"I'm very different from a lot of other writers I know and I also think this has been a problem for me, learning how to be an editor. I find the act of writing immensely pleasurable, and most of the writers I know spend an enormous amount of time talking about how much they hate to write, the suffering of writing and there's almost this competitive thing among writers, how much fetching they can do about how [writing is hard] - and I don't doubt that writing is hard, in fact maybe if I found it a lot harder and suffered more I'd be better at it. I don't know. But I found it and find it enormously pleasurable to be in a room by myself doing that with notes."Video in full here. Previous articles in the series with Charles M. Blow here, with David Baddiel and Edna O'Brien here. Jason Alan Murdock here, with Alex Massie here, with Gideon Lichfield here, with Tim Kreider here, with Christopher Hitchens here, with American author Stanley Karnow here, with Ernest Hemingway here, with Neil Gaiman here, with James Joyce here, with Dan Brown here. My piece that looks at George Orwell's 6 rules to good writing is here. I also wrote a piece on The Huffington Post here.
"This lament about a generation incapable of significant or long thoughts is a hardy perennial that comes up every ten years. Now we're worried about the Millennials. Before that we were worried about the Gen X'ers. Before that it was the punk rockers or the hippies, I forget which, that somehow had lost their ability to think critically about what's going on. I've been both. The problem and the old grampy-pants Pointing a finger at each and I think that we cycle through this."Video in full here. He also said here:
"Back in the day, for one thing… you know what, it wasn’t all that great."Previous post in the series here.
"I envy the ones starting out now, with all that in front of them to do something interesting. And whatever they do is theirs, not mine."Original in full here (27m30s). Christopher Hitchens on being envious of the young person starting out, here. Shane Smith of Vice also said that the present is the best time to be alive and in journalism.
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| Sketch of George Orwell by Ralph Steadman |
"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."He also said:
"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."Northern Irish writer Nick Laird said:
"I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort—this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn’t that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?"
"I think that all writers are like that – your mind is always galloping, trying to write the thing you cannot write. That is one of the characteristics, one of the norms of writing."Northern Irish poet and writer Nick Laird said in 2005:
"When I was a lawyer… I never stopped writing reviews and poems and articles. I’d do it in my lunch hour or after work. It didn’t matter how tired I was.In January 2014 Nick said:
"I’m working on poems all the time. I was writing a poem this afternoon, before I came here. I’ve got other work—teaching at Princeton, writing articles and so on—but I’m pretty much always working on a poem."Precious post with Christopher Hitchens here.
"I still feel a deep sense of guilt about writing. At least when I was a lawyer I felt useful, now I can waste whole days not doing much at all."He also said:
"The writing life can be difficult. Time just dissolves away to nothing some days, and it is sometimes hard to believe in the validity of the enterprise."Oscar Wilde wrote about the contrast between the bohemian and the lower echelons that make their bohemia possible. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he wrote:
"The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."
"Even people who hate their jobs take satisfaction in the knowledge that they’re paying their way and providing for their families. People who lose their jobs usually report intense stress and feelings of inadequacy even if money per se isn’t an imminent problem (perhaps because a spouse works, perhaps because they’re drawing an unemployment check). Most people want to work, and most people also want to believe that their fellow citizens are working. It’s part of the social contract. As corrosive as inequality can be, a sense of other people living off the dole can be equally corrosive."Eric Stough, producer and animation director for ‘South Park, said:
"The key to a great life isn’t just happiness. It would be a boring life if it were."Previous post in the series here.
"As a political cartoonist, there's no defined criteria for what one does and what actually a political cartoon is. I think I tend to the school of dealing with realpolitik. That is the interests, the real motives of why people act. I always found it very strange as to why sections of unionism seem to perpetually want to shove the Union Jack down the throats of those who don't regard it as their flag. The big truth which unionism doesn't seem to want to talk about, let alone face up to, is the fact that when a border poll does come, it's going to be Catholic votes that decide on the constitutional position. Not Protestant ones. We know which way the prods are going to vote. But if the prods want a substantial number of, nationalists stroke Catholics, to vote to stay as part of Britain, they have to be nice to them; they're not going to do it by shoving flags down their throats."Video in full here.
"I am very distractable. I could get empires built in literary terms if I didn’t constantly get distracted. Constantly look at the Internet."He wrote in 2010:
"I make sure I write something every day but it comes after hours of p***ing about, making tea, reading stuff on the internet and taking the children to school. A lot of the time I just look out the window. I listen to music on Spotify a lot, which takes 25 minutes to choose what to listen to then another 25 minutes of listening to Spotify's suggestions. Dave Gorman said the problem with writing now is the internet is there, it's a window on the world and you want to look through it especially when there are a lot of naked women through that window. It's incredible anyone gets anything done any more."Edna O’Brien said:
"[The book] was hell to do. They’re all hell to do." -
"Education: Of course it’s harder for graduates to find jobs — but that’s partly because there are so many more graduates. In the 1960s just one in 20 people went to university; now around half of all young people get to know the joys of freshers’ week, essay crises, late-night kebabs on vomit-spattered pavements and other formative further education experiences."Jenni Russell backed up the figures and shared some commentary in my post here.
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| On the left a painting from Julian Opie's collection. The right is one of his own works called 'Maria Teresa with sequined dress'. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images |
"With old masters there is a slight tendency to go, ‘Wow, look at that amazing craft’, and it seems to be outside anybody’s imagination quite how the flowers are painted. But actually it was a fairly standardised system as to how to do cloth, how to do flesh and so on. People would have learned it in workshops.”Mark brown said:
"Some visitors [to the exhibition] will be able to spot more direct connections. The blue curtains in a portrait of an unknown woman by Cornelius Johnson – a court painter to Charles I before Van Dyck – inspired the blue curtains in a 2008 Opie work, Maria Teresa with sequinned dress."He then said:
"Opie said he often used the poses of sitters in old masters as templates for his own works."He then explained how Opie works in a east London converted warehouse studio where his keeps his collected works on display. Opie said of this:
"I find myself feeding off them as I'm working. You never know what you need or will find, so I do learn a lot."Article in full here. Opie's exhibition opening on Wednesday 21 May at the Holburne Museum in Bath. The exhibition sees the artist display examples of his own work from the past 20 years with works also from his private collection, as you can see from the image above.
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."This public exhibition was a reaction to politicians forcing themselves before the public. This was in the public and for the public and against those politicians. Check out a full selection of the faux-election posters I created.
- Jon Minnis
"In south Belfast yesterday, Ian Knox unveiled an artwork he has designed, left, to mark 125 years since Irish cyclist Willie Hume won a race with the world's first pneumatic tyre. Scottish vet John Boyd Dunlop made the invention while living in Belfast in 1888 after a doctor had recommended cycling for his ill son. He wanted to find a way to minimise the jarring of the city's cobbled streets and so tacked linen to the wheels of a tri-cycle, which in turn held an inflated tube in place against the wheel. The artwork by Mr Knox, himself a keen cyclist and penny farthing enthusiast, hangs on the side of Hatfield House on the Ormeau Road, where the race passed on May 18 1889. Kieran Cassidy, owner of the bar, said:
"With this fantastic event coming here we wanted to remind people of Northern Ireland's contribution to cycling through a comic and fun piece of art. "We hope that the artwork will not only welcome cyclists but also remind... visitors to the city that the first pneumatic tyre was invented in Belfast."
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| Scene after fire at the Islamic Society of Joplin, Missouri |
"In a trend largely ignored by the American media, hate crimes against American Muslims are at epidemic levels."He continued:
"All of this reveals a broader truth: Islamophobia in the United States is pervasive and intense, and worse, is as ignored and tolerated as it is destructive The greatest harm from these incidents is not to the property they damage. It’s the climate of fear that is created for Muslims living in the United States. As I’ve written about before, it’s hard to put into words how palpable and paralyzing this fear is in American Muslim communities. It’s infuriating to behold: perfectly law-abiding citizens and legal residents feeling — rationally and accurately — that they are subjected to constant surveillance, monitoring, suspicion, denial of basic rights, hostility and worse solely because of their religion and ethnicity."More:
"This happens because overt expression of Islamophobia is, far and away, the most accepted form of bigotry in mainstream American precincts. Now and then, certain expressions of it are so extreme as to embarrass mainstream circles — Peter King’s Congressional investigation into The Enemy Within or the Michele Bachmann attacks on Hillary Clinton’s Muslim aide — and are thus roundly condemend, but more often than not, they are perfectly acceptable."More:
"And, as I wrote about yesterday, America’s foreign policy is, and for the last decade has been, driven by endless violence against Muslims in numerous predominantly Muslim countries, sending a message loudly and clearly to the American citizenry about the Real Enemy."In full here.
"The introduction of same sex marriage is largely designed to avoid discrimination against gay people, whereas the introduction of polygamy would create discrimination against women even if some of them felt driven to escape poverty by marrying men on that basis."The irony is that it takes religion and the religious to bring in polygamy. Where in the world can a man hold multiple wives, but in religious communities. Point in hand: Kenya has just legalised polygamy and you can thank the religious for that. Arit John reported in the Wire:
"The argument for legalizing polygamy is that the practice is part of Kenya's pre-colonial heritage, as well as sanctioned by the Bible. "Solomon never notified anyone," as one male member of parliament said while the bill was debated. "It is in the Old Testament."Further, German Lopez explained here how the institution of marriage has long evolved and changed.
"In his history of the first Australian penal settlements, "The Fatal Shore", the art critic Robert Hughes described the standard modern perception of Georgian England thus:
"A passing reference to violence, dirt and gin; a nod in the direction of the scaffold; a highwayman or two, a drunken judge, and some whores for local colour; but the rest is all curricles and fanlights. Modern squalor is squalid but Georgian squalor is ‘Hogarthian’, an art form in itself."
Note that adjective. By now it’s so well entrenched we instinctively know what it means, though it’s probably not the meaning Hogarth himself would have wanted. He had definite ambitions for his name to be associated with his practice, and yet the paint strokes or engraved lines and slashes aren’t, of themselves, "Hogarthian".
And however much he wanted - pretty successfully - to found an entirely new school of British art, there’s nothing really "Hogarthian" in his proto-impressionist study "The Shrimp Girl" or in his innovatively realistic portrait of the philanthropic sea-captain Thomas Corum, or his portrait of David Garrick or his murals in the Inns of Court or for Bart’s Hospital. These are all by Hogarth, for sure; they might even be "Hogarthish"; but
"I left with nothing. It's strange because in primary school I excelled. I passed the 11-plus. I didn't go to grammar school but went to Rathcoole Secondary School. We did mid-term exams and I was first in almost every subject. But people wouldn't play with me. I wasn't allowed on the football team. I was on my own.
I got this idea in my head that I could be bottom of the class in every subject if I really tried hard, and believe me coming bottom in some of the subjects was very difficult because they got really low scores. But I managed it, and I became popular."
"I realised that learning things was a bad idea, and being dumb was a good idea. Being stupid was the smart thing to do."
"Things were going great – I had a family, plenty of money, plenty of opportunities and plenty of work. Everything seemed perfect. In fact, I remember standing outside our house one day with my wife, and she told me it was like heaven. Nothing ever went wrong – just before everything did go wrong.
"On this issue of the drones and the permanent war footing, I mean, Obama has been the drone president. And his line with liberals is sort of "Trust me. I know what I’m doing. I’m monitoring this. I’m doing everything I can to make sure that civilians aren’t killed." But time and time again, we see incidents where large numbers of civilians are being killed, and there seems to be no public accounting for how this happened. They say that they investigate when civilians are killed, and yet we are now two years, almost, removed from the killing of this 16-year-old kid, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who appears to have been killed because of who his father was, was killed in a drone strike while
"Recently, a colleague mentioned that she had been rereading Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica,” which was first published in 1929 and is about a group of creepy little kids who become the unwanted wards of sad, listless pirates. She praised it, and her recommendation sent me to Amazon. The title was familiar, as was the vibrant cover of the New York Review Books reissue. One cent and $3.99 for shipping, and the book was on its way. A couple of weeks later, I opened to the first page and started reading. By the fifth page, I realized that I had read this novel before, and pretty recently, about three years ago, when another colleague had also praised it and lent me his copy."
"We have to make labour more skillful and more sensitive. We gotta bring dignity back. We have to assume that the entire world won't be a tech invested world and that the more we can create a skilled hand, we'll create new sectors of opportunity. Because the tech dude doesn't know how to change his plumbing. And so I don't think that there's a dignity issue in being a plumber. When I watch these guys sauter copper, I realise that they are much more sophisticated people than I am. Keeping water out of places were you don't want it is a big deal. For the roofer, for the plumber, for the electrician I'm paying these people 100s of thousands of dollars to do this work and these is no way I can argue with there value. [This goes deep with me, my dad was a roofer] and
"The same euphemism comes, in the term "some Christians". That is used in all the apologies about the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the anti-Semitic pogroms and all the rest of it. They say "some Christians" fell into error. "Some Christians" allowed themselves to be deceived in this way and to act against the gospel. Well, anti-Semitism was preached as an official doctrine of the Church until 1964. Do you think that might have something to do with public opinion in Austria, and Bavaria, and Poland, and Lithuania? That the Jewish people were accused collectively, as a people, of deicide. The crime of the murder of god, in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That anathema on them was not lifted until 1964, well after the perpetrators of the Holocaust had stood trial in secular courts and been rightly punished for their actions. How can this Church say it has any moral superiority? It has difficulty catching up to what ordinary people regard as common moral and ethical sense and it still can't make itself apologise properly."
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| Cartoon of Peter Robinson, Ian Paisley and other members of the DUP. Originally published on Slugger O'Toole. |
"The Northern Irish “loyalists” soon found themselves plus loyaliste que la loi and, indeed, in positive conflict with overall British law."S. Nelson wrote in 1984 a book 'Ulster's Uncertain Defenders: Protestant Paramilitary and
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| GPO in ruins after the Easter Rising in 1916 |
"We’re both [Tom Kettle, Home Rule nationalist] Irishmen, and that is what matters."
"Nearly all the feedback I get regularly is from politicians is from unionists. They are the ones who want the originals. Not the nationalists. And here’s a kind of discipline about nationalists which means that the cartoons aren’t quite as funny. The whole world of unionism is much wilder and wackier."My previous posts on Ian Knox. Ian Knox speaking with the Detail here. My blog post on Ian Knox's cartoons of loyalists and republicans, here. Ian Knox and I drawing together in the Black Box, Belfast in 2013 here. Ian Knox and I drawing at McHugh's, Belfast here. My coverage of Ian Knox's December 2013 exhibition, 'Lifelines and Deadlines' here. A selection of photos of Ian Knox at work here. My article here on why an Ian Knox prize to encourage satire and political cartooning like the Herb Block foundation in America which rewards and encourages future talent.
"White liberals are terrified of being called Islamophobic or racist... [and they] capitulate to the religious patriarchs rather than stand with secular feminists. Those Muslim born feminists, Southall Black Sisters is one organisation that refuses to capitulate to religious patriarchy, but still fights racism and cultural imperialism; and that's the kind of feminism that I stand with."More:
"I refuse to be one of those white liberals who ends up on the side of the religious patriarchs... I stand by my sisters in the global feminist movement."Sara Khan, director of Muslim Human Rights organisation, Inspire, said of feminists on the right:
"There is no cure for ageing because ageing isn’t an illness, but a way of life. And some are better at it than others. The secret: think yourself younger than you really are. Design a website, invent an app, take up Zoomba, forget to nap. Time flies they say but it’s hours that fly. Time sits on its hands as we rush by. In the blink of an eye, the brush of a year, you are old - but valued still. Welcome to the fold."They are also the words of the Age UK TV advert which is helping to launch an Age UK campaign - 'Love Later Life'. A vision to promote more positivity about ageing. The campaign follows from research that found that 77% of adults are looking forward to living longer, yet 91% of adults say something needs to be done to help us all lead a better later life. And 83% of adults believe negative perceptions of later life must change. The research found that 53% of adults have a generally positive attitude towards ageing and that positive attitudes increase the older we get. 50% of those aged 85 years and above believe that having a positive attitude to ageing is the key to living longer. From their wisdom and experience, this is a message for us all.
"The answer is actually well-known and well-documented. As explained by the CIA, the Pentagon, former CIA agents, and British combat veterans, spending decades bombing, invading, occupying, droning, interfering in, imposing tyranny on, and creating lawless prisons in other countries generates intense anti-American and anti-western rage (for obvious reasons) and ensures that those western nations will be attacked as well. In the London case, the attacker cited precisely such anger at US/UK aggression as his motive ("this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. . . . the only reason we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily"). Those are just facts."
Wow @ggreenwald home. @wikileaks Sarah Harrison exiled, Miranda detained by terror law & @guardian forced data destruction. Says a lot re UK
— Richard Tynan (@richietynan) April 11, 2014
"One of the shocking things when I go back to Canada is they cut off the tall trees — it’s sort of like everyone’s the same. Everyone’s going to be the same, we’re all okay. Just the, sort of, cultural ‘we’re all okay.’"Shane Smith said something similar here:
"I grew up being a socialist and I have problems with it because I grew up in Canada [and] I’ve spent a lot of time in Scandinavia, where I believe countries legislate out creativity. They cut off the tall trees. Everyone’s a C-minus. I came to America from Canada because Canada is stultifyingly boring and incredibly hypocritical. Thanks, Canada."
"I couldn't wait to get out [of school] and restart my education and do it on my own. Where I could be proud of getting high grades instead of being bullied."
"Basic to political science and the American founding and to human nature is that people cannot operate and exercise power without checks or they’ll inevitably abuse it."
"Secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts."
"Thomas Jefferson, 250 years ago, said those who most fear investigations are the ones who attack free press first. This is what journalism is about, shining a light on what the most powerful people in the country are doing to them in the dark. "
"Suddenly this great [internet] freedom became a great liability. [The internet] was destroying their profits. Eradicating lots of things they were able to do."Sinead Gleeson (@sineadgleeson) wrote an article in the Guardian on how writers are poorer and struggling to survive, eat, pay rent in the internet age. Joanna Kavenna was quoted as saying, ‘Being a writer stopped being the way it had been for ages. It wasn’t what I expected.’
"Everything online is free, we have been a free magazine, everything we do online is free. I think we are going to move towards more of a subscription model. I think that young people are realizing that I’d rather be a part of it. You know Kickstarter has been really successful. On a business sense, on a philosophical sense, where people realize if I believe in something I’m going to actually be part of that. Which I think is incredibly positive. And I think that that’s going to be the next wave of how people are going to get things done online."
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| Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lundy, Governor of Londonderry during the Great Siege of 1688-89 |
"The unionist view of the world... it simply this: to deny the validity and sanctity of the Act of Union is automatically told hold a false, untenable position.He continued:
"The fiercest unionist reaction is and always has been reserved for anyone perceived to be any class of unionist who utters a word in suspecy of any aspect of nationalism."
"More than two-thirds of our poorest children - and in some of our poorest communities that goes up to eight children out of 10 - go to school unprepared. That means they can't hold a pen, they have poor language and communication skills, they don't recognise simple numbers, they can't use the toilet independently and so on."Sir Michael added:
"The corollary of not preparing children well for school is that they don't do well in reception and, if they don't do well in reception, they don't get on at key stage one, they find it difficult to read at seven, they fail at the end of primary school and that failure continues into secondary school."
"It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public."
"But they may as well be saying:
"It is vital that police and security blah obtain data blah serious crime blah and TERRORISM KLAXON blah and to protect the public."
"I have a confession to make: I go to my hometown university.
The decision to stay in Oxford is one I often feel I have to justify. When people learn that my parents live a 30 minute walk from my college, I get an ‘Oh, cool’. It’s in that tone that I imagine might also be prompted by someone telling you, while wearing flares and flashing trainers, that they maintain a shrine to Peter Andre.
"[The National Security Agency’s] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide."
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
"It’s the best time ever in history to be a content creator."He also said here:
"It’s shifting towards the content-creator - it’s literally the best time in history... creating content is the best business model out there at the moment."Interestingly, he sees India as the measure of the future, by grace of its booming youth population:
"As goes India, so shall go the world."Jonathan Ives, Apple designer, said:
"We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed. When you think about technology and what it has enabled us to do so far, and what it will enable us to do in future, we’re not even close to any kind of limit. It’s still so, so new."Shane explained the VICE media model during his Internet Week talk:
"We didn’t start out to be a news company... we started out as an entertainment company. We were sort of pushed into news. A, we enjoy it. B, our audience pushed us into it."
"We have this thing where we think middle class people and upper class people are better than us. They [the middle class] can write things, we [the working class] can’t. We can work in factories. And if someone proves that it is possible to go to Rathcoole Secondary – the school you got expelled into - and become a famous writer then they have to pull him down. Because they said, “you’re from Rathcoole, you can’t” and stopped their kids from becoming a writer or wanting to be famous."Gary Mitchell then spoke of the pervasive inferiority complex of the Protestant working class. A culture that says you have to keep up appearances without thinking too much of yourself. Under this culture he was just a wee lad from Rathcoole. He wasn't allowed to be a writer.
