Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Drew A. Hyland has a point when he argues in 1973 against philosophy as a Hegelian view of history. And he is also right to mark out the importance of the Epic of Gilgamesh. From my perspective of the 21st century I always thought the story was silly. A comic-like story of a sexually ambivilant superhero. What was that thing he had going with Enkidu? All that wrestling in the dust. Enkidu Shams and Gilgamesh Rumi. But Gilgamesh wasn't Superman, he wasn't, as Tarantino suggested in Kill Bill II, a snide critique on the weakness of men or Chabon's Kavalier and Clay fantasizing about saving all our grandparents from the ovens of Treblinka and Aushwitz. Gilgamesh headed straight for the ovens of Ishtar. The figure of Gilgamesh is worthy of being the first human figure in myth. greater. Gilgamesh would fight for humanity's dignity and place in what Pythagoras was to call the kosmos. Gilgamesh, as quoted by Hyland says: "Shamash, listen to me, listen to me Shamash, l...

The language of Tarkovsky is poetic and he expresses himself cinematographically through images of melting ice and trees moving in breezes that swell up unexpectedly. Tarkovsky work is incohate, while barns and candles burn and vast oceans move with sentience. Tarkovsky's landscapes are always sentient. The rhythms of car and train journeys play against the unspoken thoughts of Tarkovsky's characters, which, in turn, still unrevealed, play against the watching cinema audience like Rimbaud's sunlight reflecting off water. Long slow camera shots allow us to dwell in Tarkovsky's iconography and share his sentiment. We feel we may even sense the characters heartbeats and, doing so, our own heartbeat breaks through in synchrony. We watch the candle flicker as the writer shields it from the eddies of air blowing up dry leaves in the empty swimming pool, and we can't help but hear the softly snickering whispers. Who's that? Who's there? Can you hear them too? And t...

The best charity bookshops in London are Oxfam bookshops. The books are well shelved, sorted according to subject area and alphabetically and priced slightly more highly. And the best book section in an Oxfam bookshop, I don't mind sharing this with you, is run by "the book lady" in Twickenham . Her name is Felicity. Felicity must be in her late 80s. She is thin and smiles and wears pince nez . Her diction is slow, and her vowels and consonants are grooved into the the clarity and timbre of the 1940s. She says she is so pleased when she can "match a person with a book." She thinks that "well, most literature is either Dionysian or Apollonian, isn't it." - she says this with another cheering smile. Recently, I bought from her, for 2 pounds, a 150 year old red leather bound volume of Sir. Walter Scott's poetry (Why on Earth did I do that?), A book including two of Thomas Paine's pieces, and three other books: Fraser, The Golden Bough, the ...

Post-war praise from US establishment quarters for 1. the Soviets 2. the French Communists Extract from a (1945) article on the difference between Fascism and Communism , as quoted by K Zilliacus, British MP: The USSR, like the US, is opposed to the fundamental Fascist ideas on which Germany has operated: (1) The master race; (2) the State is all important; (3) Lebensraum: and (4) desire to dominate the world. Master Race : If the US is a ‘melting pot’, then the Soviet Union is an electric mixer. Scientists have counted 189 ‘races’ in USSR. Under the Tsars, many of the racial minorities were persecuted; today in the Soviet Union, there is no such thing as racial discrimination in practice or in theory. The people of each ‘race’ have been encouraged to retain their own language, customs and individuality and to educate themselves and develop the economic area in which they live. All-Important State : Some people profess to see strong likeness between the Soviet and Nazi forms of govern...

We must believe in and work toward the further development of Regions. Regions as loose networks of nations, as freemarket areas, as confederations, even as federations and ultimately unions. Witness the historical and epic achievements and lovely narrative of the Coal and Steel Community evolving into the European Common Market and the European Union, spawning, on the way, the political and economic renaissance of its second line members, Spain and Portugal out of fascism and into prosperity, Greece out of royalist and rightwing oppression, Ireland out of historical marginalisation and deep cultural oppression, not to mention the way Irish Republican prosperity has helped the North into a peaceful settlement. Look into your history of the last few decades and note how left of centre French leaders ( Mitterand )have worked together on the European project with right of centre German leaders (Kohl), right of centre French leaders ( Chirac ), with left of centre Germans ( Schroeder ). ...

I believe Yasser Arafat would have approved a one-state solution. I wrote this at the time of Arafat's death. I republished it as Hamas was given a voters' mandate to carry the torch of Palestine into the next stage, in conditions of extreme difficulty...and now again, as Israel has gone from bad to mad. In mourning the death of Yasser Arafat, let me quote extracts from an article by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian Weekly in which he gets the historical context exactly right, in explaining Arafat's greatness:"In the days when Britain was being forced to give up one colony after another, the phrase 'father of the nation' was much in vogue. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia were among the many who won this informal title, not just from journalists in search of a label but, more importantly, from their own people. As teachers, clerics or trade unionists who became political leaders, they were seen as the chief ...

Immediately after liberation the French people were in a condition of exhaustion and demoralisation. The urgency and magnitude of the problems to be solved were so appalling that there was a general mood of apathy and despair. The Communists did a great deal at this crucial time to put heart into the French workers. They gave a militant lead through the trade unions in carrying out emergency and salvage work, repairing railway lines, rolling tock, locomotives, bridges, roads and factories, restarting production in the mines and so forth. From there they went straight on to becoming the driving force behind reconstruction. In the New York Herald Tribune in July 1946 Mr Joseph Alsop [he and his brother Stuart were two very prominent and in/famously right-wing journalists] gave his impressions of the situation in France, based on his own investigations on the spot. French reconstruction, he explained, hinged on the Monnet plan, worked out by Jean Monnet (who was the first Deputy General ...