Elegy for Bettino Craxi (1934-2000)
- Bettino Craxi was leader of the Italian Socialist Party
and Prime Minister. He went into exile in 1994 and died in Tunisia.
Poor Bettino Craxi, you’ve been taken to your grave
and we won’t see your likes again.
Your social democratic bones were barely cold
when your obituaries began to bitch.
All week long it’s [...]

Democracy
The day after they won the election
I cleaned out my Nationwide account,
Filled my satchel at an unfinished estate
With palm-sized and weighted rocks
And went looking for the chanting crowds.
Kevin O’Shea, February 2011

Book Review: Sarah Clancy: Stacey and the Mechanical Bull. Lapwing Press, Belfast 2010.
Sarah Clancy is interviewed by Dave Lordan below
It’s rare enough to go come across a volume of poetry that wouldn’t render you catatonic with boredom, but Sarah Clancy’s isn’t one of those. It pokes you in the eye repeatedly and kicks you in [...]

An Interview with Ashis Nandy.
Prof Ashis Nandy is a well known social thinker and social psychologist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. He has been an outspoken critic of science, modernity and secularism. His writings since the early 1980s have been extremely influential, in conjunction with Edward Said’s critique [...]

Crowbar
She jiggles her one year old on her knee
and smiles like Magda Goebbels,
of whom she has never heard.
If you don’t have central heating,
more fool you for having no respect
for yourself. She is not au fait
with trade unions. Her laughter,
a bag of rattling crowbars
and always at someone else’s
expense. If you didn’t get paid
no one to blame
but [...]

I was reading a fascinating article in the Canadian Journal for Traditional Music recently. The article was about AL Lloyd, the great English collector of folksong. Lloyd had a remarkable life - orphaned at 15, sent to Australia by his relatives to work as a labourer on the sheep ranches, educated himself through distance learning, [...]

Darwin Day
Saturday next, the 12th of February, will mark the 202nd anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and 152 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species. Every year organisations around the world celebrate this day by commemorating the works and life of Darwin. However, Darwin Day is also an occasion for highlighting the [...]

This is the second part of a two-part article called Life Imitates Art. The first part can be found here. For more information on the devastating legacy of Agent Orange in Viêt Nam, visit www.lenaldis.co.uk
The metamorphic transformations inflicted on their human victims by Ovid’s capricious gods have serious or even fatal consequences. When Jove’s wife [...]

Here’s a song and message from Gary Dunne.
Hi all,
I have pledged, to myself and to those who like my music, to release a new track every month in 2011.
This is the first of them – ‘What Kind Of Country Are We Living In?’

The track was written in late Dec 2010, in response to the [...]

Book Review: The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov (Allen Lane, £14.99 stg)
I started reading this book on the day the people of Tunisia’s unprecedented uprising prompted their president Zine Abedine Ben Ali to flee the country and end his twenty-three-year reign as dictator of the North African state. No sooner had Ben [...]