Over the last few weeks at Hogwarts Academy we have been watching Alex Haley's Roots with our students. It's several years since I spent one Easter holiday watching it from end to end and many years since I watched it when it was originally broadcast on television. It's an extraordinary series considering it must be around 35 years old. Obviously the production values are very much of their time and the mores of mid seventies American television are well to the fore but the attempt to portray the central issues of the whole story of slavery in what became the USA is, in my view, very successful. It steers well away from a facile 'good guys/bad guys' approach and gets across the economic nature of the system very well.
It also manages to show the appallingly corrosive effect such a system has on all the people involved and ends with an introduction to the rise of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan in the former slave states. We have been able to talk about the use of violence and the nature of one law for all as well as touch upon the Black Panthers and talk a little about John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics.
Our cohort has what society is pleased to call 'behavioural difficulties' but by and large they have been riveted and enthusiastically engaged in the many, many issues it has thrown up. (Oh and Ofsted, the curriculum areas covered were: History, Geography, Maths, English, DT, Food, Citizenship, PHSE.....do you even know what I'm talking about? Look it up).
The really nourishing thing about all this is the way that the rich and powerful (and their yellow, running dog lackeys) produce their own gravediggers generation after generation; each time better educated, more worldlier and angrier than the last. It's no wonder that the current crop of hyenas is lashing out with such fury, particularly at any young people who have the cheek to question their rule. These people must lie awake at night sweating; wondering if it is they or their children who are going to pay the price for the terrible cruelty and suffering they inflict on the majority of the world's population whilst they hoard more wealth than they're ever going to be able to use in generations. There's nowhere to run. And nowhere to hide.
I think 'War Poetry' is next.....for instance:
"...rise like lions from your slumber
in unvanquishable number
shake your chains from you like dew
ye are many.....they are few" (That's Shelley Ofsted. Look it up)
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
In the beginning...
...was the word. Not too obvious a debut then but I've been meaning to set something like this up for a while so here goes.
It seems that when faced with some of the fundamental absurdities of the modern world and the consequent feelings of powerlessness many people resort to the word as a means of interpreting, analysing, scoffing at and responding to these absurdities. That, in fact, they seek in some way to protect themselves. However, whenever any investigation is done into the lives of the writers who do it full time one thing seems to be clearer than anything else about these people. They are all as mad as a box of frogs. So at least on one level it doesn't work very well.
The fact remains though that I have followed the written word all my life and have gained enormously from it. When I was a child I remember my father saying to anyone who would listen, that if I had a book I only needed two square feet of ground and I was happy which was just as well really since he always had the best bloody chair. In the worst times of my life I have always carried reading material with me as if it had magical properties - not so much a suit of armour as a cloak of invisibility. Usually fiction but also non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, it seemed that hidden in these texts were little nuggets of information that were extremely comforting; gems that were buried within waiting to be dug up and stored away for some future prosperity. As I got older I realised that all these words were put together by people who did it on purpose. Gradually I developed a deep admiration for these individuals who could create worlds from a few randomly agreed marks on a white sheet of paper. In my early twenties I spent three years at polytechnic and so glimpsed some of the intense joy and agonising frustration that sent those who made it into careers up the wall. There was no chance that I would get sucked into that madness at the time, so when I left college I got a job in an inner city dole office. This was the mid eighties. Lucky escape there then.
One thing that has never left me, and has in fact grown stronger over the years, is a desire to have a go at this stuff. I knew I had a talent for it. I had been told as much by people whose opinion I respected. It's surprising, though, how much of the quality that the Spanish describe as 'cojones' is required to actually embark on this sort of enterprise. So here I find myself thirty years on with absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not having a go. I'm hoping that what unfolds here over time will be one person's view of life's goings on and - if you're lucky - when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit!
It seems that when faced with some of the fundamental absurdities of the modern world and the consequent feelings of powerlessness many people resort to the word as a means of interpreting, analysing, scoffing at and responding to these absurdities. That, in fact, they seek in some way to protect themselves. However, whenever any investigation is done into the lives of the writers who do it full time one thing seems to be clearer than anything else about these people. They are all as mad as a box of frogs. So at least on one level it doesn't work very well.
The fact remains though that I have followed the written word all my life and have gained enormously from it. When I was a child I remember my father saying to anyone who would listen, that if I had a book I only needed two square feet of ground and I was happy which was just as well really since he always had the best bloody chair. In the worst times of my life I have always carried reading material with me as if it had magical properties - not so much a suit of armour as a cloak of invisibility. Usually fiction but also non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, it seemed that hidden in these texts were little nuggets of information that were extremely comforting; gems that were buried within waiting to be dug up and stored away for some future prosperity. As I got older I realised that all these words were put together by people who did it on purpose. Gradually I developed a deep admiration for these individuals who could create worlds from a few randomly agreed marks on a white sheet of paper. In my early twenties I spent three years at polytechnic and so glimpsed some of the intense joy and agonising frustration that sent those who made it into careers up the wall. There was no chance that I would get sucked into that madness at the time, so when I left college I got a job in an inner city dole office. This was the mid eighties. Lucky escape there then.
One thing that has never left me, and has in fact grown stronger over the years, is a desire to have a go at this stuff. I knew I had a talent for it. I had been told as much by people whose opinion I respected. It's surprising, though, how much of the quality that the Spanish describe as 'cojones' is required to actually embark on this sort of enterprise. So here I find myself thirty years on with absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not having a go. I'm hoping that what unfolds here over time will be one person's view of life's goings on and - if you're lucky - when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit!
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