E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Recently, a well-known literary journal in Canada, PRISM International , issued an apology for publishing a few poems by one Stephen Brown , after an editor of his was accused of insensitivity for supporting the ex-convict. It turns out, so said the apology, the magazine did not know, when they published his poetry, that he had been convicted of a vile murder years before; that he had done his time, and, released, started a new life, writing under a pseudonym, in Mexico. Once they had realised they had published a criminal, they apologised; and soon, the cancellers had Brown's poems removed from the national Parliamentary website set up to showcase Canadian poems. Stephen Brown was found guilty of having beaten a woman to death with another man - she was an Indigenous woman, Pamela George , and it was of course deeply painful to this decent community in Saskatchewan to know the killer was now free and apparently being feted by the great and good (the local university in Regi...

ON THE SUPREME COURT RULING AGAINST THE PROROGATION OF PARLIAMENT, two sonnets Rain is impartial, it falls On the client, the accuser, And the bewigged court, Without favour, without fervour; The rain functions like law, It delivers its decisions On days of death, days of birth; It touches the heavens, the earth, The in-between citizen; Unlike snow, love or hatred It never thaws; it flows Where learned minds have led… It arises, in distant tumult, Above mortal struggles of those Who would play gods to ants; To go below Machiavel faces, Reading past their blank pages, As a void, to where morals plant Forests that build up parliaments, The wood that grows strong vaults. Rain is not passionate, It is sane, measured, sober… You can drink the rain Unlike wine, and not go wild; Though sometimes, supreme, It makes people run in streets In what is only apparent chaos, To partially plan, partially drea...

THIS MAN WAS A PREMATURE BREXITEER Britain - long admired as the home of parliamentary democracy, has a history of great struggle with those who would seek to limit the powers of parliament to control royal prerogatives... it just usually isn't the government doing so. However, after three law lords ruled - correctly, in the opinion of this blog - that Article 50 (that most famous of articles) cannot be triggered by PM May without the express approval of a parliamentary vote - the PM vows to contest the ruling. In short - she seeks to short-circuit the sovereignty of the elected MPS who represent the good people of the UK. The right-wing, pro-Brexit, often borderline racist/fascist media in the UK (they know who they are) have naturally claimed three pudgy white bewigged toffs have in their posh arrogance hijacked the "will of the British people" - except, the Brexit referendum was a) not legally binding and b) was never described as such a powerful instrument as...

France has a history of seeking secular neutrality among its citizens - and a more recent history of violent attacks on its citizens by foreign fighters associated (by themselves and others) with a particular form of fundamentalist religious belief. None of this should permit the sort of scenes that unfolded today in Nice - sadly a recent victim of a horrific mass slaughter - when police officers surrounded a woman on a beach there, and ordered her to remove a piece of clothing she was wearing.  A "Burkini". This is wrong for many reasons, and we here count four: Firstly, France is the home of international fashion.  The very ethos of fashion is that while some styles are in vogue, many outrageous, outre and shocking styles can be worn publically. The bikini itself is, in many ways, a product of the cinematic glamorous Cannes lifestyle that sexually-provactive French culture has long endorsed in its more liberal phases. French fashion also has a disturbing historica...

As a creative writing lecturer I was concerned Crossland Employment Solicitors might not get me and my particular concerns.  Instead, I found them not only commercially practical and legally astute, but also imaginative, concerned and compassionate.  I would recommend them without hesitation to anyone in education. - Dr Todd Swift

A terrible injustice has occurred in the UK .  If it had happened in Russia or Iran, we'd be enraged and shocked.  A woman has terminated her pregnancy (very late) by her own hand, and buried the dead foetus.  The judge and law call this a baby, and have jailed her for 8 years.  The judge is a Christian fanatic, as it turns out, opposed to abortion laws as they now stand.  As a Catholic, I know what I am supposed to think, but as a rational and tolerant human I know what I believe - no man (or other person) can tell a woman what to do with her womb; Sarah Catt may have done something sad, unfortunate, even borderline troubling.  Wrong, unethical - debatable.  But criminal?  No.  This person is a political prisoner, imprisoned by a fanatical Christian patriarchy, and she should and must be freed.  In a week that bristles with rage at MP's shouting at police officers, let us spare some sympathy for Ms. Catt, who has been slapped with the ...

Belgium has just banned all wearing of clothing which obscures or semi-obscures the face - in a clear attempt to stop certain religious clothing most often associated with women of a certain faith - on the absurd grounds that no one should be allowed to "see but not be seen" in public. Are bans on tinted car windows and sunglasses to follow? Bans on security cameras? We in the West live in a pan-optical society, and the right to look extends far beyond the right to be seen. Otherwise x-ray specs would be enforced. We have a right, surely, to protect our dignity, modesty, person - and even privacy. More to the point, is religion such a threat to the secular powers that be (namely so-called democracy and capitalism) that it must be basically cleared from the market place and the public squares, as a contagion, like second-hand smoke? Religion threatens humanist mastery, and especially the aims of instrumentalism. It gestures to realms and spaces less visible, and less scientifi...

Thanks for all the get-well comments. My condition is ongoing but hopefully can be managed by the treatments on offer. At the moment I am mostly in some pain throughout the day. I don't intend to return too often to these pages for a month or so, but did want to briefly mention that, after thinking about it, I agree with the arrest of Polanski. Chinatown is a great film, and was once my favourite, - as is Fearless Vampire Killers, Bitter Moon, and Frantic - but what he did (which he admitted to) is a crime that warrants punishment. As with Pound, we can have the man, and the work, and need not tar the one with the other. Polanski's tormented, oddly unfortunate life deepened the filmic intensity of his best projects, but the films rarely open out onto any apology or remorse, for evil. They're works of genius; but a genius inflected darkly.

Imprisonment for criminals has three or four possible, sometimes overlapping goals: a) punishment; b) rehabilitation c) prevention (keeping the perpetrators off the streets) and d. revenge - "Justice" is somewhere to be found between these. Society and citizens of all political stripes tend to confuse these various aims, especially when their own loved ones are victims. Some people think prison is just to punish, others just to improve - but one basic belief has, more or less, been accepted - when the criminal is released back into society, they should be accepted back, having done their time and "paid their dues". Not to do so is simply to turn one's back on the system itself - for if ex-cons are not so reabsorbed, but ostracised completely, what else are they to do, but turn back to their old criminal networks? So it is, we tend to hope the rehab works, and the punishment fits the crime. Murder, of course, is a problem. Because only the ultimate sanction, payi...