The current political climate is showing a political will that is struggling to effectively come to terms with global warming, let alone deal with it. Whilst a serious threat of this nature is a first for civilisation, politicians struggle with it because it can directly conflict with the agendas of those who helped them into power – and it is those same agenda’s which seem to be contributing to global warming in the first place.

The finance required to fund an election attempt in the 21st century is now of a size that can only be raised in the corporate sector. (It also raises the issue of whether these financial implications inhibit the true application of the democratic process for anyone seeking office, because of onerous financial considerations.)

As far as the leadership of any political party is concerned, raising financial support produces the problem of divided loyalties between sponsors and electors. A solution seems to have been found in the introduction of the “Party Line”, which effectively fudges the issues of local democracy by confining activity to the Party Agenda.

Political parties can demonstrate control over their members through adherence to the Party Line. This in turn provides corporate sponsors with the confidence to invest and support an organisation that can manage its direction and any changes to that direction. In so doing it can deliver on policies which are capable of supporting corporate views and desires.

For business to invest in anything, be it new equipment, staff or sponsorship, it needs to be sure that there is an acceptable level of return on that investment, whatever that might be. That is the nature of business and we should have no problem with that discipline.

However the actual democratic process seems to be under increasing threat from the powerful influences the corporate sector can now wield, further exacerbated by the acceleration of the doctrines of Capitalism across the globe.

The challenge lies in the shift in people power that this process seems to be implementing. We now have a reduction in voters at the ballot boxes because of apathy we are told, but a greater assertion of control over the corporate sector through consumerism.

Companies react to the will of there customers and this in turn causes movement by political reaction to meet corporate need. Somehow the corporate sector has managed to inject itself between the politician and the voter, enabling it to increasingly introduce corporate values and the dictates of profit into our everyday life.

Whilst consumerism operates in a similar fashion to democracy, our ability to influence and change could become restricted to our needs as consumers, rather than our needs as members of society. This new democracy is unhealthy because of the serious imbalance it creates within society, at a time when we need to be able to function as flexibly as possible in coming to terms and dealing with climate change.

Copyright 2008 – John Coombes

Born in 1946 in South London and with a Secondary education, for 35 years John Coombes had a successful career in the City where he built several companies and a £100 million group. In the late 80′s he became disillusioned with “just making money” and in his early 40′s suffered several traumas including ME, Breakdown and Bankruptcy. In the space of 18 months Coombes went from a City boardroom to the paint shop in a small art metal works factory. At the time the Stock market and housing market also collapsed and he lost everything, including his family.

Over the last 20 years he has embarked upon a sabbatical which has resulted in him now coming to view life and its workings from a new, totally different and more meaningful perspective. In his manuscript “What if WE are God”, of which this article is an extract, there are amusing as well as very poignant stories that provide the backdrop to a deeply penetrating observation on the human condition, and how we seem to continually hold ourselves back from realizing our true potential as a species in this thing called life.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Coombes

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This fifth offering from Jean Seaton, Professor of Media Studies at Westminster University, is a passionate appraisal of news and the basis of it within society today.

In ten tight chapters Jean takes the reader through her principle ideas, from Blood in the High street to Global Compassion, dissecting the representation of major tragedies played out by news corporations for mass consumption and arguing passionately that news is an essential part of a free society.

The frank and often personal accounts of news digestion and analogies to food, especially Jeans sincere and compelling accounts of her own childhood experiences in her Fathers butchers shop make an otherwise complex and often inaccessible subject matter personal, memorable and hugely relevant.

Carnage and the Media: The Making and Breaking of News about Violence is available from all good book shops: priced £19.99
Published by Penguin Books

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The Whitbread is one of the longest established and esteemed book awards in the UK and celebrates some of the most enjoyable books published in the UK each year across a number of different genres.

There are six awards in total – five category awards (Novel, First Novel, Biography, Poetry and Children’s) and, from these, one overall winner – the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Ali Smith Won Whitbread Novel Award 2005 for her work The Acceidental.

This year the awards attracted 476 entries – the highest total ever – and included a record number of entries in the Biography and First Novel categories with 114 and 80 books submitted respectively. Each category’s shortlist was chosen by a panel of judges, who this year included writer and broadcaster John Humphrys; authors Philippa Gregory, Margaret Drabble and Linda Newbery; comedy writer and performer Arabella Weir and CBBC children’s presenter Lizo Mzimba.

Since the introduction of the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, four times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

Novel Award
Renowned writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel Award 2005 for her first full-length novel The Accidental. It is the portrayal of a 12-year-old girl. Astrid is spending the summer in a holiday home with her family in Norfolk. It is a substandard house in a substandard town and she knows for sure nothing is going to happen there all substandard summer. So she starts filming the dawn breaking each morning on her Sony digital camera. Essentially a modern-day reworking of Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem, this remarkable novel is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark.

About The Accidental, Whitbread Award judges said: “This extraordinary novel of family life combined humour, sadness and mystery with a wonderful linguistic playfulness and invention.”

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories And Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002; The Whole Stories and Other Stories (2003) and The Accidental (2005). Ali Smith also writes for the Guardian, the Scotsman and the TLS.

First Novel Award
Tash Aw wins the Whitbread First Novel Award for his novel The Harmony Silk Factory. It is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loves Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. A graduate of the University of East Anglia, he now lives in London. He began his career writing short stories. Citing his influences as Flaubert, Faulkner and Nabokov, he is now writing his second novel.

Book of the Year Award
Biographer Hilary Spurling has won the prestigious 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year award for the second part of her masterful biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master, a work which took her 15 years to complete. The announcement was made on 24 January at an awards ceremony held at The Brewery in Central London.

Matisse the Master, published by Hamish Hamilton, is the fifth biography to take the overall prize. Claire Tomalin was the last author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year with a biography taking the prize in 2002 for Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.

Since the introduction of the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, it has been won seven times by a novel, three times by a first novel, four times by a biography, five times by a collection of poetry and once by a children’s book.

Biographer Hilary Spurling was born in Stockport, England, in 1940. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, she was arts editor, theatre critic and subsequently literary editor for The Spectator during the 1960s. She is a regular reviewer for The Observer and the Daily Telegraph.

Her first book was a biography of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, published in two volumes in 1974 and 1984. She is also the author of a biography of the novelist Paul Scott and of the painter Henri Matisse, published in two volumes in 1998 and 2005. The latter volume, Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954 (2005) won the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

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by John Donne

SEND me some tokens, that my hope may live
Or that my easeless thoughts may sleep and rest;
Send me some honey, to make sweet my hive,
That in my passions I may hope the best.
I beg nor ribbon wrought with thine own hands,
To knit our loves in the fantastic strain
Of new-touch’d youth; nor ring to show the stands
Of our affection, that, as that’s round and plain,
So should our loves meet in simplicity;
No, nor the corals, which thy wrist enfold,
Laced up together in congruity,
To show our thoughts should rest in the same hold;
No, nor thy picture, though most gracious,
And most desired, ’cause ’tis like the best
Nor witty lines, which are most copious,
Within the writings which thou hast address’d.
Send me nor this nor that, to increase my score,
But swear thou think’st I love thee, and no more.

Source: John Donne. Poems of John Donne. vol I. Edited by E. K. Chambers. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896: 80-81.

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Bernard Kops was born in the East End of London. Since The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1959), he has written over 40 plays, nine novels, and seven volumes of poetry including Grandchildren and Other Poems (Hearing Eye, 2000).

This poem on Whitechapel Library is reprinted here by kind permission of the poet and publisher. Bernard Kops will read from his work at the Nelson Street Synagogue on 4 September at 6pm.

How often I went in for warmth and a doze
The newspaper room whilst my world outside froze
And I took out my sardine sandwich feast.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.
And the tramps and the madman and the chattering crone.
The smell of their farts could turn you to stone
But anywhere, anywhere was better than home.

The joy to escape from family and war.
But how can you have dreams?
you’ll end up on the floor.
Be like your brothers, what else is life for?

You’re lost and you’re drifting, settle down, get a job.
Meet a nice Jewish girl, work hard, earn a few bob.
Get married, have kids; a nice home on the never
and save up for the future and days of rough weather.

Come back down to earth, there is nothing more.
I listened and nodded, like I knew the score.
And early next morning l crept out the door.

Outside it was pouring
I was leaving forever.

I was finally, irrevocably done with this scene,
The trap of my world in Stepney Green.
With nowhere to go and nothing to dream

A loner in love with words, but so lost
and wandering the streets, not counting the cost.
I emerged out of childhood with nowhere to hide
when a door called my name
and pulled me inside.

And being so hungry I fell on the feast.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

And my brain explodes when I suddenly find,
an orchard within for the heart and the mind.
The past was a mirage I’d left far behind

And I am a locust and I’m at a feast.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

And Rosenberg also came to get out of the cold
To write poems of fire, but he never grew old.
And here I met Chekhov, Tolstoy, Meyerhold.
I read all their worlds, their dark visions of gold.

The reference library, where my thoughts were to rage.
I ate book after book, page after page.
I scoffed poetry for breakfast and novels for tea.
And plays for my supper. No more poverty.
Welcome young poet, in here you are free
to follow your star to where you should be.

That door of the library was the door into me

And Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

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Whitechapel Library – that great library of the East End – finally closed its doors on Saturday 6th August 2005, after more than a century of use.

To those who used it down the years it was much more than a simple storehouse of books, as the poem here by Bernard Kops well shows. From its early years it was known affectionately, but accurately, as the University of the Poor (and not ‘of the Ghetto’, as has been said), a haven for those many without the means to buy books. It was certainly a meeting point where intense discussions took place, where Isaac Rosenberg met with Mark Gertler, John Rodker, David Bomberg and others, and where in more recent times people’s eyes were opened to work of poets such as Nazrul Islam or Jasim Uddin.

Bill Fishman recalls frequent visits to the Library as a youngster to do homework, sometimes interrupted by the voices of Hasidic scholars rising above the Silence of the Library. By 1960 it held substantial volumes of Judaica, in Yiddish, Hebrew & English and latterly the Whitechapel Library was one of the first in the country to introduce significant numbers of new books in Bengali, reflecting the demographic changes in Tower Hamlets. The then librarians Neil Veysey and Kanai Datta spent real energies establishing a strong Bengali-language section and introduced books in Urdu and Hindi also. Kanai Datta in particular was instrumental in achieving this, allowing the work of Rabindranath Tagore, Kobi Nazrul Islam, Manik Bandhopadhyay, Shamsur Rahman and many others to come to Bengali and non-Bengali speakers alike.

Built in 1901 with funds raised by Canon Barnett (yes, as of the local school) and his wife Henrietta, Whitechapel Library not only provided throughout its life books of and for the main spoken languages of Tower Hamlets, it also provided the very first Children’s Public Library in the UK. The historian-polymath Dr. Jacob Bronowski wrote of his use of the Library: “I wanted a book which I could read, which I could follow, and from which I could learn good English.” He asked and got it from the Librarian, and as he went on to say, “From that time on, much of my education was formed by public libraries”. Such was their vital function, their creative art.

It was a vibrant place: Joseph Leftwich wrote how Isaac Rosenberg, the great East End poet who died in the First World War, would “run off to the Library whenever he could, to read poetry and the lives of the poets, their letters, their essays on how to write poetry, their theories ….” Rosenberg’s plaque is on the street wall by the Library’s entrance: apt spot, for that is where so many people walked in from Whitechapel High Street, coming from homes in Brick Lane, Hanbury Street, the Chicksand Estate, Henriques Street, Backchurch Lane, the Berner Estate, Commercial Road, Fieldgate Mansions, Watney Market, Shadwell and the whole of what has been, and still intimately is, the inner East End, Stepney to Spitalfields. From small children to old men and women crossing busy streets to get there: this Library was, until a few days ago, simply a place freely to walk into, to read and write in, browse at, rest and be revived by. It is easy to underestimate the Library’s importance and easy, in the climate of spun politics, to lose what cannot really be replaced.

It was like a table that people could come to for sustenance: you walked in and sat down and some time later you walked out, back onto the street again. A few years ago Rachel Lichtenstein and Alan Dein ‘exhibited’ a table from the Library in the Whitechapel Art Gallery next door, curating memory and history through people’s words: the atmosphere of the Library as much as its presence has meant very much to many people. It was “an orchard within for the heart and the mind”. Maybe the new Ideas Store that is to replace it will also be an orchard with fruit and warmth and shade. Even so there is now no longer a Public Library in Aldgate East. And the hearts and minds of many people will be saddened, lessened, by that. Whitechapel is neither a university nor a ghetto, but the loss of this library seems salutary and painful.

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Vision Literary Society is going to publish the first issue of its quarterly poetry magazine London Poets in November 2005.

Send at least two of your unpublished poems with a photograph and a brief biography including contact phone and e-mail to London Poets, 132 Rounton Road, London E3 4EX by 30 September. Poems should not exceed 50 lines.

If you have published a poetry collection and want your book reviewed, please send two copies of it to the above address. Books must be received by 20 September.

If you run a poetry reading session or offer a poetry course in London, send your information right away. London Poets has a section for poetry events. Special introductory prices will be offered to poets and publishers of poetry who would like to place an ad in the magazine. Contact: londonpoets@tiscali.co.uk

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“Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible… The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship”

Ismail Kadare, Albanian writer of broad international reputation who has been living in France, has won the first ever Man Booker International Prize recently. He has received the prize of £60,000 and a trophy at the Award Ceremony on 27 June 2005 in Edinburgh.

Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster near the Greek border in the south of Albania. He studied first at the University of Tirana, and then in Moscow, at the Gorky Institute for World Literature, a training school for writers and critics. Returning home in 1960 after his country broke off relations with the Soviet Union, he worked first as a journalist and also published his first poems. He then wrote a short story, which he redrafted several times before it was published as his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made his name in Albania. He was then able to become a full-time writer. He also served as editor of a literary review, Les Lettres Albanaises, published simultaneously in Albanian and in French.

He had begun his literary career in the 1950s as a poet with verse collections such as the modest Frymezimet djaloshare (Youthful inspiration, 1954) and Enderrimet (Dreams,1957) which gave proof not only of his ‘youthful inspiration’ but also of talent and poetic originality. His influential Shekulli im (My century, 1961) helped set the pace for renewal in Albanian verse. Perse mendohen keto male (What are these mountains thinking about, 1964) is one of the clearest expressions of Albanian self-image under the gruesome years of the Hoxha dictatorship. Kadare’s poetry was less bombastic than previous verse and gained direct access to the hearts of the readers who saw in him the spirit of the times and who appreciated the diversity of his themes. He soon became widely admired among the youth of Albania for his verse. With candidness and sincerity, he contributed in particular to the evolution of love lyrics, a genre traditionally neglected in Albanian literature.

In the sixties, Kadare turned his creative energies increasingly to prose, of which he soon became the undisputed master and by far the most popular writer of the whole of Albanian literature. He was thus the most prominent representative of Albanian literature under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha and, at the same time, its most talented adversary. His works were extremely influential throughout the seventies and eighties and, for many readers, he was the only ray of hope in the prison that was communist Albania.

Kadare was granted political asylum in France in October 1990. In support of him asylum, he said, “Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible… The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

His years of Parisian exile have been productive and have accorded him further success and recognition, both as a writer in Albanian and in French. He has published his collected works in ten thick volumes, each in an Albanian-language and a French-language edition, and has been honoured with membership in the prestigious Académie Française.

Kadare’s works are published in France by Editions Fayard. The first eleven volumes of his Complete Works are now in print in Albanian and in French. Translations of Kadare’s novels have been published in more than forty countries and for some years Ismail Kadare has been considered as one of the greatest writers of his epoch.

He is a writer who “maps a whole culture – its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer,” said Professor John Carey, Chair of the judges. In response to winning the prize, Kadaré comments: “I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness – armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on. My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realise that this region, to which my country, Albania, belongs, can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the field of the arts, literature and civilisation.”

Other writers who were nominated for the International Booker Prize this year were Margaret Atwood (Canada), Saul Bellow (USA: passed away on 5 April 2005), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Gunter Grass (Germany), Milan Kundera (Czech), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Doris Lessing (UK), Ian McEwan (UK), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina), Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), Cynthia Ozick (USA), Philip Roth (USA), Muriel Spark (Scotland), Antonio Tabucchi (Italy), John Updike (USA), A.B. Yehoshua (Israel).

The following of Kadare’s titles have been translated into English: The General of the Dead Army, The Three Arched Bridge, Broken April, Chronicle in Stone, Durontine, The File on H, The Concert, The Palace of Dreams, Albanian Spring, The Pyramid, Elegy for Kosovo, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, The Successor (forthcoming, January 2006), Agamemnon’s Daughter (forthcoming, date TBC)

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Jonathan Coe is the winner of the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2005 for his book Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson published by Picador.

B.S. Johnson was a brilliant working-class writer, compared to Joyce and so wedded to innovation that he cut holes in the pages of his novels. He published a novel in a box so that its unbound chapters could be read in any order. He was found dead at his north London home in November 1973.

The biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best.

Coe writes enticingly, with the quiet fever of the bookish detective, but he treads softly. He uses all manner of means – tricks straight out of Johnson’s top drawer – to ensure that we see his book for what it is: as merely one way of telling an impossible story.

There are wry footnotes and an intrusive narrator; there are disarming moments when the author declares himself too bored, or too confused, to tell us more. There is even, marshalled at the end of the book, a kind of crowd scene – a cacophony of voices, each one distilling its own essence of BSJ, with no interference from the man with the Dictaphone. The result is more than insightful. It tells you everything about the quicksand on which the biographer wobbles.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. An award-winning novelist, biographer and critic, his novels include What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep and The Closed Circle. He was recently made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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