McCall has a port wine stain and avuncular smile
Arshad's white hair is tinged with nicotine,
Riley combs his hair over the scalp in a dark arc
Their talk is the hubbub of geese on the lake,
I hear from another room. Their campfire
Ghosts of smoke drifting through Autumn,
I weave their life together from scraps gathered
At the edge of the bus station concourse or
The dank shadow of the concrete overpass.
A trilby left on the greyed timbers of a park bench,
With a bottle of vodka sweating condensation
A dark flower of urine blooming on the trousers
Left in a bin bag somewhere. I slip into the clothes
I would only call freedom if freedom is a drizzle
Permeating the landscape of self. I lean back
And feel redemption slide stringent with saltwater
Down a coastal shelf.
1/19 How the Bots won the #Brexit referendum #FBPE#FollowBackFriday Pleaseread and share On 11 April 1992 the headline on the British tabloid newspaper “The Sun” read “It was the Sun wot won it”. The paper, which is owned by media oligarch Rupert Murdoch, was boasting that it
2/19 had swayed the vote in the UK general election two days earlier and brought the Tories to power. The next leader of the defeated Labour party, Tony Blair, courted Murdoch assiduously. He was rewarded with the support of the Sun and stormed to an election victory in 1998.
3/19 Murdoch and his press empire still remain an influential force but they are being displaced. Public opinion is now being moulded by bots on social media platforms such as twitter. In both the US and the UK there was a sense of shock after the results of the 2016 referendum
1/21 Thread on Ukrainian literature and Russian soft power #Ukraine#Poetry I travelled across Ukraine by train in 1993 and spent hours staring mesmerized at the seemingly endless pastures and forests. It was hard to believe that this vast country was so invisible in Western
2/21 culture. Likewise, the Ukraine has one of the richest literatures in Europe, yet it remains untranslated and the country is culturally almost invisible. Why?
3/21 In Valerii Shevchuk’s story, Birds from an Invisible Island, a wanderer is taken prisoner by a mysterious sect. Every night he dreams that a bird flies to him in his chamber, an emissary from beyond the castle walls. Shevchuk’s story conveys the sense that Ukrainians had of
1/47 #Ukraine#Poetry#Translation- a long thread on my PEN award winning translations of Bohdan Ihor Antonych and why this great poet matters to us all
2/47 I first stumbled across Antonych in a musty Soviet edition of his work I purchased in 1993, during my first trip to Ukraine. The book was an impulse buy, partly because I was sickened by what I encountered in my ancestral homeland. Hyperinflation had transformed my auntie
3/47 into a ‘millionaire’ and the interim kupony currency seemed to breed zeroes, like bacteria in a petri dish. A woman, the sickly yellow colour of ill health, fainted at a bus stop. Stalagmites of urine crystallised in the latrines of Kyiv station. I was in a country that was
1) A thread- #LateSovietBritain is a joke tag but in fact the situation in the UK resembles the collapse of what was a multinational empire masquerading as an egalitarian society.
2) The Soviet leaders really retained all the prejudices of their Tsarist predecessors who had created an empire welded together by violence and colonial oppression. The Circassian genocide is but one example adiga.com/assets/book.pdf
3) The Soviet Union was a pseudo federation of bogus republics many of which were based on ethnic areas which had been violently colonised and subject to genocide: Circassia, Tatarstan, etc.
1) In 2017 I predicted the UK would become an oligarchy in an interview with JJ Patrick on Byline Times- now, three years later, the process and its links to Russia are undeniable. But how can we "imagine" this transformation this war, so that we can win it?
2) The conflict is between two social models that can be defined simplistically as authoritarian or oligarchic populism and popular sovereignty. The first model relies on pseudo elections with choice being controlled- the second is based on voters freely choosing
3) Popular sovereignty is an aspiration rather than a reality and the "liberal democracies" were always arguably finely tuned oligarchies. But their politicians believed in accountability and the ballot box.