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

Apparently, as we all know, the Mayan calendar tediously predicts the end of the world this Friday - or, rather, tediously, the media of the West has inundated us with stories and films about this for the last few years.  The end is rather an anti-climax.  Except, a horrific massacre of children in America reminds us that doom is not farcical, but horrifically potential, in all our lives as individuals, if not as whole communities; after all, America is in mourning but it has survived this onslaught.  Calls for gun control are worthy but a little naive, though gun control is an essential step for America as it seeks to become a mature and civilised nation - naive, because American culture, and by extension, the cultures of Britain, Canada, Australia, and Europe - are exceptionally violent.  As Frankie Goes To Hollywood said about thirty years ago, "sex and violence are the new gods."  Not quite new.  About as new as the Mayans, probably.  However, the ...

As recent Eyewear posts have discussed, many British poets are (rightly I think) concerned, lest poetry become commodified, incorporated into a part of the capitalist literary industry. Sadly - or perhaps happily for those less-Marxist - novelists have fewer limits to their access to the culture of commodification. Indeed, prose writers are routinely coopted into an increasingly slick assembly-line approach to narrative-based writing: novel, radio play, audiobook, then audiovisual adaptation for TV or film - the "book" being simply the first in a potentially (and legally) infinite series of incorporations across all foreseeable media platforms. Meanwhile, back on Planet (Man) Booker, no one seems to have stopped the tedious juggernaut of endless back-slapping and PR machinations. Yet another prize has been concocted, out of the list of 41 Booker-winners, so far. The first was in 1969, so this isn't even the 40th anniversary (that's next year) - or is it? At any rate,...

Eliot Spitzer's sudden downfall (one almost unparallelled in modern American history) raises issues no thinking person should avoid. On the one hand, he appears the classic Tartuffe - hypocritically representing exactly that which he secretly despises, even undermines - bourgeois law and morality - on the other, perhaps a deeply, sadly flawed human being, struggling with desires most humans are familiar with. It is both symbolically perfect, and exceptionally sensational that the lawman who broke high-class sex rings used them himself - but it is hardly, on reflection, either peculiar, or even extraordinarily wicked. Eyewear feels Spitzer was right to resign because of his lack of judgement (surely such vices are not compatible with his occupation) - but not because of any moral lapse. That is for him, his family, and his faith to work out, out of the public eye. In the meantime, is Western society placing too much pressure on the lawman , the public official, indeed, each of the ...

The BBC lied . Perhaps not shocking news, but it should be. Those three letters (two the same) once symbolised - along with wartime propaganda - a sense of integrity, a sense of British decency. No more. A few years back, the elegant, if somewhat worthy film Quiz Show told the story of how the Golden Age of American TV in the Eisenhower Era was exposed for the sham it was - about as honest as a two-bit carnival in Idaho - but the story seemed remote from contemporary experience - we all knew, or thought we knew, that the Wizard of Oz was trumped up quackery, and that grand illusions and narratives were the order of the day; unflappable, cynical, we took our daily doses of TV with grains of salt leavening the laudanum - in a blissful opium dream, unwilling to consider the truth, or consequences. Well. If institutions like the BBC fix their contests and call-ins, for better TV, what else is fixed, in British society? Dossiers for war? Reports on police culpability in the shooting of inn...