Bubblehammerblog

The fuss over the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford's professor of poetry isanother example of cultural enfeeblement. As I understand it, Ruth Padel is claiming to have passed on to journalists her concerns about Derek Walcott so as to spare Oxford University the embarrassment of a possible headline in the press such as Sex Beast Poet Gets Chair.

This seems reasonable enough under the circumstances, and it could be argued that a Roderick Padel would not have been called upon to resign for doing the same thing. What bothers me though is the way that the world of poetry is exposed and presented as the faintly ludicrous concern of a close circle of privileged academics and touchy downbeat intellectuals. 'One is left with no enthusiasm for the whole thing', a disappointed literary chap pronounced. Queyt.

Surely, Fellow Creatures, poetic productivity is a crucial indicator of social wellbeing. Without poetry and song we have no bearings in the universe. I guess the current problem is that poetry often deals with notions such as death and despair, futility, ecstatic union with the divine, intense emotion, madness, the nature of love, emptiness, pain and loss, beholding the signs of Allah, heralding a newly made world to the toiling masses, considering toads or my cat Geoffrey, howling at folly and injustice, sailing to Byzantium, rotting corpses, the exquisite properties of soap, drunken boats, visions and portents. People are too busy now, and simply have no time for this kind of thing. And anyway, it could be upsetting, and send you a bit funny.

Which newsclip would you rather hear when you turn on your radio in the morning? :

Salford now has a burgeoning finacial services sector that has become an engine of growth and development for the whole region.

or

Salford has now been overrun by poets and artists, and performance venues are struggling to meet an ever increasing demand. The pressure on accommodation has become so acute that the City Council is appealing to the government for funds to relocate the overflow to the Lake District.

Seriously. Which?

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I can't raise much enthusiasm for the furore over MPs expenses. It seems people are saying they're angry about it, but it's just boring and almost routine. My former comrade Peter Hitchens, who many years ago used to share with me a pitch outside Belsize Park tube station, where we flogged copies of the much missed Worker's Fist, made a good point in his piece in the Mail on Sunday. You have to marvel, he points out, at the sheer chutzpah of David Cameron, and the skill of the Tory spinners. Cameron and his fragrant wife share a personal fortune of around £40 million, yet see fit to claim £30 thousand expenses to have servants clear the wisteria from the garden of one of their extensive properties. Luckily, some other Tories had made claims for daft extravagances, like moats and duck condominions, so Cameron's claim seems reasonable and fair.

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Bill Moyers, one of the very few mainstream US journalists with anything interesting to say, recently interviewed David Simon, creator and co-producer of The Wire. It's in two parts, and I urge you to watch it HERE

Moyers says in his introduction:

'When television history is written', one critic says, 'Little else will rival The Wire. 'And when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, I'll wager they will not be able to ignore this remarkable and compelling portrayal of life in our cities.'

I agree. He goes on to compare The Wire to Gibbon, for its portrayal of the decadence of an empire, and to Dickens, for that writer's description of the dark undercurrents of Victorian London. These comparisons are apt enough, though I'd prefer a comparison to Mayhew, less sentimental and voyeuristic than Dickens, and to Engels, for its comprehensive and incisive depiction of contemporary working class life. (Something that, incidentally, The Wire shares with the sadly neglected recent film The Wrestler.)

Simon has plenty of useful things to say in the interview about the US elite's 'War on Drugs' strategy, though he doesn't venture beyond the current discourse of American liberalism, and so a sense of frustration, pessimism, and disappointment is evident - but he can hardly be blamed for that, since in America, as elsewhere, this is the only oppositional discourse with any hope of getting a hearing.

Simon sees the WoD in structural economic terms, being a consquence of the fact that in the modern economic system some 10-15% of the population, for various reasons, is entirely superfluous to requirements. This is true, but in Britain at least I'd opt for a much higher figure of 20-25%.

You could present this in crude diagramatic terms. The social structure of late capitalism might be represented by a diamond shape - vast wealth at the top apex, (as Simon points out with some outrage, one percent of elite Americans own over 20% of the wealth, and counting), broad contentment in the middle, and in the bottom sector a range of relative to abject deprivation. Simon, as a liberal, implies that he'd settle for a society that looked more like an equilateral triangle. We 21st Century communists are working towards a model that might resemble a circle, or a sphere.

But don't let me distract you from watching an excellent interview.

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