Did you know socialism was bad? You did? Good. Because it is, you know. Bad, that is – not good. Just thought you might need straightening out on that point, the one about socialism being bad. A lot of you westerners think it’s good, you see. But it’s not. It’s bad. This kind of preaching […]

It’s June, so breaking a New Year’s resolution I return again to blog briefly about a book that I’ve just started – Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone. I couldn’t resist because of this wonderful passage on Italy – tying in nicely with BB Scimmia’s post of some time ago on Imagining Italy Madden’s narrator […]

June 4th rolls around again…. Twenty years gone by. What a wild ride it’s been! It’s worth looking back on what life was like before the historical change. Mostly I remember the boredom and the greyness. There was dirt everywhere and alcoholism was rampant as people sought refuge from the dull, mind-crushing realities of every […]

Listening to Diamond Head’s most enduring of epics (although forgive the mild misnomer “epic” as it happens to be under 5 minutes long), offers the chance to discuss exactly why Stourbridge’s hairiest, most underground rockers never quite grasped the glittering prize of major league renown. As the title track of 1983’s critically mixed Canterbury swaps range from […]

So, yesterday I took some of our own TMO advice (doled out by our twitter feed @litblog) and joined publisher Canongate’s site www.meetatthegate.com.. I did it out of curiosity, but also for another simple reason – they’re giving away a free download of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift. Hyde’s book has a cult following already, […]

St. Vitus Dance – what does it conjure up in your musical mind? Probably visions of doom-metal bands, either the original gloom merchants Black Sabbath, or various Scandinavian cardboard copycats. Maybe it’s the medieval buzz, and visions of Brueghel, but the title always brought to mind frigid northern metal more than anything else. How wrong […]

There is no crisis in Poland and even if there is it’s gone now and wasn’t any big deal anyway while it lasted. So if Gazeta Wyborcza has raised its cover price by a piffling 10 or 11% it’s because Poles are so wealthy.

David Ost’s The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (2005) is the best book of its kind I know. His central thesis is that anger is an inevitable by-product of capitalism and should be channelled into class struggle where it can do some good for ordinary workers. If not, grievances caused by […]