Tumescent Moon

This started off with a search for the poetry of W.B.Yeats and, through the magic of site-skipping, ended up somewhere else entirely, but first a small digression: Somebody - I can't remember who now - asked me fairly recently why I don't write poetry and I don't think I answered the question at the time so I'll do it now, and the answer is 'I don't write poetry because I suck at it'. In my mid to late teens I turned out reams of the stuff, all heavily indebted to Dylan Thomas and each one individually the literary equivalent of a steaming cow turd. Unfortunately having the technical knowledge necessary to construct poetry is no guarantee that the final result is going to be any good, and that same knowledge robs you of the ability to deceive yourself about its merits. For a while I embraced free verse as my saviour until it dawned on me that the lack of a formal structure actually makes it harder to produce anything worthwhile. So I gave up, and I remain...

I was half-watching a documentary about one of Dan Brown's books of piffle (probably 'Angels And Demons' but I wasn't really paying a great deal of attention) that (undoubtedly because I wasn't paying a great deal of attention) inexplicably seemed to segue into a nun waxing indignant about the Higgs boson . Now it's always pleasant to be presented with evidence that scientists have a sense of humour, but nicknaming the thing 'the God particle' was possibly one jape too far as it presented this poor woman with a large number of sticks, the wrong ends of which she was waggling vigorously and embarrassingly in public. This reminded me of a piece I read quite some time ago in which Deepak Chopra was trying to pray the Copenhagen interpretation in aid of the proposition of Eastern philosophy that reality is constructed by the mind rather than the other way around (it's not actually as absurd an idea as it may sound!). The comprehensive rogering that ...

"What causes riots is a hot Saturday night in any dumb cockroach-filled neighborhood where there's a lot of guys standing on the corner and they don't have no bread, no broads and no wheels." - Murray Roman OK, flippant, but you get the picture and it isn't untrue: whatever the proximate cause may be the underlying one is just a bunch of people with a feeling that they've got nothing to lose. Those who do the finger-pointing in the aftermath of a riot - the politicians, the police, the media and all the other self-styled leaders of men - throw words like 'thugs', 'gangsters', 'anarchists' at the participants, slap mobile phones and Twitter around a bit for aiding and abetting and don't take the analysis any further because they can't take it any further without admitting that there's a larger problem to do with society itself that they are unwilling and unable to fix. Let's for a moment forget about those who actual...