Zhou Xiaoming: The Silence is Deafening

Shame, shame and shame again on Northampton Uni, who have ignored for six days the email I sent to them complaining about their decision to invite Chinese Embassy Minister Zhou Xiaoming to the University today. Does my opinion only matter if the University hierarchy can use it in some way to further their business profile or their position in the league tables? The bodies may be burning far away from England, ladies and gentlemen, but they are still burning.

Email to Nick Petford, Vice-Chancellor of Northampton University

on learning that Minister Counsellor Zhou Xiaoming will be visiting the University next week

 

Dear Mr. Petford,

As a mature student at the University, I was extremely surprised and disappointed to learn, from the newspaper rather than from the University itself, of the visit this coming Thursday of Minister Counsellor Zhou Xiaoming from the Chinese Embassy.

As you are undoubtedly aware, Mr. Xiaoming represents a Government whose record on human rights has been consistently condemned by other Governments and independent bodies around the world. In Tibet, which China has occupied illegitimately for several  decades, religious freedoms are severely restricted, the native language is being erased and as fundamental a freedom (from a fortunate Western perspective) as flying the Tibetan national flag will result in your arrest. (Mr. Xiaoming's Embassy even had the temerity to complain to the Borough Council because the Mayor was present at a ceremony in which the Tibetan flag was raised in Northampton.)

Hundreds of thousands have been beaten, imprisoned, tortured, maimed and killed by the occupying Chinese army during the long years of the Tibetan struggle for independence. Since 2009 alone, approximately 26 monks, nuns and lay people have been driven to self-immolate by the desperateness of the situation there. Most call for the liberation of their country and the return of their spiritual leader, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, while their bodies burn.

These are not wild exaggerations or the product of my fanciful imagination, but solid, provable facts. In the light of the above, and the campaigns around the world to end the Tibetan genocide by boycotting Chinese goods and services, I believe the University should not make its facilities available to representatives of the Chinese Government, either by direct invitation or indirectly, by hosting conferences or seminars to which these representatives are invited.

I know that the University is a business, but business has a duty to be moral as well as profitable, especially when a large area of its focus is the education of the next generation of adults; surely it would be better not to send them the message, however unintentionally, that genocide is less important than money. Or if more visits like Mr. Xiaoming's are to be arranged (I appreciate it is probably too late to withdraw his invitation now), perhaps you should consider dropping the "Empire and After" module from the BA English degree. I take that module - it is mandatory, actually - and we are told in it, consistently, and rightly of course, that invasion and colonisation of other countries by military force, followed by the subjection of the native population, is a crime against humanity which all civilised people should condemn.

I found it a rather bitter irony to come home yesterday, after my Empire and After lecture, to find that the University is playing host to a representative of the largest and most brutal colonial oppressor on Earth.

Regards,

Bruce Hodder
BA English, Second Year.

Spirituality Vs Religion: A Holy War For The Secular Age

I've been hearing quite a bit lately - from friends and university lecturers - that spirituality is okay but organised religion isn't. We can have our own view on God, or Allah, or Krsna, or Buddha, so this logic goes, but when we align ourselves with any sort of group that shares the same views, we automatically become a crackpot.

I think people reject organised religion partly because they see it as angry and bigoted. They see Christians and Muslims telling us homosexuals are going to Hell, a woman's place is three feet behind her man's with her face covered and not in the church as a fully ordained minister. And those who look a little closer see ingrained inequality in Buddhism too (I don't know enough about Hinduism to comment).

On that score - the score of anger and bigotry - I sympathise with the sceptics. There is no place in a civilised society for the denigration of any of its citizens. But the bigotry just represents a direction that a particular religion has been pushed in by certain scholars. Or it reflects the interference of business and politics (see the United States). Often it's just the view being expounded by the person with the biggest mouth.

I think there's another reason why people separate sprituality and religion and allow legitimacy for one but not the other. Spirituality is a feeling, an inner glow, a warm buzz, and more often than not it's separated from the ritual associated with organized religion. One can feel God without bending a knee towards Him. Worship, in our secular age, is equated with a kind of voluntary subservience, and that's not acceptable.

I don't see it that way. Religion/ faith/ spirituality without ritual is fine, as far as I'm concerned, but I don't make myself unequal or a lesser being by cleaning my Buddhas in the morning, lighting incense next to them, sitting on a cushion in front of them to meditate. I am paying my respects to the highly evolved being who showed the way to our emancipation from suffering.

Besides, I'm not so special. It doesn't hurt me to bow before anybody, or to work for anybody. And how am I any more gullible sitting in a church or a mosque listening to a religious teacher than I am sitting in a university lecture being told by another institutional authority that the practise of religion is misguided?

A Christmas Message to the Readers of Suffolk Punch

Tom Waits - Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

Bob Dylan - Here Comes Santa Claus

Gerald Nicosia on the Kerouac Estate

Over at our sister station THE BEATNIK http://whollycommunion.blogspot.com/ we have something of a scoop today: Gerald Nicosia, the only really serious biographer of Jack Kerouac, writes about the recent Florida appellate court ruling on the will being used to direct the operations of Kerouac's estate. It's a forgery, people. There have been questions raised about its authenticity for a long time, but now all those Doubting Thomases (or Toms, since Kerouac fans tend not to like formalities) and all the conspiracy theorists who attach themselves to the other side of anything involving money and power, have been proven to be right. Go and read Nicosia's account, today. It will enrage you and cheer you up at the same time, since the good guys have finally been vindicated (although nobody is pointing fingers at anyone when it comes to the question of who forged the will). Where the good guys can possibly go from here, however, is anybody's guess.

My Gulliver Piece, With Added Comments

I spent half a day writing this crap for class and then it wasn't required because the lecturer was ill. So I thought I'd share it here. Might as well do something with it, although casually flaunting my laboured academic prose in front of Suffolk Punch readers is a little like doing a naked jig in the high street. The task? Take a passage from Gulliver's Travels and analyse it in 500 words using at least one 'secondary source'. Well, here we go...(I have, by the way, interposed a few comments not in the original script.)

Gulliver’s Travels Book 1, Chapter 4

“Which two mighty powers have…”

In this passage from Book 1, Gulliver learns from Principal Secretary Reldresal (sounds like redressal, that does) that a difference about how eggs should be eaten is the motivation for the long war between Lilliput and the neighbouring empire of Blefuscu. Reldresal has been asked to give this historical account to Gulliver in the hope that he will use his size and strength to support Lilliput when Blefuscu invades.

     The Big-Endians and the Small-Endians are a satirical parallel of the sort we see throughout the novel (Bywaters 734). They represent something Swift wishes to pass comment on, and in recognising what they represent we (who the hell's this 'we' you're going on about?) derive the fullest enjoyment of the text (I sound like an eight year old writing a letter to his grandad). The parallel’s satiric effect, as we shall see, depends as much on Gulliver as on the absurdity (I wanted to say 'silliness' there) of the conceit.

     Swift’s intentions in the novel have been extensively debated (apparently - what do I know?). The main source of disagreement between scholars about Book One appears to lie in the question of whether it is a cohesive allegory or a series of satirical thrusts woven into one narrative (Harth 40).  There is general agreement (I hoped there was anyway) that Blefuscu represents France under Louis XV; Lilliput, on the other hand, only has correspondences to England under George I (Bywaters 734). Given that Louis was a Catholic who gave shelter to exiles from the old Jacobite court and King George a Protestant (although his wife was a Catholic), we can speculate that warring over which end one’s egg is opened might refer to the stupidity of the ongoing hostilities between France and England, with religion symbolising all other differences (I was sure there's another literary term for what the eggs are doing but I couldn't be mithered to look it up.) (Korshin 258); whatever the doctrinal disagreements between Catholicism and Protestantism, after all, its respective adherents worship the same God.

     Although Swift achieves great comic play here with the invention of new administrative/ bureaucratic words – Reldresal refers to ‘the Brundrecal (which is their Alcoran)’ (Swift 37) – as well as in the capacity of textual interpretation (as in the different readings of ‘convenient’) to cause conflict, the trenchancy (I got that word into two essays this week cos it sounds academicky - hope the lecturers don't talk to each other) of the humour and the satirical parallel is due in large part to Gulliver’s distance from the political machinations of the Lilliputian court. He is, literally, bigger than the disputing parties, as well as ‘a foreigner’ (Swift 37); and the cause of the dispute is, by any reckoning, petty. It is made even more petty, to the reader, by the seriousness with which it is taken in Lilliput (I sound like Jeeves when I mangle sentences to avoid ending them with prepositions). ‘Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy,’ Reldresal tells Gulliver (Swift 36).

     Swift’s intention, however, is complex. Gulliver’s commitment to come to the aid of Lilliput at the end of the passage shows that Swift does not mock the notion of fighting for his country, even when the political climate is inhospitable or the cause unsupportable (like the two ables there - it's damn near poetry). What he mocks is factionalism. Swift subscribed at the time of writing Gulliver’s Travels to the Tory ideal of an informal coalition of interests in government that would end the warring and intrigue scarring British life; Prime Minister Walpole and his Whigs did not. (Good: Coalitions don't fucking work.)

     Gulliver, then, is used by Swift to show that Tories are great patriots because they are beyond factionalism (Bywaters 734). Since his argument, by extension, is that the Whigs are not, he is guilty of a contradiction he appears not to notice.(I bet that observation would have caused roars of laughter in the classroom.) (Should I say classroom?)

Bibliography

Bywaters, David. ‘Gulliver’s Travels and the Mode of Political Parallel During Walpole’s Administration.’ ELH. 54. 3 (1987): 717-740. Web. Accessed 9^th December 2011.

Harth, Philip. The Problem of Political Allegory in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Modern Philology. 73. 4 (1976): 40-47. Web. Accessed 9^th December 2011.

Korshin, Paul J. Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection.’ Modern Philology. 95. 2 (1997): 253-258. Web. Accessed 9^th December 2011.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Richmond: Oneworld Classics Limited, 2010. Print.

Harry Potter To Play Allen Ginsberg? Surely, A Calamity!

Daniel Radcliffe, who apparently played a young chap called Harry Potter in a series of children's movies about witchcraft which made a lot of money, is going to play Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, a film about the murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, an episode in the history of the Beats familiar to specialists and casual Beat readers alike. The response of the media to the news has been striking for its emphasis on the sexuality of Ginsberg. Our 'arry? Playing one o' them? Go here for an interesting article about the homophobic twaddle that almost every reference to the film has contained since it was announced.

Lunch Poems: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Colonel Potter: Goodbye, Farewell and Amen

I was saddened today to hear of the death of actor Harry Morgan, who played Colonel Sherman T. Potter in one of my favourite TV series, 'M*A*S*H*'. He was 96. The internet tells me Harry also appeared as Officer Gannon in the 1960s revival of Dragnet, and on the short-lived and long-forgotten early '70s cop show Hec Ramsey - although I've never seen the former and can't remember the latter. He can be seen, if anyone still likes Westerns enough to look for them, in two of the greatest examples of the genre ever made, The Ox-Bow Incident, with Henry Fonda, and John Wayne's fabulous, moving last film The Shootist.

But it is for 'M*A*S*H' that some of us, at least, will remember him. Sherman T. (formerly 'Hoops') Potter, that eccentric veteran of multiple wars, with a love, as I recall, for Zane Grey (or am I imagining that?) and a horse called Sophie. I watched every episode of that show again and again and I never tired of the counterpoint Potter's mature tolerance and country humour provided to the (Groucho) Marxist young urban wit -and occasional self-righteousness - of my favourite characters Hawkeye and B.J. I still, in fact, quote some of Potter's best lines today, and people who don't know where they come from still laugh, thinking how funny I am.

Thanks for all the fun, Harry, and the marvellous memories. Wherever you've gone now, bon voyage.

Siddhartha sets out on the path

Happy Rohatsu Everybody

Men, women, children, cats, dogs, cows, sheep, tigers, lions, leopards, monkeys, fish, trees, rocks, grass and everything outside and in between.