Tag: writing

Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon, translated by Daniel Hahn, is published by Hamish Hamilton (£10.99).

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

 “As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”

“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”

Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne

‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’

Eduardo Halfon

“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”

Aleksandr Voronsky

Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]

Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.

Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts.  In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such  Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.

It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]

Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?

Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.

According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.

Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]

Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.

For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript.  These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.

Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.

Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.

As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]

Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.

The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.

The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.

US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.

The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.

Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.

Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.

Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.

To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.

Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.

In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.

It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.

“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.

Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.

The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.

It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]

Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.

“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”

Notes

1.   The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf

The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-

 Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator) 

5.   Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016

About The Author

 Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.

[1] Origin Stories-www.guernicamag.com/origin-stories/

[2] Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving Guatemala-Guardian.com.2015

[3] Tarantula by Eduardo Halfon-observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/paperback-of-the-week-tarantula-by-eduardo-halfon

[4] Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents

[5] Better not say too much: Eduardo Halfon on literature, paranoia and leaving Guatemala-Guardian.com.2015

Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, Paperback by Norm MacDonald – 1 Jan. 1900, Random House

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The only time having a cult following is beneficial is when you are actually in a cult…However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.

—Norm Macdonald

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others”.

Groucho Marx

“ I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. [. . . .] The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature.”

Karl Marx

 “To live outside the law, you must be honest”. 

Bob Dylan

By any stretch of the imagination, Norm Macdonald’s Based on a True Story is not exactly a factual memoir. In fact, I would say there is hardly any factual basis for it, but it is a very funny read. As David Letterman said, “I have read Based on a True Story, and I believe it to be largely bullshit, but it is very, very, very funny!” It is not entirely made up of bullshit, but it is sprinkled with a few truths; however, most events do not hold much water.

Norm Macdonald (1959–2021) was one of the most important voices in late-20th and early-21st-century North American comedy: deadpan delivery, an appetite for subversion, and a tendency to take jokes into uncomfortable territory. For the reader studying Macdonald is not merely cultural nostalgia but an opportunity to sharpen critical tools: to examine how humour reflects class relations, ideological currents, individual psychology and the shifting political landscape of the ruling class and its institutions. It is fair to say that Macdonald stood on the shoulders of a long list of great American comics, including Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, to name but a few.

My introduction to Norm Macdonald was through the superb American Comedy The Middle.[1] I was unaware of his history on Saturday Night Live (SNL) or his groundbreaking stand-up comedy. When Macdonald was told he had a cult following, he replied in the book, “I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader, and life is milk and honey… everyone thinks you are God… you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult… In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men, also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it. However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.”[2]

Macdonald’s character in The Middle was Uncle Rusty. It is extremely difficult to determine Rusty’s social type. Certainly, he was, in the past, a worker, but he was a bit of a grifter and, at times, represented small-business conservatism, also exhibiting working-class insecurity. Macdonald’s work on The Middle is a masterful example of comedy, both in form and content. His comic timing, silences, and persona were a joy to watch.

Macdonald’s comedy exemplifies the tensions of a semi-petty-bourgeois cultural milieu whose ironic detachment both reflects and reproduces social atomisation. His recurring themes are scepticism of elites and a delight in subverting norms, but often a retreat into cleverness and anecdote. He offers a case study in how cultural forms can register genuine grievances without pointing to collective, class-based solutions.

The Middle sitcom captures the rhythms of precarious, small-town life under late capitalism: juggling low wages, shrinking public services, stalled upward mobility and the cultural weight of respectability politics. The Middle” (the ABC sitcom) and a character like “Uncle Rusty” function, in cultural terms, as a compact social text: they reflect and reproduce the values, anxieties and ideological compromises of a broad layer of American life — the suburban, small town and petty bourgeois milieu often called “middle America.”

Rusty and Macdonald, for that matter, were rebels without a cause. He certainly had an anti-authoritarian air. Rather than adhering to a strict ideology, his comedy and public persona focused on refusing to pander to audiences or authority figures, such as when he mocked the idea of “violent terrorists” respecting velvet ropes during the January 6th Capitol riot.

Through his character Uncle Rusty, Macdonald critiques cultural conservatism and populist resentment: he typically combines sharp jabs of humour aimed at elites with an affirmation of traditional family values, localism, and personal responsibility. This mixture can predispose audiences to see social problems as moral or personal failures rather than systemic contradictions. However, by framing Rusty’s flaws as quirks and resolving them within the family, the show channels potential political anger into private reconciliation and comic relief. This is a common function of mainstream sitcoms in stabilising social relations. At times, the character can expose managerial stupidity or precarity, offering openings for critique. The decisive question is whether those openings are developed into a class explanation or left as individual anecdotes; the show mostly expresses the latter.

As capitalism intensifies precarity, sitcoms like The Middle shape millions of impressions about who is to blame and what can be done. Understanding the show’s pedagogy helps organisers convert diffuse resentment into class consciousness by exposing the gap between individual coping and collective action.

Comedy is not a neutral amusement; it is a social form rooted in class relations and the material conditions that produce ideas, tastes and collective sensibilities. From a Marxist standpoint, comedy must be analysed as part of cultural production: its forms, audiences and effects are shaped by the economic base and the class forces that struggle within a given historical epoch. Historically, comedic forms reflect shifts in class power.

Carnival, farce and satire in pre-capitalist and early-capitalist societies allowed subordinate classes to mock elites—ritualised inversions that temporarily loosened hierarchy. Under capitalist commodity relations, new comic genres emerged (burlesque, stand-up, situation comedy), shaped by urbanisation, wage-labour rhythms, mass media, and the commodification of leisure. The avant-garde and revolutionary epochs produced satire and grotesque comedy that targeted bureaucrats, profiteers, and false consciousness; conversely, periods of reaction saw comedy co-opted to reinforce nationalist, patriarchal, and consumerist norms.

Today, comedy circulates globally through streaming platforms and social media, shaped by corporate algorithms and advertising imperatives. Many comedians occupy precarious economic positions while addressing issues—inequality, racism, surveillance—that concern working people. This contradiction produces both sharp, politically conscious satire and commodified “safe” humour that normalises neoliberal individualism.

The book has an overall tone of melancholy, of sadness, which Norm carried throughout his life. But he also carried an antidote to that in a sharp, rebellious comedy. Both the book and the TV series The Middle are worth reading and watching. Macdonald was a fine exponent of his craft.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Middle_(TV_series)

[2] Based on a True Story, Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald 

What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor: Conversations with Guatemalan Oligarchs Roman Krznaric-Paperback – 16 Feb. 2022

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Krznaric’s book is a fascinating and valuable insight into the modern Guatemalan oligarchy. He examines the inner life of the oligarchy and how it has maintained its power and privilege for over three centuries. It is a groundbreaking work of political and sociological analysis based on wide-ranging personal interviews.

What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor was written in 2006 and stems from Krznaric’s 2003 PhD thesis, The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.[1] However, due to political and literary differences with publishers, the book was not published in its original form until 2022. As Krznaric writes in the 2022 preface, although the book is ten years old and much has changed in Guatemala in the intervening years, the oligarchy remains in complete control of Guatemala’s political and economic life.

Guatemala is well known for its extreme wealth inequalities, which have been caused by centuries of economic and political domination by an oligarchy comprising around fifty families of European descent.  In this case, the term “oligarchs” usually refers to a small group of influential families (often called “las familias”) that have maintained economic and political dominance since colonial times. As of 2022, approximately 245 individuals in Guatemala held an accumulated wealth of US$30 billion. The oligarchs dominate crucial sectors of the Guatemalan economy, including export agriculture (sugar, coffee, bananas), finance and banking, construction materials (cement), and consumer goods. Families such as the Herrera Family: Owners of Ingenio Pantaleón, the largest sugar production estate in the country, with significant interests in banking (e.g., Banco Agromercantil), the Castillo Family: A historically substantial family involved in the production of beer and other industries and the Novella Family: Major players in the cement industry for generations. These families and others make Guatemala one of the most unequal countries on the planet.

As Krznaric relates:  “Getting the oligarchs to speak openly was a challenge. Using all I knew about ethnographic and oral history interviewing techniques, I tried to be courteous rather than confrontational – a strategy that created an atmosphere which felt relaxed, unthreatening and conversational. I quickly learned that accusing them of violating human rights or exploiting workers made them clam up. However, encouraging them to share stories about their lives and experiences lowered their guard and led them to reveal much more about themselves. Rather than offering critical comments on the spot during the interviews, I found that I could defer my critiques until I was writing about them and interpreting what they said, as I do in What The Rich Don’t Tell The Poor.”[2]

Global context: Global Oligarchy and local oligarchy

The global charity Oxfam has recently released several reports that document what every worker knows: an accelerating concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchy whose fortunes have exploded even as mass poverty, precarious work and state austerity deepen. The charity’s data shows that billionaire wealth surged to a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, and that the wealthiest handful of individuals now own more than the wealth of billions of people.  The number of global billionaires recently increased by 30% to approximately 2,750 individuals, who together control more wealth than the planet’s poorest 4.6 billion people.

As Krznarics correctly states in the book, Guatemala’s oligarchy functions as an extension of global imperialist interests. Multinational agribusiness, mining and energy firms rely on local oligarchs to secure land, labour, and concessions. Yankee capitalism has historically backed Guatemalan oligarchs and their militarisation of Guatemalan life and carried out numerous coups to protect these interests, from the 1954 CIA overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz to more recent economic and political interventions. The oligarchs’ rule requires a combination of legal-clientelist institutions and outright coercion. They co-opt political parties, control key state ministries, and use the judiciary to neutralise opponents. When that fails, repression and violence are employed against organisers, Indigenous communities and trade-union militants.

The struggles of the Guatemalan working class against the oligarchs are not documented in the book. But these struggles are not isolated: the working class has challenged the supply chains and profit zones of global capital. Resistance to extractivism (mining and hydroelectric dams), land grabs for agro-exports, and labour discipline in maquilas strike at imperialist accumulation. International solidarity can disrupt investments, cut off supply-chain legitimacy and expose the complicity of multinational corporations and imperialist states. The global working class has an interest in supporting these struggles because they weaken the power of an oligarchy that helps sustain the world capitalist order and its wars.

Summary

Roman Krznaric’s book is a vital piece of journalism and provides essential insight into the world of the Guatemalan oligarchs. Krznaric’s suggestions for countering these oligarchs have profound weaknesses.  While addressing the moral and psychological gaps between wealthy elites and the poor, he argues that, to reduce inequality, workers and youth should challenge the oligarchs to change habits, broaden empathy, cultivate longer time horizons, and reframe public narratives so that disadvantaged people can adopt attitudes and strategies associated with success.

Krznaric’s approach is fundamentally an appeal to moral persuasion. He asks the wealthy to change hearts and minds — to exercise empathy, mentor, and open networks — relying on their voluntary moral action rather than on structural compulsion. He treats inequality partly as a deficit of habits and imagination among low-income people that can be remedied by teaching the “right” psychology and practices. These elements make the argument attractive to readers who prefer non-confrontational, reformist routes: it promises measurable improvements through persuasion, education and moral example, without directly challenging property relations or class power.

As Marxists point out, inequality is rooted in property relations, the extraction of surplus value and state power. Teaching better habits or eliciting elite empathy cannot change the class relations that produce mass poverty. Moral appeals to elites presuppose goodwill and avoid building an independent working class  

[1] The World View of the Oligarch in Guatemalan Politics.A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in the Government Department of the University of Essex, Colchester, UK 2003

[2] Want to Challenge the Elite? Then first Understand What Makes Them Tick. frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/want-to-challenge-the-elite-then-first-understand-what-makes-them-tick/

Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias-, Gerald Martin (Translator), April 2025 Penguin Classics

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

 “Men of Maize” is a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.

Miguel Ángel Asturias.

“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …

Men of Maize

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”

Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente (Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life and capitalist dispossession.

Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”, and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other dead dogs upon his literary reputation.

One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.

There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.

While that dire situation has apparently not changed much, there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great writer’s work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]

On April 25th 2025, Penguin republished Men of Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will release an English translation of “Weekend in Guatemala” by the renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government.

Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”

Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]

Miguel Ángel Asturias and the origins of magical realism

Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]

Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal: mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social totality behind individual pathology.

Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical” elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read dialectically.

It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically. His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As Trotsky wrote

“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class’s position under the influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]

Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political weapon to expose the roots of oppression.

Notes

Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott

Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365

Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman


Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel Asturias-Luis Leal


A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao

[1] See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html

[2] On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/

[3] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/14/marq-m14.html

[4] The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm

Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique Paperback – 30 Jun. 2025 by Hannah McCann (Editor), Eloise Faichney (Editor), Rebecca Trelease (Editor), Emma Whatman (Editor), Routledge

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“At the moment, it wouldn’t be going too far to say [Swift] is one of the most powerful people in the world.”

Georgia Carroll

How has Swift achieved such phenomenal success with albums like this? To some extent, her rise can be attributed to the persona she has cultivated, together with the music industry. In the interest of mass appeal, the singer offers something to everyone: a little bit acoustic and country, a little bit electric and urban, a soupçon of sexiness, a pinch of feminism, and a lot of spectacle. At the same time, Swift has taken pains not to offend anyone and to remain relatively “apolitical.” She won’t “corrupt the youth” or inspire critical thinking, which is music to the ears of the industry.

Eric Schreiber

 “If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him; he masters it. …”

Walt Whitman

The essays in this book came about through a so-called Swiftposium held in Melbourne, Australia, before the start of Taylor Swift’s 2024 Eras world tour. The Symposium was the first of its kind. Its remit was an academic examination of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.

This, however, was not a regular academic conference. Despite the organisers going out of their way to say it was not a fan convention, it was pretty clear that the speakers and the audience had other ideas.

According to one report, “Fans were also desperate to take part, and on Sunday, hundreds of people—walking advertisements for rhinestones, cowboy boots, and Swift’s signature red lip—flocked into Melbourne’s iconic Capitol Theatre to hear lectures about the megastar. At a sold-out friendship bracelet-making workshop beforehand, 19-year-old Soumil says the event – run by RMIT University – is helping heal the wounds left by the ticketing bloodbath of last year, so much for academic impartiality.”

As this quote demonstrates, the degree of impartiality of these essay contributions leaves a lot to be desired . Swift fanatic Rachel Feder writes “ I was first introduced to Taylor Swift through my students, and then through my relationship with Tiffany, who grew up with the albums. She even has a picture of meeting Swift after a concert when she was 15. She’s an OG Swiftie.

At the Grammys last year, when Swift announced her “Tortured Poets Department” album, Tiffany texted me, saying, “This is your album. This is your era,” because Romanticist tortured poets are my whole thing. I shot off a quick email to my editor that said, “Hey, sorry to email you at night about Taylor Swift, but do we want to do ‘A Swiftie’s Guide to Tortured Poets?’” The team had all these incredible insights on how to make it capacious, like a “Swifties’ Guide to Literature” slash “Literary Guide to Taylor Swift.” Then I brought Tiffany on board, and we wrote it so fast. We had seven weeks to do the first draft, and we got through every album before “Tortured Poets” dropped in April 2024. We experienced that album in real time, writing that chapter in two weeks, which was a nerdy, bookish Swiftie’s dream.”[1]

It does not need an academic to tell you that Swift is big business. With a fan base of over 500 million, she is the highest-earning pop star of all time and is now a billionaire and a member of the American oligarch club. Her billionaire status has largely come off the back of fairly routine and uninteresting songwriting. Swift admits that her favourite songs are the ones where she has to think.[2] If that is the case, then only two albums from her extensive catalogue, Folklore and Evermore, are worth listening to.

One thing is clear from the essays in this book and in general is that Swift is protected and defended by not only a group of fanatical academics, but she is a fully paid-up member of the #MeToo movement who defends her with vigour.

Two such fanatics, Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold, launched an attack on the songwriter Bob Dylan, writing “Swift may be replacing Dylan feels a bit like reparations. Dylan’s work influenced a generation of singer/songwriters, as well as those who wished to write about music, rather than make it, but unfortunately, he is responsible for, among other things, a swath of material which relegates women to objects and does worse. The women of his songs, as many have noted, are, as Katrina Forrester (2020), put it, ‘Unappealing. They were clawing, childish, neurotic, and demanding, women who wanted too much or took what he didn’t want to give. The feminist invocation of Dylan inhabited the uncomfortable terrain between critique and homage: could they use his words to transcend the relations of a world that he described so well yet also embodied? When Ellen Willis (2012) later revised her classic 1967 essay on Dylan, she wrote that he exemplified the ‘bohemian contempt for women’.[3]

It is hard to know where to start with this venomous essay. My point is that Dylan had far more insight into the nature of relationships between men and women than Swift will ever have. As David Walsh writes “A perusal of Bob Dylan––Lyrics: 1962-2001, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful and, as well, genuinely outraged at American society’s injustices. The lyrics are capable of conveying physical and psychic longing, both for “the beloved” and for recognition by society at large.[4]

As for swift her songs the Marxist writer Eric Schreiber claims they are indistinguishable, vapid and self-centred. Instead of poetry, her lyrics resemble teenage journal verse, including the inevitable pretentiousness.

Making a further point, he writes, “Swift is best understood not as an artist but as a creation of the music industry and a reflection of the present state of cultural decline. She was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1989. Her father is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. When she was growing up, Swift enjoyed the privileges of America’s financial elite. She spent summers at her family’s vacation home in Stone Harbour, New Jersey, where the median price of a house is $2.5 million.[5]

Her latest album, Life of a Showgirl, continues in the same vein as her previous work. As Alex Petridis writes in his Guardian review of Showgirl, “More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating. There’s a fantastic chord sequence on Actually Romantic, but, alas, 37 years ago, Frank Black wrote a very similar one for Where Is My Mind? by Pixies, a song you can literally sing along to Actually Romantic. The rest floats in one ear and out the other: not unpleasantly, but you might reasonably expect more given the amassed songwriting firepower behind it, and Swift’s claims of “keeping the bar really high”.[6]

Given what has happened in the world recently, you would have at least expected some form of comment to appear in her new album. Swift is an intelligent girl, but has chosen to stay silent. Again, like previous material, Life of a Showgirl deals with her feelings and past relationships. Her perspective has not matured appreciably since her early days.

Schreiber is correct when he writes, “Swift also arises out of the remarkable and ongoing monopolisation and narrowing at the top of the music industry. Record companies, artist management, broadcasting and concert ticketing and promotion, respectively, have come to be dominated by two or three corporate goliaths each. Of the 2 million artists on Spotify, less than 4 per cent account for over 95 per cent of streams. In 1982, the top 1 per cent of artists took in 26 per cent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 per cent. In short, Swift’s great success is a symptom of the decay in popular music over the past several decades. It reflects an official culture unwilling or unable to look at itself critically and honestly.”[7]

Swift it would appear to be trapped in a prison largely of her own making. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet  ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’As any great artist male or female this should be their starting point. Bob Dylan was a spokesman to a generation for a time and was true to himself. Swift has had plenty of chances to speak out against the injustices and inequality in the world but so far has chosen to stay silent. This will be the legacy of her work and she will not be able to shake this off.

Notes

1.   “The Story of Us” (Taylor’s Version): Taylor Swift and Interconnections of Sociological Theory and the Music Industry- Reema Azzo

2.    Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold

3.   Left of #MeToo -Heather Berg -Feminist Studies, 2020, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2020), pp. 259-286

4.   Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? David Walsh

5.   Ceasing to be the voice of a generation-Paul Bond

6.   Celebrity, Music, and Public Persona: A Case Study of Taylor Swift

7.   Elaina K.M. Junes Minnesota State University, Mankato

8.   Campaign Problems: How  Fans React to Taylor Swift’s

9.    Controversial Political Awakening- Simone Driessen

10.Miss Americana: Taylor Swift as a Battleground for Feminist Discourse

11.Juliet Eklund University of Denver

12.Who Needs to Calm Down? Taylor Swift and Rainbow Capitalism Eric Smiale

13.“Blue Swift”: Popular Culture Meets Politics∗ Orestis Troumpounis† Dimitrios Xefteris  November 2024

[1] www.du.edu/news/du-professor-explores-bookish-brilliance-behind-taylor-swifts-eras

[2] observer.co.uk/contributor/roisin-lanigan

[3] Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold

[4] Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/nobe-o21.html

[5] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html

[6] Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl review – dull razzle-dazzle from a star who seems frazzled-www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/03/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-review

[7] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html

Diary of a Nobody

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Perhaps the most significant development in the life of both my websites has been the exponential rise in hits. For the first time in its seventeen-year history, the original blog, which began in 2008, reached fifty thousand hits in September.

Two interrelated developments account for the rise. Firstly and most significantly, the huge radicalisation taking place has produced an interest in Marxism. Secondly, the move to publicise the websites on Bluesky has not only led to a significant rise in hits but has also attracted a new audience for the websites. In the past, a slight rise in hits would have presented no problem, but this month’s increase is substantial, and if it continues, it would mean I need more writers than just myself. So this is an appeal for guest articles. The website needs to expand into other areas beyond my personal interests.

Perhaps the most important book I have read and reviewed over the last month was John Rees’s Fiery Spirits. The book is superbly written and well researched. The book breaks new ground, and already, Rees is working on what will probably be the third book in the trilogy. Like his book, The Leveller Revolution, it needs a second and possibly a third read. It is safe to say that Rees and I do not share the same political outlook, but his work as a historian should be respected, and he is taking the study of the English bourgeois revolution to a new level. I am at a loss to explain, however, why the main bourgeois media outlets virtually boycotted the book. I look forward to his latest book.

Meetings

A People’s History of the Anti-Nazi League Date: 06/10/2025 to 06/10/2025 Time: 17:30 to 19:00 Venue: Online- via Zoom –  Institute of Historical Research

Roundtable with editors and authors of In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956 Date 3 Dec 2025, 17:30 to 3 Dec 2025, 19:00 Venue Online- via Zoom. IHR

Podcasts

Rodney Hilton interviewed by John Hatcher, part of the Interviews with Historians collection. John Hatcher Series: Interviews with Historians Run 12 May 2025 https://www.history.ac.uk/news-events/videos-podcasts/interviews-historians-rodney-hilton

Interviews with Historians – Christopher Hill-https://www.history.ac.uk/news-events/videos-podcasts/interviews-historians-christopher-hill

Interviews with Historians – Eric Hobsbawm-https://www.history.ac.uk/news-events/videos-podcasts/interviews-historians-eric-hobsbawm

Interviews with Historians – Lawrence Stone-https://www.history.ac.uk/news-events/videos-podcasts/interviews-historians-lawrence-stone

Interviews with Historians – Hugh Trevor-Roper-https://www.history.ac.uk/news-events/videos-podcasts/interviews-historians-hugh-trevor-roper

Recent Book Purchases

Taylor Swift Culture Capital and Critique-Routledge

The Haunted Wood Sam Leith

Eviction Jessica Field, Verso

Martin Keown- On the Edge

Dancing through the Fire-Paul Weller

Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me by Blake Bailey-Skyhorse- April 2025-192 Pages

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience.”

Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer

“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.

Philip Roth

“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”

Philip Roth

“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”

David Walsh

When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement’s vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]

Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers’ “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.

Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.

As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]

Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]

Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.

Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”

It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book’s journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]

There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.

He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.

A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.

He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.

As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.

In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, “The Sexual Witch Hunt,” and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]

It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.

Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.

[1] www.the-tls.com/lives/autobiography/canceled-lives-blake-bailey-book-review-nat-segnit

[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html

[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html

[4] Okay, you’re hired-insidestory.org.au/okay-youre-hired/

[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said … I’m not going to take this lying down”

Diary of a Nobody

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

In November 2025, this Blog/Website will be 18 years old. Started as a vanity project after my part-time degree at Birkbeck University, it has now become something more substantial. It is now comfortably racking up 10,000 hits per month, which is not bad for a website that, outside of the World Socialist Website, is the only orthodox Trotskyist website.

This year, I hope to expand the website and add more history writers, as well as a few additional subject pages. The other aim is to produce two drafts of the books I have been working on for some time. A collection of essays on Raphael Samuel and to rewrite my degree dissertation on Cromwell, the Levellers and the Putney Debates.

Meetings

If any writer has a meeting or book launch coming up, please don’t hesitate to contact me to advertise it.

Book Launch – A.L. Morton and the Radical Tradition-

Author James Crossley introduces his biography of the Communist intellectual A.L. Morton, who pioneered studies of English radical history.

Thursday, 26 June 2025 – 7:00 pm Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU

National Portrait Gallery The Fiery Spirits: John Rees 10 July 2025, 13.00-14.00

Popular protest, parliament and the English Revolution

Books Purchased

1.   The Nazi Mind-Laurence Rees

2.   The Last Days of Kira Mullan- N Ricci

3.   Oliver Cromwell-R Hutton

4.   Did It Happen Here- D Jenkins

5.   Hiroshima-J Hersey

6.   Anne Frank-The: The Diary of a Young Girl

7.   The Many Lives of Anne Frank-R Franklin

8.   Marxist Modernism-G Rose

9.   Mafalda-Isabella Cosse

10.Mafalda Quinto 2025

11.America’s Fatal Leap-Paul W Schroder

12.Reform, Revolution and Opportunism M Taber

13.The Time of the Harvest Has Come M Empson

14.Billie Holiday The Lady Sings the Blues

15.Lost Boys-James Bloodworth.

160 George Orwell’s papers saved after a Public Protest.

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

“There are lots of people with lots of money who’d like a trophy. But you then lose track of them and they disappear, until they pop up on the market again.”

Prof Jean Seaton

‘I hope I shall get the chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies, more I can’t say, owing to the censorship.’ –

George Orwell, May 1937

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others

Animal Farm-George Orwell

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds, any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”.

1984

About 160 historically important George Orwell papers have been acquired by University College London. The Gollancz Papers, as they were known were at risk of being sold to the highest bidder at auction.

The papers contain Orwell’s correspondence, contracts and readers’ reports relating to his earliest novels, dating from 1934 to 1937. The papers relate to four of his earliest published works – A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier and Inside the Whale . His analysis of the politics of 1930s Europe, shaped his world viewpoint. The newly acquired papers contain manuscript notebooks, personal papers and the first handwritten notes of some of Orwell’s most famous words and phrases, such as “Two Minutes Hate”, “Newspeak”, and “War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery”.

The collection acquired by UCL had originally belonged to Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, who founded one of the 20th century’s most important left-wing publishing houses. Publishing several of Orwell’s early novels. However he refused to publish three of Orwell’s major political books, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Gollancz was particularly hostile to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Gollancz thought Orwell was a Trotskyist and was hostile to Stalinism. Although no Trotskyist, Orwell was hostile to Stalinism. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an important written by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth.

“Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and for socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[1]

A spokesman for University College London (UCL) said the papers were “a valuable piece of Britain’s cultural heritage”. UCL already has the world’s most comprehensive research material relating to Orwell. The purchase by UCL was done with the help of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries to stop the collection falling into the hands of a few money-grabbing collectors. Anger was also expressed at the condition of the papers, which had been “languishing in dozens of rusty, dusty filing cabinets”.

The Orwell papers were owned by the Orion Group, which was in turn owned by Hachette. Hachette had no interest in the cultural value of the papers. Their decision to sell to the highest bidder because they were closing down the warehouse where the papers were stored had been condemned as an act of “Cultural vandalism”. According to Rick Gekoski in his 2021 book, Guarded by Dragons, “No one on the Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.”[2]

How Orion came to get the papers was explained by Richard Young, who writes, “Gollancz continued as an independent publishing house even after the death of Victor Gollancz in 1967, under the guidance of his daughter Livia. In the late 1980s, however, the business was sold to new owners and went through several changes of ownership in the 1990s, ending up under the Orion Group. In 2012, Orion was faced with a problem, in that the archive of Gollancz was by then housed in a warehouse on the south coast, along with archives from several other publishing houses. The warehouse provider planned to close the facility in the coming years, and so faced with this, Orion took the opportunity to put the archive up for sale.

So, what exactly is a publishing house archive? Essentially, it consists of two main elements: so-called file or archive copies of the books published by the firm, and secondly, the correspondence or publishing files relating to each of the published works. Gekoski did his best to place the entire correspondence archive with an institution. Those tapped included the British Library, as well as Universities in the UK and the US. The price tag of 1 million pounds, which Orion was seeking, proved to be a stumbling block, however, and all negotiations to sell the archive (which included significant George Orwell correspondence) in its entirety fell through.[3]

The capitalist speculators of the Orion company stands in stark contrast to the “extraordinary generosity” of Orwell’s only son of Richard Blair, who with his own money purchased 50 letters to donate them to UCL’s Orwell Archive, to stop them being gobbled up by vampire collectors and according to him “Then they’re never seen again.

Orwell’s biographer D J Taylor concurred with Blair, saying, “This is a fantastic treasure trove from the point of view of Orwell and publishing history … Literary manuscripts have a terrible habit of disappearing”.

[1] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html

[2] Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People Paperback – 19 Jan. 2023

[3] Orwell and the Gollancz Archive -orwellsociety.com/orwell-and-the-gollancz-archive/

On: Why I Write and How I Write by Ruth Hutchinson

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

I have been asked by Keith Livesey to contribute to this series as he must believe or think I’ve something worth saying despite not being a Historian. Keith and I are very old friends, and I remember the first day we met. It was sometime in the spring of 1996 and I was walking down Oxford Road close to All Saints Campus of M.M.U. He was flogging a political paper at the time, standing outside the Student Union and asked me to sign a petition. He used the word “antidemocratic”, and I didn’t know what that meant exactly, so I asked, “What do you mean by this?”  He then explained, had a nice way about him, and I signed my name; I found myself in agreement, wanting to defend democratic rights against antidemocratic practices. He looked at my signature and commented with a smile: “It’s interesting to know what a fellow Livesey thinks?”  We started a correspondence, he changed my life and the rest is history. I owe a lot to Keith and as we’re not spring chickens anymore, I’d like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude despite our differences. Tomorrow is not a given; too much in life is taken for granted. Time passes and we wish we’d said more to those who passed on when they were alive. This is my opportunity to give thanks openly and honestly to a good friend while there’s time.

With all of that being said, I would like to tell the reader what I am. I’m not a Historian, as already mentioned, but I am an artist, gardener, mother, sister, daughter, crafter, scientist, retired C.A.B Generalist Adviser, revolutionary thinker and an Allied Health Professional. I have a B.A. with (Hons) and a BSc with (Hons). In the latter, I attained the highest first out of my entire cohort. I worked hard for that degree whilst bringing up my daughter single handed so I am not bereft of having experienced many struggles of everyday life. I am a humble human and write this essay to help anyone who struggles to put pen to paper. God knows how I have struggled, but I sometimes found a way through and succeeded. I will share my struggles, what caused them and how I overcame them; the rest will be up to you.

It would be really easy to write a mechanical piece about the A, B, and C’s of writing. It might go along the following lines: first you do this, then you do that, etc, and bingo! Before you know it, you’re a writer. That would be as dull as dishwater and would not begin to highlight anything insightful for me. It would be a one-sided list of tips that you could probably get off the internet, and if I did do this, it would beg the following question: Would I be bringing anything new to this series? Writing and thought are far more complex, and although tips are useful, we’d all have become writers years ago if all that was needed were tips! It also needs to be said that I can think of many more reasons why most people don’t write than do. This essay will, therefore, be far longer than others in the series and is aimed at a much broader audience. I am not pitching this to academia; it is aimed at the many and not the few. People will make up their minds as to whether they find this work helpful. 

My family of origin is pretty messed up and complicated, but certainly not unique. I am the middle child with two brothers, one on either side of me. I was born to an Electronics Engineer who was brought up by an R.A.F Warrant Officer and a cleaner/lollipop lady who left school at 14 without formal qualifications. They are from very different class backgrounds, with an age gap of 7 years. This is more significant than it ought to be because one was born one year into the Second World War, and the other was born 3 years post-war. They were born into very different worlds. They had completely different outlooks, psychologies, expectations and attitudes to children and their rearing. The home slowly descended into chaos and a battleground after my younger brother was born. I forgive them for I understand them; only living in chaos neither provides the conditions to sit down with mum and dad to read nor have your mum or dad read to you. My dad’s attitude was if, “It’s in them, it’s in them!” a very passive attitude that smacks of biological determinism. My dad had no interest in how his acorns would grow into mighty oaks and believed it was all to be done by the school system as he’d done his bit, which wasn’t his job. I read very little as a child before starting school and preferred picture books and watching television. Thankfully for my dad, the 1970s had superb educational children’s programmes. I loved the 1970s children’s programmes from Tony Hart Oliver Postgate and productions from Cosgrove Hall. This is where and how my love of drawing and being creative sprang from, as well as watching my mother knit and sew. 

My family life was difficult at times. My older brother was a bully and perceived me as a threat or a target for humiliation, so there was quite a lot of anguish at times in my everyday life. There are only 22 months between us, and when I came along, I’m sure his little world was turned a bit “topsy turvy”, shall we say. He was never disciplined for his behaviour, and I often felt cheated and invisible. Feeling injustice and having no voice from such a young age affects you. Having parents who fought (clashes could be quite violent at times) created a hostile environment, and I became a bit shy.

It soon became apparent that by the time I was 7, my needs wouldn’t be met half the time (emotional and intellectual needs), so I started looking elsewhere and escaping into school and playing out virtually all the time with my few friends. I wasn’t brave enough to make my friends’ and the friends I had would choose me and not the other way around. I was extremely passive in this area and ended up with friends who would later show they were no good for me. Not because they were delinquents but because of their issues and upbringing. My primary school was amazing as it was progressive and naturally didn’t focus on the “3 R’s” traditionally and formally. So, although I was a bright child, the school didn’t pressure us or give us an imposed rigid structure from above. The teacher wasn’t an authoritarian character that was dictating to us. The teachers in this school were more of guides and facilitators to our learning. They embodied healthy authority and provided us with leadership. This meant that the child led and decided their learning activities for the day and let me explain how this went down. I don’t know any other person who went to a primary school like the one I did, and I would be extremely interested to hear if anyone did. We were the only school in the area out of 6 others nearby and were called “Wheelockians”. It was very amusing in retrospect, but at the time, it left me feeling less than my counterparts from other schools. We were known to be different, and this labelling was very telling.

Some teachers at secondary school saw us differently and weren’t behind this type of school, probably because they measured success by whether we passed the stupid Richmond Test or not. Absolute Bullshit, in my opinion, because what did it measure? We had such a rich learning experience and were free of fear, and this quasi-11 plus exam couldn’t measure that. If a teacher measures success by the limited yardstick of the Richmond Test then they are extremely limited as human beings. Education shouldn’t be about filling the child with pointless facts and figures but surely to develop them into well rounded human beings that can face the world and contribute to it, and even impart some wisdom. In this endeavour, our education system truly fails. Still, a different philosophy once existed, tested in reality and moved on from a theoretical hypothesis developed by Piaget and Montessori. This type of teaching and school has been strangled to death by every single government since 1979. 

I started primary school in April of 1979 at age four, and I recall sitting on the floor cross-legged in a home bay as the school was completely open-planned. For a good number of weeks, we were given free milk at a set time each day, which I later learned had been taken away by none other than Maggie Thatcher, the infamous “Milk Snatcher”. 

The school was great, and we had there Sheep, hens, ducks, hamsters, terrapins, clay, glazes, kilns, a large library, and a large practical area where you could make a mess and paint all day. We had an incubator where the eggs from the hens were placed to hatch. We had a woodland area, a massive playing field, the best school dinners, book fairs, Christmas fairs, a nit nurse, Sport’s day, a cookery area, a mobile building, a greenhouse, and I could go on. We had teachers who could play the guitar and the piano and believed in their profession and that a child learns through play and instruction. We were taught how to read music and play the recorder. We also had spinning wheels where the fleece from the sheep was spun into yarn after being carded. I recall bookbinding and covering our handmade books with paper that we decorated with marbling.

We watched the sheep being shorn and had a pond that we would dip into with nets and examine the water boatmen from our “haul”. Looking back, we had huge human and material resources, which was a great place to be. However, this is not a criticism: it didn’t turn me into a great “writer/reader” other than Judy Blume at age 11. That’s the level I got to, which is perfectly respectable and age-appropriate. Blume deals with themes that a young girl like me would soon come to encounter and it was forearming oneself. She spoke to me, and her books were devoured by those of us living in the bloody real world. Those of us who were being and not striving to be what our parents wanted (mine didn’t seem that bothered) nor what some freaky teacher thought we should be. I enjoyed a wonderful primary school education. I had a very happy time at primary school and can recall so much of it, like yesterday. No trauma happened that I’ve ever needed to block out, and there wasn’t a competitive atmosphere except on Sports Day. We were allowed to grow organically, but by 1986, that was about to change dramatically, which I will come to later.

So, at my primary school with so much great stuff to do and be allowed to do, reading and writing wasn’t some activity that we were bullied into mastering. We were taught through the breakthrough method, which gave us a great foundation. I remember real excitement after I’d learnt a new word as it was put into our dictionary booklets and I remember taking to it quite easily. I must have been about five years old, and one day, I desperately and excitedly asked my dad if I could read to him. He said “No,” and I never asked again. I was quietly upset and shocked, a little like I’d done something wrong, and children are generally acquiescent and I found myself accepting that it was just something he wouldn’t do for me. Development of my reading and writing skills wasn’t being nurtured at home, and my dad would watch B.B.C. Open University lectures that were way over our heads. We left him to it. He did his own thing and had his reasons and attitudes that I would learn about later. I got the maximum of input around reading and writing from school, it would have been more, but they rightly focused on so much other stuff. Even our P.E. lessons were great. After climbing the ropes, I recall the delight and glowing sense of achievement the first time I touched the main hall ceiling.

So, I went to an all-girls secondary school where I failed the “Richmond Test” beforehand and was put into a lower band form. This might be unfamiliar to some as I’m 50 soon, and things were different back then. But this is how things were. It was before the internet, mobile phones, and society believed in the right to a childhood. There was no sexualisation of children or at least no outward display of it in the community. This is not to say that nefarious and sinister activity wasn’t happening behind closed doors somewhere, but I certainly wasn’t aware or privy to it. Self-harming and eating disorders were non-existent. There was no single case of this at primary school (1979-1986) or the odd case at secondary school (1986-1991).   I had a tiny tears doll and not a dreaded B.R.A.T.Z. Doll, for example, and we dressed appropriately for our age and did age-appropriate things like not taking drugs or carrying knives. Children were children and weren’t tried as adults in a court of law either. Different for sure! I think giving  context to the time I’m talking about is important. So much has changed and that change has neither been in the right direction nor for the right reasons. Examining this would require a lot of work and is for another time. Still, it is safe to say that education across all levels has suffered due to the interference and policies of every single government since 1979! A lot has been lost.

I believe the breakthrough method of teaching a child to write and read will always be above the phonics system. I have a child who is a millennial who was taught via phonics. How did anyone ever learn before this revolutionary phonics system, I might ask? I believe my child learnt despite it and not because of it, and phonics is a reactionary and cheap way of teaching a class that is so heterogeneous there’s no other option. This was applied to all schools, even if the class demographic was more homogenous. This is why you get outraged parents who don’t agree with trying to be all things to everyone, as what was worth conserving (breakthrough method, for example) gets diluted or completely lost and cast aside. It also creates a chasm between some children and parents like me who learn in a completely different way. It’s hard to bridge sometimes. What working-class person has the time to learn a whole new system when the one they had worked perfectly fine? It raises more questions than it answers.

Working-class parents have become so bogged down by these new radical teaching methods that faith in our education has waned for a long time. Is it any wonder that homeschooling started to become a viable option? Of course, this isn’t the only reason for homeschooling, but it is for some, and there are more homeschooled kids, most notably because the parents reject the school for some reason.

At secondary school, things completely changed but I still didn’t develop into a writer! Certainly not a good one. There was no confidence in my writing and a resignation. Essentially, although I digress at times, the picture here is of a working-class kid (me) living in a fairly affluent area but struggling with a chaotic home life whilst surrounded by kids with more harmony outside of school. I bumbled along, not knowing any different, and the conditions weren’t there at that time to improve. The books in my house were either my dad’s advanced technical books with two fiction books thrown in, “The Swiss Family Robinson” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. I only found those after I was 18. My mum’s small collection consisted of Mill’s and Boon’s romantic paperbacks, cookery books and knitting/sewing patterns. My mum is a wonderful woman and hid the fact that she has dyslexia as best she could. And I was so ashamed due to living in the area I did that when she wrote a note to secondary school about an absence or the need to be let out of school to go into town at lunchtime to buy fabric for a Home Economics project for example, that I would rewrite it and forge her signature the shame was so bad. 

My dad was unapproachable and saw his daughter as her mother’s problem. I am trying to explain here the atmosphere around writing and books. I thought that because my mum couldn’t do it very well, I would never be that great at it. I wasn’t pushed, stretched or encouraged to improve as I was a woman who would marry and make babies anyway, so what need was there to put much effort in with me? God, how wrong my parents were, and I’m sure I’ve been a major disappointment at times, but I was able to forge my paths and change my trajectory where writing was concerned, but this change didn’t happen until my 20s. Even though I can pinpoint the shift (meeting Keith) in my reading materials (a qualitative and quantitative change), the writing didn’t develop until years later; it was not until I was 39 that I put my new skills, knowledge and attitudes into action. I could read at secondary school, don’t get me wrong, but it was for escapism and I skipped any words I didn’t understand and gave little attention to them. I paid no attention to the format of the writing either.

Punctuation for me was capitals at the beginning of a sentence, a few commas and a full stop at the end. There was no mastery of colons, semi-colons or correct paragraphing. I got by (badly), and any manuscript I submitted was covered in red ink, shouting constantly at my many mistakes. I just thought I was my mother’s daughter, which was normal. I realised I’d had major writing problems in my early 20s and was even more confused. So confused that trying to express thoughts and feelings articulately was like pulling teeth without anaesthetic; agonising, time-consuming and a losing game. I didn’t even know what a metaphor or literary device was until my daughter asked me when I was around 36. The internet is a truly wonderful thing in the right hands. We move on if we can have the courage to admit our short comings and want to do better. First, confess what you don’t know and not be ashamed of where you are. It most likely wasn’t your fault but a combination of factors beyond your control. It certainly was for me.

At G.C.S.E., I took Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, French, Maths and English. Out of all of those subjects, I hated English. I hated English, and it made me physically sick. The stress I would feel at trying to answer the essay question and understand Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Miller, or Orwell was just crippling, and I felt tremendous shame at not understanding it or being able to formulate ideas around the question. I didn’t understand and was too unsupported by my teachers, parents and friends to develop further. Because I thrived in the sciences, they thought I was fine. I wasn’t fine and I didn’t have the skill or inclination to seek the right books to guide me to improve. I didn’t know they even existed! I just felt stupid when English was concerned and resigned myself to suffering. I was a kid, and nobody taught me any better. 

In this area, I seriously underachieved. Out of 17 assignments for G.C.S.E. English, I submitted 11. I would not produce the work as the stress and shame I had around this was incapacitating. I struggled with writing and thinking and it was totally in silence. Somehow, I evaded being pursued by teachers for the missing assignments. It just got swept under the rug. I was never disciplined with the threat of detention, nor was I threatened with parental involvement. No teacher told me, “We’ll have to inform your parents of this”. Nothing happened about it other than my internal stress and shame engulfed me at times with English assignments. And I, too, hid it, just like my mum’s dyslexia went on without much detection, or it was passively accepted as the inevitable outcome of poor genes or poor education. Either way, my crappy-quality essays weren’t earmarked as something to address. 

Although I kept quiet, looking back, there were very subtle expressions of my disquiet, but they were slight and still within the scale of what was normal for someone my age. I was always clean and well-dressed, so no one thought I was neglected. Materially, in most areas, my needs were met (except the books), I was nourished, I had dental care, and I didn’t freeze as I had a warm, clean bed. Still, I was neglected emotionally and intellectually without a shadow of a doubt. I never tried to talk about it; I didn’t have a voice at home and didn’t believe my parent could find a solution even if I had. I hadn’t much of a voice anywhere else except with friends my age.

Looking back, we were taught English G.C.S.E. badly. I would go as far as to say that it was appalling. When we read “Animal Farm” it was delivered to us as this is a political satire. Stalin’s and Trotsky’s names were mentioned briefly, but I had no idea who they were, what they did, and what political satire meant. At 14, I had no idea of this or way of finding out. I think this was one of the assignments I just ignored. The teacher didn’t go on to explain anything about the Russian Revolution. As I didn’t take history but chose geography, I couldn’t rely on any knowledge I may have acquired elsewhere. I didn’t have any books at home that I could paw over. There were no encyclopaedias or anything like that. Shakespeare, I, too, hated.

I didn’t relate to the language as many don’t. I didn’t know you could buy books that walk you through what is being expressed, so I neither developed an understanding nor an appreciation. I drew a blank, moved on and the same with Arthur Miller to an extent. We read The Crucible, and I was disturbed by it. My only reaction to this novel was: “What the hell happened to innocent until proven guilty?” None of my peers responded similarly to it, and I felt completely isolated, and there was something wrong with me. Again, we weren’t given any historical context to these novels. Somehow, at 14 years of age, I was expected to know all about “McCarthyism” and “The Salem Witch Hunts” and discuss all of Miller’s literary devices, motifs, and themes and do it all with perfect spelling, a broad vocabulary and perfect grammar. I had no cat in hell’s chance at delivering on this, so I repeatedly swerved on such a demand.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, but I’m certainly mindful of it now and have been since my late 20s after I started to try and grapple with improving my writing. On reflection, the only essay I ever wrote for my English G.C.S.E. confidently and competently was “The Chrysalids” by John Wyndham. For a change, I wanted to read this book and having prior scientific knowledge was my saviour. Here, I could scrape a B grade for once, but because that was unusual for me, I wrote it off as a fluke. It wasn’t a fluke at all. I understood because I could see what he was driving at because I knew the scientific field. Not studying history at G.C.S.E. was a big mistake looking back, especially as it had always been my best subject. It would have been the candle in the dark I so desperately needed to see and be able to write. I’m not good at writing and bullshitting my way through anything I don’t understand. We are what we are, and I’d rather have integrity than peddle another version of the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. 

I would also like to add that I had three jobs at the time of my G.C.S.E.. On Thursday and Friday evenings I would collect milk money for three hours. I’d walk about 4-5 miles in this time each evening. I had a Saturday job working from 12 pm -5 pm, and I would babysit Saturday nights until midnight. Money was tight, and my brothers and I were made to get jobs. Looking back, money wasn’t tight. It was badly managed due to the discord in my parent’s marriage. The reason this pisses me off is because I secretly wanted to be a Doctor. I concluded that I wasn’t bright enough and was from the wrong side of the street. My parents never knew this; I don’t think they know it today. Getting into Medical School would have required absolute dedication, commitment and the right conditions for serious study. I had none of these. Arguments could erupt in the blink of an eye, and although sporadic in rhythm, they showed no signs of abating. Having gotten all B’s at G.C.S.E without any revision and a C for the English language, such grades, from my perspective, were just more nails in the coffin of my dream. My dream was then buried and went on to present itself as an utter fantasy. Due to this, I went on to align myself to a completely different path.

I want to come back to the matter of the Richmond test that I talked briefly about earlier in this essay. I briefly remember the day it happened. It was a rather uneventful and business-as-usual morning until year 7 (as it was called back then) was ushered into the main hall and directed to one of the many single desks. We weren’t warned or told about what would happen beforehand in any way, shape or form. I don’t recall any letters being sent home or mum and dad wishing me well. I remember nothing surrounding this event but the event itself. There was an exam paper on each desk, and we were asked to answer the questions in a set amount of time. I wasn’t stressed, worried or anything. I did my best, and we all walked away and it was forgotten as far as I was concerned. I don’t recall talking to friends about it or exchanging anything with anybody. No teachers brought it up, and we moved on. We were all going to secondary school and didn’t know there was a rite of passage to this so I never put the two and two together.

The only question I remember was about a map and being asked about coordinates. I was 10, had never read a map, and had no idea what coordinates were. I wasn’t even bothered that I didn’t know. I was a summer baby born in July, so I accepted, not knowing as much as a September or winter baby. This gap between different children is played down, but it matters. Put a summer baby alongside a September baby, and they will have 9 months of knowledge and experience, if not more. You’re always at a disadvantage under what month you were born, whether you like it or not. It can only be bridged for the average child if all things were equal by concerted effort.

It would only be later in life that I would realise what the “Richmond Test” was for and its significance. I bombed that test and I know this because I was put into a “lower band” form at high school. I didn’t think I was in a lower band form until the end of the first year as I was the brightest in my “lower band” class and got top in every exam. I was moved into an “upper band” form and cried with sadness when I heard the news. I was happy where I was, liked my normal, nice friends who were quite pleased and didn’t feel like I didn’t fit in. I was, therefore, moved from a predominately working-class cohort to a lower-middle-class/middle-class cohort. I hated it, and believe me, this layer was far more competitive and bitchy than I’d ever have thought. I got the piss taken out of me by a particularly arrogant and entitled individual because I once said that L.Cornes was my “best” friend. Bestest isn’t exactly correct, I know (who cares at 11 years old anyway?), but it was the venom with which she desired to humiliate me that caused me alarm. I had no issue with being corrected, only how it was done. This is what they were like. I was called “thick” to my face by what I thought was a close friend, and another so-called friend would like to say such things as “Wow, that’s a big word for you”. It was a climate of less than. I was made to feel less than by these people, and it unfortunately gained a lot of traction and worked.

The new cohort was not nice. I didn’t relate well; I identified myself as working class and quite normal. I didn’t have a horse or a Pilot for a “daddy”. I couldn’t play the clarinet, flute or piano to grade 6,7 or 8, and I lived in a modest three-bed house and not a five-bed house on a posh housing estate, for example. I was placed there because I did okay in exams but didn’t like being there. Being moved also impacted my English as I felt less than in this context. I survived, but I wasn’t at home, shall we say. The Richmond test was a little like an 11-plus exam. The Girl’s School was once a modern secondary school, and there was a grammar school, too, at the same time. The Grammar School ceased to be such when I moved up and was just a boy’s school. However, after the secondary modern model was ditched and my secondary school became a single-sex school, the “Richmond Test” was used to stream kids. Based on the results, it couldn’t be excluded, but it sure enjoyed sieving through “ability” and grouping “similar” together instead of making a mixed ability class.

I continued to get my head down and was good in some areas. My education from 11-15 ( remember, I’m a summer baby and have sat my G.C.S.E.’s before turning 16) was all about passing exams. It was pretty boring towards the end, and we just went through the motions of it. I enjoyed science the most because it taught me something new and useful, and I grasped it. I wasn’t competitive, so I wouldn’t say I liked sports even though I was okay. Art was also dull because of the girls I had to take this class with and how it was taught. The resources were also a bit thin on the ground here. Luckily, I had one friend in this class, and we were not strictly outcasts, but we did not swim effortlessly with the stream. It was the competitive climate that drew me in. Cooperation and collaboration are more superior orientations and one of my mum’s refrains is: “Two heads are always better than one!”  She had many a saying, and so did my dad. They have stuck with me to this day. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t intrinsically bad people. Just two people struggling a lot of the time like everyone else in the lower middle/ working class. But they didn’t overcome their limitations and work towards solutions. That’s the crime and failure as it made life far more difficult than it needed to have been and needless suffering resulted.

So far, this essay should be called On: Not Being Able to Write. I make no excuses or wish to spin it in any other way. I had huge struggles with writing and comprehension where English was concerned, and I’m sure I’ll never be alone in this. However, it stopped me from doing what I wanted, so after gaining my secondary education, I studied “A level” chemistry, biology and art. There was no essay writing here and I deliberately dropped general studies as I didn’t want to write any essays. Unfortunately for me, level art required a dissertation, and my woes came back with a vengeance, and I played truant. I always felt ill as I went to a posh sixth form college where lots had been privately educated and had the arrogance that goes with that. I suffered in this period, and from my report, it is documented that I had 84 absences in the lower sixth. Despite this, I got my A levels, which weren’t that remarkable. I did manage to get an A grade in art, the only A grade I’d ever had, so I threw myself into this and went to Art College, thinking it would be easier. It wasn’t any easier, and I was lost, not having a clear idea of where I was going and what I wanted to do.

Eventually, two years after my A levels, I got a place at University for an arts degree. Three months into this bloody shite show, I knew I’d made a big mistake. Not knowing how to remedy this, I carried on in a state of depression. Other reasons in the background also affected me, but I had no idea how to solve them. I endured this and suffered. There was writing on this degree, much more than I’d anticipated and I was met again with myself and my inadequacy around writing. At the time, I did not know just how bad things were regarding the degree itself. I thought it was just me due to the less-than mentality that I’d developed being educated alongside “mean girls” and originating from humble beginnings. After the first year of this degree 33% had dropped out! I later learnt that the degree I was enrolled on had had more complaints than any other degree in the entire University. I was shocked by this, but particularly shocked at learning it was possible to complain to someone. I had no knowledge of this or anyone in my life who could have heard my concerns and signposted me to a place that might listen. I hadn’t a clue. Some people referred to some of our tutors as witches! 

Although there were problems with this degree course, I didn’t help myself being so depressed. I, too, was to blame a bit here because I never attended a single art history lecture in my first year. I didn’t believe it was useful and that I would even understand it, so I skived them all. It may have helped me, but I was at where as was at. Despite not attending the lectures, I still had to submit an essay for this module and earn credits. We were given five titles, which I ignored for a long time. I ignored it until the night before and painted myself into a corner. There was no way out of this other than putting pen to paper. I just wrote and did the best I could. It was by hand, written in a black fountain pen on lined A4 paper. There was no editing or reworking of this piece whatsoever. I handed it in, forgot about it, and expected to perform quite badly and took a bit of solace in the fact that at least I’d tried. Our essays were returned a couple of weeks later, and something really strange happened, and I developed quite a profound cognitive dissonance. I was only three marks off the first despite grammatical and spelling errors. I didn’t get it.

I was so concerned, alarmed and doubtful that I made an appointment with the assessor of my essay. She was taken aback as students would usually come to her asking for it to be reassessed because they weren’t happy with their grades. After all, it was thought to be too low. I was pleased but confused as I didn’t believe it was correct, and she’d marked me higher than I deserved. I was so confused that I cried in her office, and she didn’t know what to do with me. She said, ” even though there are mistakes that I’ve highlighted, your overall arguments are sound, compelling and showed more thought than any of the others”. I listened to what she had to say but still didn’t believe her. I thought it was just another fluke, a good day, and I was lucky enough to have something to say as I’d picked the correct essay title out of the five on offer. Despite this achievement that no one other than me knew about, having no one to celebrate this success with meant that I didn’t have a countering force to my already ingrained attitudes. It was a real success, but I continued with my fear of writing and still didn’t improve.

What changed for me was when I met Keith. Subscribing to the political paper and reading real stuff that was deeply interesting changed me. Nothing at University was all that interesting, but this stuff was gold. The fact that I didn’t understand everything didn’t matter. It showed me how little I knew and wanted to know and understand. I bought book after book after book. I remember my older brother commenting to my mum around this time. He said: “What’s wrong with her mum? She’s always got her head in a book?”  It wasn’t normal practice in my house, and it showed. But I carried on and would read into the early hours. There was no structure to this or guidance which could have helped, I just knew I knew nothing but as sure as hell wanted to. It was tough. I bought books on many subjects: economics, politics, art, history, film and philosophy. Some weren’t the best examples, but I trusted they were all sound because they’d been printed. This isn’t true of a book, but I didn’t understand this at the time, only having had children’s books at home. But when I look at the books I did have in childhood, they are fantastic examples of illustrated children’s literature. I was really lucky and privileged to have had those that I did. Hindsight is wonderful if you are willing to look back objectively, with honesty and humility, as then you can learn something unknown. 

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for children’s books; I may write about this in the future. I have a strong desire to write and illustrate one of my own. I have a body of work and illustrations in my portfolio (that I’ve kept hidden away) that would lend themselves well to this sort of thing. Maybe it will be something I can pull off one day if I’m lucky and all the stars are aligned in my favour.

At this point, I’d like to say that if anyone is struggling to put pen to paper, please stop and think. Everyone can write, whether it’s a simple note, letter, or shopping list. Forget the formalities around writing for now, as that is something that can be gained later. If you get hung up on the slightest little things, they will become much bigger things that will stand in your way. Yes, writing has a form to it, depending on its function. A list is simply a list as an aide memoir and doesn’t need to be anything else. Depending on the audience and what it’s about and for, an essay will have a different form altogether. A short fictional story will have another form. Poetry has a different form altogether, but it is most certainly related to its function, and there are no hard and fast rules about content in any writing. Your audience will influence the content if you want to educate and inform them. The language will differ greatly if you write for a small, specialised audience. Who are you writing for matters a great deal? 

Most of my writing until now has been to pass exams and was a means to a definite end. Writing for pleasure, I’m sure, will be different again. For academic or “serious” writing, you must have ideas, a fairly reasonable vocabulary, and be willing to work on the conventions of how it’s presented. It will take work and effort, but there’s plenty of instruction in books or online. First, you will have to read and live to become a writer. Be picky about who you read and why. If possible, read those you identify with most, as this will strengthen you. Then read those you don’t. A lot of precious time can be wasted trying to make sense of rubbish. It can drive you insane if you are isolated and new to an area. Some books can leave you feeling profoundly dumb when they have deliberately been written so badly they are obscure and illusive. Books on art and postmodernism fall into this category and I may write about a couple I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure to experience.

First of all, read what you are interested in and pick accessible sources that are easier to comprehend. A saying sums things up quite nicely: average minds discuss people, good minds discuss events, but great minds discuss ideas! You can’t do anything without ideas other than reporting. Read and read and have a thesaurus and several dictionaries by your side. I have a medical dictionary, a Latin dictionary and a legal dictionary. I have a dictionary of proverbs, too. This is how your vocabulary and comprehension will grow and how you will come into contact with knowledge and ideas. It won’t be handed to you on a plate. Work needs to be done here, and there are no shortcuts unless you plagiarise. Not something I would recommend. You will only be cheating yourself, and you will be found out!! You might hold prejudices about yourself like I did. Believing I was less than others and not producing much evidence that spoke to the contrary left me in a state of non-progression for a very long time, and no one helped me out of that until I met Keith. 

By introducing me to a whole load of writing and ideas I was interested in, I was helped to start helping myself. Keith never did the work for me but opened up a path I was brave enough to follow. I had someone to bounce ideas off and discuss things with. Choose a patient, non-patronising or condescending type of person for this. He might have rolled his eyes on the odd occasion but was approachable. I also adhere to the belief that there is no such thing as a dumb question. You are where you are, and others will think the same thing. On my second degree, I received a wonderful compliment from a Muslim student after a lecture one day that came out of the blue. She told me how grateful she was that I often asked questions and appreciated how clear and straightforward I was when I spoke. Having a pretty flat accent and a bit of courage meant she easily understood me. Our foreign students do find it difficult to understand “Scousers”, “Brummies”, and “Gordies” because the accent is just too alien to someone who doesn’t have English as their first language. 

There’s a writer in everyone if you want it badly enough, but you must have something to say. You can’t write any essay without knowing something about the subject or having thoughts about it. Before becoming a writer, you become an ideas, knowledge and information gatherer. Keeping a notebook with a pencil and rubber in hand is quite useful. Jot down anything that resonates with you or a principle about something you fully understand. And this helped once I realised that when a book is your property, you can underline as much as you want to. You can scribble in the margins to highlight everything pertinent. It’s not a crime or disrespectful.

Academics and great thinkers have been doing it for eternity. Never in a million years would I have thought of doing this until I’d seen it done. Believe it or not, that was a breakthrough for me. Let me also tell you about something else I learnt after seeing it in my 30s. I was corresponding with a Hegelian/Marxist Philosopher from across the pond and he sent me an image via email of a fragment of Schelling’s work. The devil Schelling had scribbled on it and doodled the picture of a squirrel. It’s not precious until you decide it is and needs to be polished for ease of consumption. Your work is your work and should be as individual as you are.

Being mechanical and formulaic will not bring anything new, so be daring. No one has a monopoly on content unless you let them and cave in. There might be certain conventions to follow, but the content is entirely down to the author. You have complete control in this regard or ought to if the writing is to be free, authentic and originality. As Shakespeare said, “Be true to thyne own self”. We hold these published learned thinkers in such high regard at times and come to know them through pages and pages of the polished written word. These works will have gone through so many rounds of editing and proofreading before printing that I imagine they lost count, and we must never forget that. These thinkers were as fallible and human as you and I; they had to start somewhere like everyone else. We are never shown the entirety of their personalities, characters or mistakes but only the end product. We are never given the story of how they got there. The finished work is never the whole story!

I must confess that I have read Orwell’s essays and thoroughly enjoyed them. After reading “Why I Write”, I took one significant pearl of wisdom from it. If you care about your audience and wish to reach a wide one, write with as few words as possible. Don’t go overboard with long and fancy words that are unnecessary. It will dilute the message and make you look like a prick. If the idea is the most important thing, keep it simple and choose the most familiar words to describe and explain. I don’t write for academia but to impart knowledge or insight to as many people as possible. Knowing your audience and caring about them matters. 

I would also recommend that you look at your beliefs and how you feel and think about things. Ask why, who, what and when as often as you can.   What is your gut telling you? How does something sit with you? I remember being very attracted to what Einstein once said: “Peace cannot be created through force but through understanding”. Having respect for this genius meant it chimed, and I took it on board, applied it quite broadly, and sought to understand it before anything else. Once you comprehend you can set about good expression of it and not before. But it certainly helps to know yourself well and not be ashamed of where you are or have come from.

What I find very important is setting out your aims. This is usually crystalised in a title and should guide you. I have no exact idea about what the readership of this blog is like. I should imagine there are many history buffs or students and I can’t strictly help you with an academic historical essay other than look at your method. You will no doubt have to Harvard reference content and fulfil certain conventions to pay the correct respects to academics before you and show that you have assimilated the knowledge and worked intelligently with such material. This is academia and it has its role, but it can also serve to be like an intellectual straight jacket. You will come up against some trends in thought that are reactionary and purely fantastical, totally idealist and have very little robust theory to support them. Please remember that we live in a class society, and competing theories get censored, held back, drowned out, dragged through the mud, bastardised, deliberately misrepresented and buried.

The victors often write history, and it is extremely one-sided. Be aware of your sources and who they serve. Read far and wide to balance your views before you commit to something and take it as gospel. Don’t be loyal to ideas that do not serve your interests; you will be inauthentic and missing the bigger picture. You will be punished for not reiterating the most acceptable of ideas at times and will be marked down. This happened often to me in my first degree because I didn’t quite agree with the status quo. Sadly, this happens but it’s the world as it is and not as it should be. Completely accommodate yourself to this and you will not produce anything all that original, I guarantee that much. Whether you do this or not isn’t any of my business, but your work will have little originality and you will be just going through the motions to pass exams or make money. This satisfies some people, but it doesn’t satisfy me. I urge people to also read straight from the horse’s mouth.

Don’t read a book about Orwell. For example, read his works. Don’t read a book about Trotsky, read the works he wrote with his hand and that flowed from his thought. The same applies to anyone:  William Morris, Lenin, Marx, Freud, Nietzche, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Aristotle or whoever. If you are struggling to understand them, and at times, you most certainly will go to a trusted, robust source to help walk you through it. A kind source that isn’t patronising or condescending and has the interest of empowering you rather than browbeating you. Then, you will start to grasp stuff and move forwards instead of being uncertain in your thinking. I’m sure this doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen nonetheless.

To summarise this contribution, I would say that writing is an art form and, essentially, like all the arts, is about expression. Skill and mastery of the conventions of this art form are a must but the content is down to you. You must have something to say and express before starting, even with limited skill. Like a painter, there must be something to paint that is yearning to find expression. Before starting, the artist sketches privately in a book and learns through exercise. Any mistakes made are hidden in this little private book. There must be mastery of mixing colours, knowing paints, an understanding of brushes, palette knives, sponges, and their mark making abilities and how to vary these at will to gain the desired effect. There must be an appreciation for composition, attention to how it looks on the page or canvas and how to manipulate and change this to make the expression of the content the best version of what it is trying to say or reveal. You may be laughed at and sneered at for your efforts, but an individual will never learn to swim if they don’t jump into the water.

Although I’m not a historian, I have certainly had to look at my own here, so perhaps I am one after all, and I say this with a wink! Whatever I have written has been done with the best of intention and I hope it urges anyone to improve and give yourself a try. This work will undoubtedly have some mistakes, but do you know what? I don’t care at this stage as it’s not an academic piece of writing ready to be published and published in print. It is simply to provoke thought from inertia into movement with momentum. I wish you well on this journey, and may your destination be a piece of work that you are proud of and that resonates with the many, not the few.