The Big Guns
Via Holborn, and from the pages of the communist Morning Star, a headline of crushing cultural import:
Yes, with an election looming, the full weight of the nation’s leftwing “poetry community” is being brought to bear, no doubt decisively. Inspired and uplifted by these leftwing poets and their immense cultural gravity, “our austerity-scarred society” will be “healed” with the balm of “social justice.” Being leftwing poets, there are of course demands attached, including an entirely selfless call for even more “state support for… producers of the arts and culture” – half a billion or so a year being deemed insufficient, you see – along with a “universal basic income pilot,” and “an end to the political scapegoating of the unemployed.”
No tittering at the back.
Readers who can recall a line of verse by any of the signatories will receive a drinks voucher.
And if searing leftwing poetry is your thing, you may wish to gargle the radical outpourings of Mr Roy G Guzmán.
Careful, David. They might go on strike.
Careful, David. They might go on strike.
They’ve threatened to before.
How we trembled.
“Massed hendecasyllables, attack!”
Oh no. Not the
Poets. I
Bet
The Tories
Are absolutely quaking in
Their boots with
Fear
Right now.*
*Sarcasm
From David’s comment at his They’ve threatened to before link:
Among writers and artists, there’s often a belief that they should be financially rewarded regardless of whether there’s sufficient (or any) demand for what they do, regardless of oversupply, and regardless of whether what they do has any market value.
The rabbit hole I go down when thinking about the arts and public funding and such is do the arts make people into more egotistical jackasses or does greater funding for the arts simply draw egotistical jackasses away from other endeavors? If the latter, then we must consider if the increase in productivity in having egotistical jackasses out of productive people’s way exceeds the damage done by giving more money/power to egotistical jackasses.
If there’s a young person out there looking for a subject for their PhD thesis in economics, that one is free. For a small fee I’m available to provide future grist for publish-or-perish ‘research’ papers.
That’s taking Keats’ “legislators of the world” line too seriously.
Or was that Shelley?
Right, I have to be up very early tomorrow to vote, so it’s time to be horizontal. I’ll leave you heathens to it.
Play nicely. Use coasters.
No tittering at the back.
Too late – I was already in full guffaw after reading that headline.
As amusing as the whole thing is, Labour seems to be the perfect home for these people. They really do expect to be handed other people’s money, forcibly taken, for their choice of “work”, rather than earning a wage for what people with more money need doing/making/etc.
Childhood and adolescence alike … cannot be fed solely by concerts, theories, and abstract teaching. The truth we aim to teach them should appeal foremost to their fantasy, to their hearts, and only then to their minds.
Readers who can recall a line of verse by any of the signatories will receive a drinks voucher.
“Can I have fifty pounds to mend the shed? I’m right on my uppers. I can pay you back when this postal order comes from Australia. Honestly.”
—the poet McTeagle
Tremble before our might, puny mortals, or we will write a metonymic aphorism about you!
Careful, David. They might go on strike.
That brought back fond memories of my late father. Very early ’80s (he died ’82) and that was roughly what he said when someone came on TV to be interviewed as the leader of the Unemployed Union or something similar.
(For the avoidance of doubt, no Tory Toff he. Born in the slums of Bradford, not allowed to take up a scholarship to Bradford Grammar at 14 as he had to go and work in he mills until he joined the Fleet Air Arm in ’43. Spent most of his life self employed or as a pub landlord)
PS I should have added that his favourite quip in the ’70s when he was running a pub was that he wished the Labour governemt would nationalise the pubs. When asked why by his customers he would reply that so he could sell the worst beer in town (Pickering,since you ask). Sadly, only a few got it, for the rest it fell on stony ground.
Oh, David.
It’s not “Roy G Guzman”
It’s “Roy G Biv”
No wonder the electronic blinky lights behind the bar are always burning up.
Last year around this time there was a TV ad campaign for, IIRC, the latest iPad. Quick pass through the lovely display / touch screen, great cameras, fast networking, cool applications… Very beautiful visuals were all about using it for drawing, digital painting, video, writing, etc. Stentorian voiceover was poetically gushing on and on about how crude matter, engineering, and even (gasp) science were not good for humanity or fit food for the soul, compared to the transcendental stuff created by the, uhm, creatives.
I watched this several times that season with my jaw in my lap. I think it should be mandatory for all 17 year olds to take an in-depth tour of a large-scale computer chip fab, and a Google server farm. And a sewage treatment plant. And be able to explain what they were shown.
(4000 word rant deleted)
(I’ve really got to look up Bill Whittle’s essay comparing the Egyptian pyramids and a 7-11 mini-store.)
These people think they are ode a living
Things are going from bard to verse
I cannot adopt a stanz(a) forgiving
…
(Sorry, ran out of creativity. I need more taxpayer money right now)
That’s setting the bar pretty high, David. I think even recognizing any of their names should come with a “picked egg” – or perhaps even some Hump Fat.
Stentorian voiceover was poetically gushing on and on about how crude matter, engineering, and even (gasp) science were not good for humanity or fit food for the soul, compared to the transcendental stuff created by the, uhm, creatives.
I’ve worked with many a marketing department in the Web 2.0/tech industry. There’s a deep, deep-rooted jealousy of the engineers in there that manifests as a massive inferiority complex.
Labour seems to be the perfect home for these people. They really do expect to be handed other people’s money, forcibly taken, for their choice of “work”
I know of a group of “experimental” performers who’ve been subsidised by the Arts Council – which is to say, by the taxpayer – for three decades. We’re talking figures north of £250,000 a year. Once you strip away the extorted income, the group’s actual earned income – from ticket sales, etc – is negligible. Despite this parasitic and unsustainable arrangement, a press release tells us that their chronic, self-inflicted dependency is “a good argument for the importance of arts funding in England and being a trigger to further revenue being brought to the country.” Because confiscating millions of pounds of taxpayers’ earnings and throwing it at commercially unviable performance art, thereby resulting in a financial loss, somehow benefits the British economy.
Apparently we should be thanking them.
In the mid-Nineties, when their public subsidy was temporarily reduced, the group staged an indignant “demonstration” at the ICA, where passers-by were encouraged to believe that attempts to reduce the number of marginally artistic freeloaders were in fact due to “hostility… towards challenging and innovative work.”
That kind of self-flattery, practised for years, is all but impervious.
ACTOldFart “These people think they are ode a living
Things are going from bard to verse
I cannot adopt a stanz(a) forgiving”
Bravo Sir (or Madam)!
The Yartz here in Oz seem to be going through one of their periodic rounds of insanity, too – with very little justification. (The government has merged the Department of Art with other departments, resulting in a mega department that doesn’t have the word ‘Art’ in its name…. which is apparently very, very important for reasons which are entirely inexplicable to me).
A lot of organisations as a result have been defending their arts grants. I’ve observed many of these institutions lose arts grants and almost die as a result; such an experience, you imagine, might make them – individually and as a community – quite skeptical of continuing dependence on public subsidy: it might make them, indeed, seek alternatives actively and work towards achieving those alternatives. Not a bit of it. Whenever they lose public funding they have, almost to a man, defended the system that has induced in them this fatal dependency. It’s crazy.
I’m a poet myself; most of us get little, if anything, by way of funding. And yet even amongst us maddies there is a weird, stultifyingly conformist acceptance of this system that has done us no good whatsoever.
The Yartz here in Oz seem to be going through one of their periodic rounds of insanity, too
A subject we’ve touched on before, I think.
Do note the air of humility, so common among our creative betters. Particular attention should be paid to the colossal artistic talents of Ms Theia Connell, whose creations will be forever seared into your mind.
“NORWAY: ‘Artist’ Who Spray-Paints with Anus Receives $4M in Public Funds”
https://nationalfile.com/norway-artist-who-spray-paints-with-anus-receives-4m-in-public-funds/
Poets toiling in the culture mines yesterday:
Starter:
There was a young poet from Scunthorpe…
NORWAY: ‘Artist’ Who Spray-Paints with Anus Receives $4M in Public Funds
And here he is, in action.
Remember, citizens. They’re spending your money for you. Because clearly they know best.
Poets toiling in the culture mines yesterday:
Tungsten-carbide drills…
‘Artist’ Who Spray-Paints with Anus…here he is is in action…
Meh, typical derivative patriarchal ripoff of the powerful and moving wxymns art masterpiece, PlopEgg Painting Performance #1, the artist of which masterpiece, in true misogynist fashion, only received a tiny fraction of the $4 million Mr. Anus did.
Incidentally, for those with an interest in godawful art that’s funded by the taxpayer, this post and subsequent thread over at Artblog may entertain. It touches on many of the vanities and absurdities mentioned here over the years.
This post being in regards to poets, was waiting for someone to point this out (perhaps I missed it?) but the greatest murderers of the 20th century, Mao and Stalin, fashioned themselves as poets. And the guy in third place, Herr Hitler, was a frustrated artist.
The arts are chock full of people who do not like reality. When we’re lucky, they channel that frustration into their art. When we’re unlucky, they aspire to seize the reins of power and do their ‘art’ on society as a whole. It’s like we’ve taken the holiness of the Church, the idea that you can’t criticize the priests or the pope or whomever, lest you be criticizing (blaspheming) God and transferred that sacredness to the arts, to literature, etc. I’ve studied a good bit of art and literature. While I’m not by any means a dilettante (however it’s defined these days), I’m no philistine. But when I suggest, just suggest, that maybe, just possibly maybe, our over-emphasis on the arts is not good for our society, I get reactions kinda like this:
Heh…David, thanks for the h/t on the previous post. Speaking of Stupefying Vanity, I must have been so excited I…uh…put two comments on that post regarding poets and the arts that actually belong over here on this one. Can they be moved or can I repost them?
Even when they aren’t sucking up your tax dollars, these arts-y people can be annoying little b*chs with their constant begging. I used to go somewhat frequently to the local theaters (especially after I gave up on Hollywood movies) and other performing arts. Consequently I’m on their mailing lists and email lists and such. The marketing for the actual performances seems to come secondary to fund raisers of various kinds. Worse is in the last three years or so, what used to be a pretty interesting, quirky theater company in Orlando called Mad Cow has been producing woke plays and ‘workshops’ and such. Basically they seem to have followed Hollywood into the echo chamber. What the do promote has gotten so tiresome theme-wise that I can’t trust that haven’t poisoned even the non-PC sounding productions.
Can they be moved or can I repost them?
Liking things tidy, I’ve moved them. Albeit, I’ve just realised, in reverse order.
Ah, close enough.
Hey, no problem. Thanks. I don’t think that the order matters. Except as it speaks to my frame of mind, which is all squirrels and hobgoblins anyway.
Except as it speaks to my frame of mind,
I generally assume you’re all high on butane or huffing paint thinner.
or huffing paint thinner.
Well, some of us (not saying who) have been huffing Night Train. Though others prefer MD 20/20. For some reason they tell me that one is gonna be big in the New Year.
A fun Christmas gift idea:
http://www.thepizzle.net/the-best-alcoholic-beverage-to-inhale-through-your-humidifier/
[ Discreetly slides cylinder of nitrous oxide out of sight. ]
There once was a subsidised poet
Who wanted more money, although it
Was obvious to all
He delivered **** all
While praising himself, don’t ya know it.
“a good argument for the importance of arts funding in England and being a trigger to further revenue being brought to the country.”
Mrs J and I will be spending a week in London next year.
Among the planned activities are a show in the West End and an afternoon in the National Gallery and perhaps the National Portrait Gallery.
I suspect that little “arts funding” went to the production of any of the art which we will be enjoying and which draws tourists such as us.
“NORWAY: ‘Artist’ Who Spray-Paints with Anus Receives $4M in Public Funds”
I can do that as well, but only in 3 shades of brown.
NORWAY: ‘Artist’ Who Spray-Paints with Anus Receives $4M in Public Funds
The muzzies hate us for a reason. Just sayin’.
Just because u chops
up illiterate gobbledy-
gook into
sentence fragments and u
arrange them like
cake baaaad cake
cake cake
layers, it does
not follow
that u
have created poetry, not even if it be Ur-poetry
even if it be a baaaad one – no fear, dear.