EPL 08/09 Guardian Bookmarks

A day in the life of Peter Kay:

Blackburn Rovers

Bolton Wanderers

Kara at 32 weeks

EPL 08/09 Guardian Bookmarks

For future reference:

Arsenal

Aston Villa

The Great Profundo and other stories by Bernard MacLaverty (Penguin Books 1987)

After I had finished my first painting under his direction he went up to it and looked all over its surface from six inches. He nodded with approval.

'I'll call you my drapery man.'

'What?'

'An eighteenth-century caper. Portrait painters got a man in to do the time-consuming bits - the lace and the satin stuff. The best of them was Vanaken. Hogarth drew this man's funeral with all the best painters in London behind the coffin weeping and gnashing their teeth.' [From 'The Drapery Man']

Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Critique of Religion

Quick, no one's looking. Delete that best of James Blunt playlist from your iPod and upload Steve Coleman's two part talk on Karl Kautsky's Critique of Religion:

First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Critique of Religion

FILE NAME: 02 Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Critique of Religion.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~46.17 megabytes

LENGTH:50:07

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Critique of Religion

FILE NAME: 03 Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Critique of Religion Part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~51.61 megabytes

LENGTH: 56:01

Further Reading on Karl Kautsky:

Kautsky on the Marxist Internet Archive

William Morris's Vision of Socialism

Another bit of flagrant cut and paste from the blog archive.

Another talk from the 1982 'Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made' lecture series.

According to the Socialist Standard of the time, the talk dates from Sunday 12 December 1982, and was held at the Prince Albert pub in Kings Cross, London.

First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: William Morris's Vision of Socialism

FILE NAME: 02 william morris Part 1.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~60.58 megabytes

LENGTH:1:05:46

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: William Morris's Vision of Socialism

FILE NAME: 03 William Morris Part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~50.57 megabytes

LENGTH: 54:54

Further Reading on William Morris:

William Morris on the Marxist Internet Archive

The William Morris Society

William Morris: Life and Times (From the Socialist Standard, 1984)

Morris and the Problem of Reform or Revolution (From the Socialist Standard, 1984)

Art, Labour & Socialism by William Morris . . . With a Modern Assessment (SPGB pamphlet from 1962.)

Joseph Dietzgen and Dialectical Thought

Cutting and pasting like the best of them.

Another talk from the 1982 'Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made' lecture series and, again, the speaker is Steve Coleman:

First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Dietzgen and Dialectical Thought

FILE NAME: 01 Steve Coleman Dietzgen Part One.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~53.24 megabytes

LENGTH:57:47

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Dietzgen and Dialectical Thought

FILE NAME: 01 Dietzgen Part Two.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~48.46 megabytes

LENGTH: 52:36

Further Reading on Dietzgen:

Jospeh Dietzgen page on the Marxist Internet Archive website

'Joseph Dietzgen - The Workers Philosopher' by Adam Buick, which originally appeared in the journal, Radical Philosophy (1975).

Centenary Of Joseph Dieztgen by Frank Roberts, which originally appeared in the OBU Bulletin (1928).

'Cosmic Dialectics, The Libertarian Philosophy of Joseph Dietzgen' by Larry Gambone

Get Carter (1971)

Top 100 Book Meme

AVPS Phil has passed on the following book meme to me. These book memes always kill me because it only goes to confirm my long held suspicion that I haven't read nearly as many 'classics' in this life as I should have.

The sticking point for this particular meme is that a lot of the books listed are books that you've supposed to have read as a child, and I only really got into the habit of seriously reading novels when I first went to Lancaster and discovered that I didn't have a TV in my room. The other things that bites is that there are five or six authors in the 100 who I have read, but not the book that is included on the list.

Phil provides the following blurb with the meme:

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you love.

4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.

5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them

I would add that 'read' means read, not flicked through or given up half way to the end. It's cover to cover or nothing.

Here goes:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (I've read the first book in the series. Cut me some slack.)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (Again, I've read one and a half books of Pullman's trilogy.)

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I guess 16/100 isn't too bad. Not too bright either. Phil snaffled the meme from a Liberal Democrat, and one of her blogging mates had the following red letter day when he took the meme. It's amazing what one can achieve in life when you don't have broadband.

I'm happy to pass the meme onto anyone out there who wants to take it. I won't name names (but if Sarah Silverman is looking in, it would be a pleasure and an honour if you picked up the blog meme baton) but do let me know if you do take the meme. Don't let me know if you read more than thirty of the books listed.

Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

I've decided to repost the Socialist Thinkers Series on the blog via mediafire filesharing service. Same deal as the recently reposted audio lecture, 'The Historical Place of the SPGB'; a lot of the old ZShare links are dead and I much prefer uploading mp3s via mediafire. Less hassle all round.

I won't mess you about with the whole posting one lecture a day on the blog like I did with Hardy's economics lectures. If I've got the talks on the computer, I'll repost them as quickly as I can.

There's no rhyme or reason as to why I've opted to post the Belfort Bax talk first, other than the fact it is the closest talk to hand.

For more background info on Bax and the talk, I've previously blurbed about both over here.

First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 02 Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism Part 1.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~59.47 megabytes

LENGTH:1:04:33

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 01 Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~41.88 megabytes

LENGTH: 56:01