Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

I wanted to share with you that I dreamed of Nola last night. I don't think I have ever dreamed of her before. She was beautiful, ageless, but mature. I would say somewhere between her 40's and 60's. I was grown, but perhaps younger than I am now. Maybe in my 30's. My former husband Charles was in the dream also, and there was something there, that Nola knew about, with us but she did not say it out loud but I could tell she understood and had compassion when she looked into my eyes. I think my parents may have been in it too but that part was foggy. My mother was for sure, I think. Nola did Tai Chi. She was an expert in the dream, and I followed along and tried to do the form, and was standing behind her, there were rows of people practicing. She moved flowingly and beautifully.

I thought the theme of Othello was not racism and xenophobia, but I was shocked to discover it was. Of course none of Shakespeare's work is encompassed by a 'theme' as such. Of course Iago is a banker, a Thatcherite, an 80s City boy on the make. A social Darwinist, a realist - a democrat. Simon Bowel is an Iago so are the corporate sharks in Glencore, the Liberals who writing stories about the Arab spring joke about putting sexy Tunisian girls instead of grieving mothers on the front cover, the social entrepreneurs who fight to sustain dependency relations with the poorest producers of commodities, the jobbing builders who work for cash in hand, and all the different levels of British society who belong on different levels of the inferno. They speak in unison and they say: O, sir, content you; I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knav...

 Terry Gilliam enlightens us, through opera, about corruption and the Nazis What is astounding to me is that no one has linked the old German high culture of Goethe and Schiller with Nazism more often and more directly before. Not only in the sense of culpability, but in relation to the themes explored. It's interesting how high culture and racial superiority are so closely linked.You can almost hear the Nazis and their vast German following, not all of whom are dead yet say: But we are superior. German culture is superior. We produced Beethoven and Beethoven produced the 9th Symphony and that really good bit by Schiller, what was it? Alle Menschen werden Brüder, - ale menshen verden brider.. Hmm. Now. The inferior races and cultures couldn't produce that could they?' Not since the musical Spring Time for Hitler and Germany has anyone put Nazism into song in such a big way. And who is the more profound comic and who has more 'gravitas' when ...

Who was Nola Phillips?

This was a regular school walk that we did from the Friend's School to Roseberry Topping .

Personality and personal history are the forward wake of memory. How is a snakeskin like a poem? A really good poem is the sloughed off skin of a snake. Less than a year ago we found a black Mamba skin in our garage. It was warm and delicate. It was slippery and lacy at the same time, and it still held something of the form of the snake. I phoned the neighbours. 'What should we do? There's a black mamba nest in the garage somewhere.' 'There's nothing you can do, they said. Nothing. Nothing. Just put the snakeskin in the bathroom and admire it when you brush your teeth.' A really good poem should be slippery and lacy to the touch and it should take the form of a snake. It should cause you to be alert and to look thoughtfully into shadows. A childhood friend of mine is an artist: Simon. A decade ago, in Mexico, he showed me pictures of his paintings. They were of large interlocking earthworms painted in homemade colours: ochres, browns and red...

8/ ?/1941 A Good Friend of Bulgaria Obituary for I. Steinhardt I do not speak Bulgarian. I speak Russian so this translation may not be completely accurate; it is based on my knowledge of Russian. I would love someone to help me translate it. On the 8 th of this month in Prague the famous Czech journalist I. Steinhardt passed  away. He was born in Pol Moravsko in 1873. I Steinhardt completed his education in journalism in Prague and Vienna. Around 1890 I. Steinhardt went to Sophia where he became the editor of the German language paper Bulgarski Trgovski Vestnik (Bulgarian Evening Trader) where he gained a reputation as an excellent journalist and cultural figure. He made a particularly strong impression with his  brilliant reviews of the National Theatre. His articles in the Bulgarian Evening Trader on national and cultural questions were widely read. As the correspondent of the English Daily Mail and th...

Peter Orlovsky, Jack Keruac and William Burroughs in Morroco I have never read William Burroughs though I have glanced at a passage or two of his and have seen a bit of Hollywood's pretentious version of one of his books. I am hardly qualified to pronounce sentence on him, but I will anyway. Burroughs was American. This is important. Burroughs is a flag. Burroughs was supposed to have described what you would find if you stripped the bark off the trunk of American society. Underneath there would be termites. Burroughs was a writer, but also a killer, someone who inadvertently broke the deepest rule of human society. He didn't kill an enemy in the second world war. he wasn't ordered to kill. Ordinary killers are rewarded with medals and processions. He was the executioner, his unconscious was the executioner and the same unconscious was the source of his literary output. He placed an object, drunk, onto his wife's head. He said he would shoot it off her head, ...

Reconstituted like a Turkey Twizzler - the philosophy of generation X Generation X are those men and women who hide amongst the good people of the 35 to 45 age bracket. They are located right at the rotting end of Thatcherism. They are John Major's children and adopted social Darwinism and the new materialism as their philosophy. To them, not only was greed good, but greed in its component parts was good. They plagiarised madly and shallowly. You can't pilfer in Generation X world. The world of the DJ. Intellectual property is a joke unless it's reconstituted. I was disgusted by it's exponents. The DJs the re mixers. It shows how toxic trickle down philosophy can be when even the wide boys and girls didn't have to finds arguments against thieving other people's music and remixing it. And now intellectual property theft is mainstream. I wonder if John Berger would sanction it? I doubt he would. Give me Julie Birchill any day. Now she was my generation...

Maurizio Cattalan donated this sculpture only on condition that the Milan authorities displayed it pointing directly at the office of the head of the stock eschange. In fact I am not representing the people giving the finger to the stockmarket speculators so much as representing the financial speculators giving the finger to us, said the artist. How many of you would sign a petition to have one of the these put up in front of the London Stock Exchange? By Mark in History

 Richard Steinhardt, Isidor Steinhardt and Artur Steinhardt  Regina Steinhardt, Eve Steinhardt (our  mother), and Lisa  Steinhardt in Paris  Artur Steinhardt in Israel during the war  Paula Neumann and Else Steinhardt in front, Regina and Isidor Steinhardt behind. Dear Sir / Madam, I am the great  grandson of Isidor Steinhardt, born in 1873. I have all the  documentation to prove this together with birth certificates and photos. In 1998 my Mother gave me his gold Doxa watch which the King of Montenegro awarded him. I have been researching our family history and writing a biography of my mother who lived in Paris during the war with her mother. Isidor's story is extraordinarily sad. His wife Regina, my Great Grandmother was sent to Terezin and then onto Treblinka and my  great aunt, their daughter was rounded up in Paris and died in Auschwitz. Their oldest son, Arthur emigrated to Israel with his wife Flora and then ...

I love the Culture thing, Man. And your plots may be Heath Robinson, but your transexualism and politics of surplus rock.  When we read books, we mustn't separate the author from what he or she writes. Remember Iago is Shakespeare 's thought crime. Use of Weapon's was Ian Banks thought crime. If the police had read Use of Weapons before the publishers then Banks would have been sectioned. A forensic linguist would have had him sent him to Broadmoor . Aha! There you have it. Shakespeare as Iago. The office of devil's advocate. Horror fiction writers imagine terrible things in close detail for the entertainment of their readership, who lap it up. What does that tell you about the people who write and read horror fiction? Look at misery literature. Who reads and writes that? What kind of a species are we? Where's the legislation against the imagination? This is chaos!   The imagination is like the sea. Legislators are King Ca...

 Thomasina Miers is no Diana Kennedy My nice niece came from Mexico an hour ago bringing sackfuls of goodies with her, most of which are not available here. This is why Mexican cooking will not take off in the UK. Every day I eat a variant on Mexican food at home because we have, squirreled away, dried chiles, achiote, cans of this, bottles of that. But the most basic ingredient of Mexican food is the tortilla and you can't buy them here in retail outlets. In Thomasina's kitschy Mexican kitchen they use this staple of Mexican cooking, the tortilla, in odd little rounds - such as I have never seen the like of in Mexico. And yes I know what a 'sope' is Thomasina. The mole in her snack bar comes from a bottle, it's not made in-house, and on top of the mini tortilla, with bottled mole, is a little dribble of sweet cream - not even sour Mexican cream. There shouldn't even be cream on Mole!I've written about Mole for the Guardian blog. Now this i...

This is not sour grapes... Oh alright, maybe it is.  Thomasina Miers is no Diana Kennedy My nice niece came from Mexico an hour ago bringing sackfuls of goodies with her, most of which are not available here. This is why Mexican cooking will not take off in the UK. Every day I eat a variant on Mexican food at home because we have, squirreled away, dried chiles, achiote, cans of this, bottles of that. But the most basic ingredient of Mexican food is the tortilla and you can't buy them here in retail outlets.  In Thomasina's kitschy Mexican kitchen they use this staple of Mexican cooking, the tortilla, in odd little rounds - such as I have never seen the like of in Mexico. And yes I know what a 'sope' is Thomasina. The mole in her snack bar comes from a bottle, it's not made in-house, and on top of the mini tortilla, with bottled mole, is a little dribble of sweet cream - not even sour Mexican cream. There shouldn't even be cream on Mole!I've written about...

w a soft side to my grandfather. He came into my room one evening. He had taken out his teeth, so he was toothless and mumbled when he said, his arm around me. 'Look Phil, I understand you. You love this Natasha. But you know what, we all have our Natasha's. You love them and you think they are so important, but they are not important. What is important is your family and your future and the fact that so many people love you. We all love you.' 'Thank you grandpa.' I said, and my cold heart warmed. I started to enjoy myself. Trust me, it was only in the spirit of closing circles that I decided to go to Yugoslavia in 1981. I decided to go by bicycle. I was developing a sense of humour. I was beginning to enjoy my anarchic, surprising life more. I wanted to take a long look at Natasha and through Natasha and to free myself of teenage angst and move on before I turned 20. It was not hope or devotion that motivated me. I decided to go by bike and my ...