Diary of a Permaculturalist 20: Statement of a Problem

Follow-up to Diary of a Permaculturalist 19: Master Gardening on your doorstep from George Ttoouli, Warwick Writing Programme

Solutions or responses welcome.

Current developments in Marxist ecology point to how the capitalist project, with its issue of the metabolic rift, is arriving at a dead end. Naomi Klein's identification of disaster capitalism, in The Shock Doctrine, is one example of how capitalism is reaching its limit in geographical exploitation of resources and now has to manufacture crises in the supply chain of resources to generate market instability and open up new markets.

New markets is a buzzphrase at the high end of free market capitalist systems. New resources, new ecologies; these are overlooked in favour of the global hunt for the most profitable area of exploitation, which can only grow the rift between the human/nature dynamic. Yet ecology's response, as a perspective, is now one that increasingly not only accepts, but asserts, the fact that humanity = nature, is a subset of. So we are only destroying ourselves as part of the planet we are destroying.

Recently, though (OK, about ten minutes ago) I've begun to have doubts about the methodology of Marxist ecologists. The method of capitalist critique is one that I've seen elsewhere, such as in union battles with employers. Searching through law, through social structures, for a valid critical approach to defend workers' rights, union legal teams often have to fall back on an approach that they hope will create valid change, or, more than likely, deter continued detrimental change. So, for example, in recent UK battles, on a local level, unions are attempting to exploit Health & Safety laws as a way to find leverage in increasingly hostile-to-employees Employment Law. Prior to that, in my limited union experience, the struggle centred on cases of unfair dismissal, harrassment and so on, but these laws, as I understand it, have been tightened to protect employers.

So, a model arises in which unions select a cause, one that is effectively within the scope of a 'new market' in terms of being a battleground that hasn't been fought over before. The problem as I see it lies in how the environmental movement, by developing into social ecology, has merely found a new market to exploit in its anti-capitalist battleground.

In other words, from this perspective, the anti-capitalist movement in the form of the ecological movement, is adopting a capitalist model by which to launch its attack on capitalism. This feels as much a psychological conditioning in myself, however: that I am trained to read through capitalist structures, and training further to identify capitalist structures. Yet I can't help feeling, underlying all this, that the futility of the alternative PR project is futile because it isn't drawing on an alternative to capitalism: ancient religious fundaments, or perhaps something so antiquated - barter systems, foraging, similar social structures that are improbable in light of current population scales - that the new approach will defy capitalist structures utterly.

It's easy to think yourself into a bind when you haven't read enough, or the right books. But all this unloading of chest-weights is helpful while you're on the road to change.

George Ttoouli : 08 Feb 2012 14:17 |  Tags: Creative Writing Marxist Ecology Permaculture Union |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Moffat on Sherlock

Writing about web page http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/20/steven-moffat-sherlock-doctor-who?newsfeed=true

There's very little TV I like, generally, because the medium is so curtailed by budgets and ambition and producers with their heads in the clouds of assumptions about what audiences really want, but I have followed some of Moffat's Sherlock, if only because they are close enough to film length and self-contained as to basically be films. The hype has left me repeatedly talking about it in terms of what isn't quite satisfying, or something I don't trust about the over-produced moments, the under-explored character depths, etc. etc. and I still can't shake off the feeling that it's one of those shows that only looks good because it's surrounded by dreck.

But this is still a worthwhile interview with Steven Moffat. Perhaps a little bit for the wrong reasons, once again, though the article also shows current limitations to mainstream journalism. Jeffries has to use the hook of the Sherlock show's cliffhanger to draw you in and then tries as hard as possible to get a serious conversation about writing out of it.

The most interesting point Moffat makes is that Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes are supposedly both written for children. Really? Moffat makes some very entertaining comments that suggest the whole idea of writing for children or adults is rubbish. In fact, when he says: "I get irritated when people say on Twitter: 'It's too complicated. I'm not following it.' Well, you could try putting your phone down and watching it" you can imagine him thinking some adults lack the concentration levels of children, hence writing for children is the more satisfying challenge.

Or in other words, the reader should elevate themselves to the level of the show? Or stop making snap judgments based on partial or even no effort readings. (Which has been annoying me lately in other walks of life.)

George Ttoouli : 21 Jan 2012 14:24 |  Tags: Creative Writing Screenwriting Writing For Children |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

University Pension Disputes / Soft Science, Hard Facts, Power Narratives

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/insite/news/intnews2/latest_uss_valuation

Just saw this link to the latest on the USS pensions valuation. The title there is acutely misleading; the word "reveals" and "valuation" leading me, as intended, to believe that there is an actual gap of £2.9bn in the scheme, rather than a predicted gap.

I had an interesting chat in July with a lecturer from the Accountancy Dept. here at Warwick. I was surprised to hear that they had a module called, 'Accounting in Context', which teaches critical perspectives in the field. I thought only the Arts used that kind of woolly thinking, but it turned out, to my naive surprise, Accounting is an equally interpretive discipline. They even have a journal called Critical Perspectives on Accounting.

So when a particular team of actuaries drum up a set of "assumptions", a reader can't automatically assume that they're operating with the employees' best interests at heart. In fact, the current dispute over pensions is entirely a battle of narratives over the state of play of the USS pension fund.

And, given the stacking of power, and the USS board, in favour of the employers, the only thing in the employees' favour is their right to withold labour. And then it comes down to a battle for dominance of one narrative over another. This article, then, relies on people's assumption of accountancy and financing as being a kind of 'hard subject', with concrete numeric outcomes, and so on.

Yet, as we all know, the concept of forecasting is an inexact science. The modern soothsayer is fond of using graphs in place of animal bones, spreadsheets in place of the crystal ball. The science underlying these approaches are the same - reading clouds, reading markets, reading habits. Behind it all, is an attempt to understand and predict human nature: the brief, whimsical burst of years we spread across the planet and leave behind in a sear of smoking footprints.

George Ttoouli : 08 Nov 2011 19:08 |  Tags: Action Industrial Pensions Ucu Uss Uuk |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Diary of a Permaculturalist 19: Master Gardening on your doorstep

Follow-up to Diary of a Permaculturalist 18: Avaaz vs. the Amazon (Jungle) from George Ttoouli, Warwick Writing Programme

An exciting discovery on campus this week! Warwick's dark satanic halls have buried within them a green and pleasant bit of wild field, upon which hath been demarcated a patch for growing food. Somewhere southeast of Tocil and Jack Martin Residences, or east from the lakes below the Health Centre, you'll find a fenced off patch of land for students and staff to use as an allotment.

Nick Hillard, UoW's Environmental Manager, has given that land over to student societies to manage. He has even offered, should the project begin to thrive, to double the space available. While I was down there last Sunday, pretending to be young enough to dig a trench, a few students showed up with white buckets of kitchen scraps, to add to the compost heap.

One of the people managing the space, Carla Sarrouy, is also a Master Gardener and is all set to help train up students and staff to make use of the space, and their own gardens, for growing vegetables in a sustainable way. There'll be a meeting soon - probably on Sunday this weekend, to talk through new plans for the space.

At the moment there's a need for postgraduate and staff volunteers, as the academic year doesn't match up with growing timetables, particularly if you're fallowing in winter. At the same time, perhaps some winter growing could happen, if every kitchen on campus got rigorous about bringing kitchen waste over.

Also, I've been thinking about the kind of teaching that could take place in a garden like that. Imagine, for example, a class on the 'Dig for Victory' campaign, combined with actual gardening? Somewhat gimmicky, maybe. What about reading Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Seamus Heaney (both these links are a bit ad-heavy, be warned) while holding a spade in your hand? A bit more illuminating, perhaps! And a chance to expand upon their metaphors, to come up with new meanings for the act of digging.

Or a session with Prof. Liz Dowler on food sustainability, ethics and social issues? Or perhaps a talk by Nick Hillard himself on the campus environment, biodiversity, and water management (the Canley Brook runs across campus, with parts running along the edge of the allotment). Or even someone from Warwick's Food Security research group? Or outside speakers - how about setting up Permaculture training?

George Ttoouli : 26 Oct 2011 11:55 |  Tags: Creative Writing Permaculture |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

PN Review Launches Archive

Writing about web page http://www.pnreview.co.uk/

Received an email from Carcanet recently, announcing the launch of their digital archive. Forty years of magazines right there, for the eye.

Almost: it comes for a price, of course. While resources like the Poetry Library's Poetry Magazines website (incidentally, you can read PN Review's predecessor there, Poetry Nation) have relied on generosity and the basic assumption that poetry makes no money most of the time, PN Review and Carcanet are essentially commercial, though both the archive's creation and the publishing house are propped up substantially by the Arts Council and other funding. (Corona beer features on the back of every issue: "The drink of poets everywhere!") Let's not begrudge them, or anyone else, trying to survive and thrive off poetry; they've maintained a strong editorial line and excellent standards over the decades, under Michael Schmidt.

Yet the part of me that has got used to getting my poetry fix for free online still begrudges coming up against the firewall. I'm working on crossing these wires with the part of my brain that likes to fling money at charities via online payment systems.

They offer generous rates for students, you'll be relieved to hear: £18 for online access and 1 year/6 issues of the print journal. That's 50% off adult rates! As a resource for learning about contemporary poetry, especially of the high-modernist descent, it's excellent. The prose I've found to be rigorous in thought and intelligence, leaning towards academic style (I don't want to typecast the whole, as it's impossible to generalise with any magazine, but sometimes I've found parts a little dull-edged, while at others very vigorous), generous and quotable material for researchers. I think our university library still subscribes, and we've a handful of sample copies in the Writers' Room if you want to take a look.

You'll also find, if you visit the website and click the relevant subject headings, that there's a wealth of free sample material - hundreds of poems, and, at a quick glance, a good fifty each or so of interviews, articles and reviews, plus a selection of reports. For example, this wonderful discussion about the New York School and New York in general, between John Ashbery and John Ash:

I like some of the Language Poets though I've no idea what their movement is all about.

-- John Ashbery, 1985

Carcanet's Full press release follows:

PRESS RELEASE

16 December 2010

Last night in the centre of Manchester an unusual celebration took place: the magazine PN Review launched www.pnreview.co.uk, its complete digital archive, including more than 200 issues and four decades of literary writing.

The website, designed and implemented by WebGuild Media Ltd, the Cheshire-based web solutions company, makes more than seven thousand items – interviews, poems, essays, features and reviews – by 1625 contributors immediately available to subscribers, with much material open access, in an unprecedentedly easy-to-navigate and user-friendly form.

At the launch, surrounded by writers, subscribers and academic colleagues, Michael Schmidt OBE FRSL, editor of the magazine since its inception as Poetry Nation in 1973, said: ‘Considering what we have here, it feels as though we’ve achieved as much as a dozen magazines. The conversations with Isherwood, Genet, Beckett, Lennox Berkeley, four Ashbery and three Murray interviews, for example, the many now-famous poems first published here, a host of writers making their first appearances in our pages… modern literature has much to be thankful for, and it’s suddenly all here at our fingertips!’

Four years in the making and realised with assistance from Arts Council England, this major online resource reinforces the critics’ claims that PN Review is:

…the most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines. Simon Armitage

…the premier British poetry journal... Marjorie Perloff

...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world. John Ashbery

…quite remarkably good – it must have a claim to be the best anglophone literary magazine there is. Sir Frank Kermode

…the most incisive voice of a vision of poetry and the arts as central to national life. George Steiner

PNR is a journal in the tradition of Criterion and Scrutiny. It combines discovery and appraisal of new writing with reappraisals, celebrations and advocacies. It is committed to modernism and its aftermaths and sets vital, alternative agendas for modern poetry. PNR champions the work of the New York School; the Antipodeans (Les Murray, Judith Wright and Bill Manhire); it stands up for experiment and keeps a weather eye on the poetries of Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia. It is also a magazine of new writing: Andrew Motion, Blake Morrison, Sophie Hannah, Sujata Bhatt, Sinéad Morrissey and Jane Yeh are among those who published early in PNR. And it is a journal of re-discovery, in which W.S. Graham, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Laura Riding among many others have featured.

For further information about PN Review please contact:

Eleanor Crawforth at Carcanet on 0161 834 8730 extension 21

For further information about WebGuild Media Ltd please contact:

Angela Bent at WebGuild Media Ltd on 0161 428 1102

George Ttoouli : 17 Dec 2010 12:30 |  Tags: Archive Pn Review Poetry Poetry Magazines |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Villanelle exercise

Just a quick draft written during Can Sonmez's session in week 9.

A Year of Dry Seasons

The river's stones are piled bone dry
magnificent to look at, touch and climb.
Some seasons have no sense of country,

which is why the water's gone and why
the reeds are the spines of a broken comb.
The river's stones are piled bone dry

against the year's endless sunrise
and maybe tells us something of the times:
some seasons have no sense of country,

or its unlucky people's lives
and cloudless skies don't know to rhyme
the river's bone-dry stones

with the ruined fields, the brittle sties
a plywood bandage on the fences' lines.
The river's bones are piled stone-dry
by seasons with no sense of country.

George Ttoouli : 16 Dec 2010 19:14 |  Tags: Poetry Pop10-11 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On Posterity and Cultural Conservatism

Writing about web page http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/gabriel-josipovici-modernism-tom-mccarthy

"In cultural terms, we live in deeply conservative times. Editors at several major publishing houses have to run novels' synopses past reader focus groups before being allowed to publish them; "literary" festivals feature newsreaders and other media personalities. We shouldn't imagine, though, that things were that different in the golden age of modernism. Ulysses was printed, in 1922, on a small, private press in Paris, in a run of 1,000; Kafka's Metamorphosis, on its small-press publication in 1915, sold 11 copies – of which 10 were bought by Kafka. Yet can anyone, now, name the successful middlebrow writers of 1922 or 1915? Of course not."

(Tom McCarthy, reviewing Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? for the Guardian.)

What the fuck is a reader focus group?

How do I get onto one?

George Ttoouli : 20 Oct 2010 12:13 |  Tags: Modernism Publishing Tom Mccarthy |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Pensioners and Poverty

One of the stranger, but very rewarding freelance jobs I've been doing for a while now is editing British Pensioner. It's published by a (non-party affiliated, but mostly Old Labour) organisation called the British Pensioners & Trades Unions Action Association (BPTUAA). One of their slogans is, 'Don't vegetate, AGITATE!' A worthy slogan. The man who invited me to start editing the journal, Jack Sprung, was General Secretary of the BPTUAA at the time, was in his early eighties, taking about seventeen different pills a day, writing poetry, taking watercolour painting classes to keep his hands agile, and attending protests around the country.

Every now and then I receive a letter to the magazine that really kicks. Here's one below, going in the latest issue.

Down Memory Lane

I am now in my eighties. Some time ago, friends asked me which day in my life did I remember most.

No, it wasn’t my wedding day, or the cost of the Queen’s Coronation, or the day (in the forties) when I joined the army. Nor was it the day when I returned home from service in the armed forces.

My everlasting ‘memory day’ was in the early 1930s, as a very small boy, clutching my mother’s hand, visiting the office of the local PAC (Public Assistance Committee). Yes, we were poor. And my mother almost had to beg for a few shillings, to feed herself, my blind father, and me and my little brother. The self-important clerk in the office verbally abused my mother, almost reducing her to tears. She had to thank him for four shillings, four shillings. I can never forget that day.

Well, back to reality, we have just had a Labour Government who could deal in trillions of pounds, not just millions, yet the poor are still with us.

(Four shillings.)

Albert Rollinson
(Survivor)
Hull

George Ttoouli : 08 Jun 2010 11:30 |  Tags: British Pensioner Letters To The Editor |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On the side of the Angels – Elytis on Greek Poetry and Light

Writing about Lorca: Theory and Play of the Duende from David Morley

In response to David Morley's post, Lorca on duende, I found this article (originally at Dragoncave, but I've now ordered Elytis' 'Open Papers' from Copper Canyon) by Odysseas Elytis:

It has been said that I am a Dionysian poet, particularly in my first poems. I do not think this is correct. I am for clarity. As I wrote in one of my poems, “I have sold myself for clearness.” I told you that I am critical of occidental rationalism, skeptical of its classicism, and that I feel the breach opened by surrealism was a real liberation of the senses and the imagination. Could one possibly conceive of a new classicism in the spirit of surrealism? Is this a contradiction in terms? Do you know the work of Hans Arp? There you have great simplicity! He is a classical sculptor, isn’t he? Yet he was a surrealist! In other words, the world of surrealism had its classicists and romanticists. Essentially, it was romantic movement. But Éluard, for example, I personally find more classical than romantic.

I never was a disciple of the Surrealist school. I found certain congenial elements there, as I have told you, which I adapted to the Greek light. There is another passage in my “Open Papers” where I say that Europeans and Westerners always find mystery in obscurity, in the night, while we Greeks find it in light, which is for us an absolute. To illustrate this I give three images. I tell how once, at high noon, I saw a lizard climb upon a stone (it was unafraid since I stood stock-still, ceasing even to breathe) and then, in broad daylight, commence a veritable dance, with a multitude of tiny movements, in honor of light. There and then I deeply sensed the mystery of light. At another time I experienced this mystery while at sea between the islands of Naxos and Paros. Suddenly in the distance I saw dolphins that approached and passed us, leaping above the water to the height of our deck. The final image is that of a young woman on whose naked breast a butterfly descended one day at noon while cicadas filled the air with their noise. This was for me another revelation of the mystery of light. It is a mystery which I think we Greeks can fully grasp and present. It may be something unique to this place. Perhaps it can be best understood here, and poetry can reveal it to the entire world. The mystery of light. When I speak of solar metaphysics, that’s exactly what I mean.

I am not for the clarity of the intelligence, that which the French call “la belle clarté.” No, I think that even the most irrational thing can be limpid. Limpidity is probably the one element which dominates my poetry at present. The critic Varonitis has perceived this. He says that in my book “The Light Tree” there is an astonishing limpidity. What I mean by limpidity is that behind a given thing something different can be seen and behind that still something else, and so on and so on. This kind of transparency is what I have attempted to achieve. It seems to me something essentially Greek. The limpidity which exists in nature from the physical point of view is transposed into poetry. However, as I told you, that which is limpid can at the same time be altogether irrational. My kind of clarity is not that of the ratio or of the intelligence, not clarté as the French and Westerners in general conceive it.

You always look somewhat puzzled, I notice, whenever I contrast Greeks with Westerners or Europeans. This is not a mistake on my part. We Greeks belong politically, of course, to the Occident. We are part of Europe, part of the Western world, but at the same time Greece was never only that. There was always the oriental side which occupied an important place in the Greek spirit. Throughout antiquity oriental values were assimilated. There exists an oriental side in the Greek which should not be neglected. It is for this reason that I make the distinction.

Let me conclude by reading to you a concise statement I have prepared concerning the aims of my poetry:

I consider poetry a source of innocence full of revolutionary forces. It is my mission to direct these forces against a world my conscience cannot accept, precisely so as to bring that world through continual metamorphoses more in harmony with my dreams. I am referring here to a contemporary kind of magic whose mechanism leads to the discovery of our true reality. It is for this reason that I believe, to the point of idealism, that I am moving in a direction which has never been attempted until now. In the hope of obtaining a freedom from all constraints and the justice which could be identified with absolute light, I am an idolater who, without wanting to do so, arrives at Christian sainthood.

Here's my own take on this:

Greek Fire

My most unnoticed acts
and my most veiled writings—
only from these will they know me.
—‘Hidden Things’, K. P. Kavafis

the mountains and the buried light
                 where goats ritualise the thistle
fire’s demesne in stasis
                 irrigated with root and sediment
whetted firestones underfoot
                 signified by hesperidins
and bronze fruit chipped by the flint
                 in these things she activates
apollo’s chariot unhorsed
                 leaf’s citrus in barium blazes
canopies pipetted with sparks
                 crows harlequins, magnesium flaring
the smokestone skies, no green
                 in the abattoir light where remorse
usurps every abscess that remains.

George Ttoouli : 16 Apr 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Duende Lorca Picasso Poetry The Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why can't poetry reviews be like this?

Writing about web page http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

Zero Punctuation is possibly my favourite review series on the internet.

George Ttoouli : 15 Apr 2010 10:00 |  Tags: Reviews The Escapist Yahtzee |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem