Far off over the leagues of it,
the wind,
playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.

But more than the many-foamed ways
of the sea,
I know him
of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
who awaits.

Dubious,
facing three ways,
welcoming wayfarers,
he whom the sea-orchard
shelters from the west,
from the east
weathers sea-wind;
fronts the great dunes.

Wind rushes
over the dunes,
and the coarse, salt-crusted grass
answers.

Heu,
it whips round my ankles!

ii.
Small is
this white stream,
flowing below ground
from the poplar-shaded hill,
but the water is sweet.

Apples on the small trees
are hard,
too small,
too late ripened
by a desperate sun
that struggles through sea-mist.

The boughs of the trees
are twisted
by many bafflings;
twisted are
the small-leafed boughs.

But the shadow of them
is not the shadow of the mast head
nor of the torn sails.

Hermes, Hermes,
the great sea foamed,
gnashed its teeth about me;
but you have waited,
were sea-grass tangles with
shore-grass.

At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.

Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.

The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.

“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.

“Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick.”

“Oh,” said Nick.

Across the bay they found the other boat beached. Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up on the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.

They walked up from the beach through a meadow that was soaking wet with dew, following the young Indian who carried a lantern. Then they went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills. It was much lighter on the logging road as the timber was cut away on both sides. The young Indian stopped and blew out his lantern and they all walled on along the road.

They came around a bend and a dog came out barking. Ahead were the lights of the shanties where the Indian bark-peelers lived. More dogs rushed out at them. The two Indians sent them back to the shanties. In the shanty nearest the road there was a light in the window. An old woman stood in the doorway holding a lamp.

Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her. The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke cut of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty. She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt. Her head was turned to one side. In the upper bunk was her husband. He had cut his foot very badly with an ax three days before. He was smoking a pipe. The room smelled very bad.

Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.

“This lady is going to have a baby, Nick,” he said.

“I know,” said Nick.

“You don’t know,” said his father. “Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.”

“I see,” Nick said.

Just then the woman cried out.

“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.

“No. I haven’t any anaesthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”

The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.

The woman in the kitchen motioned to the doctor that the water was hot. Nick’s father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin. Into the water left in the kettle he put several things he unwrapped from a handkerchief.

“Those must boil,” he said, and began to scrub his hands in the basin of hot water with a cake of soap he had brought from the camp. Nick watched his father’s hands scrubbing each other with the soap. While his father washed his hands very carefully and thoroughly, he talked.

“You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they’re not. When they’re not they make a lot of trouble for everybody. Maybe I’ll have to operate on this lady. We’ll know in a little while.”

When he was satisfied with his hands he went in and went to work.

“Pull back that quilt, will you, George?” he said. “I’d rather not touch it.”

Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, “Damn squaw bitch!” and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him. Nick held the basin for his father. It all took a long time.

His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman.

“See, it’s a boy, Nick,” he said. “How do you like being an intern?”

Nick said. “All right.” He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.

“There. That gets it,” said his father and put something into the basin.

Nick didn’t look at it.

“Now,” his father said, “there’s some stitches to put in. You can watch this or not, Nick, just as you like. I’m going to sew up the incision I made.”

Nick did not watch. His curiosity had been gone for a long time.

His father finished and stood up. Uncle George and the three Indian men stood up. Nick put the basin out in the kitchen.

Uncle George looked at his arm. The young Indian smiled reminiscently.

“I’ll put some peroxide on that, George,” the doctor said.

He bent over the Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.

“I’ll be back in the morning.” the doctor said, standing up.

“The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.”

He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.

“That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said. “Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”

Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.

“Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.

“Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs,” the doctor said. “I must say he took it all pretty quietly.”

He pulled back the blanket from the Indian’s head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.

“Take Nick out of the shanty, George,” the doctor said.

There was no need of that. Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back.

It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.

“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along; Nickie,” said his father, all his post-operative exhilaration gone. “It was an awful mess to put you through.”

“Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” Nick asked.

“No, that was very, very exceptional.”

“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”

“Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?”

“Not very many, Nick.”

“Do many women?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Don’t they ever?”

“Oh, yes. They do sometimes.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Where did Uncle George go?”

“He’ll turn up all right.”

“Is dying hard, Daddy?”

“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

They were seated in the boat. Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing; he felt quite sure that he would never die.

After rummaging in her bags, Corinna pulls out a book and gives it to you.
“But this isn’t it,” you say, seeing on the cover an unknown title and the name of an unknown author: Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera. “The book they confiscated was by Ikoka!”‘
That’s what I’ve given you. In Ataguitania books can circulate only with fake dust jackets.”
As the taxi moves at top speed through the dusty, smelly outskirts, you cannot resist the temptation to open the book and see whether Corinna has given you the real one. Fat chance. It is a book you are seeing for the first time, and it does not look the least bit like a Japanese novel: it begins with a man riding across a mesa among the agaves, and he sees some predatory birds, called zopilotes, flying overhead.
“If the dust jacket’s a fake,” you remark, “the text is a fake, too.”
“What were you expecting?” Corinna says. “Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won’t stop. We’re in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen.”
“And who gains by it, in the end?”
“It’s too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it’s the police or our organization.”
The taxi driver is pricking up his ears. You motion Corinna to restrain herself from making unwise remarks.
But she says, “Don’t be afraid. This is a fake taxi. What really alarms me, though, is that there’s another taxi following us.”
“Fake or real?”
“Fake, certainly, but I don’t know whether it belongs to the police or to us.”
You peep back along the road. “But,” you cry, “there’s a third taxi following the second…”
“That could be our people checking the movements of the police, but it could also be the police on the trail of our people….”
The second taxi passes you, stops; some armed men leap out and make you get out of your taxi. “Police! You’re under arrest!” All three of you are handcuffed and forced into the second taxi: you, Corinna, and your driver.
Corinna, calm and smiling, greets the policemen: “I’m Gertrude. This is a friend. Take us to headquarters.”
Are you gaping? Corinna-Gertrude whispers to you, in your language, “Don’t be afraid. They’re fake policemen: actually they are our men.”
You have barely driven off again when the third taxi forces the second to stop. More armed men jump out of it, their faces hidden; they disarm the policemen, remove your and Corinna’s handcuffs, handcuff the policemen, and fling all of you into their taxi.
Corinna-Gertrude seems indifferent. “Thanks, friends,” she says. “I’m Ingrid, and this man is one of us. Are you taking us to the command post?”
“Shut up, you!” says one who seems the leader. “Don’t try acting smart, you two! Now we have to blindfold you. You’re our hostages.”
You don’t know what to think any more, also because Corinna-Gertrude-Ingrid has been taken away in the other taxi. When you are again allowed to use your limbs and your eyes, you find yourself in a police inspector’s office or in a barracks. Noncoms in uniform photograph you, full-face and profile; they take your fingerprints. An officer calls, “Alfonsina!”
You see Gertrude-Ingrid-Corinna come in, also in uniform; she hands the officer a folder of documents to sign.
Meanwhile, you follow the routine from one desk to another: one policeman takes your documents into custody, another your money, a third your clothes, which are replaced with a prisoner’s overalls.
“What sort of trap is this?” you manage to ask Ingrid-Gertrude-Alfonsina, who has come over to you at a moment when your guards have their backs turned.”
Among the revolutionaries there are some counterrevolutionary infiltrators who have made us fall into a police ambush. But luckily there are also many revolutionaries who have infiltrated the police, and they have pretended to recognize me as a functionary of this command. As for you, they’ll send you to a fake prison, or rather, to a real state prison that is, however, controlled not by them but by us.”

SIR – It was with sadness that I learnt of David Cameron’s visit to Indonesia this week to renew arms sales. I still bear scars and a permanent walking impairment as a result of an Indonesian bombing raid on my village using British-supplied Hawk jets. Two years ago, Mr Cameron publicly acknowledged the “terrible situation” in my homeland of West Papua. When he became Prime Minister, thousands across West Papua took to the streets to celebrate his appointment, with great hope. Today, my people will have tears in their eyes.

Human rights groups estimate that more than 400,000 of my people have been killed by the Indonesian military. Hundreds more languish in jail as political prisoners. There is no democracy in West Papua.

Benny Wenda
Oxford

Republished from the Daily Telegraph

I saw in a hall an arrow pointing the way and I thought that this inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inescapable and fatal projectile that pierced the flesh of men and of lions and clouded the sun at Thermopolae and gave Harald Sigurdarson six feet of English earth forever.

Some days later someone showed me a photograph of a Magyar horseman. A coiled lasso circled the breast of his mount. I learned that the lasso, which once whipped through the air and brought down the bulls of the prairie, was now nothing more than a haughty trapping of Sunday harness.

In the west cemetery I saw a runic cross, chiseled in red marble. The arms curved as they widened out, and a circle encompassed them. That limited, circumscribed cross represented the other one, the free-armed cross, which in its turn represents the gallows where a god suffered, the “vile machine” railed at by Lucian of Samosata.

Cross, lasso, and arrow–former tools of man, debased or exalted now to the status of symbols. Why should I marvel at them, when there is not a single thing on earth that oblivion does not erase or memory change, and when no one knows into what images he himself will be transmuted by the future.

In case you can’t see a tracklisting, the bands include, The Men, White Denim, The Rural Alberta Advantage, Death, Field Music, Smiley With A Knife, Lite, The Wave Pictures, Jonathan Coulton, Cloud Nothings, Favourite Sons, Big Scary, Ty Segall and Girls.

They have squirrels like we have croissant from geecologist on 8tracks.

Here’s an embedded ‘Pin’:

Feel free to hook up with me on Pinterest, and I’d obviously really welcome your thoughts on how this is going to be an effective tool as well – that’s why there’s a comments area at the bottom of this page

Audience

How Pinterest is being used at the moment is very interesting. The ever on-the-ball Mashable have already done their first infographic about it:

If you’re craving more info, check out Michael Litman’s presentation.

Underlying the brain’s ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term “open architecture” to describe a system that is versatile enough to change – or rearrange – to accommodate the varying demands on it. Within the constraints of our genetic legacy, our brain presents a beautiful example of open architecture. Thanks to this design, we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.

Thus the reading brain is part of highly successful two-way dynamics. Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant ways from the pathways used in reading English. When Chinese readers first try to read in English, their brains attempt to use Chinese-based neuronal pathways. The act of learning to read Chinese characters has literally shaped the Chinese reading brain. Similarly, much of how we think and what we think about is based on insights and associations generated from what we read. As the author Joseph Epstein put it, “A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.”

These two dimensions of the reading brain’s development and evolution – the personal – intellectual and the biological – are rarely described together, but there are critical and wonderful lessons to be discovered in doing just that.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop pass the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.

You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.

You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacked begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries.

No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which , having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let’s see how it begins.

Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough. Watch out, you’re elbowing your neighbors; apologize, at least.

Or perhaps the bookseller didn’t wrap the volume; he gave it to you in a bag. This simplifies matters. You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you; the light is green, you’re blocking traffic.

One of the best tracks on Extras is Liza Radley, another song about disenfranchisement from the place and society you’re growing up in.

For some reason Paul Weller changed the lyrics for the album version (above, can’t find demo version online anywhere), and again the demo is much stronger. Lyrics reproduced below:

Liza Radley see the girl with long hair
See her creeping ‘cross summer lawns at midnight

And all the people in the town where we live say
“She’s not quite right”
But she don’t fit in with a small town

They just can’t understand why she’s got to be free
And for their lives only, she cries

Liza Radley see her jump through loneliness
Liza Radley take me when you go

And all the people in the town where we live say
“She’s not quite right”
But she don’t fit in with a small town

They just can’t understand why she’s got to be free
And for their lives only, she cries

Liza Radley I pledge myself to you alone
Then she kissed my face and says “love means nothing at all”
She kissed my face and says “life means nothing at all”

Plus as a bonus, the lyrics to the Burning Sky one that’s still potent for me:

How are things in your little world, I hope they’re going well and you are too.
Do you still see the same old crowd, the ones who used to meet every Friday.
I’m really sorry that I can’t be there but work comes first, I’m sure you’ll understand.
Things are really taking off for me business is thriving and I’m showing a profit and
And in any case it wouldn’t be the same,
’cause we’ve all grown up
and we’ve got our lives
and the values that we had
once upon a time,
seem stupid now
’cause the rent must be paid
and some bonds severed and others made.

Now I don’t want you to get me wrong, ideals are fine when you are young
and I must admit we had a laugh, but that’s all it was and ever will be,
’cause the Burning Sky keeps burning bright. And as long as it does (and it always will),
there’s no time for dreams when commerce calls.
And the taxman’s shouting
’cause he wants his dough
and the wheels of finance
won’t begin to slow.
And it’s only us realists
who are gonna come through
’cause there’s only one power
higher than that of truth and that’s the Burning Sky.

Oh and by the way I must tell you, before I sign off,
that I’ve got a meeting next week,
with the head of a big corporate
I can’t disclose who but I’m sure you’ll know it and.
And the Burning sky keeps burning bright.
And it won’t turn off til it’s had enough,
it’s the greedy bastard who won’t give up,
and you’re just a dreamer if you don’t realize,
and the sooner you do will be the better for you,
then we’ll all be happy and we’ll all be wise, and we’ll all bow down to the Burning Sky.
Then we’ll all be happy and we’ll all be wise and together we will live beneath the Burning Sky.

Full demo version here: