https://wordcounter.net/website-word-count
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20140127-boycotting-beauty-the-jerusalem-quartet/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/7550019/The-concert-hall-should-be-out-of-this-world.html
https://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2011/01/really-new-beginning.html
http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2013/05/susan-mcclary-vs-beethoven.html
http://dailynexus.com/2016-02-01/feminist/
Giles Fraser
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/feb/02/free-speech-universities-spiked-ban-sombreros
https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/stories/india-190116/
But nothing could make clearer the pivotal role of music in maintaining the Palestinian sense of dignity and identity than the establishment of this orchestra.
Israel Folau is being investigated by Rugby Australia’s integrity unit after resuming his anti-gay tirade on social media, claiming “Hell awaits you” to anyone who identifies as homosexual in comments that have been labelled “unacceptable” by his employers ... Folau now faces the wrath of RA after issuing a fresh attack on homosexual people among other groups, including “drunks”, “liars” and “atheists” in an Instagram post that calls for people to “Repent” as “Only Jesus Saves”.
“Those that are living in Sin will end up in Hell unless you repent. Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him.
“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these , adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:19-21 KJV.”
Rugby Australia issued a statement on Wednesday to condemn his actions and confirm that an investigation is underway.
An RA statement read: “Rugby Australia is aware of a post made by Israel Folau on his Instagram account this afternoon.
“The content within the post is unacceptable. It does not represent the values of the sport and is disrespectful to members of the rugby community.
https://reaction.life/ten-times-corbynistas-praised-chavez-maduros-venezuela/
1) Jeremy Corbyn, March 2013
Corbyn tweeted on Hugo Chavez’s death: “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”
We shouldn’t be surprised at Corbyn praising the legacy of Chavez, or indeed citing his politics as a model to be replicated, but we should certainly be concerned at Corbyn’s tenuous grasp of history. Ricardo Hausmann, Harvard economist and former Venezeulan Government Minister gives a pretty comprehensive account of the irreparable damage Chavez did to the Venezuelan economy, and how he created the conditions that allowed Maduro to thrive: changing the constitution to consolidate presidential power, expropriation of the economy and the incredible mismanagement of Venezuelan oil that created the conditions for the implosion in 2014.
2) Jeremy Corbyn, March 2013 (again)
Jeremy Corbyn delivered a speech after Chavez’s death and said: “In Chavez let’s remember someone who stood up, was counted, was inspiring, is inspiring, and in his death we will march on to that better, just, peaceful and hopeful world.”
3) Jeremy Corbyn, 2014…
In 2014 Jeremy Corbyn rang President Maduro, already on his way to further entrench presidential power, live on a Venezuelan television broadcast to congratulate his electoral success. Maduro introduced Corbyn as a ‘friend of Venezuela.’
Jo Cox’s widower accuses Corbyn of ‘defending a dictator’ over Venezuela views
“The future of Venezuela has been taken out of the hands of Venezuelans by an increasingly corrupt and totalitarian state.
“By all means call for dialogue but if you don’t strongly condemn the subjugation of democracy it sounds like you are defending a dictator.”
Guinn Batten and the drowned sheep
In Guinn Batten's essay 'Heaney's Wordsworth and the Poetics of Displacement' as in Fran Brearton's feminist essay irresponsible suppositions multiply unchecked, unchecked, that is, by any responsible notions of evidence or plausibility. These academics seem to assume readers with almost unlimited credulity.
In connection with an episode in the 1799 Prelude of Wordsworth (lines 314 - 320 from the First Part) she writes, 'A woman wandering across the landscape bears a pitcher that suggestively evokes ...' I give her answer not immediately but at the end of this short section which discusses her essay. In the meantime, readers who aren't familiar with the essay can ponder, if they like, their own interpretation of 'pitcher' and later decide whether Guinn Batten is interpreting responsibly or irresponsibly. Wordsworth wrote:
And reascending
the bare slope I saw
A naked pool that lay beneath the hills,
The beacon on the summit, and more near
A girl who bore a pitcher on her head
And seemed with difficult steps to force her way
Against the blowing wind. It was in truth
An ordinary sight ...
It was an ordinary sight for Wordsworth but not ordinary for Guinn Batten.
It's surely irresponsible interpretation if an object can mean whatever the reader thinks might be plausible, including the academic reader with 'expertise' in Wordsworth studies. Is the pitcher a symbol here, or does the more straightforward interpretation make more sense? Perhaps the pitcher is simply 'a large jug, usually rounded with a narrow neck and often of earthenware, used mainly for holding water.' (Collins English Dictionary.)
She gives an imaginative interpretation of the jam jar in which the chestnut was planted ('Clearances 8,' 'The Haw Lantern'). It's mentioned in the lines 'my coeval / Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole.' Guinn Batten is very clear on this point. The jam jar is ' ... of course, an image of ... ' Again, readers not familiar with Guinn Batten's interpretation can interpret the jam jar themselves if they like, decide if there is an obvious image at all, and if there is, decide what they think is the image and compare it with the image so obvious to Guinn Batten. Again, her interpretation is given at the end of this section on the essay.
Earlier, she interprets digging and ploughing. The world of basic, necessary work - digging turf to heat water to boil potatoes, ploughing as a preliminary to sowing seeds - seems to mean nothing to this writer. It's simply the starting point for speculation (speculation offered as if it amounted to certainty.) 'Yet here, in that second or 'emptying' stage of disempowerment, a paradox emerges: in assuming the place of Mother Ireland, in displacing into his own voice her latent power, the Irish male poet, Coughlan contends, who elsewhere is '(phallically) digging and ploughing like his ancestors', ironically thereby 'becomes the culturally female voice of the subjugated Irish, about to inundate the "masculine" hardness of the planters' boundaries with "feminine" vowel-floods'.
She writes that Wordsworth 'is removed to Hawkshead Grammar School where (on a peninsula shaped, significantly, like ears) he observes a search party 'sounding' and probing with their 'long poles' to recover a dead body from the lake's depths.' The peninsula came to be shaped like ears for good geographical reasons.
The significance claimed for the shape of the peninsula is a reminder of the significance claimed for the shape of plants under the 'Doctrine of Signatures,' which effectively began in the first half of the seventeenth century, for example in the writings of Jacob Boehme. According to this doctrine, God had marked created things with a sign. Many herbalists believed that the appearance of a plant determined its medical uses. For example, the seeds of Skullcap, which was used for headaches, look like small skulls. The spotted leaves of Lungwort (used, completely ineffectively, for tuberculosis, look like the lungs of a patient with the disease, with the exercise of imagination and determination. Plants with a red signature were used for diseases of the blood.
Guinn Batten continues, in connection with the search party, 'They restore, one might surmise, in ghastly and masculine form, the maternal body that is now palpably absent for the young boy.
The lines which describe the supposed restoration of the 'maternal body' are lines 455 - 481 ('The Prelude,' 1805 version.) These are the significant lines:
... I
chanced to cross
One of those open fields, which, shaped like ears,
Make green peninsulas on Esthwaite's Lake.
[Wordsworth saw a 'heap of garments.']
... The
succeeding day -
Those unclaimed garments telling a plain tale -
Went there a company, and in their boat
Sounded with grappling-irons and long poles:
At length the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene
Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright
Rose with his ghastly face, a spectre shape -
Of terror even ...
By transposing the sex (or 'gender') of the victim and ignoring completely his 'ghastly face,' then the maternal body becomes plausible, to Guinn Batten although not to me. If the search party had recovered a dead sheep from the lake which looked faintly bewildered, then the sex (or 'gender') wouldn't need transposing, assuming this was a female sheep, not a ram, but with a transposition of species this time, and ignoring completely its appearance, the maternal body could easily be restored, 'one might surmise.' Transposition enormously increases the commentator's freedom to interpret, to interpret arbitrarily, to interpret irresponsibly - to interpret badly.
Earlier in the essay, she has written about the associations of muddy ground and a thorn tree with 'maternal power.' She claims that Seamus Heaney 'echoes the two sources of mysterious power in [Wordsworth's poem] 'The Thorn' - the muddy ground and the upright thorn tree, both of which are associated with maternal power.' She claims that Seamus Heaney combines the maternal muddy ground and the maternal upright tree - to form what? She writes, 'he may even collapse them into a single image in the figure of the pump.' A few pages earlier, Wordsworth's gnarled thorn tree 'is arguably an allegory for the withering of liberty.' (The thorn before it became gnarled is a very unlikely allegory for liberty before it withered - the spikes don't convey liberty in the least.)
She offers yet another interpretation of this remarkable thorn tree: the thorn tree linked with destructive powers. Even though in Wordsworth's poem it seems much too small and much too old to be destructive in the least: 'Not higher than a two years' child / It stands erect this aged thorn;' she finds not the least difficulty in a decrepit thorn tree leading Irishmen to destruction. She writes, 'For an Irish reader such as Heaney that thorn's decrepitude - 'It looks so old and grey' - might find associative links with the maternal figure for Ireland, mentioned by Heaney in 'Feeling into Words', who in her destructive aspect leads her sons to martyrdom.'
These
interpretations can be presented very clearly using Linkage
Schemata. In my notation, the angle brackets < > indicate
linkage, the square brackets indicate the things which are linked. So, the
first example below is read, 'muddy ground is linked with maternal power.'
is used for the conjunctive 'and.'
[muddy ground] < > [maternal power]
[thorn tree] < > [ maternal power]
[thorn tree (before gnarling)] < > [liberty]
[thorn tree (when decrepit)] < > [maternal, destructive Ireland]
[muddy
ground
thorn tree] < > [pump]
The poem by Wordsworth which gave rise to all this in the mind of Guinn Batten is a piece of near doggerel which has been ridiculed for its 'measurements,' but this wouldn't deter Guinn Batten in the least, if she ever decided to interpret the measurements as representing something on a much higher plane than the sphere of plausibility.
Not five yards from the
mountain-path,
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
The character of the narrator should be taken into account. In a note, Wordsworth writes, 'Such men having little to do become credulous and talkative from indolence; and from the same cause, and other predisposing causes by which it is probable that such men may have been affected, they are prone to superstition. On which account it appeared to me proper to select a character like this to exhibit some of the general laws by which superstition acts upon the mind.' The word 'credulous' here is worth noting ...
Guinn Batten likes using italics, as if to give the illusion that this is a writer aware of the exact weight and significance of each word in the creation of a meticulous argument, as here:
'Heaney, keenly reading an English and Romantic patrimony in which the poet imaginatively sounds in order to express a maternal absence linked to place, has developed a politics and poetics of embodiment inseparable from his politics and poetics of displacement. Further, he situates the experience of embodiment as displacement within Ireland's particular history of dispossession, which includes famine (the land's failure to fulfil, maternally, the human need to 'incorporate' its bounty) ...'
Here, I'd italicize a word she doesn't italicize, 'particular,' in the phrase 'particular history' to show the falseness of her interpretation. There was nothing particular about Irish famine, which was, supposedly, 'the land's failure to fulfil, maternally, the human need to 'incorporate' its bounty) ...'
Extracts from my section Agriculture, industry and famine on the page 'Feminism:'
'On the back cover of [Peter Mathias's 'The First Industrial Nation']: 'The fate of the overwhelming mass of the population in any pre-industrial society is to pass their lives on the margins of subsistence. It was only in the eighteenth century that society in north-west Europe, particularly in England, began the break with all former traditions of economic life.'
'In the 'Prologue,' this is elaborated: 'The elemental truth must be stressed that the characteristic of any country before its industrial revolution and modernization is poverty. Life on the margin of subsistence is an inevitable condition for the masses of any nation ... The population as a whole, whether of medieval or seventeenth-century England, or nineteenth-century India, lives close to the tyranny of nature under the threat of harvest failure or disease ...
'Larry Zuckerman, 'The Potato:' 'Famine struck France thirteen times in the sixteenth century, eleven in the seventeenth, and sixteen in the eighteenth. And this tally is an estimate, perhaps incomplete, and includes general outbreaks only. It doesn't count local famines that ravaged one area or another almost yearly ...'
There was nothing particular about Irish famines, then. The fact that famines no longer occur in developed countries is due to the fact that they are developed, that they have increased agricultural productivity by mechanization, that they have increased productivity in general.
These considerations offer none of the deep, or rather shallow, significance of Guinn Batten's interpretations. Centuries ago, life was far more significant for most people than today. If their plans for the day were ruined by poor weather, then the poor weather could be interpreted as 'directed at them personally.' The development of meteorology took away this particular significance. If their cattle produced much less milk or their crops failed, then there were forces to explain it, so much more personal and significant than any humdrum scientific explanation. If a plant has a shape that suggests a part of the human body, then this is significant, not accidental. New Age thinking perpetuates this discredited mode, Guinn Batten's interpretations likewise.
The answers to the two questions posed earlier. The pitcher carried by the woman suggestively evokes, according to Guinn Batten, uterine life or urn burial, two contradictory interpretations. The jam jar, according to her, is an image of transformed purpose.
For Guinn Batten, the hunger striker Francis Hughes offers further opportunities for 'interpretation,' in this case in terms of 'the self that imitates, one might say, the destructive feminine aspect of the land). From my page on Seamus Heaney: ethical depth?
'In 1978, a ten year old girl called Lesley Gordon was decapitated when a bomb exploded under the car of William Gordon, a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment who was taking his children to primary school. He was killed too. His seven year old son was severely injured by the blast.
'The bomb was planted by Francis Hughes. The year before, he had taken part in an attack on a police vehicle in which one man was killed and another wounded. In 1978, Francis Hughes was captured, after a gun battle in which one soldier was killed and another severely wounded. After his capture, his fingerprints were found on a car used during the killing of a 77 year old Protestant woman.'
She can offer an interpretation of his self-starvation in terms of 'the destructive feminine aspect of the land.' What interpretation would she offer of the decapitation of Lesley Gordon and the deaths and injuries he inflicted on the other people? In such a case as this, Guinn Batten's project is morally as well as intellectually indefensible.
Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) reads against the grain of style history to propose that the whole of music history, from the late 16th century to the late 20th, might be better understood through the lens of ‘modernity’
David Starkie
'The making of India' Kartar Lalvani
https://artistsforpalestine.org.uk/2017/03/02/immediate-threat-to-academic-freedom-and-freedom-of-speech/
https://sites.google.com/site/ukcommitment/home/the-commit/the-signatories
http://www.the-wagnerian.com/2012/11/in-discussion-with-barry-millington-id.html
http://wagnertripping.blogspot.com/2013/05/wagners-character-problem-of-biography.html
He signed the so-called 'Commitment by UK scholars to Human Rights in Palestine,' a call to boycott Israeli institutions, but not individual Israeli scholars. The 'Commitment' is organized by Tom Hickey and Jonathan Rosenhead. Tom Hickey is prominent in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party. The evidence that the policies of the Socialist Workers' Party are deranged is overwhelming. This is the Socialist Workers' Party on the Holocaust: '…thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered… ' Overlooking the slaughter of the Jews is more than a minor oversight.
HE Minister, Jo Johnson, to Universities UK with the request that it be disseminated to all universities, and with the suggestion that the universities seek to ban events in Israel Apartheid Week.
Government and Zionists combine to disrupt Israeli Apartheid Week summary and analysis by Mike Cushman on Free Speech on Israel
https://donsspeakout.wordpress.com/category/history/statements-of-support/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/22/more-support-for-lpo-four
http://boulezian.blogspot.com/2011/09/letter-to-guardian-lpo-four.html
caucher birkar
http://campalestinestatement.blogspot.com/2014/11/statement-by-academics-at-university-of.html
https://johnblakey.wordpress.com/page/49/
https://cambridgebinveolia.wordpress.com/letters-of-support/
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2017/11/16/cambridge-vs-bds-standing-up-to-institutional-bias
malia bouattia
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6146649/jordan-peterson-cult-hero-young-white-men/
"freddy gray"
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8781855/brunei-sultans-wealth-lifestyle-sharia-law/
"alison maloney"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco0zOFN8sA
My Website www.linkagenet.com has a page on Cambridge University www.linkagenet.com/themes/cambridge-university.htm which amongst other things contains criticism of Dr Priyamvada Gopal and of the Cambridge English Faculty. I've already drawn the attention of Dr Gopal to the page.
The site does have very high rankings for a wide range of search
terms. Some recent examples:
Cambridge University excellence stupidity 1/1,190,000 [a striking
result, I think, for a page which is so new]
ethical depth 4 / 102,000,000
religion ideology honesty aphorisms 4 / 242,000
(I've an interest in short forms as well as extended forms. I've
contributed to the short literary form of the aphorism - but not to the
short form available at 'Twitter.')
Israel Islamism Palestinian ideology 5 / 1,520,000
metaphor theme 5 / 53,300,000
poetry line length 2 / 42,600,000
poem composite 1 / 19,300,000
poem modulation 1 / 601,000
metre scansion notation 5 / 13,800,000
Rilke Kafka 1 / 1,560,000
web design "Large Page Design" 4 / 44,000
bullfighting arguments action 2 / 431,000
structures plant protection support 6 / 330,000
gardening beds boards 6 / 41,000,000
gardening conservation composting water collecting 1 / 31,400,000
The criticism of Dr Gopal in the page on Cambridge is wide-ranging. I discuss amongst other things her very disturbing response to a former President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Sultan of Brunei has been criticized, completely justifiably, for the decision to begin stoning to death in Brunei, but when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was President, stonings to death were actually carried out, as well as so many other barbaric acts.
The criticism of the English Faculty isn't wide-ranging. There's criticism of members of the English Faculty (in the section 'Cambridge protest and Cambridge English') who supported the refusal to allow the Minister David Willetts to speak when he came to Cambridge. They include Dr Gopal. I discuss the striking fact that Owen Holland, who graduated in English at Cambridge and who was a postgraduate student in the English Faculty at the time, had such insensitivity to language that he could perpetrate lines of 'poetry' such as these (the reciting of the 'poem' was the central tactic in the protest):
We do not wish to rape our teachers
Your methodistic framework of excellence
We none of us believe
that any of our possessions are our own [a blatant falsehood]
So we are climbing into the driving seat
because your steering is uncomfortable to us
You can threaten to shoot at us
with rubber bullets
You can
arrest us.
You can imprison us.
but you cannot rape us
Dr Gopal seems to have accepted these lines as genuine poetry. In the section 'Dr Owen Holland and the English Faculty' I give my reasons for disagreeing.
Many of the pages of the site, including the page on Cambridge University, are wide as well as long. They can't be viewed adequately on the small screen of a mobile device.
Best Wishes,
Paul Hurt