Post-Election Blues: Seeing Red & Voting Green
So. Here I am, a Kemp Town resident, bleating at the gates of the newly declared Green Socialist People’s Republic of Brighton and Hove to be let in. Not that a change of post code would make much difference. I could move to Liverpool or Glasgow and still be a lost goat chewing down on a rusty old banger…
2015: The year of living philosophically?
Farewell 2014, but may your turning tides sweep us between the icebergs and whirlpools of political despair and environmental collapse, toward the hard-won shores of a fairer world. For though global disasters and injustices only seemed to intensify this year – climate change, Syria bleeding into Iraq, Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, Ebola, Boko Haram, racist executions on the streets…
Sea Change: A Residency @ Fabrica Gallery
Photo: Gavin Weber. Copyright Simon Faithfull. As a writer, activist, mystic and summer sea dipper, I was very pleased this week to begin a fascinating new job: Artist-in-Residence for Fabrica Gallery, responding to the Simon Faithfull exhibition REEF. In a work that combines sculpture, video, eco-art, and installation, Faithfull salvaged and rebuilt an old boat, then deliberately sank the…
Tottenham Palestine Literature Festival 2014
Getting excited! Sept 19-20 I’ll be taking part in the second Tottenham Palestine Literature Festival, organised by Haringey Justice for Palestine. The festival is a free weekend of literature, politics, music and Palestinian food, held at the West Green Learning Centre and featuring an international cast including Ghada Karmi, Selma Dabbagh, Baroness Jenny Tonge, Brian Whitaker and Sarah Schulman. Guests…
Peppered Mead & Gnostic Democracy: Gifts of the Spirit, from Ukraine
With pleasure, and no small amount of astonishment, I announce today that for my ‘poetry and essays about Ukraine’ – the latter published here on the blog – I have earned a place on the list of recipients of the 2014 Hryhorii (Gregory) Skovoroda Award (honestly, in section 7, there I am: Наомі Фойл). Hryhorii Skovoroda was a 18th century…
Opening the Door a Crack: Depression & Activism
As I discussed in my last blog, for various reasons I don’t want to discuss my inner world in detail online. But the current moment, however, feels like the right time to at least publically acknowledge that, like so many others, I am affected by mental health issues. While I’m not a particular fan of Robin Williams, as someone who…
Two Watermelons: Inner Reflections & a Letter from Ukraine
1. Rebelling against the old Arab adage, the Palestinian novelist Emile Habiby ‘believed that it was possible, and even useful, to “carry two watermelons under one arm” – that is, to take up both literature and politics’. The risk, of course, being that you will drop and smash both. Everyone who knows me knows I care about Palestine. And Ukraine.…
Talk Amongst Yourselves: The Great Anti-Debate
#thegreatarmstradedebate: 1914: the Western world is descending into the bloodiest war it has ever witnessed. Amid the waste of life, the waste of money and the wastelands of Europe, arms manufacturers thrived. What did people do to stop it? What means of protest did they have? And what are people doing now, 100 years later, to stop the arms…
English PEN Ukrainian Poetry Evening
Given the current crisis in Ukraine, and my own lack of expertise in the country’s history and politics, it is humbling indeed to be included in English PEN’s Ukrainian Poetry Evening in Oxford this Thursday, featuring poet Ihor Pavlyuk and translator Steve Komarnyckyj reading from A Flight over the Black Sea, published this month by…
The Blu Tack of History
Jenny Diski‘s characteristically pithy LRB blog today on Thatcher’s funeral ends with a quote from Peter Hennessy: ‘More of Margaret Thatcher… will cling to the velcro of our collective memory than any other politician of recent times.’ Velcro’s far too suburban for Brighton, of course, where we prefer to camply flick about grotty balls…