Michael Blackburn: ‘It just happens that many of the books proposed are not just grown-up but “old” and “old” is always categorised as bad by certain people, even some who want youngsters to develop the reading habit. ‘
Michael Blackburn: ‘This Snooper’s Charter, which received no attention whatsoever in the UK media, was “transposed”, i.e. incorporated into English law in 2009. Thus we are already being snooped on. Both the Labour government’s planned database and the Coalition’s are merely expensive add-ons to what already exists.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘This is where Thatcher and her colleagues failed: totally, dismally, catastrophically. They allowed Political Correctness and its corruption of the language to enter the culture, mainly at local level, and it has proliferated ever since. The leftist ideologues and educationists poisoned the country from inside and the EU poisoned it from outside. Now we are all made to suffer from the hysterical hypersensitivity it creates and the institutional bullying employed to enforce it.’
Michael Blackburn: The same words and phrases kept rising up and floating away like untethered balloons: young people and police “relating”, finding “views” and “needs”, “communicating”, “interacting” and making “connections”. This is no more than the slop of cod psychology dished up as serious social policy.
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Michael Blackburn: ‘Community’ is a toxic solvent that destroys both society and the individual. It’s the atomisation of a nation. It’s a means of destroying the concept of society while pretending to care about it. It’s the operation of a very old, well-tried political tactic: divide and rule. Dissolve society and you have nothing left but the state.’
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Michael Blackburn: ‘You would normally assume that failing to learn any facts is the same as being ignorant, and the purpose of education is to eradicate ignorance. But there’s the core of modern progressive education for you: ignorance is knowledge. And quite how you can interpret anything from evidence when evidence is fact-free I don’t know. Perhaps that’s a skill teachers learn at training college.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘ the phrase “aspiration nation” makes me think of a body in terminal decline, enduring painful interventions for only short-term relief. There’s no need to labour the metaphor. As far as the country’s concerned all we know is that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We just don’t know how much worse.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The problem Marxists have is that they can’t cope with anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their intellectual plan of the universe; that accounts for their difficulty dealing with reality. The problem with most politicians is that they are pretty stupid but think they aren’t – that and the fact that they’re inveterate meddlers who can’t leave anything alone. We’d all be better off if both groups were subject to frequent bouts of creative destruction. Or just destruction in the case of the former.’
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Michael Blackburn: ‘We’ve had enough snow. It doesn’t take much in Britain. A day or two of it lying around on field, farm, housing estate and rooftops is sufficient for us to enjoy its transient beauty and to be reminded of childhood pleasures. More than that is an imposition.’
Michael Blackburn: Will Self doesn’t have to stick his nose outside the media bubble he inhabits…which is why he can go on to make the astonishing claim that the last Labour government implicitly played the race card and “triangulated” on immigration. The fact that Labour deliberately engineered mass immigration into the country with the intention of changing the culture seems to have eluded His Immense Braininess.
Michael Blackburn: ‘today if you wish to catch a politician out and subject them to a bit of mockery the easiest thing to do is get them to make a comment about everyday life – everyday life as the rest of us live it, that is. Pasties, the price of milk, tv programmes, bands – they’re all minefields for the clodhoppers in the Commons. Any comment by a politician (presumably guided by some overpaid PPE graduate in the role of adviser) about music, for example, is guaranteed to provoke ridicule. They’ll either come up with something that’s blatantly nonsensical or just weird.’
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Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Michael Blackburn: ‘I wanted to know what this fugitive memory was. It may have been some little treasure of a moment that had not seen the light of consciousness before. It may possibly have been my ramshackle memory going off at half-cock, like an aged librarian in an ageing library that’s accumulated so much material there’s no way either organise it or sift through it any more.’
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Michael Blackburn: ‘The source of this scandal is twofold: idiotic bureaucracy from the EU; and criminality. The latter is with us always, which is why we have the law. The former, unfortunately, will be with us for a few more years yet, as will the simpletons who can’t see how much trouble it causes, even as they demand more regulation. And that’s what we’ll get – more regulation and more unintended consequences.’
Thursday, 14 February 2013
Michael Blackburn: ‘Of course, I may be suffering the same illusion as everyone else in the poetry ghetto, that there’s a way out, that we’re not just muttering to ourselves. I’m not bothered any more if that is the case but I still like the idea that someone, somewhere is taking a look at the poems and enjoying what they see. If the only way to make that happen is to use the latest technology and expect no payment, then why not? As Rimbaud said more than a century ago, “Il faut être absolument moderne”, so let us be absolutely modern.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘THERE’S ONE GROUP of people you don’t get to meet in Borgen: the people. Given the focus of the programme – ie the Danish equivalent of the Westminster bubble – that’s almost inevitable but it’s still telling. There’s an awful lot of pious mouthing about the Denmark “we” want to build; and how “we” want to cherish “our” welfare state, and “we” want to be working towards a “Common Future”, etc. In the realm of political-media doublespeak “we” means those in power; “we” as in “not you, the voters, because you’re too thick to understand”. Inadvertently, Borgen reflects the view that politicians and media have of the populace as mere bit players.’
Writers Museum, Dublin: tat and ephemera.
The youth tactic. | Edward Dorn – a two-part review. | What’s happened to ‘working-class’ poetry? | The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett. | The prosaic declarations of ‘world poetry’. | Books received: Summer 2012. | Alistair Noon and the English Sonnet. | Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press. | Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus. | Denise Riley and the force of bereavement. | Poetry beyond the cults and enclaves.
