“Here’s looking at you, kid.”

That’s it, I’m stopping the blog.

I’ve never really had much that was particularly interesting to write about, and as I think I said in my last post, I’ve never particularly wanted to expose my own privacy in blog-posts, so I’ve not even had that to talk about.

In the same way I now find a lot of student journalism petty and disheartening and often bloody cruel (and I’m betting that it’s worse in the real world) I find the ‘blogosphere’ sometimes very arrogant and often a very cold place.

People (and I’m one of them; we’ve all been guilty of it) can be very cruel when it feels as though the person they are writing to is anonymous, made so through a computer screen. You don’t have to apologise to a computer for hurting its feelings, for causing distress, in the same way you would if you were talking face-to-face.

There’s more potential to be misunderstood; there’s more room for people to assume that everything they think is important when often it’s not. It’s certainly not original. I doubt anyone really has many truly original thoughts any more; the ones that are original and interesting to read are often swallowed up by the dross of the rest.

Unless you’re able to write engagingly and cleverly on subjects close to your heart (which often, in the blogs I most enjoy following, means talking to an audience you know about mutually shared events and people) there’s little interesting to say, I think. I certainly don’t think much that I write is particularly interesting and engaging; I just find myself getting tired and angry as I rehearse the same old arguments and the same debates.

Frankly, I’m getting fed up of losing my voice. So maybe if I stop keeping this blog and pouring energy into thinking about it, I’ll have room in my head to think properly again.

It’s been fun, but I only ever meant to keep this up for a year anyway.

Goodbye.

So…

I’ve been very quiet here for a long time. And I’m now dithering (not for the first time) about whether or not to continue this blog.

For a start, I don’t write on here nearly as often as I used to. For another thing, I don’t write well when I write here. I rant. And not about very interesting or original stuff.

I don’t like to tell people all the innermost thoughts of my life, I don’t want to go into detail about what I’ve been doing, so that leaves me with just my not-very-interesting musings on the happenings of the day.

Often those musings result in a lot of anger and raaage (trademark…) from people I don’t necessarily know very well. Or from me.

So emotionally I haven’t found this blog very healthy.

Maybe that just means I should wipe the slate clean and start again.

Or maybe it means I should give up.

I probably will. So watch this space. Or rather, don’t. This might well be the last post before I shut it down.

The London Thing

I’m going to hop brightly on the bandwagon and suggest first that you look here, and then look at the various links in that post. And then come trundling back here.

I’ve been working for the last couple of weeks with groups of children in some theatre workshops; today, we had a big old chat at lunchtime about what’s happening at the moment in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and generally all over the place.

One kid wanted to know if the people taking part in these riots were “bad people”. And if you look at a lot of the coverage and a lot of the public responses to what has been happening, you’d forgive someone a lot older than that kid for agreeing; for dismissing this as mindless, pointless, causeless violence.  There are causes. We can’t divide ourselves neatly into two camps of ‘good’, law-abiding, safe, polite non-rioters and ‘bad’, cruel, thuggish, mindless rioters. There is a reason that so much anger in this country is boiling over. Look at what Camila Batmanghelidjh has to say in the Independent.

I’m not condoning the sort of violence that has been happening; but if we reduce it down to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ then we’re just going to perpetrate the same blinkered thinking that has led to these feelings of alienation and disgust with society that are driving all this chaos and violence. These attitudes come from two people who yes, it could fairly be said, possibly haven’t put a lot of thought into what they’re doing, but there is, somewhere down there an understandable sense of lingering unfairness. I’d argue that maybe firstly they’ve got the wrong targets, and secondly (and more importantly) violence isn’t the way to go. One of the most sensible and awesome voices I’ve heard so far on all this is this woman, who I want for our PM.

But this is sort of leading me on to another aspect of the conversations I was having at lunchtime with the workshop kids. Some of them were born after 9/11, a fact I find peculiarly unnerving, considering how much of their lives it will have indirectly/directly shaped. Most of them didn’t really know who Osama Bin Laden was, they just knew of him as “that evil guy that the Americans killed”. I overheard one child likening him to Hitler, which confused another – who didn’t really have a clear idea of who Hitler was.

Fun lunchtime task for Clare – explain the Holocaust to a bunch of bewildered nine-year-olds. It would be so easy to take the same dichotomising response as has been struck with these riots and say that the perpetrators were just bad people. Maybe, at nine years old, that’s what you want to hear. But that’s not a fair depiction of what happened to anyone. I dislike referring to anyone – Bin Laden, or (sohelpmegod I am not a neo-Nazi, so do not misunderstand me) Hitler – as evil. Fucked up, cruel, and displaying a hideous absence of respect for human life, maybe. Definitely, in Hitler’s case. Evil, no.

Someone’s actions can be evil. They cannot. That is too reductive a view to apply to one person, far more so when applied to a group. So, even if it makes for a more complicated answer, I am not going to tell a group of nine-year-olds that the Jews, and homosexuals, and the Romany Gypsies, and Black People, and physically or mentally disabled people were put to death by a bunch of “bad guys” called Nazis. Or, worse, as I heard one child put it:

“well, the evil Germans killed a load of Jews.”
“Who are Jews?”
“I don’t really know. I just know that the Germans are bad.”

Not so much, no. As someone of German and German-Jewish heritage, that’s an explanation I find deeply troubling.

So, to wander round back in a circle and say something perhaps not deeply enlightening, moral absolutism, of the sort we’ve seen in the reactions to the riots, can (I feel) only really be a negative, damaging and reductive way of responding to a situation. Maybe those two girls in the video who seem to be only out for “free alcohol”, and getting their own back on the police and/or rich people seem fairly close to the mindless thugs we’re being warned about. But they are responding to deep and underlying feelings of unfairness and social exclusion that will continue to trouble our society until we start listening and responding to those voices with respect. Give people a voice and maybe they won’t need petrol bombs.

(And if you want me to spell it out, no, I’m not condoning the violence. It really, really worries me. But dismissing it as mindless thuggery is not going to help.)

The Summer

Last year, I spent the summer camped out on the sofas of various neighbours while a large crowd of builders first half knocked down and then rebuilt our house (not without disaster, but we got there in the end) – and it wasn’t very satisfying.

This was partly because I didn’t have anything much to do except read, and was also in part because I didn’t really read the things I was supposed to be reading properly – I took nothing in. So essentially it was a moderately wasted vacation, apart from the occasional visit to London, or to Birmingham (to see the family, especially my much loved and sadly missed Gran), or a lovely fortnight first in Somerset and then in Wales. I want this Summer, instead, to be slightly more pointed. Not sharp and prickly, but interesting.

Naturally, therefore, this requires a list. I love lists. And then once I’ve written the list, you’re going to hear about every item on it, as I do it. That’ll teach you… (to… read my blog? Please don’t stop! I promise it might be interesting!)

Touching Base

I’ve been away a while… never fear – I’m still alive. Just revising, mainly.

Occasionally I write things, and by that, I mean (for once, at long last, and after a very long absence) poetry, mainly, and stories.

I’m back on an even keel after what feels like a very long time. Maybe the crisis was last term, but I think it had been building for months, if not years. I feel lighter than I have in a long time. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Meanwhile, because who doesn’t want cute videos of kittens, these are the new arrivals at my cousin’s place:

And guess who gets to baby sit?!

“Wanna be your victim”…

Right, to get one thing straight – I’m not saying, or assuming, or even meaning to imply the song I’m about to talk about excuses or condones rape. (What a way to start the first entry in a while, hey?) I’m not saying Katy Perry is on a one-woman conspiracy to persuade all the teenage girls and boys of the world that the best way to be sexual is to offer themselves up passively to the stronger party. I’m just… mildly perturbed. Maybe it’s just good old feminist wolf-crying again. Or maybe there is something slightly creepy about the lyrics to her soon-to-be-released-in-the-UK song ‘E.T.’…

Have a look at the lyrics:

“Take Me/Ta-Ta-Take Me/Wanna Be Your Victim/Ready For Abduction”

Right. So I get that the point of the song is that she’s imagining her hot new lover is an alien, so his/her/non-gender-specific its (it’s an alien, it could be anything. It might not even have gender, after all) ways of lovin’ are straaaaange. Still. Anyone else find the line “wanna be your victim” just a bit too passive to sit comfortably?

It gets better:

The delightful Kanye West gets a little moment to rap by himself, and politely tells his/her/its (again, he’s playing the Alien in this scenario) human lover (here played by Katy Perry) that:

“I’ma disrobe you/Then I’ma probe you/See I abducted you/So I tell you what to do”

Okay. I don’t want to read too much into this, but seriously? I don’t give a damn which way round the genders are singing it, I don’t like this message. Yeah, so S&M is fun, and being bossed around is fun and can be/is a turn on. Implied consent (or given consent) is important, and a song like this, which will have/has an audience of millions worries me.

No, I’m not going to suggest, and I’m not trying to say that it’s either condoning or implying rape, but it’s got a pretty dodgy, unpleasant undertone however you look at it. But maybe that’s what Alien Sex is like? Maybe it’s all about the power and the lack of consent, and all that is sexy now and no-one told me? I guess I’m a feminist, so maybe I missed that memo…

Oh, and one more thing, which maybe struck shadows at me for more personal reasons and is probably totally harmless:

“They Say/Be Afraid/You’re Not Like The Others/Futuristic Lover/Diff’rent DNA/They Don’t Understand You”

Right. So this probably is me reading too much into this. But warning bells start screaming in my head the minute anyone starts claiming that either they or someone they’re besotted with is somehow magically different from everyone else and horribly, horribly misunderstood. (Earlier in that part of the song, Human Katy asks Alien Kanye if he’s the Devil or an Angel…) Usually, in my experience, when someone starts claiming that they’re somehow supernaturally bad or good, and totally misunderstood, there’s something more sinister going on.

It’s a prime tactic of manipulative people everywhere (see also: whatsisface Vampire-guy in Twilight). Telling the person you’re isolating that the reason their friends all hate you is because you’re special and they don’t understand you is a brilliant way to cut them off from people who would otherwise be able to protect them.

But maybe that’s speaking too much from experience and Katy just means that her new Alien lover is just really weird…

Emmaus – Fiona Benson

A Faber New Poet, this poem was sent to me recently be a wonderful young man, one of my sister’s closest friends, who’d heard I wasn’t having a particularly easy time of it, so sent me a beautiful care package of a variety of teabags, a letter, and two postcards with poems on them. If I could put into words the brightness given to my day by that parcel, I would. Since I can’t, here’s one of the poems:

Emmaus

And if you should forget
walk out across the Hungerford Bridge
where the city falls back

and pylons loom in the dark
like an avenue of silver birch.
Regard the work:

a simple stitch, it heals
the breach of the river, allows passage and pause
to acknowledge our place

beneath this infinite sky
in a wind that knows we are mortal, porous,
a beautiful trick of the light.

- FIONA BENSON

Ohhh My…

Just wandered on over to ‘Comment is Free’ and came across – in the comments section, where the boogiemen (or monsters, non-gender specific) lurk, this delightful little moment:

@JessicaReed This ‘gender pay gap‘ argument is one of the most blithely wrong-headed ones feminists come out with, and truly, there’s plenty to choose from. You cannot compare like with like in similar jobs in the way feminists try to; there are plenty of reasons men still earn more than women, usually for reasons to do with biology.

Until modern science either comes up with a way to medicate the mothering instict out of women (something I’m sure the more hardened feminist would celebrate) and/or contrives some Aldous Huxley-esque way of raising babies in tanks then the situation will persist.

When challenged (about the biological thing) his response was this:

@JessicaReed

You cannot compare like with like in similar jobs in the way feminists try to; there are plenty of reasons men still earn more than women, usually for reasons to do with biology.

I used ‘biology’ as a short-hand for innate gender differences.

Men tend to have the time to work longer hours, don’t take maternity leave, have fewer commitments outside the work place; plus they’re bolder and more assertive in negotiating their paypackets and are more competitive in their pursuit of higher salaries. Women are more likely to give higher priority to ‘quality of life’ considerations rather than raw take-home pay.

Or, you know, it’s just the invisible hand of the evil patriarchy conspiring to keep women down, whatever you like.

And my response to him would be “yes, yes it is the invisible hand of the patriarchy”… mainly because nothing he’s said actually supports (or even suggests) that it is biology which programmes men to work longer, not take maternity leave, or be more assertive in the workplace. Those things, I’d argue, are social, not genetically programmed.

Urgh.

And why (she says, having written an opinion piece, as usual, as this is what this blog tends to be…) do people always feel the need to wave their opinions around? To be honest, I’m with Howard Jacobson on this one: blogs and twitter and facebook all encourage a laziness and an arrogance (I know, I know – the irony of the medium in which I’m saying this is not lost on me) that everyone else will be interested in their opinion. Which is leaving me having serious doubts about whether or not to continue writing this blog. I’ll probably write an entry on that at some point – be prepared for the tasty, tasty irony.

!

This girl is amazing. In my opinion. You may disagree. But have a look anyway.

 

http://www.myspace.com/mistymillermusic

“So you’d better run”

Yeah, aren’t I being lazy?

Have a song. And admire the glory of a woman in black tie.