the chicken, the egg, Idun's apple, Adam's apple and a few snowflakes

Well, here we are, in the middle of the story. I can never quite break away, in Holy Week, from the idea of being in the throes of a tale unfolding, of being in some kind of real-time replay. And in fact we are: it's spring, and the old exhausted winter must be put to death so new life can be born - whether everlasting or merely until around October is up to you, really. (Of course, I say this now: and it's snowing outside, which for London is just ludicrous of course. Though I'm sure I can remember at least one other Easter when it snowed here.)

One of the oldest and most human of all human attributes is our need for stories. They do literally explain us to ourselves; they also explain the world. Little Miss B was raised, for example, on Greek myths, which were explained to her as the attempts of ancient people to explain the attributes of the world, which is one reason why the myths and legends of different civilisations can be so similar: they are - in the sense that applies only (for all we know) to our own world - universal. This is why Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces was such a seminal book, after the adolescent shock-to-the-system that is The White Goddess: long before Christopher Booker's back-to-basics Seven Basic Plots, they showed us something about how we work. Imagine my joy unbounded when, aged something-or-other, I discovered that the wife of Bragi (the Norse god of poetry) was called Idun, and she had a precious store of apples which helped the gods to stay young. At some point she is lured by Loki out of Asgard, and without her apples the gods age visibly; great means have to be resorted to in order to get her back and restore their eternal youth.

Campbell and Booker are both Jungian in their philosophy, though Booker also bolstered himself with an epigraph from Johnson, just to be on the safe side. And while we don't want to turn "The world's plots into a narrative sludge," as Adam Mars-Jones pithily said in his review of Booker,* it is a good idea to get over this idea that we're somehow more clever than the people who went before us, or that our world is somehow full of things that weren't in theirs, and sometimes to respect something precisely because it's a story, not in spite of it. We're concerned here wih plot, but also with scenario, character and symbol.

Sorry, I'm tying myself up in knots here. I know there are problems with Jung. Jaysus. There are problems with everything. In a minute you'll see how that's the only way we can possibly understand that everything is okay. And no, I don't mean that the Holocaust's okay! We are allowed to have some things, the things that are okay, be okay - I'm trying to say that the point of the story - any story - is to figure out how they are, and which ones they are, and what went wrong when it did go wrong.

Basically, I think what I'm getting at is that although everything is itself - gloriously, beautifully so, as Henry James might have said - everything also represents something else. This is the case if someone who unaccountably disturbs you suddenly reminds you of the bully at school, or if the colour of the wallpaper in a hotel room makes you feel weirdly sad - or happy - and maybe it's the same as in your favourite room in the house where you grew up; or, you know, the stars twinkle out at sea... People talk about symbol being pretentious (eg in discussions of poetry) but all it is is something reminding you of something else, and harnessing or assuming some of the properties of power of that other thing. Hence, in dreams, if you dream about money it represents your "values," aka "what you treasure." Hence eggs mean new life. Also, though the ancients didn't really know it yet, aren't they universe-shaped? Hence also eg female=vessel, male=the thing that goes in the vessel. Smut!

Anyway, so here we are in the middle of a story. When I started writing this last night we were in a very sad bit of the story. I always feel, with Easter, that one should help to act out this story, but maybe only because it's traditional. Then again, why not be traditional? Acting out a story, following it to the point of empathetically becoming part of it, is a good, cathartic thing for us humans. It's why we like movies better on the big screen and why we think 3D is an improvement. (Hm. Maybe I'm the exception.) It's why, as Booker says in the intro to his Seven Basic Plots book, "we take it for granted that the great story-tellers, such as Homer and Shakespeare, should be among the most famous people who ever lived."

On Thursday, after a week of increasing tension and uncertainty, though with great reviews in the popular local press, Jesus sat down to a meal with his friends and followers. The authorities were after him; they didn't like his brand of insurgence and they were frankly annoyed that it was such a hit with the very people they were trying to keep under control. Okay? Then we have the betrayal by the best friend. In the Gnostic Gospel of Judas Jesus even reveals to us, in a touch almost worthy of (though, frankly, subtler than) Italo Calvino, that we are in a story: he says to Judas words along the lines of, "Yes, off you go; you have to betray me, because that's just what you do, and it's the story."

On Friday Jesus is duly taken away by the authorities, driven through the streets and then executed in a particularly nasty, humiliating way - humiliating, on top of everything else, because it is usually reserved for the lowest sorts of thieves and gangsters, horrible people - though, in this story, even they are not allowed to be without their redeeming qualities. I think we don't need to be reminded of the power this part of the story has for us poor humans, who have suffered thousands of years of political and personal oppression, who have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, who have been silenced and misrepresented, who have so often known we were not what we were made through circumstances to seem. Part of the power that this story has is that it is so universally applicable, to large-scale political events - due to the civic nature of Jesus' protest - and also to small, personal disasters. The fact is that this story of Jesus has provided comfort and example to many.

In fact, at the time when he was executed, at 3pm, there was a fearful storm (or was it an eclipse?) and the whole sky went dark. The people who had come to sit vigil with him - or to watch for fun, as there were no movies in those days - were terrified. So although he is stripped of his public pride and killed, there is a hint even here of the power he possesses. He is, of course, Everyman, literally, in that he is God (and the son of God) and, according to this model, God is all of us. So he, God, and all of us, dies and is put in a tomb by his friends.

Of course he rises again! On the third day. That's early today, this morning. The friends went to the tomb to look after his poor body, and discovered the stone in the doorway rolled away, and no body inside. In some versions he speaks to them, says everything is all right, and he's going to work. In some they are left to infer all this. In yet more, the naughty ones, he goes away to Egypt and lives a life of sybaritic pleasure with Mary Magdalene or similar - that's the Alec Guinness version. But whichever it is, today we're all wearing nice clothes and eating hot cross buns and chocolate, and singing songs, because we're acting out the happiness of the friends when they found that their dead friend was alive again, which also meant that they were alive again (because when someone you love dies you do feel as if you too are dead, don't you), and of course it was spring, and Persephone was freed from the Underworld, so everything could grow again and they would all eat in the summer, and in fact everything is in its place and all's right with the world.

Unless you had the story of everything going wrong, how could you possibly know it was all right?













* By the way, in case any of you read the review, I'd just like to say that I think his view of the role of the anima and animus is fundamentally flawed, by being partial. The mistake he seems to be making is to view the thing literally - a very common failing de nos jours - and looking from the dark bottom of the well we know as the politics of gender and sexuality. It just ain't so that because the hero is a male character, seeking to incorporate his anima in the person of the heroine, the reader or viewer must be literally male! Just as she is the anima of him, he is the animus of her. The story is admonishing all of us in the same way.

I'm certainly not above a feminist rendering of a story, and I know there are problems with Jung, but I think on this one we can just let it rest. The ancient stories allow women more power than the ancient world did, and often more than our newer stories do.

Job can haz cheezburger?

Oh, hai. Has happend. Thx to da alwayz-araldite David Wheatley Ms B fownded out - the Bible is being translated into lolcat!

I mean, OMG wut waz I tawkin, dat kittehs uv tehday not haz touch wif cultural hertilage, no srsly, wtf!!

Here's a sample:

Prowlog

1 In teh land of Uz wuz a man calded Job. Teh man wuz goodz, wif respeck fur teh Ceiling Cat and hated evilz.2 Teh man hadz seven sunz and tree doters,3 And lots of sheepz and camlez and rinoceruseses and servnts, srsly.4 His sunz tok turns mading cookies, and they all eated them.5 And Job wuz liek "Oh noes! Wut if cookies were sin? Gota prey, just in cased."

Furst Tess

6 Teh ayngles wented to seez Ceiling Cat, and Saitin wented two.7 Ceiling Cat axt Saitin, "Wher wuz u?" Saitin saied "Oh, hai. I'z wuz in ur earth, wawking up and down uponz it."8 Teh Ceiling Cat sayd "Has u seen mai servnt Job? He can has cheezburger cuz he laiks me."

9 "No wai!" sed Saitin.10 "U just plyin favrits.11 If u take his cheezburgers, oar his bukkit, he no laiks u no moar."

12 Then teh Ceiling Cat sed "Okai, u can take his bukkit, but no hurtzing Job hissef." And then Saitin went awai.

13 Wun day Jobes' sunz and doters were eateding cookies at teh oldest wuns hoose,14 And a mans cam to told Job a mesege. "Ur donkzeys and moo cows was eateding grass"15 And thens teh servnts was atacked by some dudez and ur naminals was stoldz by them and only i got wai."

16 And then anotter mans cam to told Job a diffrant mesege. He sed "Teh Ceiling Cat maids fyr fall from teh skys and it burnded ur sheepz and more servnts and only i got awai."

17 And thens a more diffranter mans cam to told Job a mesege. "Sum Chaldean dudez took ur rinoceroseseses and killd moar servnts and only i got wai."

18 And then 1 moar mans cam to told Job a mesege.19 "Ur sunz howse feld over and skwishded evryones. Sry."

20 Then Job got upt and shaved and was liek "Gota prey now."

21 "Teh Ceiling Cat giv me cheezburger, teh Ceiling Cat takded mah cheezburger awai. I stil laiks teh Ceiling Cat."

22 And teh Ceiling Cat sed "I winz!!"

An laik, Ms B now lates fur werk, awl cuz uv she be seens menny menny lolcat pitchurs an cannot stopz lookin. She be thinkin in lolcatz naow which not guds fer da meetinz. She iz bad kitteh. Kthxbai.

international women's day

You know the Baroque: I'm not really into these international this-n-that days, with the possible exception of International Pirates Day (Q: Why are pirates called pirates? A: Because they arrrrrrrrr). And I won't be going to any International Women's Day events nor will I listen to any Women's events on Radio 4, or whatever they do. I think I saw something about an all-women poetry reading which I won't be attending; I'm a little wary of anything where people get to feel smug about how misunderstood they are. (I'm be home watching Ghost Club.)

But today is a day to realise that:

Convictions for reported rapes in the UK have plummeted from from (what we then called "only") around 30% in the 1980s to an appalling 5.7% now - the lowest in Europe. More women are reporting rape than ever before. Most are raped by people they know. And juries are reluctant to convict if the victim had been drinking. (It's worth knowing this, girls: go to a party and you have no protection in the courts if something happens later.)

In some countries rape qualifies as "adultery" for which the woman can be punished.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, aka "Mr Reasonable", has even made his famous remark about "some aspects of" sharia law being "inevitable" in Britain. Yeah, right. Here in Baroque Mansions we deliberately stayed away from that one. But it's just civil matters, you know. Still within UK law. Well, sharia is not fair to women, either as law or, more importantly as the sensibility under which people live (as we, under British law, live within its sensibility; come on, this isn't rocket science); I saw this even in my limited capacity working for years in a Muslim neighbourhood. Sharia courts are far more likely to rule in favour of the male-dominated sensibility, according to the religious texts. Read this. Really: read it.

Let's not forget about the case (in 2002) of Amina Lawal - she was sentenced to stoning (to death) in Nigeria because she had a baby two years after separating from her husband! The male partner in question was not prosecuted, "for lack of evidence." Oh - and her defending lawyers won on appeal (she is now remarried) on a sharia-based defence that it is apparently possible for an embryo to lie dormant for up to five years, thereby "proving" that the baby "must be" her ex-husband's.

Also, in the UK! The Department for Work and Pensions has recently ruled that it will pay additional benefits to Muslim men [sic] who have up to four wives! Yes! Just as long as those marriages were contracted in countries where polygyny is legal. Even though polygamy is illegal here.

Er - don't you think it's funny that they're not talking about paying the benefits to the women?

Worldwide, women are still paid on average 16% less than men. Apparently the pay gap is even wider for highly educated women. (Get that! Mind you, I suppose Martin Amis and the footballers have pushed men's average hourly pay right up.) In Britain they get 17% less. In Japan apparently they get 49% less. (Yes, that's a 4.)














Of the 1.2billion people estimated to live in poverty, 70% are women and children. In the developing world a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications every minute.

AIDS is rising faster in women than it is in men:

"Women now make up nearly half of the 37.2 million adults aged 15-49 living with HIV worldwide.

In sub-Saharan Africa about 60% of those with HIV are women. And among young people aged 15-24, 75% of those with HIV are girls and women. Only a quarter are the boys.

Over the past two years alone, the number of women infected in East Asia has increased by 56%.

In Eastern Europe and Central Asia the number has increased by 48%." (figures from here)

According to the UN, for women to be "adequately represented" by their governments, 30% of government representatives should be female. Thirty countries have reached this figure (including Burundi, Guyana and Rwanda) and only three countries - Chile, Spain and Sweden - in the world have achieved gender parity. In the UK 18% of MPs are female. In the USA, only 14% of seats in Congress are held by women.









41 million girls in the developing world are being deprived of an education. How will they ever get into parliament, so they can make it illegal for men to infect their wives with HIV?

it's a good thing poetry makes nothing happen

In the Telegraph:

"The Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead.

Paulin, who appears regularly on the panel of the BBC2 arts programme Newsnight Review (formerly Late Review), allegedly made the comment in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

The interviewer wrote that Paulin, a consistent critic of Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians, clearly abhorred 'Brooklyn-born' Jewish settlers. Paulin, a lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford, was then quoted as saying: 'They should be shot dead.

'I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them'."

Phew!

"Earlier in the interview, he was quoted as saying: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all'."

not Vincent Price

(not)


"To leave is romantic, to return is baroque." -Anton LaVey

I saw this quote on 3 Quarks Daily. I collected it for my Baroqueness files. I looked up Anton LaVey. Oh dear.

And he was born on my birthday! I'd love to be able to think of him as a sort of lovable Vincent Price character, but I'm afraid it is not possible. (Though, for coincidences, here's another: Vincent Price died on the very same day as my grandmother. I have to say, it was a comfort.)

However, of mild amusement is LaVey's listed list of influences. Spot the odd ones out...
Ayn Rand
Aleister Crowley
Friedrich Nietzsche
HL Mencken
Jack London...

in which Ms Baroque returns from the seaside, culturally enriched and somewhat tired out

Well! The adventures! I'm back now, and am disgusted to learn that you lot have not been hanging around in Baroque Mansions reading all the back numbers as instructed. Though Mlle B did have a sleepover here on Saturday night without telling me, which is not what one had in mind. Is it really enough that her father, who does not live in this home and therefore has no jurisdiction over it whatsoever, and who in fact never telephoned me to make sure we were all joined up on the point, knew where she was? No, I thought not. But the girls did tidy up beautifully, and made the beds and washed the dishes.

In the past few days I have been to the impressive Holy Trinity church in Blythburgh, ("the finest church in Suffolk"), and learned that the little carved figures on the ends of the pews (in this case, shaped like little people committing mortal sins) are called 'poppyheads'. I've visited the beautiful and tragic parish church of Walberswick ("one of England's most fashionable watering holes, still cheaper than over-rated Southwold across the river"), sacked by Cardinal Wolsey's men and then again by the Roundheads. I've walked through the churchyard of the Church of St Edmund, King & Martyr (with its stone figure over the doorway of the rope-bound King Edmund, who fought beside King Alfred and chose a terrible death over capitulation to the Vikings), at night. (OOOooo-ooo-OOO...)

It's a fresh surprise to me always, the way these churches dominate the countryside and seem to accommodate the life of the countryside itself, somehow. The air in them seems to breathe with the breath of the people who have worshipped in, and lived around, them for centuries. If that doesn't seem too poncey.

I've tramped around Dunwich, the village that's falling into the sea, in a blasting gale with my eyes streaming and the collar of my coat flying all around, and managed not to get sucked off the cliff. I've seen the remaining buttress of the medieval church that did fall off the cliff. I've eaten a slap-up dish of mussels in a pub called the Anchor in Walberswick. (Annoyingly it turns out to be run by Londoners and to have a sort of Cath-Kidston - if that's an adjective - website; but we loved it there. And I also learn that it has a poltergeist! but it was neither seen nor heard, whcih may be a good thing given the Baroque fear of poltergeists.) I've eaten fish & chips in the Lord Nelson in Southwold, a posh meal in The Swan in Southwold, and a Stilton cheeseburger in the Red Lion in Southwold. I've shared some chips and cold quiche in Dunwich. I've had fish pie and tramped on the pebble beach in Aldeburgh, and I've drunk more bitter than in the past several years put together: it's Adnams country, of course.

I've written two probably-unpublishable poems, read a lot, and prised 640 useful words loose and onto the laptop.I've not bought anything in a secondhand bookshop in Southwold that smells musty and has about a gallon of condensation on its windows, even though they had a book I could have used; and I've engaged in other artistic and literary activities too numerous and arcane to list here, though I have yet ever to attend a single screening in Southwold's charming Electric Picture Palace.

The weather was glorious, high blue skies and blazing sunshine, but the gales yesterday were something uncanny. Whipping - and icy. (and no, not like cream!) And we drove past two pig farms; I love pigs, and they are wonderful when they run. Later, they seemed confusingly to have turned into a group of very sedate horses, but I think that was probably a different place.

I have not seen a newspaper or TV since Friday morning. I have just checked, read, deleted, replied to, etc, 51 emails plus spam, and read (okay, but this is about it) two Guardian blog pieces on the Arts Council funding fiasco, with comments. And now I feel as if it were midnight; I might go to bed and have a lovely sleep.

God, Terry Eagleton, Christmas shopping and Jeremy Irons

Oh my GOD, dear readers! You have no idea. Or maybe you have. It's not an easy life, is it. Well, anyway, I seem to have done quite a bit of damage today; in fact the odious Damage* is one of the few films I seem not to have bought, in my perigrinations across the internet and the Angel, Islington. I have managed to do all that while in the throes of a terrible cold, which is leaving me drained and wan, and then the word "drained" only reminds me of Dr Strangelove, which I might go and buy on Amazon now I've thought of it; I'm sure the Urban Warrior would love to own it. I wonder if it's one of the ones that cost £20? (answer: no. It's £5.97. I find these prices very hard to resist...)

Yesterday, before I went to the cinema for my splendid Dippyfest, I read the piece on Terry Eagleton in the Observer. I was gripped, fascinated and amused. Parts of it blew through my brain like a fresh wind, and it did make me laugh out loud a couple of times.

I know my colleague Elizabeth Baines is annoyed at Eagleton's assertion within that piece that writers of fiction are somehow not as worthy to be public intellectuals as, say, ideosyncratic Marxist philopher-professors.** What Eagleton in fact said was that:

"I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners. I don't know where their status comes from. When someone like Ian McEwan stands up and says, "I believe in individual freedom," you know, it's like: 'Hallelujah, put up your hands all those that don't,' but such words do not respect a much larger problem."

I think that the second, McEwen, half of this sentence strangely goes some ways towards defining what he means in the first half - though I'd say it would be a pretty interesting window cleaner who'd be able to put together 10,000 words of Horrible Horrorism. However, Eagleton goes on:

"The implication from Amis and McEwan - and from Hitchens and Richard Dawkins - is that civilisation and atheist rationalism go together, and I think that is a very dangerous argument to make. The debate over God - Muslim or Christian - is for them increasingly becoming code for a debate on civilisation versus barbarism. I think one needs to intervene and show the limitations of that."

Now, this is where it gets interesting, because - put starkly - I think this analysis, its one paragraph, is correct. I haven't read Dawkins, it just looked too boring, but I did read most of Hitchens' book. It is just rank polemics; there isn't one sentence of it that proves what he's saying unless you already believe in his basic premise. You could go through with a red pen and substitute the phrase "human nature" for "religion" and the thing would still stand up.

Back to Eagleton, there's more in this vein:

"He suggests that the question 'do you believe in God?' is akin to asking someone whether they believe in the Loch Ness monster.** Dawkins, he says, seems to imagine God 'if not exactly with a white beard then at least as some kind of chap', whereas even in the simplest sense, 'for Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is... He is the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.'"

Anyway, I'm leaving you there, just as I left Eagleton when he started talkimg about Iraq. Just because I never trust these people when they start talking about Iraq. You might as well be listening to a taxi driver.


* Jeremy Irons was largely rehabilitated in my eyes by his performance in The Merchant of Venice. I thought he had been before that, but looking on IMDb I can't quite see why. He was a bit wooden in Danny the Champion of the World, and hopelessly miscast, I thought, in Lolita. Or maybe that was part of the horror, if not horrorism, of that film. The story doesn't berar contemplating without Nabokov's prose, in any case. Help me out here, guys.

** Basically Elizabeth is forgetting, in caring what TE says about this, that at bottom it isn't what you do for a living that makes the difference: it's whether you make sense. Even Eagleton, even now, is making more sense than Martin Amis. I say this who, after a lifetime of watching Amis turn himself into a more and more unbearable ponce, thought Ronan Bennett made no sense at all. Even Martin Amis is thinking more deeply than he is.

*** Here in Baroque Mansions we used to have the DVD. Nessie does exist, and Ted Danson gets the girl. She's a Redgrave: it must be real.

cup poems from Guantanamo

poet Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, with his son, kept his sanity through poetry - but has since been rearrested and disappeared

Remember the old Soviet days, when poems and novels were smuggled out of the USSR in suitcases - when prisoners wrote poems about freedom and then had to scratch the words out of the dust on the floors of their cells? Remember apartheid, the way the black writers of Africa were denied their voices? Remember how unjust that was, how we reviled the governments that did that to their prisoners?

I interviewed Irina Ratushinskaya once, when she gave a reading in London after the publication of her book of prison poems, and she told me how she had written them in her head, transcribed them infinitesimally onto scraps of toilet paper and then slipped them to visitors. She was a tender little thing, solid and no-nonsense but very young - maybe younger than her years, for having spent several of them locked up.

Well, it's happening again. Locked in solitary cells, forbidden even to write letters home* under suspicion of every word being a coded message, the prisoners of Guantánano Bay - most of whom, remember, have no known terrorist connections, have never been tried, and are thus technically innocent - are writing poems, any way they can. They write them in toothpaste, etch them on the edges of styrofoam cups, horde scraps of paper, they write them in between brutal interrogation and torture sessions, and give them to the only people they're allowed to see: their lawyers. Thousands and thousands of lines of poetry have been confiscated and classified by the US military.

One of those lawyers, Marc Falkoff, was so struck by two poems he'd been given that he thought of asking other Guantánamo lawyers if they had ever been given any poetry. They had. And this time - in a delicious ironic disjuncture, because this perpetrator is in fact the Land of the Free itself - the government has no option but to allow the poems to be published, under Freedom of Speech.

According to the CBC:

"Falkoff said the poems have been translated from Arabic to English by a limited pool of translators granted security clearances by the U.S. military and some of the poetic cadence may have been lost in the process.

The poems were cleared by U.S. military censors, who screen any material sent out of the Guantanamo Bay prison."

Funny old world, eh?

However, "Many poems did not make it through the Pentagon's security screening.**

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, described the detainees' poems as 'another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies against whom they are at war.'"

In a refreshing paean to the power of prosodic device (their English teachers would be so proud) US military officials say: "poetry ... presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language". The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside," according to today's Independent.

Almost makes you want to go away and write some allegory, doesn't it? However, the poems are gut-wrenchingly far from being allegorical: take this poem by Jumah al Dossari, a 33-year-old Bahraini who has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.

death poem (mp3)

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Here is a sound file of some "cup poem" fragments by the Afghan/Pakistani poet and religious scholar*** Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost. He was released by the Americans, and has subsequently been arrested by Pakistani security - and disappeared.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that in these sort of contexts the phrase "religious scholar" usually seems to mean "ultra-rightwing Taliban-supporting lock-up-your-daughters back-to-basics scholar" - and in this case, the poet was, before his arrest, editing three Taliban-friendly magazines, though he had no connections with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda itself. I would just like to stress that I'm not supporting the Taliban here! Far from it. The poet in question would himself probably not like me even having the ability to write this in his support. What I'm supporting is the US government not becoming like them.***

The book - Poems From Guantánamo: the Detainees Speak - is published by the University of Iowwa Press this month, priced to sell at $13.95 (just under £7 at current rates), with additional content by Ariel Dorfman, and quotes from Gore Vidal, Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky.

The book's web page also has an impressive list of link to do with human rights and publishing. Proceeds from the book will go to the American Center for Constitutional Rights.

* except, apparently, for ten minutes a week, heavily censored, via the Red Cross.

** and there was me, thinking Don Paterson had a reputation for editorial rigour!

*** On this note, trivial and unconnected as it may seem, I noticed that in the movie Waitress, which I saw last night, they were unable even to say the word "abortion" - though the subject came up two or three times in the film, as the heroine is unhappily pregnant by her violent husband. They just did that thing of interrupting the sentence right before the word, and of course the heroine said she could never even consider such a thing! And her doctor was keen to say he wouldn't provide the service anyway. The film, quirky and unreligious as anything, is set in the American South.

one easy lesson

Recently there has been a very small storm in a very small teacup about the UCU's boycott of Israeli academics - and also, in Baroque Mansions, an even smaller one about the tiny print at the very bottom of an email about the AGM of MY union, the NUJ - so much for impartiality, boys! - saying that the NUJ supported a boycott of Israel.

This has, following an uprising of NUJ members which alas I had nothing to do with - I've been so out of it - been rescinded. (Thank God, because it was cracked.) There was even a blog! Who knew! It was written by BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, who in his final post gives an admirable account of just why the boycott idea was so cracked. (If you weren't sure.)

The papers say anti-semitism is on the increase. Anecdotally, anti-semitism is on the increase. Most of my friends on the left are so rabidly anti-Israeli that it makes me very uncomfortable, and I'm not even Jewish (though, as the joke goes, I pass).

Anyway, Dina Rabinovitch has a couple of humdingers of examples on her blog, fresh from the streets of Hendon (where, by the way, she is also on a quest for a really good blow-dry, a project we here at Baroque can only support).

She also has a link to a video of her husband, Anthony Julius, describing the "new anti-semitism" and why we find it hard to recognise, acknowledge properly, or deal with. Of course he says "we" and he means Jews, but I think "we" is everybody. One of the most prominent lawyers in the land, he is no slouch at putting together a position, and this little ten-minute video outlines brilliantly a particular way in which anti-semitism creeps in under the door, as it were. Watch it below and ask yourself a few questions.



By the way, I think the ideas Anthony raises, if applied to the position Muslims find themselves in today, might equally well apply. The truth is that we are in a rationalising age, where all sorts of polemics are being used to give intellectual support to all sorts of irrational prejudices and fears. This speech gives the beginnings of a cogent analysis of part of this tendency.

The speech was made at a meeting in Euston last week, run by Engage. To see the other speakers click here.

Freelance nutter gets new gig

I see that Yvonne Ridley (aka "Sister Yvonne") – former English tabloid journalist, current spittle-flecked* Islamist and sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome – has joined the staff of Iran's latest propaganda initiative. Press TV is aimed at viewers in Europe and the US, and has as its chief news anchor a real Lord Haw Haw character in Henry Morton ("Salaam, and welcome.").

Ridley has had a chequered journalistic career, and it will be interesting to see how this comical Wahhabist fares under Iranian Shia tutelage. Ridley worked until recently for the London-based Islam Channel, but was given the boot after offending its Saudi backers. Only that's not how Ridley's friends describe the affair. In a brilliant display of originality and political acumen, the Ridley fanclub claim that it was all part of a cunning plot cooked up by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

In 2003, Ridley was fired by al-Jazeera from her position as editor of the TV station's English-language service. Angry at her dismissal, Ridley is said to have "declared jihad on al-Jazeera". She sued for unfair dismissal, and won a settlement that no doubt buggered up her dole claim.

Back to Ridley's current employ. I was approached in January by a certain Keivan Hassanpour of Press TV with a view to working with the new channel. Maybe I was seen as someone who could carry news of Iran's scientific triumphs to the western world, and enthusiastically present its side of the nuclear story. Whatever the reason, it says a lot about the thoroughness of the station's HR procedures.

But that's by the bye, and while I am always open to new commissions, I'm not that desperate. Still, if I had access to a satellite receiver, I would definitely tune in to Press TV from time to time for a spot of light entertainment. Fawning interviews with Hugo Chávez sound absolutely delightful, as do live political debates hosted by "Sister Yvonne".

Going by Ridley's track record, however, it's unlikely she will be there for long.

* Talking of spittle-flecked, did any of you catch Melanie Phillips blowing a gasket on yesterday's Moral Maze programme on Radio 4? You can listen to the programme online for one week after broadcast.

Aside from the raving bag lady with an NUJ card, it was in parts an intelligent discussion about the nature of Islamism and religious-inspired terrorism. Shiv Malik was particularly good. In the second part of the programme, the Muslim Council of Britain's Inayat Bunglawala had his arguments disassembled with surgical precision, and received a severe verbal kicking from Phillips.

One of the highlights of the programme was sometime biologist and regular critic of Israel Steven Rose lambasting Phillips for her obsession with "The Jewish Problem". Following Rose's tactful intervention, the stunned bag lady made a few strangulated noises in protest, and was promptly shut up by presenter Michael Buerke. I was driving at the time and had to stop the car, so distracted was I with what was coming over the airwaves.

independence day

Alan Johnston is free, after three months held captive by the so-called Army of Islam (top marks for originality there - we're sure to remember that brand). Opening the headlines this morning I was greeted by this picture - imagine! What a glorious wake-up!

I read the articles in the Guardian, and then started my morning blog perusal. The first blog I turned to - maybe, in fact, chosen because of the topicality of the morning's news - showed me a different picture (thanks to my guest-blogger Jura Watchmaker).

I do remember the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and his two colleagues last summer - a summer of constant bad news and sadness, much of it concerning the very young conscripted people who seem to make up Israel's armed forces. And you know what? I had forgotten. And the reason for that is beause, unlike Alan Johnston who had the BBC behind him,* they haven't been in the news. Looking around a bit this morning I discovered that Gilad (who is only 19 even now) is still in captivity. He looks like a lovely boy. He is in fact a French citizen (as if that made a difference).

There are concerns over the wellbeing of the other two, Eldad Regev and Edud (Udi, for short) Goldwasser, both of whom also look jolly nice; Udi had only recently got married.

So, sadly, I will be replacing the Alan Johnston sticker in my sidebar with this:







I know that all these concerns appear relatively remote from the busy, singleminded politicking of Ben Franklin et al. (much as one loves to ponder on Thomas Jefferson's peculiar icy brand of rationalism and all that...) but then - now more than ever - we are all swimming in the same soup. America may have got its freedom from England, but I don't think any of us can really call ourselves free while all this is going on.** We should, however, now more than ever remember what we got from our Enlightenment forebears.*** I for one always find Tom Paine refreshing:

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself."

As for the other two Israeli captives, in the absence of any security that they are even alive, all we can do (though I know Francis won't like it! call it early training) is pray for them.

(And if you think that even the idea of ecumenical praying is dangerously close to dancing with the devil, I'll refer you to this lovely story I read on normblog.)

* And lest I sound at all cynical, I'm not. I was moved to tears by his acocunt of hearing about the worldwide vigils on his birthday.

** In my own case I am painfully aware on a daily basis that I don't know enough to be able to interpret the news properly - how could anyone keep up?? Spinoza, as my E-Verse Radio newsletter this week tells me, had something to say about this:

"The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free."

Something to aim for, then.

** Not long now till the election...

Gray's anatomy of human nature

I have been reading Bryan Appleyard's review, in the Sunday Times, of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by professor John Gray. It's so interesting - so full of things that I've been thinking, and thinking I was the only one thinking them - and also of things I'd never have thought of, that now look like things I was waiting to realiser - that I have lifted some snippets out of it for your, dear reader, delectation. By all means go and read the whole article. Or read Appleyard's blog post about it. Or even buy the book.

By the way, I'm not framing it all as quotes. Unquoted statements below are Appleyard's; quoted statements are Gray's. The analysis of liberalism is largely Isaiah Berlin's.

.....

Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all [Gray's] thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused."

Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature.

Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny.

He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”

...With the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten.

The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress.

“Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

...Many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons.

...The roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress

Holocaust Memorial Day

This year's Holocaust Memorial was themed "Same. But different", with the aim of raising awareness of our common hunmanity; that it wasn't just Jews who were killed by the Nazis; and that genocide still occurs. According to a report commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust there is massive ignorance among Britons as to the true nature of the Holocaust. Quoted in The Voice,

"Holocaust Memorial Day Trust chairman, Dr Stephen Smith said: “Prejudice is not a problem for other people. It affects us all, be it because of our religion, our race, our sexuality or just our way of life. We must stand up to discrimination and ensure such atrocities are part of our past and not our future.

“This year on Holocaust Memorial Day, we invite the country to celebrate what makes them unique, and recognise that we are all the same, but different. We are an impressively diverse nation, and ought to take pride in this fact.

“We are calling on everyone to light a candle in memory of all those who have been persecuted in genocides.”

Following Normblog's copious and very useful links, I have found an Auschwitz Alphabet, a trailer for the film Shoah, an account of a trip to Auschwitz, and an interview with Anthony Julius on the "new" anti-Semitism.

Ms B is saddened to admit that she increasingly hears remarks that sound anti-Semitic even from friends; and that they are often couched in rationalist terms, so that a comment may be ugly but is framed to sit unexceptionally within a specific conversation; or they are political, normally about the situation between Israel and Palestine, but somehow seem to extend further than that. Julius talks about anti-Semitism as being like a liquid, of which even a drop can begin to infect in subtle ways any liquid into which it is put.

Bearing in mind the continuing depressing - and to the Baroque mind so ill-advised - boycott of the Holocaust Memorial by the Muslim Council of Britain, I am also happy, thanks to Black Triangle, to bring you this quote from Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel acceptance speech:

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentors, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religions, or political views, that place - at that moment - become the centre of the universe.”