Alan Sillitoe

During an expedition with Dr Scarpone I ended up in a closing bookshop. One of my purchases was Alan Silitoe’s Birthday. Years ago - early sixties- I read his Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, stunned by its raw vitality, the vibrant lingo, its sexuality and the values that carried the story. I didn’t realize I had just picked up its sequel. 40 years later Alan Sillitoe is still concerned with masculinity and social justice (maybe class is the better word), yet it is all about change, reflecting the changing Zeitgeist and incomprehension of the younger generations. This book is “human”, anti-authoritarian with its freethinking and non-religious brand of thoughts. He gave me with this book an acceptance of aging, death and physical decay. On this melancholy rainy grey Sunday I talked to Rockcastle about the book & ravage of time in ourselves and that the conclusion of his stoic and funny review of life was a defiant ‘Life goes on’: You live in order to create memories. By the way: the novel is situated in Nottingham, officially the drunkest city in the UK. A few quotes:
- Brian slewed much of his pint, to keep up with his brothers. He wiped his mouth, then speculated on whether the amount of spunk he had shot in his life would have been enough to drown in. Maybe the ink he had used was a safer bet for suicide. Gallons of both, but neither death was tempting. The collective of matches struck for fires and cigars could have made a tree from which to hang himself, though he’d only ever thought of such an end to scorn himself out of doing it. Every morning he mainlined ink from a fat Mont Blanc into his upper arm, one side one day and the other the next, at which notion they laughed, as did he.
- There had to be more in life than talking to someone with no common bridge.
- People preferred overwhelming noise to quiet thoughts that would drive them insane, not knowing that only silence enabled you to be yourself.
- He saw black faces here and there, ore someone wearing a Moslem pillbox hat, or turban, though he’d noticed that when such people opened their mouths the accent was often as Nottingham as the rest, language a perfect mixer.
- Not even God controlled life and death, so any support would be feeble, though better than nothing.
- … the girl he had so intimately known turned into an unfamiliar old woman.
- His passport was always up to date, though he occasionally panicked that it might not be, and pulled into the next layby or petrol station to fumble through his wallet.
- I am sure it’s this bombing of Yugoslavia. I just can’t believe it. They should have spend all the billions dropping TVs and washing machines, then the people would have stopped killing each other to get at them. Or they could drop a million mobile phones so’s people could start talking. That Blair’s a real prat. Bombing hospitals and orphanages – it’s cruel. And all they can do at home is cut benefits for the disabled.
- Hard to say whether he went to her or she to him, but they stood in the middle of the room for a kiss which had all the passion of their early meetings. The only excuse he could find for not getting her to the floor and fucking her was that the scorched infant he suddenly turned into wouldn’t allow him to get a hard on, and when one came he saw panic on her face in case he tried. It was equally hard to know who broke away first, their pressing lips no more, after all, than a sign of days long gone.

Women writers in prison

Dear Excellency, Mr. Ambassador of Iran,


No friend of President’s Bushes attitude and policy toward Iran, together with many people all over the world we are trying to avoid another disaster like the war in Iraq. Yet defending your country isn’t easy when prominent writers and journalists Shadi Sadr, Mahbubeh Abbasgholizadeh and Jila Baniyaghoub are imprisoned for having organized a peaceful demonstration. In total 33 women were arrested in Teheran March 4, 2007. As far as PEN International knows all were released, except the three above mentioned women who are still detained in Evin prison. PEN fears that these women’s right to free expression, see article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This Covenant has been signed by Iran. These facts have cast a shadow on the International Women’s Day, March 8, 2007, a day dedicated to Women and Peace, a truly important subject for the world.

Shadi Sadr is a well-known writer, journalist and lawyer. She has written many articles and books on women rights in Iran, and created Zanan-e Iran, the first website entirely dedicated to women’s rights issues in the country.
Mahbubeh Abbasgholizadeh is the editor of the quarterly journal Zanan and has been previously imprisoned for posting articles on reformist websites.
Jila Baniyaghoub is a prominent journalist and editor of the Iranian Women’s Society website and the women’s section of the Sarmaye newspaper. She was recently acquitted of charges of ‘acting against national security’ and ‘participating in an illegal demonstration’ after she covered a demonstration attended by thousands of women on 12 June 2006 calling for legal reforms.

PEN Writers in Prison Committee is very worried about the fate of these three women and would like to know what they are charged with. Furthermore we would like to be reassured as to their wellbeing.

Dear Mr. Ambassador, I urge you to forward our appeal and concern for these women to your government.

Mourning

Over the determined dictate of the clock I long for the chaos of clouds, the freedom of chance which brings shade or soothing rain. I mourn the free fall of snow on the Kilimanjaro, yesterday's snows, meltwater of spewing chimneys, producing like clockwork.

Eavesdropping

Arizona, last winter:

"A sub, Sir, with turkey please", said the gray man at Pilot.
- "No fire arms are allowed in here, Sir." replied the young kid.

Now how to handle the shift in the eyes of the man, the need to chase evil with the gun by his side. Skinny with lightless eyes, he is as stained as was his life. Not dirty, grimy but unclear with the fog of his mind around him.

The kid does not know about the man's fearful, fiery dreams of shooting at what doesn't breathe, shooting at the stillness of the night, the noises, voices in the clouds. He doesn't even know about the war never called a war while soldiers killed and died. The war, like all others, that should not have been. The boy with confident smile knows of Mohave greens, gila monsters but nothing of the sharp sticks hidden on the jungles paths, the snares, the tunnels, the distrust of friend and foe.

The man just stands there, doesn't move nor speak. Looks at the boy's hands cutting the sandwich with the glimmering efficient knife.
- "Here you go, Sir." handing him the sub with turkey. After all his father is a hunter and does no harm killing quail and deer for fun.

The man reaches for his order, eying the now resting knife and breathes more even now. He is OK. All is well. He goes out in search of a lifeless place.

Down the drain

On the road and down the drain, burned up, maybe even burned out to the point that the blogging stopped. Not for lack of subjects to share. After all there was the surprise fiftieth birthday party for a friend, which brought mutual friends from Scarborough to my house. I have shared with them my place in the desert and my lowland place. He wrote and composed ‘Meet me at Death Valley’. It is uplifting but as he writes in on of the songs ‘living on the edge, I can’t afford to stumble…’ During my silent retreat March 8, International Women’s day was dedicated to women and peace. In ‘Pragmatics of Human Communication, Paul Watzlavitch showed us that ‘You cannot not communicate’… Leonard Peltier wrote from his prison:

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
Just as doing nothing g is an act.

Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message.

You are the message.

So, I try to find back my voice, and throw myself in the fray again. Tumbleweed is looking for a breeze to jump off the fence.

One-eyed Ford

Actually a one-eyed Chevy, not quite the same rhythm...

I don’t care if you’re married I still love you
I don’t care if you’re married 

After the party’s over

I will take you home in my One-Eyed Ford

Way yah hi yo, Way yah hi yo!


From “Big Fun,” Riding the One-eyed Ford, 1981 
by Diane Burns - Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother. In the Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie (Spokane) read the Reservation Love Song. First stanza:

I can meet you
in Springdale buy you beer
& take you home
in my one-eyed Ford

How many of you have had one-eyed cars?

The Algebraist

Just some quotes from the excellent The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks:
I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and ending are contingent things anyway; inventions devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassing greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with, ‘BANG! Expand! Sssss…’, then itemise the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things… ( first § )
P. 29: Nevertheless, in all that flux of chaos, propaganda, distortions, drivel and weirdness, there were nuggets of actuality, seams of facts, frozen rivers of long- forgotten history, whole volumes of exobiography and skeins and tissues of truth.
P. 54: ‘Can any of us think of a good reason why this place is prohibited, apart from standard authoritarian, bureaucratic, overreacting, territory-marking militaristic bullshit?’
P. 116: No great breakdown in society took place and there were no significant riots or rebellions, though there were protests and crack-downs, and, as the authorities admitted much later – much later- Mistakes Were Made. But the system held together rather than fell apart, and many people would look back on that strange, unsettled epoch with a sort of nostalgia. There had been something feverish but vivid about the time, a reconnection with life after the disconnection with everybody else, which led to what even looked from some angles suspiciously like a cultural renaissance for what people were now starting to call the Ulubine Disconnect.
P. 223-24: a grandiose rant against the fucking system….
P. 310: Wormhole access portals were the pinch-points of the wormhole system – the city’s underground stations – were people of various species-types were forced to meet and to some extent mingle, though given the tiny amount of time one spend near a portal or within a wormhole, even this seemingly profound tying-together made very little difference to the ultimate unconnectedness of the many different life-strands, and both before they gathered and after they dispersed, the users of the system still tended to congregate at places specific to their own comfort criteria, usually quite different from those of all the others.
P. 437: he far preferred conference calls, holo meetings. They tended to be shorter ( though not always – if you had one where everybody was somewhere they felt really comfortable, they could go on forever too) and they were easier to control – easier to dismiss, basically. But there seemed to be this distribution curve of meeting reality: people at the bottom of the organisational pile had lots of real all-sat-down-together meetings – often Saluus had long suspected, because they had nothing useful to do and so had the time to spare and the need to seem important that meeting could provide. Those in the middle and towards the top had more and more holo meetings because it was just more time-efficient and the people they needed to meet with were of similarly high stature with their own time problems and often far away. But the – this was the slightly weird bit – as you got to the very highest levels, the proportion of face-to-face meetings started to rise again.
Also the rest about vital informational and body language….