely, who, between bouts of noisly photographatising dangerous places (whhhhhooooooohhh) and producing hundreds of boringly same-y looking b&w photos of moody, thin girls in an OCD storm of snapping, manages to run marathons in deserts and get himself signed up to all sorts of potentially interesting projects which he then smears with his pale cast.

I think he should be written out.

We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no “vision thing” as our ex-president would say, or, as our current president would say, we have no Hillary.

All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people. And that had better be clear and provable harm. No nonsense about secondhand smoke or hurtful, insensitive language, please.

P J O’Rourke at the Cato Institute

Castro

Has outlasted nine American presidents

Fantastic achievement. Let’s not mention that US presidents are 2-term limited and democratically elected, eh?