Slow Talk

Been there, done that.

News

Bit of news for my four regular readers. Kara's pregnant.

We're not sure about the date at this point - the earliest possible appointment with the midwife is three weeks away - but we're guessing that the baby should be born around late April/early May time. We found out Sunday morning, but it was only after triple confirmations from three home pregnancy tests that I've picked up the nerve to mention it on the blog.

Both our families are really happy for us.

Kara's nervous, excited and - being the sensible one in the relationship - thinking through the practicalities of the coming months. (In Kara's words, she's thinking about the matter of saving up for a crib whilst I'm panicking about the possibility that the unborn baby might not support Celtic; "Don't worry, we'll enrol them in a school in a predominantly Latino area to ensure that they get into football" is Kara's sage advice.)

Me? Happy, dazed and a wee bit scared seems to be the order of the day but the more it's sinking in, the more the feeling of happiness is overtaking the other two.

I'm sure we're both in for a rollercoaster of emotions in the coming days, weeks and months. I'm already experiencing the tumult of fifty questions shooting through my mind simultaneously:

Please God - did I mention that I've temporarily ditched my disbelief in God? - please don't let the unborn baby inherit my nose or Kara's taste in music.

When they start school - yep, already thinking that far ahead - will they be teased and ostracised by the other school kids for having the name Eleanor Marx Bell Hooks Rosa Luxemburg Kathleen Hanna Patsy Cline Roseanne Barr Youngs O'Neil?

What if it's a girl?

Too many questions at this point, but I'm too happy to hazard a guess at the answers.

Gone to Siberia? Try Miami

David T. from Harry's Place is getting in a tizzy about the whereabouts of uber-SWP blogger, Lenny. Apparently he's gone missing.

Of course, he claims his concern is motivated by no more than a desire to know where Lenny will pitch his tent on the Galloway versus SWP dispute, but you know that it's more than that.

Dave T and co need Lenny as much as they need Benji in their comment box. They're a source of political comfort in an uncertain world. It's like a modern day blogging version of the The Jocks and the Geordies. A verbal scrap and a cyber-warrior scrimmage, and then home in time for tea.

Bugger the whereabouts of Lenny. In my alternative universe, he's suffered suffocation after disappearing up Zizek's arse once too often. The more pressing question is where's Harry? Oh, there's Harry.

PS - Look at the first comment on the Harry's Place thread. What did I say before? Google Alert is good, but Tim's 'Galloway Alert' is better.

"Don't want to live in an Adidas world with the Adidas boys and the Adidas girls."

Is it the first of April?

"I suffered from a condition known as obsessive branding disorder - a combination of compulsive shopping and a reliance on status symbol brands for the maintenance of one's self esteem."

Nah, just turns out that he's got a book to sell.

Liked this knowing quote from an interview that Boorman did with the Press Gazette from a while back:

"Ultimately it's impossible to abandon brands altogether, says Boorman.
'The final twist in the book, if the book is a success, is it doesn't matter how many brands I get rid of, one new brand is created — and that's Neil Boorman, the anti-brand bloke.'"
[Quote found here.]

Perhaps the quote is too knowing.

The Magazine Wrack

Mr Bone has a . . . . has a . . . . point to pick make regarding the glossies.

Whatever you do, don't sign him for a subscription to Lucky for his Christmas. The poor sod will have a heart attack.

A Bitter Dispute

Ouch, it can be a bit of a pain in the arse for union bureaucrat types when the workers decide to get a bit too militant in the wrong places.

Via the Dreaming Neon Black blog comes the news that the servers who work at various music festivals for the Workers Beer Company have decided to set up a union.

According to Adam Ford - who was a worker/volunteer himself for the WBC at the recent Leeds Music Festival - apparently trouble has been brewing for a wee while now with disputes over such bread and butter issues as health and safety, working conditions and what happens to the tips given to servers.

It's still early days, so there's no information about which union they are seeking to link up with, but you'd think that they'd give the IWW some consideration? The original Bread & Roses crew for the Pot Noodle & Festival Tickets generation.

I have to admit that I have a declared interest here: the WBC bar was ridiculously overpriced in the Leftfield Tent at Glastonbury Festival a few years back when four of us spent six days in the Green Fields doing an SPGB stall. Surrounded by the spiritual and the trustafarians, alcohol was needed in high doses to get us through the week, and the WBC and their pricing policy had us by the short and curlies.

Couple that with the fact that the WBC pub, the Bread and Roses is just around the corner from the SPGB's Head Office. As I remember it, it was a wine bar masquerading as a pub, with chintzy black and white pictures of Arthur Scargill on the wall, and a clientele that seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Marxism Today, circa 1988. The personal being political, I opted for the Manor Arms pub a few hundred yards down the road.

Hat tip to Alan J.

She Respect Belongs To Me

Galloway Redux

You can't take it with you. You can't take it back.

Seasoned readers of Dave Osler or the Shiraz Socialist blogs will testify to the danger of even thinking the words 'George Galloway' sotto voce on those esteemed blogs, because even before the miscreant can exclaim, 'Fuck, what have I brought on myself and the innocents around me?' in quick succession comes six comments from a 'Tim', outlining in exhaustive detail the open and shut case of Galloway being the second gunman in Dallas in 1963 (he was the man behind the grassy knoll, but missed his chance to fire at Kennedy 'cos he was filling out his expenses form at the decisive moment); GG being the last man seen with Shergar before the thoroughbred went missing in 1983; and, most shockingly of all, GG being seen Christmas week, 1987, coming out of Our Price in Dundee with 174 copies of the Pet Shop Boys single 'Always On My Mind', thus depriving The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl of the Christmas Number One that year.

Google Alert is good, but Tim's 'Galloway Alert' is better.

It's all harmless stuff in the main and, if nothing else, it makes the other Galloway Watcher, 'http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/', seem well balanced and good humoured by comparison, but credit to 'Tim' when it's deserved.

Via that same Galloway thread on Dave O's blog came this Dylanesque gem from 'Tim'. Why have an blogzession, if you can't capitalize on it at every opportunity? And, it has to be said, that it was a stroke of genius to get John Molyneux to play Allen Ginsberg in the background of the clip. The SWP's loyal oppositionist conducting an open-air meeting of the 'Democracy Faction' of the SWP is another sock in the eye for the 1930s cover band John Rees and the CC's.

Quote of the Day

"Tony, we received a special midnight shipment from our crew on the south side. We'll make a bundle."
(Caught off-guard, the minutes secretary and the student officer of the Glasgow Shettleston CLP are spotted caucusing discussing next week's combined jumble sale and tombola to raise branch funds for the coming General Election.)

Over at Dave O's Place, the artists formerly known as the UK Left Network Denizens are currently chewing over what many of them are interpreting as George Galloway's Dear John Letter to that 1930s cover band, John Rees and the CC's.

In its own way, it's fascinating stuff, and I'd definitely recommend to anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of the machiavellian far left to wing your way over there - or to any other of the 57 far-left blogs also currently doing the rounds on the Galloway/SWP square off - for a quick shufty.

Dave O's thread on the matter is especially enjoyable as you can witness a snowball melt before your very eyes in the comment box, and it also contains this wonderfully vivid quote from Jim Carroll that definitely makes my quote of the day:

"No one with any knowledge of the brand of Scottish labourism that nurtured Galloway, which is essentially an amalgam of Straight Left and The Sopranos, would have been under any illusion that the swp were anything more to him then useful idiots and that sooner or later they were going to get right royally screwed. One would have though that the swps scottish wing might have counselled a degree of caution but given that leading members of that grouping seem to have got themselves fatally involved in the looming disaster that is Sheridan and Solidarity, maybe that was too much to ask for.

The bit in the Galloway document that amused me was GGs reference to the train wreck that is the scottish left. Given that Galloway actively campaigned for Solidarity at the scottish elections I would imagine that Solidarity members will not be too chuffed to read that comment. More useful idiots to advance Galloways career.

The SWP and Galloway deserve each other. Its like watching rats fighting in a sack.

Providing Back-Up

Inspired by the common sense approach of fellow WSP'er, Jason, who has set up the The World Socialist blog, and fearful that the unofficial Socialist Standard page on MySpace could be deleted at any moment by some minion at Murdoch Inc, I've decided to provide a back-up with the Socialist Standard@MySpace blog.

Sadly, I can't carry over/transfer the comments from the MySpace blog - over a thousand and rising - at the same time, and I can't be arsed to make a note of all the splendifirous music that I've listened to whilst maintaining the page, but hopefully over the next few weeks/months, I'll be able to transfer all 475+ articles, book reviews and glorified links to pump up the sitemeter on this blog from the MySpace page over to the blog. *Gulp* . . . only 350 to go.

It's not some maniacal attempt on my part to duplicate unnecessary work, but the recognition that in amongst the articles, book reviews and glorified links that can be found elsewhere on the web, there are a number of excellent articles on the MySpace page that appeared there on the net for the first time, and if the page suddenly got dropped-kicked into a cyberspace black hole one morning a lot of that good stuff would be unnecessarily lost. For that reason alone, it makes sense to provide the back up.

As I've been doing the cut and paste in the last couple of days, I thought I'd use it as a cheap excuse to point people in the direction of a number of recommended articles amd reviews that have already been posted on the blog back-up.

Orwell's Nightmare

Class War No More?

The Beauty Trap

Oscar Wilde and Socialism

The Wobblies

What Marx Should Have Said To Kropotkin

The Most Dangerous Song in the World - A Rewrite

Xmas Eve at the Grotto

Class Politics in the USA - Interview with WSPUS and Union Activist

Is The Socialist Party Marxist?

Socialism in the 21st Century

Brendan Behan's 'Borstal Boy'

More links to follow when the mood takes.

Do I Even Know How To Read? Do You Even Know Me?

Nothing like a broadsheet reading poll to show one up to be the poorly read dolt that you've always suspected yourself to be.

It's not enough that I don't 'get' the subtle nuances of the handful of books that I have read, it now transpires that there are 48 must-read lost classics out there that I've not even heard of, never mind read.

Snappy Kat can probably guess the one book out of the fifty from that Observer's Forgotten Fifty that I've actually read, and I will put my hand up to having actually heard of 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin' by David Nobbs, but I fall into the category of people who thought that the book was a novelisation of the sitcom, and not the other way round.

The fact that none of the fifty "celebrated"* writers feel fit to mention Gordon Legge's 'The Shoe' or Edward Gaitens' 'The Dance of the Apprentices' seems to confirm my long held suspicion that both books are lost classics only within the realm of my ever-diminishing brain.

*Of course they are 'celebrated'. Any time I see Will Self's name in the paper, I do a Mexican Wave in his honour. I'm sure you're the same.