‘Move over Jacko,’ a Guardian headline proclaimed, ‘Idea of Communism is the hottest ticket in town this weekend’. Despite the fact that tickets cost £100 - £25 more than the tickets to see Michael Jackson at the O2 - demand for the tickets was so great the organisers had to move to Logan Hall at the Institute of Education with a capacity of almost 1,000. Even this sold out several weeks in advance.

This is certainly unusual for what was planned to be a relatively small-scale academic philosophy conference. This prompted lots of discussion about why this was the case: following the credit crunch is communism now back on the agenda and being taken seriously by the public once more?  Will this event give birth to a new philosophy that will be internalised by activists during the predicted ‘summer of rage’? Or does the stellar line-up of speakers make this event the continental philosopher’s equivalent of going to see the Rolling Stones (see them all together in the flesh – as this could be your last chance)?

The crowd was surprisingly young: most were students in their twenties and thirties. In many ways the mood was similar to that at the early stages of the 1 April G20 protests: there was a strong mix of curiosity and anticipation, but no-one really knew why they were there. As one attendee exclaimed to her friends, ‘with a crowd like this, with the economy as it is and with Zizek, Badiou, Negri, Ranciere all talking about Communism… Something’s got to happen’.

But what wasn’t going to happen, as the co-organisers French philosopher Alain Badiou and Slovenian psycho-analyst Slavoj Zizek made clear, was any call for a return to ‘once more to Communism’ or immediate political action. As Zizek argued, in a time of crisis such as this, ‘now is the time to think. It’s crucial to resist the urgency of the call to ‘do something, people are starving, do something’. No, it’s time to think’. And whilst a return to an adoption of the Communist politics of the 20th century is off the table, it was declared by Zizek in the opening plenary that it was safe to come out of the closet: ‘The stigma associated with being a communist is over. All are permitted with no shame to be for communism.’

What does it mean to be ‘for Communism’? It is certain that PhD theses could be written on the differences between the understanding the range of speakers over the week, from ‘token Anglo-Saxon’ Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton to Alberto Toscano, however the common frame of reference was that of Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’ —the proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not inevitable (2).

The introductory quote to the conference, on all of the posters, is one from Badiou:

‘The Communist Hypothesis remains the good one; I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it… what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.’

Of even greater concern for Badiou was a perceived need to focus upon the very conditions of existence for such an hypothesis. Despite this, however, Badiou’s discussion of the idea of communism remained - as Peter Hallward aptly characterised things – as if what was being discussed was a Kantian abstract idea largely distinct from understanding of the specificities of the historical period in which we live. Many of the papers delivered took place on this level of abstraction, which – in the case of Hallward for example – gave some important insights into Rousseau’s concept of the General Will. This, after all was a philosophy conference. But it did not constitute the event that the curious audience had anticipated.

Zizek – who, addressing a packed crowd during a warm-up gig at the Southbank Centre earlier in the week, stalled during a discussion about ‘how to act’ and promised answers at this conference – was commendably alert to the lack of a concrete discussion regarding the possibilities of realizing Communism. In the short opportunities for questions after the delivery of three hour-long, consecutive papers, he made an effort to inject ‘spice’ into the proceedings. And it was only during the final session, which was opened by Zizek, that sparks began to fly and very real political tensions between speakers and audience, previously possible to ignore due to the level of abstraction of much of the discussion, became apparent.

Zizek recognised that the majority of people accept the ‘Fukayama-ist’ thesis that history has ended and noted that one could be forgiven for anticipating that those who accept such a thesis will emerge from the ongoing meltdown like ‘awakening from a dream’. However, Zizek argued, this is not going to be the case: the crisis is far more likely to lead to a panic – a ‘return to basics’, which will instead ‘create the conditions for future liberal therapy’. People, Zizek argued, won’t target their blame at the capitalist system itself. Reactions at present make it clear that ‘capital is the most real thing in our lives’. As Zizek pointed out, you can say, ‘Save AIDS patients, stop global warming’, but ‘Saving the banks is an unconditional imperative. Even democracy is suspended – congress gets it wrong and is told ‘the situation is serious, don’t fuck things up with voting’’.

Zizek characterises the contemporary reactions to the economic crisis as endorsing the naturalisation of capitalism as an elemental force. For Zizek this means that we live in ‘apocalyptic times’ with an impending ecological catastrophe, digital control over our lives, biogenetic developments, new forms of apartheid and new models of authoritarian capitalism are cited as some key concerns. Also, memorably, is a dystopian vision of the future where, ‘Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian and Murdoch is the greatest environmentalist’. To counter this, Zizek argues, there is a pressing need for a return to the left.

None of the speakers wanted to ‘write recipes for the cookshops of the future’ – or blueprints for a future Communist age – but it was clear that ecological thinking has begun to shape what a utopian future would look like. Zizek – unlike Eagleton, who hinted at potential limits to the world’s resources that means Marx’s original vision of Cornucopian Communism is no longer achievable – argues for a ‘resolutely modern’ vision of Communist society: ‘Whatever communism is, it’s not a return to mother earth.’ Correcting Heidegger, ‘incessant expansion is the only true goal.’

Whilst one may agree with Zizek’s vision of communism, however, where is the universal class that will drive us forward to this new society? For Zizek, we cannot ‘play a waiting game’ for a new historic class: ‘we are the ones we have been waiting for. Do not be afraid. Join Us. Come back’. Are, we – as Zizek suggests - simply rationalising our inactivity today? Is this due to fear of past failures? More fundamentally, however, who is the ‘us’? The audience Zizek was asking to ‘come back’ and adopt the idea of communism were broadly a post-cold war generation who had no lived experience of what they needed to ‘come back’ to. 

Nowhere was this clearer than when Zizek stood up at the end of the conference and asked for the whole audience to join him in a rendition of ‘a certain song that begins in I and end in E’. This act, he said, would demonstrate that some kind of progress towards Communism, no matter how small, had been made. The audience looked around at each other, muttered and broadly cottoned on to the fact that he was talking about The Internationale. ‘Do you know the words?’ a guy next to me whispered. ‘I think I know the chorus’ another said. ‘I know the first few lines in Italian’ someone behind me said. Despite – as much as anything - a general sense of not wanting to dampen Zizek’s wild enthusiasm, no attempt at a rendition of the Internationale took place. The vast majority simply didn’t know the words.

As one of the very first speakers form the audience over the weekend asked, why Communism? ‘Why not discuss the idea of Capitalism?’ The assumption that Zizek and Badiou were making even that the audience were ‘closet’ Communists was one that needed to be questioned. Even the fierce will and determination of Zizek could not bring together the thousand individuals in the room to join him in singing the Internationale.

Zizek is wrong to try to try the tactic of scaring us to the left through the range of apocalyptic scenarios he paints. He’s right, however, that now is the time to think. Trying to understand the barriers that lie in the way of this ideal these philosophers wish to achieve, the concrete factors that are threatening – as Badiou says – the very conditions of existence of the Communist hypothesis (should one choose accept that term) is a far more pressing task today.

(1) Move over Jacko, Idea of Communism is hottest ticket in town this weekend, by Duncan Campbell, Guardian, 12 March 2009
(2) The Communist Hypothesis, by Alain Badiou, New Left Review 49, January-February 2008

Sex education is one of those topics that seems to pop up in the news as a ‘current affairs’ issue on an almost seasonal basis. Young boys becoming fathers, statistics about teenage pregnancy, outbreaks of sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs), the nanny state, single mothers, feral youth, cycles of poverty, moral decay – they can all lead to a heated rehashing of arguments about sex education. Identified in crude ways as a ‘soft target’ and an ‘easy fix’ solution for a host of ‘social problems’, we are told that there is too much of it and, at the same time, that there isn’t enough of it, and that it should start earlier.

But if you want to think about the issue in an original, and it must be said, far more entertaining way, watch these films. The BFI’s release of 17 sex education films made between 1917 and 1973 provides an opportunity to sit back and take the long view. These films are in turn courageous (censorship was a recurring problem), pious (you learn more about marriage than sex), tragic (they remind us of the desperate shame of illegitimacy and show us hospital wards full of blind children resulting from hereditary syphilis) and sometimes mystifying even when they aim to inform (did you know that mold was ‘most particular about who it marries’?). They are also sometimes very, very funny.

While individually interesting, viewed together they provide a remarkable snapshot of images of personal and intimate life in Britain in the twentieth century and of changing aspirations and representations of the good life. They also provide an important record of government and quasi-government attempts at informing and regulating sexual behaviour.

The dominant recurring theme is that sex education is not about pleasure and empowering individual choice but about damage limitation – in particular stopping the spread of disease. So in ‘Whatsover a Man Soweth’ (1917) we are taken on a tour of a VD clinic (‘venereal disease’ being the old-fashioned term for what are now called STDs), and shown in such graphic detail the consequences of untreated syphilis that the film was censored. In ‘Any Evening After Work’ (1930) we see a farm labourer being sacked because the illness has made him unfit for work. And in ‘Ellie and Lyle’ (1967), a health advisor, while treating an infected young man, takes on the role of a detective as he hunts down the source of infection through the city. In a cops and robbers style, with a map of the city behind his desk, he announces: ‘We want to know how you got it… That’s my business’. 

But the most often mentioned risk associated with VD – referred to in both these films and in ‘Trial for Marriage’ (1936) and ‘Love on Leave’ (1940) is that a man might pass on the infection to his wife and subsequently to his (unborn) children. Here the threat is not just disease but tarnished reputation. The message attached, however, changes subtly over time. In ‘Whatsover a Man Soweth’ (1917) the recommended way to avoid VD is explicitly moral: ‘live as you would have the girl live who you intend to marry’ and ‘do nothing of which you would be ashamed to tell your sister or mother’. In ‘The Mystery of Marriage’ (1932), marriage itself is portrayed as a natural state (that’s where the mold comes in). And similarly in ‘Learning to Live’ (1964), VD is identified as a consequence of having sex outside of marriage; for many disease and immorality were and still are ‘reassuring’ bedfellows. But in ‘Love on Leave’ (1940) and ‘Ellie and Lyle’ (1967), however, while health experts sing the benefits of marriage, at the same time they let the viewer know that treatment is effective, freely available and confidential.

The tension between providing factual information in a neutral way, while at the same time not appearing to condone the breaking of traditional moral codes, was often strategic as much as principled. And the restraints that the film makers were under is made clear in the excellent short articles and individual film notes in the pamphlet included with the DVDs.

Alongside VD, the other great deterrent to sex that dominates the films is the risk of pregnancy. Here the focus turns to women. In ‘Brenda’ (1973) the tragic ‘heroine’ is seen handing over her child for adoption with the voice over solemnly saying: ‘one unthinking moment – two lives ruined’. In this film and in ‘A Test for Love’ (1937), where a respectable young women working in a haberdashery in a seaside town is infected with gonorrhea and is cruelly shunned by her relatives, the women are portrayed sympathetically as victims of callous male behaviour. These are exceptions, however; for in most of the films the images of women fall into those two familiar roles of Madonnas or Whores. In ‘Whatsover a Man Soweth’ (1917) we see heavily clad Edwardian Picadillly street walkers luring innocent soldiers, in ‘Trial for Marriage’ (1936) an ‘arty’ floozy from Chelsea seducing a clean cut betrothed man from the provinces and in ‘Love on Leave’ (1940) we see a pleasure seeking femme fatale.

At the other extreme are the ‘innocent’ and almost totally desexualised women infected with VD by the unfortunate and feckless men who are taught that they can not ‘sow their oats’ with impunity, and that lack of self control threatens family life as much as their own health. A curious twist on this is ‘The People at No 19’ (1949), a kitchen-sink drama in which a wife discovers on becoming pregnant that she has contracted VD from a one-night-stand while her husband was away during the war. With utter sincerity and disbelief at the fact, she shifts responsibility to her husband with the words, ‘But it must be you… You were in the army’. The effect of both world wars on the rates of VD was a motivation for many of the films. Interestingly in light of what is perceived to be acceptable now, one of the solutions proffered for containing men’s natural urges, in ‘The Road to Health’ (1938) and ‘Love on Leave’ (1940), is early marriage. But even in the most progressive film ‘Growing Up’ (1971) where female sexuality is explicitly acknowledged – a woman is shown masturbating – traditional essentialist understandings of gender prevail, as it informs us ‘factually’ that all women have maternal instincts while men are ‘better at giving birth to new ideas’.

One of the unexpected things about the films is that most of them were made to educate adults. Children appear largely as innocent victims of hereditary VD or illegitimacy. The earliest film that tackles educating children is ‘How to Tell’ (1931). Here, around the glow of a warm fire, a respectable young married couple make what appears to be a bold decision to tell their children the truth about ‘where babies come from’ on the grounds that, ‘They shan’t suffer the agony of mind we suffered’. And while many of the films for adults can appear somewhat naïve and almost quaint for a modern audience, social history research has revealed that ignorance about the most basic facts was indeed widespread until relatively recently. Consequently, while the films make abundantly clear that ‘education’ always went hand-in-hand with traditional messages, and was an attempt at social control, they also enabled some people to make informed choices of their own making.

Tim Boon, in one of the articles that comes with the DVD, argues that the films are ‘time locked texts that speak volumes of constrained social universes inhabited by our antecedents only two or three generations ago’. There is some truth in this, but it is too easy to simply view them as evidence of the bad old days before our more sexually enlightened times. This is not to belittle the huge social change in relation to the stigma of illegitimacy or to overlook the fact that pleasure does get mentioned in the later films – most playfully in the last film ‘‘Ave you got a Male Assistant Please Miss?’ (1973). But as Hera Cook makes clear in another of the articles, ‘risk avoidance and encouragement to say “no” to sexual advances remain as central to sex education now as they were in 1910’. The point would be made clearer if this collection included materials made more recently in relation to HIV/AIDS – for initiatives on this were, and remain, strikingly similar to the films here concerned with syphilis. Moreover, the panic about teenage pregnancy demonstrates the continuing linking of sex education with ideas of ‘legitimate’ families.

Perhaps the clearest evidence for questioning the progressive narrative is the fact that this DVD has been classified ‘18’ – not because of the films aimed at adults, but because of the film ‘Growing Up’ (1971) which was made for school children.

Ensconced in the cavernous Roundhouse is a giant spider of scaffolding that resembles a big-top after an arson attack. Within, nofitstate seem intent on the destruction of traditional circus in order that, phoenix-like, it might rise reborn from the ashes. In this, Tabú is a modified success – certainly, it presents a new perspective on the medium, but it fails to truly reignite.

Pitched in promenade, there is a quality of immersive street theatre about Tabú. When performers cascade over your head, you feel the rush of air; when they spin dizzyingly just in front of you, you become caught up in the rhythm, swaying on the spot. Up close, the feats on show appear magnified and infectious. However, from distance, it lacks the scale to really dazzle. Aside from the silhouetted crowds obscuring one’s view, the acts themselves often fall short of genuine gasp-factor.

That said, the shift away from demonstration and derring-do allows nofitstate’s breed of circus to function almost as performance installation. From the very first image – a field of horizontal bodies hanging from butchers’ hooks as if a human battery farm – Tabú’s component parts demand interpretation rather than astonished applause.

Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tabú takes its aim at individual fear and isolation, but seems to speak more about the evolution of society. What begins as a communal carnival, playing in amongst us with shared smiles and private jokes, becomes increasingly distant and out of reach. Where we walk into a bustling town-square populated by toy-box oddities of clowns and action-men, the place we leave is a towering metropolis that seems look down on us with menace and suspicion.

The rural simplicity of Tabú’s first half brings with it a playful exuberance. Men tumble past on spinning wheels, as young girls, perched on a tightrope above, peer down on them flirtatiously. Together they swing from municipal trapezes and leap into one another’s arms in a free-flowing dance of warmth, courtship and community. After the interval, however, no such conviviality remains.

Instead, everything seems self-contained and self-involved. During a raggedly sexual stationary trapeze routine suggestive of a couple holed up in a hotel room and entangled in each other’s bodies, there appears a high-rise population dotted around the space. As they dance, swirl and clamber in isolated pockets of space, each seems unaware of the world beyond their own personal bubble. For its inhabitants that toss in breathless sleep and drown in its plugholes, this Escher-like city is an inescapable nightmare fraught with panic.

Even when the whole company comes together to spring tumultuously on a single trampoline, community is absent. They dart haphazardly as if trapped in a wind-tunnel or lottery-machine, each a commuter concerned only with his or her own journey.

Beyond its content, though, Tabú beautifully opens the circus event to include the mechanics that operate it. Tiny moments catch the attention: an empty trapeze, a discarded hat, a pair of shoes tucked for later. Equally, the human counter-balances scuttling over the scaffold become as pleasurable as the main acts. Across the two halves they shift from playful companions in a trust game to malevolent controlling forces.

Circus, for nofitstate, can be traced in anything and anything can be found in the acts of circus. While there are problems – individual acts, for all their diligent imagery, rarely seem complete and the recorded text of fears and dreams is irksomely over-poetic yet unrevelatory – Tabú lubricates an old medium, though more through the spectacles it prescribes its audience than those it contains inherently.

Til 19 April 2009

From its very first image, Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno leaves us in no doubt as to our position as its subject. The word itself, a near-neon sign flickering and buzzing towards the back of the stage, acts as our collective title, framing us both as exhibit and accused. Where Sartre denounced other people as hell, Castellucci drop-kicks each one of us into that collective noun. We – all of us – are the inferno. Not some unknowable, ineffable elsewhere, but here, now, us: this blistering mass of body-heat blindly protesting the sanctity of life in the face of its squalidity.

The ninety minutes that follow, for all the scale and grandeur of the individual images contained, consist solely of bilious condemnation. Eloquent, bold and extraordinary bilious condemnation, but bilious condemnation nonetheless. True, Castellucci sets the mind whirring with dense ambiguity and inflicts a squirming revulsion with the sheer viscerality of his content, but, as a whole, the piece is so unswerving in its damnation that it lacks the development to engage a range of emotions. Watching Inferno a bit like receiving the hairdryer treatment from an opera singer: a bombard of beauty too intense to be appreciated.

You will struggle to find a more visually arresting string of images, however. You can almost feel them burning irrevocably onto your retina, like the startling flash of a Polaroid camera, even as you take them in.

Castellucci begins with an image of the classical underworld. He walks onto the now letterless, empty stage and announces himself, before dressing in a padded suit and allowing himself to be attacked by guard dogs. It is a curious mix of real and represented danger that almost serves as a marker for the contemptuous picture of human existence that follows.

Inside a glass box, children play with colourful balloons, unaware of the black, threatening world outside. Their sound is amplified and strangely disconcerting; their play increasingly destructive. Above them bulges a tumour of cloud. Into the dark storm steps the figure of Andy Warhol, oddly plasticised in his movements. As he snaps us with a Polaroid and enacts birth, pointing upwards with the accusatory finger of Death, Warhol seems the recurring surveyor of this Inferno; an anthropologist of Hell.

Castellucci’s other components are equally striking. A mechanical skeleton crawls across the stage. A skull is shattered. A white horse is splashed with stage blood. A grand piano burns. He marches an army of people, dressed in bright synthetic colours onto the stage. By turns, they seem an ocean, a pilgrimage and the tip of a queue stretching absently through the world in which the whole of humanity waits for their moment onstage.

Even their enactments of human kindness – caring hugs, passionate kisses, parental play and guidance – seem coated in slime, somehow containing traces of the repulsive. Even choice, a man’s head ticking between two women, becomes an endless, insoluble dilemma. Finally, they slit one another’s throats with murderous embraces in a vicious game of wink murder. There exist no innocent victims, only a last murder standing amidst his own ruins, searching for someone to end his existence. Finally, at the hands of a child, he turns to the audience, smiles and exits the inferno.

Castellucci’s piece is the antithesis of American Beauty’s plastic bag moment. Where the latter sees only beauty, he perceives horror. Inferno is a piece that never snaps or bites, never rages, riles or rallies. Instead, it quietly hollows, softly and slowly, as if imperceptibly gnawing out your insides: an acid that painlessly erodes and dissolves until nothing worthwhile remains.

Run over. Castellucci’s trilogy, which also includes Paradiso and Purgatorio, plays till 9 April

I will begin with my experiences. In March 2003 I watched Slam, starring Saul Williams. The movie depicts a poet’s journey of reconciliation and search for identity against a backdrop of hard drugs, poverty and violence. In the most memorable scene, Saul stops a prison fight by stepping between the warring tribes and simply reciting a poem. So taken was I with his spectacle, I googled ‘Poetry London’, found a regular, and after months of immersion, plucked up the courage to read some stuff. Six years later, I have published a best seller, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, toured extensively from Hay-on-Wye’s Lit Fest to the Oxford Playhouse to London’s South Bank to the Bus 343, and distinguished street corners between.

I am as influenced by the classic Romantics, their form, language and sentence structure, as I am by Hip Hop’s ebonics, diction, rhythm and demand for attention and awe. I’d say Hip Hop’s influence alone lends my work to the stage. Now, I’ve encountered different reading styles… I recall Niall O’Sullivan’s story of being so nervous at his first reading, his legs shook. To be stilled enough to read, he crouched down frog-like, after which an audience member thanked him for his unusual delivery. I’ve seen Southbank Centre’s Artist in Residence, Lemn Sissay give a performance of a performance, reading from a book, constantly losing lines, stuttering, starting from the top, entirely captivating the audience, and I’ve presented poems in a variety of ways; set to music, live radio readings; on occasion, over phones as bed time stories. At live literature events, I’ve recited poems with such gusto I hurled myself across a stage, once attired as a bare chested West African story teller (for The Fairy Tales), to now, where I mostly stand, one hand grasping the mic, the other pocketed, and simply speak the poem from memory.

At last year’s Battle of Ideas festival in London, I read in the latter style, and it was put forward that had my poem been encountered instead on page it would differ entirely, as it had just been ‘performed’. To which I retorted, ‘Is conversation then a “performance” of language?’ So is this all there is? Is the dividing line between performance and the page as thin as memory? Is there any actual difference between a ‘stage poet’ and a ‘page poet’?

An opportunity to test the question came up in January. I completed a play for the Soho Theatre’s young writers’ programme. Titled Calling Maywell, it features two characters, a writer/poet called Lewis and his friend Fred. Lewis is typical of a Live Literature regular, a nerd (as I am), who writes and reads his creations for the thrill and mild lunacy of wanting to touch the world. Freddy is brash, rude and charismatic. One night, Lewis uncovers a plot and sells the story to tabloid newspapers, writes about it in poetic form and reads it wherever he can. Because of a checkered, hidden past, Freddy has to stop him. The play centres on friendship and truth and queries the responsibility of writing.

The play was awarded a ‘rehearsed reading’ and fortunately, I got to work with award winning actors and director during the full day rehearsal. In the morning we talked through the play, in the afternoon we rehearsed and in the evening, with a little stage direction, it was presented to an audience. Before I continue, there are a few things to consider. a) For 15 of the 20 minute duration of the play, the character ‘Lewis’ is in a Live Literature setting. He reads two poems. b) ‘Fred’ reads a poem at the end. c) The play is littered with poetry, so its poetry is delivered by actors, readers trained specifically to act out and perform text. d) They ‘performed’ the poems, whilst ‘reading’ from the scripts.

Messy isn’t it? So many factors: if a performer plays a poet who reads a poem, he is firstly performing a poet, then performing a poet’s voice, all this before the actual poem. To deliver the poem then, even if he just ‘reads’ (that is to say stands still, speaks in monotone), it would be a performance regardless of how pared down a delivery it is. So, already we are on a back foot, but work with me…

The actor who played ‘Lewis’ instinctively tried to ‘perform’ the poem employing an array of tricks, from modulating cadence, to speech inflection, dramatic pauses, gradual amplification etc. It was altogether… quite something, the actor getting so caught his performance he, on occasion, lost his way in the poem. I have seen this work to great effect where an audience accepted the humanity of the poet and even cheered! But on this occasion the performance failed. Why? Because it overpowered the poem. Simply. To such extremes that it interfered with its form and content, and had I not authored the stanzas, I would have lost its meaning. This was in complete contrast to the actor who played ‘Fred’. He’d read the poem to himself, understood what was going on and ‘performed’ it as such, that is to say speaking the line about death with the sadness it invokes (which would naturally call for a slower, sombre pace), the stanza about guilt, with guilt. By staying true to the poem and reading with its emotional intention, the poem lived. This is no more a performance than it is to hold a relaxed conversation.

To do otherwise, to stifle emotion is to act away from the poem, therefore is a performance. It does the poem a disservice, undermines it and, I’d argue, is as bad as an overpowering. Obviously, there is room for argument about how good a poem is. Dramatic monologues may dazzle an audience yet fall flat on a page, but this article deals with the delivery of a poem, and begins with the assumption of well written text.

I don’t believe there is a difference between a stage poet and a page poet. There is just a poet, the poem and the lengths one is willing to go to give a good verbal representation of the poem.

Labour, divided

In the week of protests about the G20 summit and mass unemployment, CW looks at the role of artistic endeavour in times of social upheaval and wonders about the world of work.  A review of Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work holds interesting insights about menial jobs but offers little critical reflection. A polemical essay on the state of the arts argues that today’s artists may benefit the economy, but are parasitical on society’s values whilst producing little of any real worth. And new novel Wildlife trades on the sense that society has failed its youth yet fails to impress.

Meanwhile, an essay on Spain’s Civil War poet Lorca asks what he has given to the country today; whilst a review of a play worked on by Georges Schehadé during the Algerian war and reworked by Ted Hughes during the Vietnam War argues it is a badly secularised version of an English morality tale that may well have been a waste of time.

Next week: The Convention on Modern Liberty vs the Idea of Communism.

3 April, 2009

In his German Ideology Karl Marx famously teases the reader with a glimpse of how work would be transformed under Communism. Such a society would regulate production in general so one no longer has to have to be locked into a particular career, making it possible to ‘do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.’ (1)

In the almost whimsical spirit this description conjures up, De Botton has chronicled a year or so of his life in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work spent examining an eclectic collection of workplaces, from those of fishermen, to an artist repeatedly painting the same tree, to marketeers working for biscuit companies.

Not, however, that De Botton actually engages in any of the work he observes, instead remaining at a critical – and sometimes cynical – distance. As a piece of reportage, an extended Sunday Times Magazine feature, the work serves to provide glimpses into the lived experience of the workplace: an area somewhat neglected in literature and intellectual study despite the fact a large proportion of our time is spent there.

This neglect is an interesting phenomenon in itself, arguably revealing the lack of a market for individuals willing to spend the precious free time they have apart from the workplace reflecting and writing about it. But given De Botton’s track record of delivering appealing, light-hearted flights-of-fancy on travel, love, philosophy and architecture to name but a few, publishers Hamish Hamilton have evidently decided this is a risk worth taking.

And de Botton should be commended for his labour over this work, following, for example, the journey of a tuna from where it was caught in the Maldives to where it was ultimately consumed (or not) by a family in Bristol. Or the design of Cadbury’s ‘Moments’, where the conceptual development of the experience the biscuit will generate in the mind of the consumer is given for more weight than the design of the biscuit itself. Through laying bare the stages of labour necessary in each case, De Botton sheds light on the importance of otherwise mundane jobs.

All of which is complemented by evocative black-and-white photos by Richard Baker, which at points are more thought-provoking than the text itself. A fact that seems to have been recognised in particular in the chapter on Logistics, where the photos are given prominence and the text becomes almost a caption.

However what isn’t laid bare is the intellectual labour behind De Botton’s journey. He will, for example, inform us that he engaged a lady in a conversation around the nature of alienation in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts but chooses not to engage the reader in any such conversation. When he does decide it would be ‘unfair to deprive the reader’ of one of his ‘soliloquies’ – this one about an investigation into semi-ruined objects – his comments are far from original. Indeed one can’t help but sympathise with the security guard to whom he delivers it, who exclaims ‘Get out of here before I shoot you in the ass.’

This lack of transparency regarding his philosophy of work means that there is a disjuncture between De Botton’s empirical reportage and his ruminations about the nature of work. These tend to be asserted, rather than appearing as a logical conclusion of his observations.

For example he concludes the work claiming:

‘Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.’

There is nothing in his observations that necessarily lead to this conclusion. As a result, when de Botton chooses to make such abstract statements it appears more of an articulation of a particular mood he’s experiencing, instead of the result of a more objective intellectual investigation into the nature of work.

Does work, for example, give us ‘a sense of mastery’? Does it provide a ‘perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection’? Why add a moral dimension to work and suggest that the result of our labours make us ‘respectfully’ tired?  Certainly one can imagine a large range of jobs that don’t do anything of the sort.  And there are quite a few that don’t even allow one to put sufficient food on the table. And what’s wrong with getting into ‘greater trouble’? Indeed, what does he even mean by this?

De Botton’s rag-bag of asserted conclusions about work appear to stem from a crude existential philosophy that as the universe is infinite, our existence comes before our essence and our death will – ultimately – mock us all, then the function of work is ultimately to ‘destroy our sense of perspective’. He chooses not to dwell upon arguments for ‘our triviality and vulnerability’ as they are, ‘too obvious, too well known and too tedious to rehearse.’

These abstract claims feel like a cop-out. De Botton has been effectively characterised as ‘a bookish Martian, sending a post-card home’ (2). De Botton the Martian is undeniably empathetic with that that a large number of the individuals he observes are engaged in less than meaningful - and sometime farcical – labour.

But he never once seems angry seeing people being suckered into pseudo-therapy sessions with career counsellors, with the fact that generations of bright young things are brainwashed by company value-statements, or that vast amount of intellectual energy is squandered on the development of marketing material for biscuits.

The idea that people’s situation could be improved and labour should be made more meaningful is barely entertained – although De Botton recognises that ‘the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money.’ Whilst his observations are often rich, de Botton’s attempt at interpreting the world of work leaves a lot to be desired. And the entire changing of things is off the agendas completely. Regardless of its content, the primary role of work is therapeutic: it is simply a way of distracting us from our imminent demise.

(1) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a4
(2) http://www.alaindebotton.com/assets_cm/files/PDF/work_review_daily_mail_reviews.pdf

An entry for the 2003 Turner Prize was a sculpture depicting bodies being picked at by maggots. Entitled ‘Sex’, it was by Jake and Dinos Chapman who were the bookmakers’ favourites and grabbed headlines as the most shocking nominees. Maggots feeding off a body is a fitting picture of contemporary artists. Contemporary art has developed from great artistic traditions, yet often destroys the common values embodied within them. The resultant separation of form and content undermines traditional art without managing to create new meanings.

Contemporary art is not really art at all. Today’s art is commodified and used to make money for the elites who buy and sell it. Art is a financial asset. Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in July last year raised more than $1 billion, which shows how the world’s super-rich are investing in art in spite of gloomy economic predictions. Sotheby’s evening contemporary art sale raised 95 million pounds, the highest total for a summer contemporary auction held in Europe and just below the overall regional record set in February. Francis Bacon’s ‘Study for Head of George Dyer’, the artist’s lover, fetched $27.4 million, including commission; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Untitled (Pecho/Oreja)’, owned by Irish rock band U2, sold for $10.1 million. Senior executives are confident the art market will sustain soaring values in spite of falling stocks and house prices with rising oil costs. Jussi Pylkkanen, President of Christie’s Europe, said the success of auctions held around the world in recent months ‘demonstrated the continued strength, depth and breadth of the global art market’.

Contemporary art is a movement of an elite that finances its interests through grants and sponsorship from global corporations. It is exhibited by commercial art galleries, private collectors, corporations, publicly funded arts organisations, contemporary art museums or by the artists themselves who are supported by grants, awards and prizes as well as by selling work. There are interlocking and exclusive relationships between publicly funded contemporary art organisations and corporations. A select few dealers represent the artists featured in major publicly funded contemporary art museums, whilst individual collectors are highly influential - Charles Saatchi has dominated the market in British contemporary art for twenty years.

Historically, there were qualities that denoted an idea of civilisation that gave meaning to culture: confidence and a sense of belief in one’s own people that generated a sense of permanence. This was reflected by the arts elite of the day. A major collector at the beginnings of our civilisation was King Athelstan. Among his gifts to Chester-le-Street was a tenth-century West Saxon codex, containing Bede’s eighth-century prose and verse Lives of the sixth-century St Cuthbert, with a frontispiece illustrating the king presenting the book to St Cuthbert. There were episcopal and royal records in this book, including a list of popes, alongside the Cuthbert material. Athelstan stands out among the relic-collectors of late Saxon England as a great relic-collector of his time. Several churches’ traditions attributed their own collections to his religious largesse.

There was a self-belief in our society’s values and a desire to receive them from our ancestors and transmit them to our descendants. These values came from a sense of continuity: that we have endured and will continue to do so; but now it seems this process is being jettisoned for a vague future that is being artificially constructed by cultural elites. To combat this, artists would need not only great talent but also independence of mind and the courage to stand alone and rebel; not just go along with fashion for personal gain.

Promoting cultural diversity is the Arts Council’s main goal. Here their ideology of conforming to fashion is expressed in customary Doublespeak: it aims to encourage an environment where the arts reflect the full range and diversity of society. The Council wants everyone to have access to excellent arts activity. To make this happen, it is focussing on race and ethnicity, disability and social inclusion. More than 10 per cent of regularly funded organisations are run by ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ (BME) organisations that take a lead role in supporting BME artists. By 2007/2008, 25 per cent of the London’s regularly funded organisations will be Black and Minority Ethnic arts organisations. In what sense are these ‘inclusive’?  However, ventures representative of our culture, like the English Music Festival, are discriminated against on the grounds they are ‘exclusive’.

But there is a tension between the traditional culture that elites benefit from themselves, and that they want to give to society. The current chairman of Arts Council England is Sir Christopher John Frayling (born 25 December 1946) an educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture. He read history at Churchill College, Cambridge and gained a PhD in the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He taught history at the University of Bath and in 1979 was appointed Professor of Cultural History at London’s post-graduate art and design school, the Royal College of Art. Since 1996 he has been Rector in charge of the College. He is also Chairman of the Design Council, Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, and a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a governor of the British Film Institute in the 1980s. He was knighted in 2001 for ‘Services to Art and Design Education’.

A similar sense of double standards is shown by many artists. The Evening Standard told of the millions that Damien Hirst is spending on the mansion once owned by Lord Sudeley’s family. Hirst is supposedly worth £135 million. Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works, a series in which dead animals like a shark, a sheep and a cow are preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is a 14-foot tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine. Arts Council England is the national development agency for encouraging this disturbing practice. It distributes public money from the Government and the National Lottery to the arts organisations that share their ideology and refuse those that do not.

A further feature of contemporary art is paedophilia. Bowie’s 1975 concept album 1.Outside has a tale about the dismemberment of a young teenage girl. Hypocrisy is another. In his video ‘Let’s Dance’ Bowie is filmed playing the guitar and singing while watching an Aboriginal couple struggling with metaphors of Western cultural imperialism. It looks cool and gives an atmosphere of culture and poverty. Bowie is worth £200 million. Modern art is not really art but anti-art and detached from true culture which develops amongst a people or community and grows traditions over time. However, the irony is that the people producing unmade beds or piles of bricks need the established old masters and traditional art as a background; for if the old standards were truly swept away, no one would be able to say: ‘Oooh, what a provocative statement, Tracey’.

For the June 2008 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Tracey Emin was invited be curator of a gallery. The sex-themed works on show include a Zebra with an erection. ‘... it is a crankshaft that operates a model of a zebra, which in turn is copulating with a model of woman in Victorian dress’ as the hackneyed image of prudery. It is pretentious and has no intrinsic merit; only what the elites who buy and sell it give it. It is a piece of propaganda for cultural elites; changing the Victorian woman to someone like Cherie Blair or Diane Abbott would provoke hysterical prejudice from these pseuds.

The Chapman brothers are conceptual artists who work together. They were part of the Young British Artists movement that was promoted by Charles Saatchi who also sponsored Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Jake Chapman has published a number of catalogue essays and pieces of art criticism in his own right, as well as a book, Meatphysics in 2003. The brothers have also designed a label for Beck’s beer as part of a series of limited edition labels produced by contemporary artists.

The Chapman brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003, and their work also centred on themes of sex and death. Their piece ‘Sex’ referred to their previous work ‘Great Deeds against the Dead’. The original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree; ‘Sex’ shows the same scenario, but in a further state of decay. Clowns’ noses have been added to the skulls of the corpses, while snakes, rats and insects, similar to ones in joke shops, cover the piece. ‘Death’ is two sex dolls, placed on top of each other, head-to-toe in the 69 sex position.

But one could get still more pretentious than this. In May 2008 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave a performance of composer John Cage’s 4’33”, which does not have a single note. Radio 3 broadcast it live and switched off its emergency system that cuts in when there is silence. The performance took place at London’s concrete block the Barbican Centre. TV viewers were also able to watch the event when BBC Four broadcast the concert. Cage’s justification for 4’33” was to demonstrate that ‘wherever we are what we hear mostly is noise’. General manager Paul Hughes told BBC Radio 5 Live the orchestra had rehearsed to ‘get in the right frame of mind’. Even though they had no notes to play, the musicians tuned up and then turned pages of the score after each of the three ‘movements’ specified by the composer. The audience applauded enthusiastically.

Mr Hughes said Cage believed ‘music was all around us all the time’ and the piece was his attempt to make the audience focus on sounds that were ‘part of our everyday lives’. But the audience at the premiere in 1952 was not so gullible and people were heard walking out. Mr Hughes said, ‘They were completely outraged and extremely angry’.

An interesting precedent comes from 1937 when novelist Graham Greene reviewed the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie for Night and Day magazine. He was sued by Twentieth Century Fox and Miss Temple. The plaintiffs objected to this section:

‘Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.’

When this review was written Miss Temple was eight years old. Greene suggested the film makers were pandering to those older men who had an unhealthy and perverted sexual interest in young children. This was a complaint about the sexualisation of children by Hollywood. Greene found himself being vilified as some sort of abuser of children for daring to point out that Temple’s films were a magnet for dirty old men. The basis of the claim was that Greene’s article damaged her and was libellous to the extent that it suggested she was deliberately sexually provocative. The trial was before the Lord Chief Justice of England in the Kings Bench Division on 22 March 1938. Temple’s counsel described the article as ‘one of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine’, and described Night and Day magazine as a ‘beastly publication’. The magazine was on its last legs anyway the trial finished it off.

Greene was in Mexico and apologised through his counsel for the libel and paid £3500 in damages to 20th Century Fox/Temple - a considerable sum then. The Lord Chief Justice wanted Greene arrested and prosecuted for criminal libel, describing the article as ‘a gross outrage’ but he was not arrested. Now, it is clear Temple’s films did portray children as objects of lust which is now commonplace - TV soaps have a tendency to show their younger female cast as objects to arouse desire and break down people’s inhibitions to grooming young girls. Those who do this are not innocent television producers and writers but culpable and therefore punishable. On EastEnders, Jim Branning’s daughter Lauren (Madeline Duggan) who was born on 29 March 1994, usually wears a very short dress; Lucy Beale (Melissa Suffield), who was born on 9 December 1993, looks as though she is wearing a push-up bra. On Coronation Street Kevin Webster’s daughter Sophie’s breasts almost fall out of her top and she is about 14. Contemporary art and entertainment is creating a climate where our young people are only valued as sex objects. Parents who watch these programmes should start to realise what is being done to their children and future generations of society.

I think what Joe Stretch wants me to say is that he’s like George Orwell for the Skins generation. Although I’m sure Orwell never had to use the words ‘fuck me’ to get his point across. The Xiaolu Guo quote proudly emblazoned on the novel’s cover describes Stretch as ‘a radical new writer’. But in a literary lagoon that swells with ghost-written autobiographies and chick lit, we are all too aware that ‘radical’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’.

Don’t get me wrong: Stretch’s take-no-prisoners denunciation of our ultra-technological society is a rigorous and thought-provoking assault on the disposable nature of the modern world. How long will it be before humans are ultimately rendered obsolete? My only issue is the use of melancholic extremes and provocative shock tactics to make his point (for example, Roger, the blogging fanatic, to use Stretch’s words ‘craps a motherboard’ – which begs the question, did this truly enhance the novel or was it merely for show?) After the Charlotte Roche Wetlands debacle, is modern literature becoming a breeding ground for ‘warts and all’ style over substance?

On paper, the characters and plot of Wildlife are so deliberately off the wall that they are easy to dismiss as the elaborate ramblings of a brilliant-yet-drug-addled student. It boils down to five trendy young things who realise that they are pioneers of a revolutionary new Wild World whether they like it or not. Nevertheless, the players are merely the careering vehicle, the runaway train that explodes to reveal Stretch’s anti-manifesto for successful living. One is even named ‘Life’ (or ‘Lie’ for short) which makes for an ironic paradox.

In musing on the human condition (survival of the fittest, robotics, the dominance of technology over humanity,) and the fixations of life as a 21st century being (eg events, sex, self-image, music), Stretch urges the reader to consider whether the nurturing persons among us are relevant or necessary to the functioning of society; whether love and its traditional associations have become extinct. Of the five protagonists, Joe is the only character who is a ‘carer’ in the truest sense: capable of loving and protecting others. Whereas Anka, Life, Janek and Roger are searching for advancement, pleasure and success; Joe is the only character that wants to regress and metamorphose into a puffin. 

Stretch has a penchant for exploring societal extremes and following them to the most depressing conclusion. Anka, a self confessed ‘skeleton with big tits’ becomes the inspirational poster girl for the Wild World, where the leaders ‘want to re-brand eating disorders’. Modern society accepts that glossy magazines will obsess over size zero diets, making Stretch’s assertions disturbingly accurate; ’…the anorexic is not just an exciting and entertaining mentally ill young woman, but increasingly she has become a person to look up to, aspire to and find attractive.’

Similarly, Roger’s peers consider him akin to a prophet for his continuous no-holds-barred blog and fondness for solitary confinement. His life has been so reduced to mere words that he ‘… can no longer tell the difference between really breathing and describing breath.’ Roger has become reliant upon the validation of complete strangers, so much so that he begins to feed on it, failing to notice that he has neither eaten nor drunk for days. ‘Am I alive or am I describing being alive? Both. Tell me, are you reading this? If you are then comment on it…Comment on me.’

Roger and Anka are visions of the future, albeit excessive ones. It’s pointless denying that the online world is taking over; the internet allows us to stay in contact with our ‘life bubble’ from pretty much anywhere in the world. Humans can swallow down all the cultural and social nutrition they need in quick and easy bite-sized morsels, care of their favourite websites. Natural progression dictates that all that is left to do online is live – to engage in physical activities defined by their need for actual contact. A frightening prospect if ever there was one.

Similarly, the image of love described in ‘Wildlife’ is of something outdated, irrelevant. The focus is on physical pleasure and instantaneous gratification, most commonly associated with masturbation and sex.  Stretch’s presentation of intercourse lacks the sensuality and emotion that characterise it as a pleasurable activity. We demand everything in the public world to be fast and efficient, if love were reduced to this, it would boil down to no frills pro-reation at best, virtual intercourse at the worst.

Life enjoys the ‘impressive, well-programmed, unnatural beauty of Wow Bang’, (a virtual world where men adorn themselves with phalluses and it’s possible to kill or rape your fellow man without fear of reprisal). Life has an affinity for the clinical nature of virtual reality, leading us to question whether she is truly heartless or just emotionally vacant. Life is described throughout the novel as though she were the fulfilment of every man’s fantasy – a beautiful woman who enjoys sex but won’t complicate it by getting emotionally involved.

All the time we are encouraged to remember that despite leading a eventful life online, in reality she is ‘in some dimly lit room in the real world…sitting on a real chair, staring at a screen…But she sees through that reality and so should we.’ By creating Life, ‘a happiness machine’ seduced by the effortlessness of a world characterised by the lazy convenience to which we have all become accustomed, Stretch has hit upon the provocative notion that there may be nothing left to live for.

‘When robots become cool and totally convincing, how and why will humans motivate ourselves to go on living?’

Life should be renamed McLife, a homogenised version of what we experience on a daily basis. Her ultimate goal is to seek ‘a way of life that was…smiles without brains, love without odour and sex without stains’.

It’s appalling to think that anyone would prefer to live in a world without smells and mess. Countless generations have been brought up to believe in that Lady Justice has weighed the scales evenly for us, that karma is on our side, and any bad moments in life make the good moments even better. Stretch sculpts the current generation into the antagonists of modern life: the young cynics who are will not be fooled by the idea of retribution and cosmic order; who want to do what they want, regardless of the consequences.

There is a common consciousness growing among young people; a loss of faith in traditional values that buckle under the weight of life’s harsh realities. In a similar way to the plight of Japanese youth, in Britain many twentysomethings feel that, like the characters in Wildlife, society has failed them. The use of the phrase ‘quarter life crisis’ is becoming worryingly common. Stretch’s metaphor for the unfulfilling life of a young adult describes an alarming truth, a bitter pill that you choke on rather than swallow, as ‘…you show off the gruesome exit wound left behind by your youth.’

As children of the 1980s we were promised the world, a booming economy, a university education and jobs for all. We celebrated in our teens and early twenties and graduated into a world where we were redundant before we even started. Joe Stretch is one of the lucky ones, striking enough to sign a publishing deal and make an income from his talents. Many of his contemporaries are making coffee, working in offices, denying their dreams.

Wildlife seems to suggest that current evolutionary practice will be based on survival of the most interesting:

‘Youth culture is, broadly speaking, our final attempt to justify out species, to keep it from extinction.’

It is almost an apology, to succeed in this world, one must stand out, hold people’s attention and go out with a bang, just as Joe Stretch is doing with this novel.  The only hope for future creatives is to see Stretch’s over-arching metaphor and start the evolutionary process for themselves.

Perhaps ultimately my concern is that Joe Stretch’s brand of harsh realism is to become the norm. Amid the insane imagery of babies drinking black milk and vein bracelets, Stretch makes a startlingly accurate point. What are the implications of the deconstruction of the modern world? Where can we go from here? Be afraid, be very afraid. I leave you with the voice of a new generation: ‘No tactics. No point to this. Run wild.’

Dead babies, you’d think, would be a fairly disturbing sight in the traffic-clogged, construction-choked heart of the Spanish capital. But have a look round the corner from the Corte Inglés department store on the newly pedestrianised Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s emblematic emulation of Trafalgar Square, where the New Year receives its Dionysian Spanish welcome, and workers’ rights are vindicated by the May Day masses. Not much resting in peace gets done here.

A grassy gully a few miles west of the southern city of Granada is far quieter than the Puerta del Sol. Even in the fierce Andalusian summer, you can count on a breeze to rustle the pines that shade this bucolic spot. A spring bubbles nearby—perhaps not such a bad choice for a poet’s final resting place. Certainly an appropriate one, for here is where the poet in question was shot dead and tossed into an unmarked grave. But what might Federico García Lorca have in common with a dead baby in downtown Madrid?

A lot, perhaps, if Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has his way. The baby is part of the period furnishings in the Convent of the Royal Discalced Carmelites, still open for business at its original location centuries after Spain’s Hapsburg rulers had it built to ensure their surplus daughters did not produce inconvenient, though bloodline-sanctioned, claimants to the empire that dominated the world.

No expense was spared in providing the princesses with all the luxury royalty can command. When today’s cloistered nuns are at their secluded offices, visitors can marvel at the heaps of silver plate, Flemish tapestries and not quite first-rate artworks (the good stuff was long ago crated off to the Prado), as well as the dead baby. The tiny, linen-wrapped corpse is identified in a bold italic hand as one of the ‘holy innocents’ slaughtered by Herod.

Sainthood status means that this nameless infant, who surely never lived his brief life anywhere near Roman-occupied Judea, qualifies as a holy relic, just like the fragment of Saint Thèrese of Lisieux, which astronaut Ron Garan carried with him on a shuttle mission to the International Space Station in June of last year. Spaniards, especially, seem to have a fetish about bonding with body parts of the illustrious dead.

King Philip II stocked his Escorial monastery retreat with 7,000 bones and wisps of hair, 12 complete skeletons and 44 jawboned skulls. Didn’t do the Armada much good, though. Supine but incorrupt, St Felix inhabits a glass sarcophagus under the altar in the chapel of Madrid’s Royal Palace, allowing him a privileged view of Princess Letizia’s shapely legs when she married Crown Prince Felipe a few years ago. And during his final—for most Spaniards, long overdue—illness, Generalissimo Franco had St Teresa of Avila’s desiccated forearm at his bedside the whole while, and to this day, everyone mimes back-scratching whenever the subject is brought up.

Now it is Zapatero’s turn. He desperately wants to locate and exhume the body of Spain’s best-known poet, so it can be venerated by right-thinking Spaniards. Not for his poetry, however. For Lorca is a victim-monger’s dream come true, murdered a couple of weeks after the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 for voicing support for the Republic, and because Granada’s reactionary, vehemently pro-Franco middle classes had, shall we say, a poor opinion of his homosexuality. His only crime was being personally and politically obnoxious to his killers.

Perhaps even among Catholics, relics are a minority taste. Not so with the belligerently secular Zapatero, who seems obsessively fixated on ‘restoring the historical memory’ of the Spanish people by churning over toxic confrontations and old grievances dating back to the Civil War, in the belief that it is good for them, and good for his chances of remaining in power long enough to transform Spain from the country it has always been into the one he thinks it ought to be.

There is another reason. Among the rash promises enshrined in a 2007 law is that relatives of Civil War victims are guaranteed the right to have their remains exhumed, identified and reburied with dignity, and that the public administrations responsible for seeing that this law is implemented shall ‘make all necessary funding available for this purpose’. The catch, of course, is in the last bit. A grand, one-off gesture would be so much easier—and cheaper—to sell to his leftist constituencies as a kept promise.

Let us assume Zapatero’s definition of victimhood excludes the 4,000 or so junior military officers executed by the Republic as potential turncoats at Paracuellos de Jarama; 6,832 murdered nuns, priests, monks, friars and seminarians, the hundreds of Republican militiamen shot for cowardice, insubordination or political unreliability, or Trotskyites massacred by Stalin’s Spanish flunkies in Barcelona with Orwell looking on, plus assorted undesirables (landowners, aristocrats, Christian Democrats, etc) whose torture and murder does not conform to Zapatero’s notion of ‘repression’.

But it definitely includes the 30,000 people that Franco had executed after hostilities ended, as well as all ‘those who suffered imprisonment, sanctions or personal violence’ between 1936 and 1951 (why Franco, who ruled until 1975, became legitimate in 1951, is not clear). It definitely includes Zapatero’s own grandfather, an army captain executed for refusing to join the uprising. Now, let’s do the maths.

The League of Historical Memory Associations has drawn up a list with 143,000 names on it. Reputable historians generally chalk up some 70,000 extra-judicial executions or non-combat deaths to Franco’s side, vs. the 40,000 imputable to the Republic. The human body contains 206 bones. Multiply by the victim estimate of your choice. Multiply again by ₤2,700, the price of a single DNA analysis—and expect no refunds, even if there proves to be not enough intact genetic material for a match.

In fact the chances of identifying anyone from that period are at best slim, says José Antonio Lorente, head of genetic analysis at the University of Granada, who calculates the likelihood at somewhere between 15 and 30 percent. But even if money were not an issue, qualified personnel and laboratory facilities certainly would be: it is estimated that all of Spain’s forensic scientists would be kept busy for decades doing nothing else but identifying the Civil War dead.

One obstacle that Zapatero won’t have to deal with is the adamant opposition of Lorca’s family. Their argument was and is that he should be left to lie in peace alongside the people he lived with and wrote about, and that were killed for believing the same things he believed in. That was the bottom line maintained for years by Laura Garcia Lorca, the grand-niece who heads the foundation that controls the poet’s copyrights and represents five more descendants of his siblings.

All that changed when the granddaughter of a one-legged, left-wing schoolteacher who was shot and buried with Lorca appealed to the judge then handling the case, claiming one family’s preferences should not override another’s, no matter how famous and influential, and that she, personally would not rest until her grandfather’s remains were given a dignified burial in the nearby village where he taught his classes.

It is a matter of interest that this lady admits to being ‘advised’ by Ian Gibson, Lorca’s Irish-born biographer, who goes about proclaiming that the poet ‘doesn’t belong to his family any more; he belongs to the Spanish people’. In the event, the Lorca descendants opted to end the standoff. ‘We will not oppose it,’ Laura García Lorca told the daily El País. ‘Although we would prefer it not to happen, we respect the wishes of the other parties involved’. She insisted, though, that the exhumation be carried out in strictest privacy, in the presence of family members and with guarantees that it does not turn into a media circus.

Three things now must happen before Professor Miguel Botella and his colleagues from the Forensic Anthropology department at the University of Granada can unpack their ground-penetrating radar to scan the Viznar ravine. The two most likely sites are about 400 yards apart and both probably contain human remains. Identifying Lorca’s should be fairly easy, however, since the radar should have no trouble picking up the wooden leg of the unfortunate schoolteacher who shares his grave, along with two trade union organisers.

First, they are waiting for the ground to thaw. Then a Granada judge will have to issue the exhumation order. And finally the Madrid government will have to draw up a protocol with Andalusian regional administration specifying procedures and assigning responsibilities for recovering the remains. But what will Zapatero do with his trophy bones, once he’s got them? The Convent of the Royal Discalced Carmelites is certainly a place Federico might have found appealing, but it looks to be booked full up for now.

Athol Fugard’s Dimetos starring Jonathan Pryce at the Donmar was meant to be a cracker; this is the kind of meaty play, respected stage name and in-form venue that should produce great things. But Fugard’s symbolic script and Pryce’s pompous delivery have clashed to horrible effect here; Douglas Hodge’s production is constantly at odds with itself and, with scant support from an uneven supporting cast, holds little conviction or appeal.

Instead of bubbling quietly beneath Fugard’s script, the play’s images and ideas have been brought crashing to the surface. It is painful to watch in parts and even harder to listen to. Fugard can get carried away at the best of times, but Hodge’s inconsistent directing and some poorly pitched acting have blown Fugard’s metaphors out of all proportion, his symbolism so overworked it begins to sound ridiculous. 

The play centres around Pryce’s exiled engineer Dimetos – a man who once used his hands to help people, but retreated to a primitive village, after realising he just didn’t care anymore. Free from the city’s influence, Dimetos has been restored and reinvigorated by his ominously attractive young niece (Holliday Grainger). He is even putting his hands to good use again: the play opens with Dimetos rescuing a frightened horse from a deep well, with the help of some nifty engineering and half-naked writhing from niece Lydia.

It is easy to guess what happens next as Dimetos’ skilled hands stray from his work and towards his niece. But what could’ve been a mesmerising tragedy feels laboured and unconvincing here. Much of this is down to a downright odd dynamic on stage. All the actors feel worlds apart: Pryce has walked straight off a heavy weight RSC number, Grainger’s light delivery is ideal for TV not theatre, I’m not sure where Alex Lanipekun’s Danilo has turned up from and Anne Reid is excellent as faithful servant Sophia, but only when she remembers her lines.

The overall effect is one of quiet mayhem and missed moments. The delivery is all over the place and the actors gesticulate to the point that they mime the script, rather than just act it. None of the relationships click into place. Pryce is only good when he is alone on stage; with enough space and time he finds his own pace and pitch and delivers some smart and provocative speeches. He works less well when sharing his stage with others – Pryce shows little awareness of his supporting cast, acting them off-stage and skewing the scenes in his favour.

There are a few bizarre, special moments here which stand out from the overall production. Laced in between some thumping denouements are some much quieter, more interesting sections; Fugard has written a series of beautiful, spooky scenes between the devoted, jealous servant Sophia and the young, beautiful Lydia. Over and over the two women count to ten together, numbering the beautiful things they’ve seen that day, in the hope it will lead them to heaven. They are such wonderful scenes to watch and listen to – comforting and terrifying at the same time – and it’s one of the few times the show calms down and the actors really connect with their script.

Other than this it is a pretty painful and drawn out production – one that tries to say an awful lot about man’s hands and their shifting function in a modern world, but left me biting mine in frustration. 

Till 9 May 2009

As anticipated some time ago by Richard Lea, the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond has unearthed a previously unknown play by Ted Hughes. In fact, though, as Lea already pointed out, The Story of Vasco is not a completely original work by Hughes, but an adaptation of a play by Egyptian-Lebanese author Georges Schehadé, and it was originally not rewritten for theatre, but for opera.

Schehadé was born in Egypt to Lebanese parents in 1905, moved to Paris in 1949, and hung out with the likes of Julien Gracq, André Breton, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco; he wrote Histoire de Vasco: pièce en six tableaux in 1956, and first staged it in Paris in 1957. Hughes was commissioned by Sadler’s Wells to translate the play almost ten years later, in 1965, and to adapt it as a libretto for an opera by Gordon Crosse. It took Hughes three years to complete this work, and eventually Crosse only used some sections of it, chopping it up and rewriting it. The opera was first performed at the Coliseum in London on 13 March 1974; in his preface to the published libretto, Crosse thanks Schehadé for allowing Hughes and him ‘this freedom with the play, even though he does not necessarily agree with our views’; he adds that only about half of the libretto was ‘pure Hughes’.

To his credit, director Adam Barnard carried out thorough, passionate research to find Hughes’ ‘original’ adaptation, pre-Crosse, which he eventually found in two numbered boxes of papers kept at the Emory University in Atlanta. Several drafts and redrafts revealed how Hughes had significantly changed Schehadé‘s text, and it was Barnard who assembled these drafts into a playscript, assessing, according to his own words in the production’s programme, ‘what might have represented Hughes’ revisions to his own works, and what changes had been made to accommodate the intended operatic setting’. The result is the production now on at the Orange Tree Theatre: a mixture of Schehadé, Hughes, and Barnard.

The Story of Vasco is a strongly anti-war fable, telling the story of barber Vasco, who is lured out of his home by the mayor to join the army as a barber to the Mirador, and then sent on a top-secret mission - the hope being that as a completely implausible and naive military man, he will succeed where the rest of the army is failing. In the meantime, a poor girl who lives in the forest with her father, Marguerite, has a dream in which Vasco is her husband, and in spite of having never met him she decides to go looking for him. During this journey, Marguerite and her father, Caesar, come across a number of army characters, including tormented lieutenant September, and villagers who have lost their children to the war. Many of the scenes are designed to underline the irrationality of violent action and the delusion of omnipotence of the men who run it; Marguerite and Vasco do meet, and the war is eventually won, but, obviously, at a considerable price.

It would be interesting to know how much of the play’s pacifistic moralism comes from Schehadé, and how much comes from Hughes’ own contribution - particularly because both authors were working on the text in significant times for their respective countries. Georges Schehadé was writing at the height of the Algerian war that had mobilised French intellectuals, including the very powerful and influential circle that moved around Sartre’s journal ‘Les Temps Modernes’, advocating civilian disobedience, which led eventually to the collapse of the Fourth Republic. Ted Hughes was writing several years into the Vietnam War, which would famously produce a previously unseen levels of civil protest in the U.S., transform youth culture, and shake American society to its core. There are many parallels between Algeria and Vietnam, both wars being somewhat connected to the 1968 student movement,  but also, and arguably most importantly, with regards to the role played by left-wing intellectuals in the way the two conflicts were perceived by the Western sides. Thus, The Story of Vasco is quite unique having been passed on from anti-war movement to anti-war movement. It is also a compelling coincidence, perhaps, that it should open in London in the days before the infamous G20 meeting, at a time when Afghanistan and Iraq risk to be chased out of the front pages by the economic downturn.

All of this said, the Orange Tree Theatre production failed to impress me. Perhaps it is because I am from the Continent, where this sort of secular, politicised version of the English morality play is more common and feels quite dated. Perhaps it is because of the repetitiveness and insistence of the pacifist message - we got the point in the first ten minutes, yet the play takes more than two hours to make sure. Perhaps it is the vague feeling, for much of the evening, of having a finger shaken in our face. The naivety of the set-design and costumes adds to the feeling of watching a 17th century French comedy in some local theatre in Italy. And while the text can be quite funny, particularly thanks to Michael Kirk’s performance as the town Mayor/Sentry/a few other characters, it also uses every trick in the book to get our laughter - including dressing tall, broad-shouldered men as women. Laura Rees is a too often bemused Marguerite, whose mood swings and dreamy looks do not really make us believe her love for Vasco is any deeper than the one she’ll develop for somebody else next week; and Jonathan Broadbent as Vasco is an eternally similar version of all the slightly simple but very likable young men in distress since Plautus.

There is a distinct feeling that the repetitive, simplistic way in which the subject is treated would be better suited to melodrama or, indeed, opera, and there is also more than a trace of traditional French theatre - specifically of Molière’s big, headstrong, ridiculous men. Fans of Ted Hughes will notice the menacing and grim presence of crows, that populate the forest where Marguerite lives and whom her father suspects of wanting to corrupt his daughter - Hughes would publish Crow, perhaps his best-known work, shortly after completing the adaptation, in 1970. And there are resonances of other barber/soldier stories, including the very popular Franz Woyzeck, protagonist of the homonymous play written by Georg Büchner in the 1830s and first turned into a movie by Georg Klaren in the 1940s, as well as, more famously, by Werner Herzog in 1979.

It is, in other words, a play that provokes plenty of thought in literary enthusiasts, scholars, researchers and those who love to know their cultural heroes had approvable political views; it is a good thing that it was rediscovered insofar as the academic appreciation of Ted Hughes’ work goes. But I am not convinced on the strength of this particular production, that it is a worthy theatrical piece.

Till 25 April 2009

More than any other theatrical medium, puppetry has the ability to shatter the boundaries of possibility. A well-manipulated puppet can not only reflect humanity as acceptably as any actor, but also perform feats utterly beyond the human body. One need only look towards Blind Summit’s Low Life, Complicite’s Shun-kin or Improbable’s Shockheaded Peter to recognise puppetry’s knack for flicking from the mundane to the magical and its capacity to blend metaphor and reality as one.

Ronnie Burkett’s marionettes, however, are a different breed of puppet. Sure, they evoke humanity, but they never threaten to truly uncloak its inner-life; they reflect us without revealing a great deal about us. As such, they feel strangely old-fashioned, somehow constrained by their own peculiar limitations. Controlled by sixteen strings rather than the usual nine, and operable with only one hand, Burkett’s marionettes are undoubtedly complex creatures. Yet the technical mastery involved in their construction and manipulation never transforms into wizardry. Indeed, in comparison to the eloquent, expressive puppetry around today, it is the clumsiness of the marionette that shines through.

Instead, Burkett’s puppets work best when still. The detail in their faces and physiques makes them blank canvases ripe for the projection of emotion and thought. Their empty eyes seem, at times, to well with tears; their starched cheeks to flicker with amusement. This subtle capturing of humanity is the asset by which Burkett’s marionettes become the puppet-world’s answer to Strasberg’s Group Theatre.

Strange then to see such formidably convincing actor-puppets paraded in the cruise-ship cabaret of Billy Twinkle (played by, and arguably interchangeable with, Burkett himself).

Twinkle is a disillusioned marionettiste reduced to overseeing a glitzy, gag-ridden circus of strings aboard an ocean liner. Visited on the brink of suicide by a bunny-eared glove puppet of his former mentor, Sid Diamond, Twinkle resolves to tell his life’s story in search of self-worth. Thus, we see the marionette Billy manipulating his own marionettes, growing gradually older, fatter and increasingly disillusioned, but never abandoning his artform.

The thing is that Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy looks and feels like an off-off-Broadway show as pastiched by The Simpsons. Burkett channel-hops between cartoon voices to conduct conversations with himself and litters a sweet story with camp asides. Perhaps this is intentional. It certainly fits with the puppet Twinkle’s dilemma between high art and lowly entertainment: whether t’is nobler to present puppet Shakespeare or striptease. Seen in such a light, Burkett’s piece appears to focus precisely on the limitations of his material co-stars. However, the amateurism and self-indulgence never quite confirms itself as deliberate.

In fact, the highlights of the evening are the self-contained moments of entertainment, each a routine in itself: the dancing bear on roller-skates, the recreational preacher complete with singing glove-puppet Jesus and, best of all, the hobbling pensioner exposing himself to reveal a pink balloon that swells in size.

Burkett’s battle has long been to restate puppetry as an art-form for adults. Here his tactics seem along the lines of South Park or Avenue Q, simply allowing them a crudeness at odds with their cutesy exteriors. The result leaves Burkett’s marionettes looking stuck in adolescence while puppetry elsewhere has grown up and flown the nest.

Run over

Getting ideas

This week on CW, Shahid Bux suggests the UK government’s ‘deradicalisation’ strategy is ominous as well as patronising to Muslims. And Dave Clements reviews Helene Guldberg’s Reclaiming Childhood and argues that today’s obsession with child protection reflects an infantilisation of adults.

Giulia Merlo, Andrew Haydon and Matt Trueman review current London theatre including Burnt by the Sun at the National, which dramatises the authoritarian terror of Soviet Russia, and Deep Cut, which continues the tradition of verbatim political theatre at the Tricycle. And Timandra Harkness finds John Adams’ latest opera Dr Atomic a little too rooted in the facts. Meanwhile in films, Sam Peczek reviews a documentary about the F word and Hamish Todd reviews Anvil! The Story of Anvil.

27 March 2009

‘We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’

The dangerous drift towards the type of ideological conformism foreshadowed by George Orwell in 1984 continues in the wake of the government’s recent announcement of who or what is deemed ‘extremist’. In the latest set of ‘counterterrorism’ proposals, people would be considered extremists if they advocated a caliphate, promote sharia law, believe in Jihad or support armed resistance – most notably armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military – or fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The proposals also seek to broaden the definition of ‘extremists’ to those who hold views that clash with what the government defines as ‘shared British values’. Indeed, this ‘new’ initiative has eerie parallels to proposals introduced under the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who crafted a ‘script of British values’ to fight a propaganda war against al-Qaeda for the hearts and minds of a ‘lost generation’ of Muslims in November 2006.

As well as being patronising, this focus quite worryingly implied that Muslims must necessarily have some inherent conflict with Western values and ought to engage in activities that somehow provide overt, convincing evidence that they accept them. The idea that Muslims or any group must assimilate to a ‘common template’ contains within it the seeds of intolerance and polarisation. As James Baldwin once said:

‘Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.’

This represents the continuation of a long and unrelenting campaign to identify and criminalise any subversive ideas as ‘thought-crime’. The unseemly source of these latest proposals have been laid over the past few years in attempts to ‘de-radicalise’, ‘de-programme’ or, as one security minister put it, ‘end radicalisation of Muslims in Britain’. The government extended this last June with the announcement that it was to pledge £12.5 million to support ‘de-radicalisation’ programmes in the UK.

The normalisation of these initiatives, first introduced in Yemen, has been part of the government’s broader initiative to tackle ‘extremist ideology’. Existing attempts at ‘de-programming Jihadists’ have gained popular currency in Saudi Arabia, where there is an ‘effort to correct theological misunderstandings’. As a New York Times article claims, many young men ‘have become the subjects of a continuing experiment in counterterrorism’ (1). The success of these programmes is often highlighted with the case of Egypt, which is thought to boast the largest de-radicalisation programme in the Arab world, cited as having ‘reformed’ or changed the minds of numerous Islamic militants.

The idea of ‘de-programming’ in itself has a long and ugly history, often associated with practices of brainwashing, thought reform or mind control as used by New Religious Movements and other cultish groups in attempts to convert members of a faith. Such programmes attempt to ‘gut-check’ participants into thinking along more ‘appropriate’ lines that serve to inhibit critical thinking and express support for the status quo. Inspired by such initiatives, it was claimed last October that psychologists in the prison service will attempt to ‘cure’ Muslim inmates of their political beliefs through the use of these therapies. As one widely cited authority on radicalisation put it, ‘you replace one sound bite with another sound bite’ (2).

Ironically, such processes of indoctrination or mind control represent the same process as often suggested of those involved in terrorist activity. Sustained by stock phrases and popular metaphors couched in notions of ‘our’ way of life and ‘our’ imposed notions of liberty and democracy, they represent efforts to hijack the mind and ‘think like us’ (the majority of citizens), exacerbating the very issue they claim to tackle and further imprison rather than empower individual choice. As one expert on brainwashing in religious movements remarked: ‘You are saying, “You are a victim of terrible psychological forces that robbed you of your reason, and in order for us to fix you we are going to do it to you again, but we are the good guys and what we do is really good for you”’ (3). With disturbing parallels to the ‘special interrogation techniques’ used by the CIA to ‘remake minds’ in the 1950s, the notion that one can populate the mind with ‘counter-messages’ and transform individuals into passive, benficent, conformist individuals has been described by some civil libertarians in Australia as tantamount to torture (4).

However, that these practices have become so ingrained in ‘counterterrorism’ discourse means that there has been little or no systematic attempt to challenge the ethical dimensions and foundations of these practices, continually justified on the pretext of national or international security. While those who support the programmes maintain that they aren’t about dissuading ideology but dissuading violence, its clear that this assertion contradicts the government’s focus on ‘the battle of ideas’ and recently suggested proposals, in addition to those ‘moderate’ organisations that the government has done much to support including the Quilliam Foundation and the Radical Middle Way, who are virtually sustained by the premise that ‘extremist’ ideas lie at the heart of political violence.

These methods are problematic in practical and ethical terms, and also lie upon a misleading theoretical basis in its unequivocal and linear connection between ideas and actions. Just as one cannot separate Pol Pot from Marxism or Pinochet from Christianity, the ideological content cannot be divorced from the deed in question, but the more significant issue concerns the function and application of ideology involved. As the Carl Jung once said, ‘I do not want anyone to be a Jungian…I want people above all to be themselves’. The focus ought to lie in this respect on the use of ideas rather than their structure or content, as John Dewey reminds us: ‘It is an idea because of what it does in clearing up a perplexity or in harmonizing what is otherwise fragmentary, not because of its psychical make-up’ (5).

Attempts to provide counter-narratives to subversive discourses and police seditious ideas and to ‘moderate’ or tame expressions of ideology have been and will continue to be futile approaches. As Amin Maalouf once claimed, ‘instead of pondering the essence of a doctrine you need to look at the behaviour … of those who claim to believe in it’ (6). In any case, suppressing individuality is not and cannot be the way forward. Until more systematic attempts to challenge these initiatives are put forward the Orwellian nightmare promises to persist and worsen.

1) Deprogramming Jihadists , by Katherine ZoepfNew York Times, 7 November 2008
2) Marc Sageman quoted in How to defuse a human bomb, by Drake Bennett, Boston Globe, 13 April 2008
3) Govt considers deprogramming terrorists, The Age, 9 March 2006
4) ibid
5)  Dewey, John (1933). ‘How We Think’, The Later Works 1925-1953, Volume 8: 1933/1989, Southern Illinois University Press
6) Maalouf, Amin (2001). In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, Arcade Publishing