tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-157163802024-03-13T12:57:49.977+00:00Sam JordisonSam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.comBlogger60125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-1763417204090633462017-08-14T10:52:00.001+01:002017-08-14T10:52:13.858+01:00Hello,<br />
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<br />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-17936643940561137192013-07-28T17:44:00.001+01:002013-07-28T17:44:53.121+01:00Mick Farren: Hail and Farewell<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">I was sad to read about the death of Mick Farren last night and am posting this in haste, by way of tribute.</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">On 12 January, I met Mick Farren to interview him for </span><a href="http://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/products/Adventure-Rocketship!.html." style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">Adventure Rocketship</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">. You can get the background for that interview there, and more on my thoughts at the time inside the book (which is great, incidentally). Here though, in its raw form (and I think Mick Farren liked things raw) is the transcript of my interview with him. </span></i><br />
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Things you need to know: I met Mick in his flat in Brighton. He was breathing with the aid of a respirator. But mentally he was still firing on all cylinders. I was there to talk about Speculative Fiction. Hence the first question: </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ</i></b><i> Why did you go for speculative fiction when you started writing?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Because that’s what I lived. I really grew up on Dan Dare and the Eagle and Flash Gordon and Journey Onto Space on the radio. Almost before I could read I was fascinated by science fiction of one kind or another. So I was just kind of naturally following along.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[I quote cover the cover of The DNA Cowboys trilogy which had lots of stuff about how he was much cooler than the average space opera author.] </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b> <i>Were you in opposition to that stuff?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not so much in opposition. It was more that... The chronology really was that round about the mid 60s I dived into rock and roll and then into the counter culture and worked for IT and eventually edited it. And then we got busted and Nasty Tales and blah-de-blah - it all went on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<a href="http://www.funtopia.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/friends/nastytalestrial1.html">You can find out more about the Nasty Tales trial here</a>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I started to feel I was burning out. After being at the Old bailey for the Nasty Tales trial for two weeks. I felt it was time to do something else. So I began on The Texts Of Festival, which was trying to integrate a Dystopian future with a leftover rock and roll quasi religion. That enabled me to bring my interests together. And moving on to the DNA Cowboys, that was very much to trying to - because it’s very cinematogrpahic - it was almost trying to make a logical linear scenario out of the kind of imagery that was being tossed around by Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and whoever. Plus, in science fiction I’ve always had a fascination with wanting to write about the low lives. I like an evil dictator of the universe - but I’m much more interested in who were the con man and bank robbers and drug dealers on Mongo. I wanted to take a street hipster concept and push it into a fictional world.</span></span></div>
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<b>SDJ:</b> <i>The Cowboys are rock stars in a way</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yeah, yeah.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>Mick pauses to use his respirator.</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don’t let this freak you out, I’m not dying. It just makes my life a little easier. I’ve had flu on top of the COPD that I’ve lived with for so long...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>That seems to be the way life generally is.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yeah, that wasn’t too hard. Nobody ever predicted the fax machine. There’s something else I was very proud of - I’ve forgotten what it is - but maybe it will come back to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Is there anything you’re surprised hasn’t happened</i>?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Oh all of it! Although I’m not so much surprised as disappointed. Just about everything we hoped for has failed. Kubrick said we’d be on Mars by now. the Jetsons told me I’d have a private plane. Dan Dare nuclear weapons would be outlawed in 1965. But we didn’t get any of this shit! If Victorian technology had continued on - if Steampunk was real, you’d go to the kitchen and find the six taps that were giving you Coca Cola, and beer as well as hot and cold water... That’s one of the fascinations of steampunk. The tech. I don’t know if you ever saw those things - or you’re too young - those wonderful things in apartment stores where you’d put the money into a tube. I loved all that shit. It was an interesting mass distribution technology. Now we’ve come down to so much individual isolation. There are at least three replicated computers in this room. Why?!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the other hand we’re not a nuclear wasteland. Total dystopia has not taken over.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b> <i>It could be worse... So there’s super abundance now, but we don’t have very much of it?</i></span></span></div>
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</i><b>MF: </b>Well super abundance has become a super abundance where there’s a lot of people with no abundance at all. I don’t want to get into politics...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>Slight interruption. “I don’t want to get into politics” was definitely the least true thing he said!</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another side of the coin is that always along the line, even in the most extreme fantasy, there’s been either an interest in political systems or more usually a rebellion against an oppressive political system. But I do think I’m the only person in the world who’s ever written a science fiction novel that ended up with the protagonists forming a union - which happens in the Long Orbital (or Funtopia, as it’s called in England). Which I was quite proud of, actually. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b> <i>In Give The Anarchist A Cigarette you’re quite down on some of the stuff you’ve done. You say that Mona is like listening to a nervous breakdown... But it’s quite a special record, isn’t it?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I don’t really read my own stuff. A lot of the time I don’t listen to my own music. It’s like actors who say they can’t watch themselves in films. </span></span></div>
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It’s funny actually because I’ve got a Kindle fire for Christmas, so I’ve been loading a lot of stuff on there. I’ve got a kind of shuffle that goes on and on and on - I’ve put some of my own stuff on there - and giving it a context makes it much more appealing. Rather than saying I will no put on one of my own records, when all you is re-analyse and say “oh I’d wish I’d never mixed it that way - or oh I wish I’d put the voice up at that point. You’re sort of wanting just to repaint it all. So I tend not to go there. Plus I guess I was raised in a very English sort of way where deprecation is the way to go...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>But you must be quite pleased with the books as well?</i> </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m pleased with the books, yeah. I may have written too many of them - but that was an economic factor. But no, there’s nothing I really wish I had never done. Except I took on -- Oh - Car Wars the book of the game. And that was kind of... But I needed the money.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But in terms, there’s nothing I’m really ashamed of. But I felt a bit stupid when I wrote this book Mars The Red Planet, which has American and Soviet bases on Mars. When I started the book there was a Soviet Union. When I finished the book there wasn’t. I thought it was going to take 25-30 years for the Soviet Union to collapse. It took more like twenty days. I thought “what! No, you can’t do that. I’ve got a book to do.” And it had great big Soviet machines with these bolts in them - big iron things. Oh, they were great. And there was this Soviet Martian railway. It was beautiful! It was like Dr Zhivago on Mars. But then it all went away... The book got published... But suddenly it was in a totally alternative modernity... or future. When did the Berlin wall come down? 1989? That had never happened in my story because I was writing the damn thing in 89.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b><i>Where you the only person that was annoyed when the Berlin wall came down?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yeah! I was really pissed off!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>In Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, you say fantasy allows you the space to mess around. In the DNA cowboys people’s personalities split... And you bring in stuff from the stuff generator... It gives you freedom to play around.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>What’s the question?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>Good question! What is my question? Here we go: Do you think SF gives you an outlet to launch ideas that you wouldn’t normally be able to go for in other kinds of novels?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yes, absolutely. Especially ideas. I have all these politico friends who say “I don’t read fiction.” And okay, you can read Marx, you can read Chairman Mao - but nothing had a bigger political impact on me than Orwell’s 1984, or in a very different way, Bill Burroughs. I do see fiction as a propaganda machine. I don’t mean that fiction it written according to the dictates of a party. It’s my own personal propaganda - but it’s certainly ... I wanted it to have some more lasting effect than merely being decorating entertainment. And that was very easy, growing up in the era of Dylan and The Doors, was rock and roll was really a means of communication. And that was the other beautiful relationship between the sort of fiction I was writing, what rock and roll was doing and the world in general. Plus simultaneously, we were taking an awful lot of psychedelics - which wasn’t exactly science fiction. But Sun Ra sure made a hell of a lot more sense on acid than he did without. Plus, psychedelics seemed to contribute to an appreciation of a much larger universe. Where you end up with Set The Controls To The Heart Of The Sun or Interstellar Overdrive, or various bits of Grateful Dead, or Jefferson Airplane. That was all science fiction. Once you’ve started expanding the imagination, you’re going to be converted into, if not speculative fiction, at least a speculative state of mind. That was the big link for me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>And what about William Burroughs? Would you call him speculative fiction?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF:</b> Oh definitely. It’s the Burroughs brothers. William and Edgar Rice - you know, the Mugwump. You know there’s that great still from the Cronenberg Naked Lunch of Burroughs and the Mugwump sitting in the bar together. The distance between that and the barroom scene in Star Wars is not very big. It’s a jump of philosophy, not of visual impact, or imagery. The time when I discovered Bill Burroughs, I was coming out Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke, and suddenly, I’m in the interzone - which is just as fantastic. And in many ways much more appealing. I think once again, it goes back to the fact that it’s picaresque - it’s a lowlife story. It’s not kings and emperors. Frodo does not have to go to the mountain to save the earth. I was much more interested in trying to write Micky Spillane novels in the future. That’s the other great influence on my work. When I was a kid I was reading Micky Spillane and Jim Thompson and Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spillane - well put it this way - I got to the cheap pulp ones before the classy ones. It was Spillane and Thomspon rather than Chandler that I read first. Which also brought in a much more street language. They used shorter sentences - punching stuff. And even various kinds of slang and whatever.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Did you feel you were part of a new wave or out on your own doing that kind of thing?</i></span></span></div>
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<b>MF: </b>I sort of missed the bus on the New Wave. Michael Moorcock are good friends. He was putting out New Worlds with Ballard - and everybody. They were sort of the SF version of the underground press when i was at International Times doing a bi-weekly tabloid. We were on the same train - but not in the same carriage. I hadn’t really started writing fiction then. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>You once said something like fantasy gave you the illusion of detachment</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Well, it’s an escape. Without getting too Freudian about this, I had a rotten childhood. It made life more bearable to be off in my mind with John Carter on Mars rather in Worthing with me dad -or my step father,a ctually. I used to live in a fantasy world where I couldn’t get on a train without thinking I was James Bond in From Russia With Love. It just made life more interesting. I was constantly playing fantasy games. So when I started writing seriously I quickly began to realise:</span></span></div>
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<li style="font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i></i>If you’re going to create worlds and write about them, they have to be places that you’re happy and comfortable to go to every day.</span></span></li>
<li style="font-size: 12px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i></i>If you’re doing it right, and you get your characters established, you don’t have to write any more - they’ll do it for you, just like Elmore Leonard said. If I’m writing you, you aren’t going to get up and do something that’s completely out of character. The characters themselves will carry along the narrative. As long as you know why X does this at the end. And if he doesn’t do it, you’ve written in wrong and either you change the end or you change the character...</span></span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>He coughs -</i>] oh I’m not dying...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s a theme park ride that you climb into and you remain there as long as possible and luckily come out with a product at the end which somebody will hopefully pay for - or at least give you some kind of recognition. It’s really a retreat. It’s a great big exercise in tranquillising yourself...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>I wanted to ask you about writing. I know you were a lot more sober than people assumed. But did you sit in a darkened room and hammer it out?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Pretty much. I lucky in that I can handle interruptions very easily. Actually, the science fiction writer Chris Rowley - and we’d be on the phone to each other every day because we were fucking bored of writing and needed to talk to someone...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I find to a degree marijuana very useful, just in terms of an imagination booster. That sort of “tee=hee-hee” what if it did that - oh man that would be so cool. Dope gives you that. I’ve written sometimes when I’d get home from a nightclub and couldn’t sleep because of the cocaine - and some interesting stuff comes out of it. Mainly it’s garbage and you read it the next day and think oh I’ll keep that and that - but that’s crap.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there’s alcohol. It’s the break. It lets you get out of the creative zone and become completely obnoxious and falling down drunk. Which I got a bit of a reputation for. But that was really only the aftermath of a hard day’s work. That’s why I was so happy in New York. Because the bars stayed open 24 hrs a day.I could be working until 2am and go out and still find some joint open where they would serve me whisky. And probably run into a few ne’er do well friends as well.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ:</i></b><i> What about the internet as a distraction now?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>No, I love the internet. I’m trying to live in as close to a paperless world as I can. The only think I don’t like doing is reading books on the internet. The kindle I don’t mind. I actually believe there’s a whole different way of writing for the internet. I blog in an entirely different style and approach to sentence construction. It’s almost like a sort of radio delivery. There’s a lot of conjunctions to start sentences and things like that. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I love it. I have this blog that I do two or three times a week. It’s mainly pictures - things I’ve gleaned. It’s a public diary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And facebook I use to attract attention to the public diary and it’s a great marketing tool. Shit loads of stuff comes to me - there’s a crew of us who pass interesting information on. I’m 100% in favour of it and I’m interested in writing for it. But I do believe that it requires a different craft approach, and structural approach to the writing that I’m still working on.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m not sure you can do anything of any length on the internet. I wouldn’t stick up a novel on a website. I think people’s eyes move differently.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>I tell him about the funny comments I sometimes get on my blogs for <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/samjordison">The Guardian..</a>.</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF:</b> If you want to see comments look at the New York Post...The racism... it’s unbelievable. I don’t take comments too seriously. Unless I know where the people are coming from. It’s like when new cats would come into the NME - it’s very hard to write a good review - and easy to write a bad one. So it’s the same with comments. It’s easy to be negative - or just say right on. But to advance the argument in a positive way is harder.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>Do you miss the hunter-gatherer aspect? There’s a great passage in Give The Anarchist A Cigarette when you find the right shop, and really seek out material--- and suddenly, now, everything’s there.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I miss it in theory. But I do like to be able to just find out lyrics to a song from Google, or a quote from Corialanus. What I worry about is that I lived in a magical time when these things happened and we made our own discoveries, and they weren’t just load out there. Simon Cowell didn’t decide what music we were going to fucking listen to. I don’t know. It may just be an effect of ageing but it seems like, there’s a generation now which is hardly dressed up and there’s absolutely nowhere to go. Maybe it will change.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>Do you think you lived in a fortunate time?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>There’s a lot of material about the generation gap and conflict in the DNA cowboys. There’s a lot of argument between the older and younger generations. How does that feel now you’re on the other side?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>The thing is that I don’t feel I’m on the other side.Because I don’t think it’s terribly age related. I mean David slimy Cameron - he’s a lot younger than me, but he’s also a fuck of a lot older. He’s just Margaret Thatcher rehatched as greasy old Etonian.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>What everyone thought was a generation war was more a war of attitude?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yes, it was. Absolutely. Except there weren’t that many elders. The only elders were a few eccentrics and the Beat Generation. You could count them on your fingers and toes. And the rest of us were having to make it up as we went along. Bohemianism is kind of like a reptile and you get flat bits when it’s digesting a pig... So you know there’s the post World War II generation and it tapers off and almost vanishes - but then it comes back again. Essentially it’s more of a war between uniformity and individualism, and self sufficient creativity rather than imposed culture. That’s really what it is. Youth cults on their own I absolutely don’t believe in. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There had been such a jump in the birth rate after World War II, something was going to happen to all these kids. Over here we had the Who and Rolling Stones, while in China Chairman Mao was busy organising them into the Red Guard. That was weird. He was the only world leader who managed to turn the youth explosion to his own ends. But then you have to remember that Hitler was very big on youth.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There’s that amazing scene in Cabaret, Tomorrow Belongs To Me... Nordic blonde kids singing. Oh Jesus Christ, it’s really creepy. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So it’s Woodstock, or it’s Village Of The Damned.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>I feel sorry for kids who are 18/19 now, and should be having the time of their lives, but are so constrained by fees and everything else...</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I don’t know. I wasn’t born with a silver coke spoon in my mouth, for Christ’s sake. We had to make a lot of it up as we went along. If we were transported back to the UFO club in 1966, it would look stupid and primitive. But it was magical at the time. Except I don’t know. I don’t hang with a lot of 18 year-olds. I can’t tell. But I don’t see the same kind of thing... Except maybe the Occupy movement... Time gets so concertinaed. Now there are people walking around who think Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against The Machine are oldies but goodies. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m optimistic that it may stratify its way out. Rather like Japan. Where you’ve got the whole pop culture - and everything that Simon Cowell stole. At the same time you’ve got a bohemian rock and roll strata of life. I like being in Japan a lot, but you leave your own strata at your peril. Even to the point that you get frozen out if you walk into the wrong bar. If someone like me goes into a salary man’s bar - they don’t want you in there. Then a few blocks down there are these weird little bars where they only play David Bowie on the jukebox. Which is where you should be...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>What did you think of the David Bowie single?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>It’s a bit grim! It’s a bit post heart attack. And what’s with Berlin at the moment?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>You can understand it with David Bowie</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yeah. But he was in a very different Berlin, when the CIA had poured millions of dollars in to make it a shining jewel of decadent capitalism. I don’t quite know what the attraction is now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But it’s cool. David can do a good slow song. Although I’d rather listen to Wild Is The Wind...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>I want to ask about Elvis. Was he still alive when you were writing DNA cowboys? Elvis has appeared in fiction doing similar things so often since - in Bubba Ho Tep and My Elvis Blackout</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>One of my jobs at NME was monitoring Elvis. There were lots of weird rumours before he died. He was in hospital and he went crazy in Vegas a couple of times. Larry Watson were sitting around writing a song, and there was a terrific thunderstorm outside and we had the TV on with the sound off. And something flashed up and an image of Elvis and we both knew - Oh God. He died. towards the end he was so messed up. Have you seen that clip where he’s doing Unchained Melody and he’s sitting at a piano and the sweat’s pouring off him. The voice is gorgeous but the man looks like he’s going to have a heart attack.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve got a new book on the way - Elvis Died For Somebody Else’s Sins But Not Mine. It’s my greatest hits. The new book has something about about Elvis as a fertility god - or whatever you might want to believe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>In the obituary you wrote for the NME, you say he was never the same after he joined the army...</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>They symbolically cut his hair off. It was very symbolic. It was a kind of Fisher King, Samson and Delilah castration.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The power was still there afterwards - but it was just so diminished. It probably would have blown itself apart if it had just gone unchecked.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>While we’re talking about the big icons - you saw Bob Dylan at the Albert Hall.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Twice actually. There was one before the famous one, which was just him acoustic. Dylan made it all make sense. When I left school, I told everyone I wanted a career in advertising and spent most of my time trying to get a band together, but I was also writing bits of poetry and bits an pieces of odd stuff that didn’t really make much sense. But when you were working with a band, and you were singing, it was nursery rhyme stuff: Be bop a Loola be my baby. Some of the best writing in rock was Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, and even that was dumbed down. At best you’d get teenage soap operas. THen suddenly, it was Dylan. And you could actually put something with some complex content onto rock and roll. The fact that he had to come at it through the back door, via Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Newport Folk Festival, before he sprung the leather jacket and the stratocaster. That didn’t come as a surprise to me at all. It was logical. It got him the fuck out of the clutches of the old time, rather hidebound, hypocrtical, authoritarian CP attitude and moved him over into what much later I started to call the psychedelic left. And woah! There it was! you could do it! You could do anything you wanted to do. Stick a backbeat on it! Dylan tied it all together and made it possible for Pete Townsend and Mick and Keith. Lennon/ McCartney were already doing fairly complicated teen love songs - but it opened doors for them. It just opened the doors. And anything was possible.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Have you listened to Tempest?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yeah. I like Tempest a lot. And before that I liked Time Out Of Mind. It seems like Dylan’s a bit of a wave pattern. You get peaks and then you get troughs. Depending, I think, on how happy his domestic life is. And what religion he’s embracing this week. He’s one of those cats who does much better work when he’s miserable. Blood On the Tracks, Street Legal. They’re my post Blond-On-Blonde favourites. And there’s others... I listen to bits of Desire. But Planet Waves never had an impact. And some of the stuff this century has sort of passed me by. But Tempest had a vibe about it right from the start. I stuck on Duquesne Whistle - and thought yeah! This is great! What is he? 71? His voice is - well not quite shot - but it’s shot in a good sort of way.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yeah man. I wish Cash had lived a bit longer. But him and June Carter were like swans. When one went the other went straight after. But he was doing the Mercy Seat - that was great stuff. And it blew away the generation gap. When you’ve got Johnny Cash doing Nick Cave tunes. the world’s clearly a better place.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ:</i></b><i>You say other people thought you were a self-publicising ego maniac. Is that true?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Well, yes it is true. I never realised just how bad I was at it until I read into people like David Bowie or MIck Jagger, or PJ Proby to go to the other extreme. Then I was like - “oh! That’s what self promoting is.” I was distrusted in the early hippy days. The hippies distrusted anybody with what they perceived as a goal or an agenda. Which in many respects was their downfall. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Do you think hippies are misremembered now? Because people think of them as being all flowers and love - when there was 68 going on? In a sense, they were just as punk as the punks... Or some of them were.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>There were three weeks in the middle of 1967 when we actually believed that we could change the world by example. This was teargassed out of us later. I never particularly subscribed to that end of things. Kaftans, brown rice and Hare Krishna. I didn’t see that as the salvation of the human race or the planet. I think it was a convenient thing to laugh at. But by the summer of 1968 that washed away... It was only on television.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>What’s the legacy then? What’s left over?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Oh lots. A lot of shit got started. Because people saw that other people could do things, therefore they could do it. For instance, the Stonewall rising in New York, where drag queens were fighting the police. That only occurred because war protestors had been fighting with the police.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All the liberation movements really kicked off from that point. Okay there had been votes for women and suffragettes. But the modern form of a lot of movements came out of the 60s. That’s why we lost the underground press really, because it fragmented away into Gay News, Spare Rib - and then Rolling Stone took away the profitable parts. Animal Liberation? Who’d have thought of that prior to 1970. A lot of facets of the Green movement. We were talking about the environment in exactly the same terms - and we’re now seeing it happening. The guys who put together stuff like the Whole Earth Catalogue were predicting that yes, there would be increased atmospheric energy and sea energy patterns causing anomalous weather patters if we didn’t do something about it. And we didn’t. And here they are. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The examples of one led to the examples of another. It was like rocking a pond - and the first wave patterns are very intense. And as they spread out, they’re smaller, but cover a great deal more ground.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So fuck it. I’m not one of those people who wants to hear that the whole thing was over by the Isle Of Wight or by Altamont or this that or the fucking other. It goes on. There were a lot of movements sparked. There’s a lot of things that we take for granted. At the same time there always has been and always will be a thread of freethinking bohemianism that takes us all the way back to Watt Tyler, Marquis De Sade, Charlie Parker.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s an attitudinal history. That will never go away. They might try to kill us, but it will never go away. And that’s where the seeds are sown for the next movement and the next evolution of the culture. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b> <i>In Give The Anarchist A Cigarette you don’t name anyone, but you talk about rock groups and underage girls. And there’s AA Catto in the DNA cowboys...</i></span></span></div>
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<b>MF: </b>Saville was just creepy. BUt had the power to carry you along. He was very touchy feely. If you were walking with him, he would take your arm.</span></span></div>
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<b>SDJ: </b><i>You met him?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF:</b> Quite a few times. Just wondering around the BBC and stuff.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m more talking about Ronnie Bigenheimer’s English discotheque and 13-year-olds being served up to [<i>REDACTED</i>]. And there’s other people still alive who liked young girls. And I’d probably get sued if I mention them, so I won’t.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of the worst pervs are the violently angry moralists. There was a woman busted last week in New Hampshire... {Lisa Biron: http://dangerousminds.net/comments/sick_story_of_antilgbt_christian_kiddie_porn_lawyer_gets_even_more_demented] ... She was making kiddie porn while she was also a pro bono lawyer for anti-abortion, anti-gay groups. It’s a strange, huge self-hating thing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>And what about AA Catto? [This is a reference to a teenage character in The SDNA CowboysCowboys Trilogy]</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I guess I was just being perverse. It’s not pedophilia as much of the idea of an incredibly powerful and sinister little girl. It made a change from the Mekon. It’s difficult... Incredibly scary little girls are a factor in everything. Modern Japanese horror. Alice In Wonderland. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ:</i></b><i>You compare her to Julie Burchill in attitude in the introduction. You say you’d already invented Julie Burchill before you met her?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF:</b> Yeah... Oh God. This is going to get me into trouble... What’s the actual question here?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Well, you both live in Brighton. Do you still see her?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I don’t see her. We email each other. She’s become an insane zionist. And islamaphobe. We might not talk about other things later, that first part of the conversation, I really don’t want to have. I’ve kind of avoided meeting her. She’s not even fucking Jewish.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b> <i>Is this a departure for her? Was she very different when you knew her?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>No. She gets the wrong end of the stick and then buries it up to its hilt... One day she’ll be liking Thatcher and the next she’ll be a Stalinist. The trouble with Julie is that she has no education except what she’s gleaned from the street and the Groucho club. She really doesn’t know her political ass from her elbow - except in terms of shock. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>By coincidence, on the same day Burchill was writing her trans-hating filth for the Observer. Goes to show how right Mick Farren can be.</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now that’s a self promoting ego maniac.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve always been very strong on education. The idea that you might teach yourself... In one of the Vampire books I wanted Renquist to have a relationship with Francis Wallsingham - Elziabeth I’s CIA chief. I read all the books. But Wallsingham was damn amazing. It just all stays there. Without education we are lost. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Do you want to tell me about Road Movie? [This was Farren’s latest novel.]</i></span></span></div>
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<b>MF: </b>It’s a graphic novel without pictures. Moving pulp fiction into a more surreal, almost poetic, flow. It’s not totally successful, it’s not there yet. But I’m keeping on doing the same things. It’s almost a trial run. When you read it you’ll see where it’s coming from...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s crazy shit. Burroughs-ish crazy shit. Somewhere between Jim Thompson and Burroughs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b><i>You were out in LA...</i></span></span></div>
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</i><b><i>MF: </i></b>Forever.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>What brought you back to Brighton?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Well, my girlfriend died. I was burned out with LA. I’d done some work in the movie industry and sworn never to work in the movie industry again. They give you a lot of money - but they bust your balls, they break your heart and even though they give you a lot of money, you find yourself spending a lot of it. So at the end of the year all you do is owe in tax.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was on a plane from Heathrow, going back to LA, and I was looking out over the fields and i thought fucking hell, I want to go home. Bit by bit, and with the help of Felix Dennis, I put the cat in quarantine, packed up stuff, had a garage sale and came home, feeling like some kind of Francis Drake pirate, finally returning to where I started from. I wasn’t born here, but I was raised here. This is where I saw Gene Vincent.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Are the Deviants in Brighton? You’ve been gigging? Is anything else on the go?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yes, I don’t know what. Andy Colquhoun and I have been doing some recordings - through the Autumn. We’re just negotiating to get someone to put it out. But the gigs things is difficult. Everybody wants to be on the road because there’s no other way of making money. We were going to do the Borderline next week... But there’s a whole bunch of reasons not to. We’ll be doing something again. None of us are physically in a place where we’d like to open for Motorhead or something. I do most of my shows sitting on a stool now. We’re getting old man. We’re turning into the old black geezers that we used to admire. Which is a very strange feeling. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But it would be nice to play every three weeks or so.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b> <i>What’s the material you’ve been working on?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>It’s Bill Burroughs meets Jimi Hendrix which is spoken word. A very Jeff Beck, Hendrix guitarline. It’s sort of Deviants light. And then there’s a few odd songs. But it’s mainly spoken word stuff. And having Jaqui in the band there’s a lot of percussion now. A lot of African drums. But we’re not doing The Lion Sleeps Tonight. There’s a song called Cocaine and Gunpowder about 12-year-old mercenary troops in the Congo who have just massacred their 15-year-old officers. It’s more post-Wild Geese part fantasy, part straight news headlines.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It should be out pretty soon. But not for a couple of months. It’s in the can. It’s just the making of a deal and then the packaging. The problem these days is that everybody’s broke. So things aren’t happening or they happen slowly. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve waited a long time for the Headpress book to come out. They can only do one a month because they don’t have the capital. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When you were asking about the internet. I’m a great believer that books will survive. But they’ll be objects. They’re killing off mid-list authors now. So major publishing houses aren’t even talking to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the Penny Antebook - I like the short form style. Because it makes you just blast and then stop.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Someone’s putting together my back catalogue as ebooks. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Paper books are going to be collectors items... If you want to read trash download it...I’m optimistic about the turnover from print to the internet. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of workable business model. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which puts me in a unique position because I am an old age pensioner. So the government gives me money. I wouldn’t be able to do a lot of this if it didn’t. <br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That is going to be the weird one. There’s an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where we see the Replicator - looks like a microwave and can prepare anything from socks to a martini. There’s just this throwaway line “When the replicator was invented, that’s when we abolished money.” And in terms of the internet, we have really abolished money. Because no one’s going to pay for anything.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I downloaded the complete works of Shakespeare for 99p</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>It’s harder to sustain being a writer</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Yes it is. Hopefully there will be an evolutionary process where... because a lot of people shouldn’t be writing. But then again, the public turns around and proves me completely wrong. 50 Shades Of Grey is almost unreadable... </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don’t know. It’s not my world any more. But that may be where the hope lies. One of the reasons I left America, apart from to come back to the NHS - on one side you’ve got LA and on the other you’ve got Boston and New York. And inbetween there is this nightmare land of people living on high fructose corn syrup and animal fat and they really have no function. They hate socialism, but collect welfare. Unless they’re running a meth lab. They’re homophobes. They’re Christians. They think the world was invented 6,000 years ago. It’s nothing to do with me. Fuck it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was very happy to come back to England and sit around watching Danish detective stories... </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>It’s quite SF how divided America is.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>It’s scary. There’s nowhere that I’ve seen with quite the levels of insane stupidity. But on the other hand, there aren’t the Essex people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>I guess I turn on Strictly Come Dancing and feel pretty alienated. But it’s not the same, is it?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I wonder if a lot of that Made In Chelsea stuff... It all seems very pre-2008. When you could earn a living running a Teddy Bear boutique and there was unlimited credit.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>But for some people that’s still working. I guess there is division in that sense in the UK. Some people have been completely fucked. Some people have carried on doing the same useless stuff - and are still coining it. If you go somewhere like Chipping Norton, the recession has never happened. And it’s not like they’re doing anything particularly different there. There are pockets where the money has stayed. And places where it’s evaporated.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>How much of the money in Chipping Norton was in real estate? </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>A lot. But it’s the same in the City Of London. No one’s poorer there.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>True, nobody is poorer there. But I’m wondering if it’s like Daffy Duck walking off the cliff and he hasn’t looked down yet. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>Maybe. But they’re just the fuckers who have stolen all the money...</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>They are. Then we gave them more money to steal. My mind is so in a boggle with Merkel and Obama. When Obama came in, I was really expecting a very sort of Keynsian New Deal, Roosevelt style and shit would really turn around, and we’d jack a lot of the nonsense. But it didn’t happen. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And Labour wore itself out here. And now we’ve got this austerity thing. I read a lot of Paul Krugmann... And the Greek economy is now being austeritied down into nothing. There’s no tax base. Nobody’s got a job. What are we going to do? Just let them starve? We were nicer to the Germans after World War II.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Krugmann - every week in the New York Times he throws up his hands and says, this is simple, easy. Spend money on public works and infrastructure. Build up a tax base - and then pay the debts back. It’s fairly simple shit. It’s simpler than this crazed debt reduction that Osborne and Merkel and the rest of the clowns are pushing through. On the other hand, I’m fascinated by what’s going on in Spain. It’s almost going back to the old Anarcho-syndicalist communities that grew up at the start of the Spanish Civil War. And then Greece has Golden Dawn and the fascists are taking over...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don’t know where you’re going with your interview. We’re now into Greece. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>[I tell him about Iceland and the different approach there. And the success of their anti-austerity policies.] They put the bankers in jail</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Oh did they! Oh cool.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>SDJ: </i></b><i>And they spent money and got things working again. It’s easier for them because they’re a small country and it’s doing all right now.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I wish we heard more about that.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Well we don’t. George Osborne isn’t about to start talking about the success in Iceland because they did the exact opposite of what he’s prescribing</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Having been back I’m slowly sorting out what’s what. The BBC only tell me what they want me to hear. I would like to hear more about Iceland. I hadn’t heard anything since the economy collapsed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m only just discovering that hipster is a pejorative term. I used to be proud to be a hipster but what can you do?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That’s what we have to decide witht eh Deviants. Are we going to be playing the rock and roll circuit or winding up in galleries in hackney. Probably both. If we all live.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m still reeling from hearing about Wilko. He’s got terminal pancreatic cancer. He’s not going to do chemo. He’s just going to play his guitar until he dies. We were good mates. As you get older the reality of death comes ever closer. With the Boom Generation all facing it, we’re going to have to have a good look at it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You’ll probably see an upsurge of spirtualism. I’ve written my art of life book so that’s all taken care of. But I think the Angel business will see quite an upturn by the end of the decade. Get into the angel business! And morticians and tombstones. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>Death is going to be a growth industry.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Oh God! That really is frightening. A mate of mine at LA weekly had a look at the funeral business. They’re doing lead-lined coffins that will last for millennia and not leak. They sell for $25,000. An American funeral can now cost you $100,000 bucks - to get rid of Grandma. That’s the other thing about America. They don’t believe in death.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We’re living in interesting times.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We had more of a sense of where we were going in the 60s. It wasn’t so much a sense of the future as of the speed-up. 2001 was a serious business. Jesus Christ we said we’d go to the moon in ten years and we did it. Everything was just going so fast. There was only five years between the shadows doing Apache and Jimi Hendrix doing Hey Joe. That’s shifting man. It takes that long for Bruce Springsteen to write a fucking song these days. David Bowie hasn’t written a song for nine years. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>When I was growing up there was techno and jungle. At least a sense that things were different. But now, either I’ve missed it - or there hasn’t been anything that’s really moved things forward, or seems new... There isn’t anything that a 16-year-old can listen to, but a 70-year-old can’t</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>No, unless it’s absolute ear-destroying thump.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Monotony. That seems to be the only thing...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I quite like Florence and The Machine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I think what’s really happened is that rock and roll has been unseated as the major means of communication. Unfortunately a lot of it has devolved down to very short attention span internet stuff like twitter. We may be fucked. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There’s this strange thing where the mainstream know much more than is good for them. Amy Winehouse wouldn’t have died in 1969. Well she might have done. But nobody wrote tabloid articles about Jim Morrison’s drunkenness. Or Janice. There was this crazy thing with that obnoxious bastard Piers Morgan and Alex Jones. Alex Jones is stone crazy - the prison planet guy. The new world order is going to send the black helicopters and we’ll all be put in Obama gulags. He’s a huxter and played it to the hilt and pretended to lose it...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The new book I’m working on is about the gun battle in 1979 between the aliens and humans in Mexco... There’s this crazy alternate history that write alternate histories...</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Is there a potential Tim Leary up the street at Brighton university?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It gets tiring fighting the same war over and over and over. What do you mean we’ve got to go through it all again. NO! Roe Vs Wade. We’ve got abortion. Fuck off. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s better here. There’s some sense of what’s cricket, so to speak. Even Cameron wouldn’t be able to completely wipe out the NHS. It’s all nibbling at the edges. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can’t see how long this coalition can hold on. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ: </b><i>I voted Lib Dem - which was a mistake</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>Aren’t there a body of decent LibDems who are chafing?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b><i>They aren’t voting against the government. </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>What about the non-MPs?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>SDJ:</b><i>They must have left the party.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>MF: </b>I hope Labour get revenge. Although I’d feel a lot more comfortable if Ed Balls were leading the party . Becuase he looks like the kind of labour politician I’m used to.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I worked on the Obama campaign and we didn’t get what we expected. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">God knows what’s happening in China... </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>We see a fox on the wall. Mick tells me about his garden and its visitors for a while: “I have a garden that’s full of wildlife.” He seems pleased. But then we’re back on politics</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’ve got friends in Bangalore - which seems to be a hotbed of cyber subversion. YOu’ve got these massively over-qualified young people working in customer service for BT, American Airlines, whatever. And in the meantime they go online and get up to all kinds. Making bizarro movies and god knows what else. You walk though the market and there’s a guy full of mangoes and the next full of cellphones that never sold... </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Keep an eye on Bangalore. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It feels like they’re really having the late 60s and discovering all kinds of things. I don’t know what the drug consumption’s like.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>The fox comes back.</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Urban wildlife is a fascination of mine. If you want a dystopia throw in some urban wildlife.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">[<i>At that point, I realised I’d stayed hours longer than I intended and have to leave. Mick shows me to the door, presses a copy of Elvis Died For Somebody Else’s Sins, But Not Mine. Later I read it. Guess what? It’s fucking good</i>.] </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's Mick in action in younger days: </span></div>
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Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-42700573421807233502013-02-05T11:22:00.002+00:002013-02-05T11:23:11.123+00:00A Yes! Party. Connecting with Osho...While I'm <a href="http://samdjordison.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/magdalene-laundries.html">revisiting my archive,</a> here's another article I wrote about religion for <a href="http://www.learnoutloud.com/Audio-Books/Religion-and-Spirituality/Comparative-Religion/Everything-You-Know-about-God-Is-Wrong-Volume-1/29367">Disinformation</a>.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>A Yes! Party</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>After a long period in the wilderness Osho are once again on the rise. They are attracting new followers to their bases around the world—including Osho Leela, an old Manor House in Dorset in the South of the UK which I visited in late 2005.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>One</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Fascist boot-camp, Oregon, USA</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Back in 1985, Margaret Hill, a former mayor of Antelope Oregon, had the measure of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “He is a crook,” she said. There were few people around then who would have disagreed with her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mrs Hill was being interviewed by a New York Times reporter who’d gone to investigate the chaos the Indian guru and his followers had wreaked during their four-year tenure just outside her home town. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In brief, the facts were these: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Indian guru Bhagwan Rajneesh had arrived in America in 1981 (along with twelve tons of luggage) claiming that he needed to enter the country for ‘medical reasons’. He was accompanied by around 7,000 disciples, who settled in a 60,000 acre $6million ranch on semi-desert scrubland just outside of Antelope. Almost immediately, things took a turn for the weird.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To the surprise of everyone around him, Bhagwan stopped talking (or, as he put it, he determined on a course of ‘speaking through silence’). The day-to-day running of the huge community then fell to his follower, Ma Anand Sheela. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sheela took to wearing robes and calling herself ‘queen’. Fences, complete with guard towers, went up around the compound and disciples armed with Uzis patrolled Bhagwan’s residence. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of the commune’s members were forced to do twelve hours work a day for no pay. While they succeeded in clearing and planting 3,000 acres of land, building a 350-million-gallon reservoir, a 10-megawatt power substation and a functioning dairy farm, only Sheela and her coterie seemed to live in any comfort. The others had to endure unbearable hardships. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The most bizarre incidents occurred outside the ranch in the town of Antelope itself. There were so many people living on the ranch that they were able to force the results of the 1984 local elections and take over Antelope’s local council. They decided to rename this hitherto upright Oregon backwater Rajneeshpuram. When attempts were also made to rig local county elections by shipping thousands of homeless people onto the ranch, resistance to the Sannyasins (as Osho’s followers were known)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> grew stronger. Sheela responded by having her followers dump salmonella into the salad bars of several local restaurants. Antelope therefore gained the dubious distinction of being the site of the first (and to date, the last) successful bio-terrorism attack in US history. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eventually, Bhagwan Rajneesh emerged from his silence and attempted to distance himself from his disciples. He said that Sheela had been running the place like a ‘fascist concentration camp’ and went on the talk show <i>Good Morning America</i> to try and suggest that those with him were ‘fellow travellers’ rather than followers. He also called on the FBI to conduct an independent investigation into the ranch. The FBI quickly found an extensive eavesdropping system that was wired throughout the commune residences, public buildings and offices. They also uncovered a secret laboratory where experiments had been run on the manufacture of HIV as well as salmonella. Oddest of all they found that Rajneesh’s bedroom was rigged up so that he could receive Nitrous Oxide – laughing gas – while he lay in bed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sheela confessed to having a rather ‘bad habit’ of poisoning people and was sent to jail. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh himself was charged with criminal conspiracy, 34 counts of making false statements to federal officials and two counts of immigration fraud. He paid a $400,000 fine and was given a ten-year sentence – suspended on the understanding that he would leave the United States. When he left he declared that he “hoped never to come back.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many of his followers, meanwhile, were simply abandoned on the ranch. Most of these people had given over their life savings. They had been promised that they would be returned when they left or once the ranch had started making money. Of course, they weren’t. Somewhere along the line, however, Bhagwan Rajneesh had managed to amass no fewer than 93 Rolls Royce cars.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Now he has left two groups of followers in the lurch when the going got tough,'' the plain speaking Margaret Hill told the man from the New York Times (Rajneesh had moved to Oregon primarily to escape a large tax bill he faced at his original commune in India). His cult had been disgraced, discredited and, finally, displaced. It seemed that the end had come. Few organisations would have been able to recover from the kind of scandals they’d been engulfed in, no matter how fanatical their devotees. Few would even have the gall to stick around.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Two</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Paradise, Pune, India</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All of these antics in Oregon were a far cry from the cult’s humble beginnings just over a decade before in India. In 1971 Mohan Chandra Rajneesh (a former philosophy teacher at the University of Jabalapur, who had quite his job to dedicate himself to his full time calling as a spiritual leader) assumed the modest title of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, meaning ‘The Blessed One Who Has Recognised himself as God’. He had simple commandment: “Enjoy!” Unlike other more ascetic gurus to have emerged from India in the 1960s and 1970s, he demanded little from his followers in the way of renunciation – and lots in the way of carnal pleasure.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The ashram he established in Pune in West Central India in 1974 quickly became a New Age Mecca. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It attracted thousands of young Western disciples sold on the charismatic teacher’s mercurial wit and unique brand of Eastern mysticism. Marked out by their happy expressions and orange clothes (dyed at the Bhagwan’s instigation, to reflect the colour of the sun) they quickly spread their guru’s teachings and popularised his unique forms of taboo-breaking therapies. In these sessions, known as Dynamic Meditations, pupils were encouraged to destroy their religious and social conditioning to find out who they really were. They wore blindfolds – or nothing at all – and explored their deepest selves by screaming, fighting and, inevitably, they had sex. Broken limbs were common, as were broken relationships. The latter came thanks to the teachers’ propensity to encourage their students to watch their partners having sex with another person – so they could confront the emotions that this betrayal provoked.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In spite of, or maybe even because of, these extreme practices, the ‘Rajneeshees’ continued to expand in number. Soon they spread out across Europe and the USA, often in stately homes like the one they named ‘Medina Rajneesh’ in Suffolk, where 400 of the Bhagwan’s followers established themselves in the early 1980s – seemingly in utopian contentment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At his peak, Bhagwan Rajneesh laid claim to 250,000 followers. His Orange People were the cults’ cult. They fulfilled every cliché – sex, drugs, tribal music and crazy clothes. Their leader was the very image of the guru, with twinkling eyes, a long flowing beard and a priapic fondness for his flock. And just like most cult leaders, he left behind him a trail of broken families, ruined minds and wrecked lives.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even before the Antelope episode there had been plenty of signs that all was not well in paradise. One of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s more chilling suggestions was that prominent female followers should become sterilised so that they could better practise his teachings. Ugly rumours of child abuse and the destruction of family life slowly began to surface. The growing anti-cult movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s also warned that the group’s communal living practices and intensive ‘meditations’ were akin to brainwashing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The disaster in Oregon was just the tipping point. The communes around the world had been gaining momentum for a rapid descent a long time. As soon as Rajneeshpuram in Antelope imploded and Rajneesh fled to India, many more of his communities around the world dissolved. Most of them were embroiled in unique scandals of their own. Bhagwan’s English followers, for instance, had developed a marked fondness for the drug ecstasy, which the Indian guru had recommended as a spiritual elixir. It’s widely believed that they were the first to bring it into the UK and members began producing it on an industrial scale. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Meanwhile, the original commune in India limped on, but Bhagwan Rajneesh was a shadow of his former self. In 1985 he declared that his religion was dead – and that it had, in fact, been invented by his followers. He said he was glad not to have to pretend to be enlightened anymore. Then, in December 1988, he told his followers that his body had become host to none other than Guatama Buddha. However, when the Buddha disapproved of his use of the Jacuzzi, Bhagwan banished him from his body and said that he was now Zorba the Buddha instead. In 1989 he changed his name for the last time to Osho. He died in 1990, bed-ridden and addicted to laughing gas. He left a simple instruction to his disciples for after he passed away: “stick me under the bed and forget about me.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Three</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Osho returns - everywhere</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For a long time, it seemed that the man last known as Osho had indeed been forgotten – or was at least regarded as little more than a bad memory. In 2004, for instance, when Tim Guest</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> published ‘My Life In Orange’, his autobiographical account of his childhood in the UK commune Medina Rajneesh, it read like an obituary for the group. As the blurb on the jacket put it, they represented: “a lost moment of madness in the cultural history of the West.” The press presented them as nothing more threatening than a fascinating museum piece and in nearly all of the coverage this excellent book produced, the cult was written about firmly in the past tense. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Osho was a busted flush. Nothing to worry about anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The trouble is, however, that in direct contradiction of his last known command, Those of Osho’s followers who remained did not forget about him. They just laid low for a few years, licking their wounds, waiting for the fallout from all the scandals to blow over. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These followers – who now call their faith ‘Osho’ as well - only actually forgot about all the bad stuff. Like nearly all durable religions and belief systems, Osho has developed a distant and shaky relationship with history. Those facts that don’t suit their cause seem to have been conveniently forgotten (or at least banished), while a new narrative has taken their place.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Osho we are now told, with the cult’s Christian-like habit of talking about their dead master in the present tense, “is not a guru.” He is just the man who gives people the space to take “responsibility” for their own lives – and thus “find total freedom.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So that’s clear. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Oregon days, meanwhile, when they are mentioned, are explained rather differently to the way, newspapers, witnesses, local people in Oregon, the FBI and even Osho himself saw things. The article most frequently cited on ‘Osho’ websites (‘The Story of Osho – Master, Mystic, Madman by Amit Jayaram) describes how the guru and his sannyasins<i> ”</i>transformed the face of a timeless desert” into a green and beautiful land. Then they came under attack from “a bigoted government” which used every “foul means” at its disposal to destroy the nice old guru and his cult. Meanwhile, the residents of the nearby “ghost town” of Antelope joined in with this conspiracy and harassed the innocent sannyasins. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So <i>that’s</i> why the ranch collapsed and they all had to leave. The US “government”, it’s claimed, even tried to poison Osho with the drug thalium. (Osho himself came up with this theory and he was convinced of it right up until his dying day, even though he exhibited none of the usual symptoms of thalium poisoning. For instance, he still managed to hang on to his hair and lustrous grey beard, even though thalium induces rapid and catastrophic hair loss.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What’s more Osho’s followers have been busy at more than rewriting history. They have also been steadily regrouping over the last decade, attracting new members and spreading out again all over the world. Without anyone really noticing, they’ve once again grown into a huge multinational organisation. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In short, Osho is back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Alongside the huge centre in Pune (which never closed down, even in the cult’s darkest days) there are now known Osho-based communities in Iran, Thailand, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Taiwan, Patagonia, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, Denmark, France, Mexico, Canada, all over the UK and the US (where there are large retreats in Colorado, New York and, naturally, California). </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you were to read the websites that promote these communes without knowing anything about the group’s past, you could easily mistake them for perfectly legitimate New Age therapy centres. Of course, it’s understandable that they don’t market themselves as a crazy cult with a terrorist history, but that doesn’t mean such comprehensive – and fundamentally deceptive – re-branding isn’t troubling. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Pune commune in India, for instance, looks on its website like little more than a resort - and they encourage visits from anyone and everyone: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“This lush contemporary 40-acre campus is a tropical oasis where nature and the 21</span><span style="font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>st </sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Century blend seamlessly, both within and without,” the website gushes. “With its white marble pathways, elegant black buildings, abundant foliage and Olympic-sized swimming pool, it is the perfect setting to take time out for yourself.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sounds lovely. And if that doesn’t convince you, they even provide a plug from <i>Elle</i> magazine: </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>"</i>Every year thousands of people visit this luxurious resort… A very comfortable paradise where you can stay a long time, with low-budget hotels nearby and very good food in the commune, with meditations free. The atmosphere is really like a fairy tale. A paradise where all your emotional, bodily and spiritual needs are met. I can advise everybody to visit for a few days and walk around that beautiful garden where everybody is friendly."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s only when you delve deeper into the site that you find the odd stuff about the need to wear red robes during the day – because the colour maroon, when worn by many people meditating together “adds to the collective mental energy” and because loose robes are comfortable in the tropical climate. Oh – and you have to take an AIDS test before you can enter the campus. That’s right, an AIDS test.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even with these strange restrictions and the bizarre nature of the meditations that “guests” are invited to partake in, many people who visit the “resort” have no idea what they’re getting into. I recently horrified a personal acquaintance who had visited the centre in all innocence on a trip around India by telling her about the history of the friendly looking old man whose picture hung on every wall. Up until that point she’d still been convinced that Osho Pune was nothing more than an eccentric resort -even if the AIDS test had made her feel awkward and she had found it strange how many of the people there had changed their names.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">*****</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s not just spiritually inclined tourists who have been taken in. In Holland one of Osho’s most prominent followers, a man who calls himself Veeresh runs something called a ‘Humaniveristy’, which terms itself “an international centre for therapy, training and personal growth.” Here they run a series of courses designed to help create “people people”, easily able to work with others and who will the literature says, “develop and refine many positive and beautiful qualities to become heartful, dynamic, resourceful, juicy, creative and humorous.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As well as fostering these useful, if eccentrically labelled skills, the Humaniversity runs a large addiction centre. All very commendable – although it may set alarm bells ringing among those who know about other cults’ involvement with drugs and the way they recruit from the ranks of the homeless and hopeless. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This addiction treatment has also gained Veeresh a degree of legitimacy that other Osho followers have so far failed to attain. In May 2006, for instance, Veeresh was visited by John E. Sheehan, Vice President of Phoenix House Programs, one of the biggest and most respected drug and alcohol relief organizations in the world. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">An even bigger coup came when Veeresh appeared on BBC radio in March 2006. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Presented as a "spiritual therapist", Veeresh described the Osho 'Humaniversity' he leads as a training, meditation and therapy centre and claimed not to follow a religion. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The talk was most notable for Veeresh’s unintentional hilarity. When asked about hugging he replied: "Yeah, yes, that’s what we teach. We're a hugging school. I love hugging. When I met you I thought that you looked like this image of the Johnny Walker bottle, whisky bottle. Yeah, yeah, you're a warm guy, I like you man. I like your voice; I heard it for the first time yesterday."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He then went on to suggest all members of the UN should hug before and after meetings ("that would be so beautiful man, wow!") and explained at length how he once threatened to break his sons legs.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Odd as Veeresh may have appeared to Johnnie Walker’s traditionally rather staid audience, the fact remains that it’s a show listened to by millions in the UK. It marks a new high in the UK for Osho’s disciples’ continuing quest to present themselves as modern dynamic therapists rather than an old-fashioned cult. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Four</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>A juicy weekend, Dorset, UK</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The continuing success of Osho’s rehabilitation can be measured by the fact that on the very day I’m writing this (6 May, 2006), there’s a recommendation to visit the Osho Leela commune in the glossy magazine section of The Guardian, one of Britain’s bestselling quality broadsheets. It’s the third recommendation in as many years from the paper, and just one of the many that get printed around the world every year by journalists who know little about the group’s true nature. “Consider getting your festival fix at the Great British Yoga Festival in Dorset,” counsels the writer, next to a photo of the Osho Leela building. Judging by the article, it all sounds like good healthy fun with talks, workshops, “nice cups of herbal tea” and lights out by 9:30pm. The worst thing that’s likely to happen to you is that your hair might end up being braided. Anyone clicking on the yoga festival website, meanwhile, will learn that Osho, rather than being a crook, is a “great mystic and teacher.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course, as Margaret Hill from Antelope could tell you, the reality about Osho is very different. And, from my own personal experience, I know that there’s a bit more to worry about at their communes than hair braiding. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I spent a weekend at Osho Leela in the autumn of 2005. I was there specifically because I’d developed an interest in the group while writing a book about cults, cranks and religious eccentrics, The Joy Of Sects</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, but I signed up in the guise of a normal punter. I wanted to keep my identity as a journalist with an interest in cults quiet: both so that they would allow me to visit in the first place and because of a vague sense of paranoia about my own safety.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Using the group’s website, I put my (false) name down for a “A Yes! Party” [sic], just like anyone else can. Described as “mini-festivals’ the ‘Yes!’ weekends offer meditations, workshops, and, according to the promotional literature, “much laughter, play and dancing – not forgetting the great food and cuddles.” They are regular events open to the general public and which strangers to the group are actively encouraged to attend. This last element was good news for me as it meant I could get an inside glimpse into life in Osho Leela without having to declare my interest. More to the point, since so many of the participants were going to be “first timers” it provided a great opportunity to witness first hand the process by which a normal person could become involved with Osho. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I also hoped to be able to find out why anyone would want to have anything to do with Osho when so much about it and its history seemed downright crazy to me. The answer to this question turned out to be simple. The majority of 50 or so people who had gone along to the party didn’t think the Osho group was odd at all - for the very good reason that they didn’t know anything about its true nature. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There were several categories of attendee. First there were the actual members of the household who were generally in charge of things. Working closely with them, but performing more menial tasks in the kitchens, gardens and around the house were the ‘volunteers’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Then there were the regular visitors who had taken on sannyasin names and paid large amounts of money to keep coming back to various events. There were also a few people who had been on two or three visits to Osho Leela and finally there was a large contingent of first timers like me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even the regular sannyasins seemed to know little about the organisation that they were devoting their lives to. There was a limit to how far I could press them about the unmentionable episodes in Antelope, since I was keen not to let on that I was a journalist, but the overwhelming impression I took was that they regarded Osho Leela simply as a place for therapy where they could make friends and kick start a new life (they often seemed to have ended up in Osho’s embrace after personal tragedies: nervous breakdowns, divorces, bankruptcies). Many (particularly a few goaty 50-something male divorcees) also seemed to regard it as something of an advanced singles’ club, frequently dropping lascivious hints throughout the weekend and as I was eventually to discover, engaging in some decidedly ‘blue’ practices.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Out of the less regular attendees, a few had been attracted out of an interest in Osho the guru and a few more were regulars on the UK spiritual circuit and seemed to have a vague idea what Osho was about. Most, however, had not even heard of Osho the person; let alone what he had done. Indeed, videos were shown throughout the weekend with the specific purpose of introducing newbies to the old guru. (Curiously, the one I watched made no mention of guns, nitrous oxide or Rolls Royces).</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The question of why –and how - people with absolutely no knowledge of Osho could end up there is harder to answer. Some seemed to have turned up pretty much on a whim. One girl I spoke to, Jo, said that she had signed up for the party after a brief internet search. She’d been looking for a therapy weekend having been treated to one in a hotel once before, where she’d been pampered, massaged and spent most of her time in the steam room. She’d enjoyed this experience so much, she said, she wanted something similar again and since Osho Leela had seemed to be the cheapest “therapy centre” with easy rail access in the South of England, she’d decided to give it a try. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Naïve as Jo appeared, she did at least have a more savvy friend at home. “He’s dead worried about me,” she said. “He told me, if it’s a cult or anything, you leave girl.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In spite of this advice, Jo was staying. Osho Leela wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting, but she was having a very “interesting” time and wasn’t planning on leaving until the weekend was finished. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But if Osho Leela isn’t a cult, I don’t know what is.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The most stereo-typically “cultish” of the weekend’s activities were the trademark Osho meditations. Sometimes they were reminiscent of the kind of reality TV exercises employed to humiliate the contestants, at other times they were pretty worrying. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For instance, on my first morning in Osho Leela (after a sleepless night spent in a dorm above a room where loud techno music was playing until 4.30am), I got up early (7am) to take part in the infamous Dynamic meditation, a practice carried through from the good old / bad old days of Osho. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This meditation was split into fifteen-minute stages. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first was called "chaotic breathing". As intense a-rhythmic drumming sounds boomed out of the stereo (accompanied by other indefinable sounds in the high-registers) we were told to breath in and out, hard and fast and in no regular pattern. Several of the participants quickly became wet with sweat, while snot and mucus dripped down their fronts. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The disorientating music and hyperventilating induced a panicky, intense atmosphere in the room; one that was only heightened when the second stage was introduced by a loud crash on the stereo and the room erupted around me. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When this next stage had been explained for the benefit of the newcomers, we’d been told that the idea was to expunge all bad thoughts and negative energies from the brain. To do this mind-cleansing we were expected to shout, scream and swear at the top of our voices and use our bodies to ‘let out’ our anger. So it was that the people around me began beating cushions (left in the room specifically for the purpose) against the floor, or they used them as protection as they pounded their fists against the walls. A couple of sannyasins stripped down to their shorts, writhing and stomping, the polished wooden floor around them becoming ever slicker with sweat. One man started spinning round and round on a cushion. A woman lay on her back, her legs furiously pedalling at the air. The noise and pressure were immense. A few first-timers were looking as self-conscious and uncomfortable as I felt myself, but most were throwing themselves into it, the hysteria in the room pushing everyone to respond with ever-greater energy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After all that stress it came as something of a relief that the next stage was just plain old-fashioned daft - if a little tiring. To the accompaniment of pulsating music, we had to bounce up and down on our heels for another 15 minutes, our hands in the air, going "Oooh!-Oooh!-Oooh!-Oooh!" until a voice (Osho himself, recorded before his death) shouted "Stop."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Next there was 15 minutes of complete silence. The calm was broken only by the laboured breathing of participants recovering from their exertions - and one particularly percussive fart around the 10-minute stage. I didn't laugh. The atmosphere forbad it. I noticed when we entered the final stage - 15 minutes of dancing to fast, soaring Indian music - that several people had tears running down their cheeks. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Afterwards, I was exhausted – and the people around me, who had been participating in all earnest rather than with journalistic scepticism, looked drained. I was surprised how full-on the experience had been, especially since I thought that the sannyasins must have softened things up considerably for the benefit of the inexperienced attendees at the Yes! Party. The stories of broken limbs and group sex from the 1970s and 1980s were beginning to seem far less outlandish…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Alongside the meditations, there were several other characteristics of the weekend likely to effect participants’ minds and emotions. One of the first things we were told upon arrival is that English people never hug properly. A proper Osho hug, we were informed was far better. The correct procedure was to make "a foot sandwich" so that your legs are inter-spliced with your partner and then twist so that your chest is pressed up against theirs and hold still. During this time, the experienced sannyasins would let out deep sighs and porn star style “ahhh” noises. After a good 30 seconds of squeezing, the embrace was released so that you could move on to the next person. The whole thing generally went on for about quarter of an hour – long enough to ensure that you hugged every person in the room at least once. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There was a hugging session in the evening when we arrived, another directly after the Dynamic meditation another after lunch… I tried to avoid them as much as possible, but still ended up taking part in five. I learnt the aroma of more complete strangers’ armpits in one weekend than I had in the whole of the rest of my life. And if this enforced intimacy, felt like an assault on my boundaries, that was exactly what was intended. One of the first things that Dhyano, the founder of the commune and leader of that weekend’s activities, explained was that to refuse a hug was to “come on all English": with all that cold reserve and all those dreadful hang-ups about personal space. It was thinking with the head instead of the heart. Keeping a safe distance was weak. "None of us die safe at Osho," he declared proudly.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most anti-cult activists say that the breaking down of boundaries and intense physical and emotional bonding exercises - like the Osho hugging - are a common characteristic of most dangerous cults. It’s one of the primary ways they create a tie to the group – a tie of guilt and fear (as much as affection) for anyone that might be thinking of leaving. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">"Babies die without love," Dhyano told us. “In orphanages children can't survive.” No evidence was provided to support these bizarre claims, nor his most alarming pronouncement: "If you're alone, you will wither and die."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The corollary to this intense bonding within most cults is the creation of an extreme “us” and “them” mentality between the group and the outside world. The frequent references made over the course of the weekend to the deficiency of English nature and the superiority of the sannyasin way was indicative that such conditioning was on the agenda at Osho Leela. Even more emphatic was the workshop I attended following on from the Dynamic Meditation. The subject was “non-violent communication”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Non-violent communication, we were told, was “a way to learn how to listen empathically and communicate our authentic feelings and needs”. In reality, it was a method that stigmatized everyday language – and, therefore, everyone that speaks it (i.e., everyone that hadn’t taken the course – i.e., almost everyone outside Osho). </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The workshop teacher, a man called Michael, arranged a series of cards on the floor with words printed on them like "Demand", "Threat", "You are," "I am", "Punish", "Sorry". These words we were told were examples of 'jackal' language. Words that bad people use. Attaching two puppets to his hands – one of a giraffe and one of a “naughty jackal” - to help make his points, Michael explained that he wanted us to talk with our hearts rather than our heads (the need not to think being another theme that was cropping up again and again over the weekend). He warned us to be 'self-full' rather than 'selfless' or 'selfish' and to beware of the kind of language – heavy in demands and hard logic – that 'jackals' would use to trick us. We weren't supposed to say "sorry" because that is "a demand for absolution." We weren't supposed to use the verb "to be" too often as that "labelled" people.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These language strictures resulted in some strange combinations. For instance, Michael suggested that instead of saying "that was a good dinner" (“a meaningless and labelling construction”) we should say to the cook: "I was really touched by the way you brought me that dinner. It satisfied my inner need for beauty."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course, it was ridiculous and laughable. But no one else was smiling. By the end of the workshop Michael had even managed to reduce one girl to floods of tears as she was made to relive an argument she had recently had with a friend and asked to try to think of the ‘non-violent’ way of resolving it. There was no doubting that she was taking all this very seriously even though Michael had made her wear a pair of giraffe ears and talk what was, essentially, nonsense.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Brainwashing is a controversial subject. Ever since American GIs captured during the Korean War started coming back talking about how great they thought communism was, there's been hot debate about what constitutes brainwashing - and whether indeed it actually works. Anti-cult groups are convinced that some sinister organisations have been using mind control techniques for years, but medical opinion is divided. The term is too emotive - with its redolence of cold war propaganda and paranoia - and it's too hard to test 'brainwashing' situations in a controlled way for any theories to be completely scientific. There's also the problem that some people seem far more open to mind control than others, leading many people who've researched purported brainwashing cults to conclude that people have to want to be indoctrinated, or at least open to suggestion, before mental coercion can occur… in which case it's not really coercion at all. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">However, while the jury is still out on brainwashing, as any good-cop/bad-cop torture team can tell you, there are definitely a few things you can do to alter people's mental state and to make them more open to suggestion and manipulation. Deprive them of sleep. Exhaust them mentally and physically. Subject them to extremes of pains and pleasure. Be nice to them and then scream at them like a maniac…</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The attendants at the Yes! Party all encountered varying degrees of this treatment. The meditations were all physically tiring as well as mentally exhausting, the highs and lows of the screaming sessions followed by intense group hugging must have played fury with participants’ dopamine levels. The jumping, dancing and cushion pummelling ensured most participants were reduced to sweating, quivering messes. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Meanwhile, even by Saturday afternoon, with a full (largely sleepless) 24 hrs still to go, the wakefulness enforced by the all night music and dancing was already taking its toll on the bleary eyed, puffy skinned people who wondered zombie-like around the compound. The strange atmosphere of the weekend was only increased by the sight of men and women passing out in their chairs, dozing off while eating their dinner and, in the case of the ‘art class’ I took part in after the non-violent communication workshop, lying flat on their backs and snoring while other people scribbled away on the floor around them. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Osho’s defence, I should note that this constant loud music and impossibility of getting a good night’s sleep was the only unavoidable facet of the weekend. Nobody <i>had </i>to take part in any of the other activities and they were free to leave at anytime. Indeed, I sneaked away to visit a local pub on Saturday afternoon instead of taking part in a group “Love meditation”. (A high point in my weekend.) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All the same, even if there were no rules about attendance and there was certainly no physical coercion, there was a lot of peer pressure to take part in everything, ensuring that Osho ticked yet another box on most cult-watchers check lists. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I noticed several people around my dorm being questioned intensely throughout the weekend. They all were forced into making excuses about why they hadn’t been to various meditations and left looking embarrassed and even ashamed. I had personally been cornered several times by the end of the second day and told that I to participate more and try harder. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“The more you put in, the more you get out” one man I’d never met before yelled at me, naked and dripping with sweat in the communal dorm, angry that I’d missed the afternoon’s activities when I’d slipped out to the pub. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“You’ve just got to do it… No point in half measures. Come on!” someone else urged me less than five minutes later. And so it went on. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Meanwhile, although some people who had come back from the ‘Love Meditation’ that I’d skipped looked like all their Christmases had just come at once, others looked ashen faced and sullen, especially those who were visiting Osho Leela for the first time. “It was a bit much," said a man called John (who only the night before had been bright eyed and telling me how much he’d been looking forward to having a new experience that weekend). He didn't think he was going to come to Leela again. He wasn't even going to try the main event of the weekend - the following morning's Aum meditation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Aum meditation took place on Sunday morning. I already had a reasonable idea of what to expect thanks to a session the night before where Amira, one of the full time residents, explained the meaning and techniques behind the various unusual rites we were expected to perform. All the same, nothing could have completely prepared me for the real thing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As performed at the Yes! Party, the Aum was two and a half hours long, split into 12 stages of 15 minutes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first stage was called the ‘Return To Hell’. We’d been told in the pep talk that as in the shouting stage of the Dynamic, the aim of the exercise was to get rid of all our ‘negative emotions’ by “continuously exhausting” ourselves. The difference was that this time we had to go round the room, encountering as many different people as possible and shouting and screaming that we hated them - alongside any other obscenities that sprang to mind. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reason for all this, we were told, was that “cancer arises from unexpressed anger” and so we needed to get rid of it. The frenzied shouting, combined with another weird soundtrack on the stereo, created one of the most unhinged scenes I have witnessed in my career. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And that was just the beginning. The second stage was far quieter, but more unsettling in its way. It was called ‘heaven’. Now we were expected to go around the room telling each person individually that we loved them, with just as much passion as we had been screaming at them before. “I love you,” I had to say to complete strangers, looking them straight in the eye. It felt like a betrayal of all the people outside Osho that I really did love. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The third stage, ‘second wind’ involved fifteen minutes of running on the spot, arms in the air. It was physically tiring, but a relief after all that forced intense interaction and emotional display. The same went for the fourth stage, ‘kundalini rising’: fifteen minutes of continual shaking of the entire body that certainly looked (and felt) strange, but was relatively innocuous compared to what followed. Labelled ‘the cuckoos nest’, this was the strangest of all the sections of the meditation. It involved 15 minutes of acting “as mad as you can be”. We were told to scream, shout, cry, jump, have tantrums, act like a mental patient if we could… </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The reason for this? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“You’ll never go mad if you freak out.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The practice was just as dubious as the science. Most people in the room were whipped into a state of extreme hysteria. Some even started going into spasms. One man fell at my feet having a convulsive fit. He was foaming at the mouth, so the sannyasins in black t-shirts (who were there to ensure nothing went wrong during the Aum) took him to one side of the room and propped him up on cushions… And when he came round and they sent him right out again into the maelstrom.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We descended from that sharp emotional peak with 15 minutes of dancing, then 15 minutes of crying (which we’d been told the night before “helps the brain chemistry turn from depression to feeling good”) and then 15 minutes of laughing. The laughing stage was creepy. It felt like being in a room with 50 people doing impressions of the Joker from Batman. Or 45, I should say, because a handful of people had been unable to stop the uncontrollable weeping they’d entered during the crying stage.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The ninth stage was called the ‘Dance Of The Lovers’ and rather alarmingly entailed dancing in a “sensual and sexual way” with other people around the room. We’d been asked to “allow” ourselves “to take a risk.” I had no desire to do anything of the sort, but it turned out, I didn’t have much choice. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Already shattered from all that had gone before, I moved to the side of the room, intending to keep out of things. Most other participants joined in near-orgies, dry rutting as a deep Barry White voice boomed over the sound system about how "nice and sexy" everyone was feeling and how much we all loved Osho to the accompaniment of moaning sounds and crazy trance music. Several girls were crying. They didn’t seem to like it either. My attention was diverted from their plight, however, when two (much older) female sannyasins came towards me. I told them I wanted to be left alone, and according to the explanation we’d been given the night before, that should have been that. Instead, they grabbed me, sandwiched me and started frotting me. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m aware that this “Sam-sandwich” sounds pretty funny. And I’m sure that the look on my face was absolutely priceless while it was all going on. But as the old cliché goes, I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible. Then it seemed less like a good dinner party anecdote and more like molestation. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The only way out seemed to be to overpower the two over-enthusiastic ladies, a prospect I was I was beginning to seriously contemplate when I was rescued by the sudden malfunction of the stereo system. As the CD began to skip, I was able to push myself clear without using too much force, spending the rest of that particular stage by the water cooler, feeling very odd indeed. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The three remaining stages were all extreme and unpleasant in their way too, but by then my attempt at objective observation had collapsed, my one aim being to keep my mind clear and just endure the meditation until I was free to leave. I went though it all on autopilot: 15 minutes of chanting the word Ohm in a circle, 15 minutes of complete silence and then that Osho favourite, 15 minutes of intense hugging. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was two and a half hours I never want to repeat. Judging by the faces of others around the room it had had a similarly intense effect on them. But our experience palls in comparison with what the full time sannyasins put themselves through and what it really means to be a full time follower of Osho today. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Amira had hinted darkly during his pep talk the night before the Aum, ‘The Dance Of The Lovers’ could get much more serious. Even more unsettling was his proud declaration that the Aum should really go on for days. He himself had been on a five day Aum marathon. For three of those days he’d gone without sleep (“a <i>big</i> thing for heightening emotions” he explained). He’d only finally stopped when, he said, “one guy became completely catatonic”. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By the end of the Aum, I was eager to leave, already convinced that despite their efforts to forget the past, the Osho group was already repeating it (to paraphrase </span><span style="color: #040811; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">George Santayana)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. I also felt that I’d been made to throw off quite enough of my “typically English” reserve. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The excitement wasn’t quite over, however. During Amira’s evening talk about the Aum, I’d taken the opportunity to take a few photos of sannyasins who were helping him to demonstrate the weird rites. That had turned out to be a mistake. Soon afterwards I’d been approached twice in quick succession – first by Amira himself and then by Dhyano the commune founder. They’d both demanded to know (in as aggressive a way possible for people who insisted on communicating 'non-violently’) why I was taking pictures and what I intended to do with them. Now again on the following morning, as I sat panting in the main hall with all the other people who’d taken part in the Aum, Dhyano made me raise my hand, informing everyone that a “snapper” was present and making sure they all got a good look at me. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was time to leave.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I made my exit soon after the meeting was over and my already tired and paranoid brain had decided that sticking around was going to, at the very least, cost me my camera and what little dignity I had left.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My last contact with an Osho follower came as I packed my back and hurried out of the dormitory.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“You better not publish those photos man,” he said. “There are governments that want to shut us down. They don’t like people supporting themselves or being happy.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I should have asked in return what possible harm would come through publication of the photos if Osho had nothing to hide. It might have been pertinent too, to inquire why, if Osho Leela was were a mainstream therapy centre as it purported to be, they’d object to someone explaining what went on there. I could also have pointed out that no one had seemed at all “happy” to me and that the only people supporting themselves were the group leaders while most other people appeared to be parting with an awful lot of money to keep them afloat. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course, by the time I’d thought of all that, it was too late. I was already in my car, eager to put a good few hundred miles between Osho Leela and myself. When the heat was on I’d simply made a weak joke about how my photos probably wouldn’t be good enough to print anyway (true enough as it turned out) and wished him luck for the future (he was another man drawn in by Osho following a recent bankruptcy). My feeling of culpability and personal dishonesty added to the already uneasy mix of fatigue, paranoia and disorientation the weekend had instilled. My conscience was clear on one point, however; the story of Osho Leela was one that should be told. I’m convinced it’s still a cult, and potentially dangerous for anyone that goes there.</span></div>
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Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-79556535928260394412013-02-05T09:50:00.005+00:002013-02-05T10:25:13.284+00:00Magdalene Laundries<b><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/magdalene-laundries-hunger-strike">The Magdalene Laundries are in the news again today</a>. </b><br />
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<b>In case you're wondering what these women are fighting for, here's an article I wrote for Disinformation back in 2006. </b><br />
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It took a chance discovery to set in motion the chain of events that led to the unravelling of the mystery of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.<br />
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In 1993 a mass grave was discovered in the grounds of a Catholic nunnery in the north of Dublin. The grave was found on land that The Good Shepherd nuns from High Park Convent had sold to a developer, to build the kind of brash new development that has characterised Ireland’s economic miracle during the past 15 years. At first it was thought that there were 133 bodies. They were all female.<br />
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Extraordinarily, even though most of these women had died as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, the nuns were unable to name 45 of them, or to provide death certificates for 80. Since the nineteenth century, it’s been illegal in Ireland not to register any death that occurs on your premises, but even so the Irish government did nothing. Nor was any investigation made. Instead, the Department of the Environment quickly granted the nuns an exhumation certificate so that the bodies could be removed and the building work could go on. No action was taken, even when the grave was exhumation was carried out and a further 22 bodies were found. It was a flagrant avoidance of the legal requirements, but no more than typical in a country where until very recently the Roman Catholic Church had been at least as powerful as the state.<br />
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However, while the Church may have escaped the law, history at least was catching up with it. When it became known that the bodies had been discovered, Dublin families streamed to the convent hoping to identify long-lost daughters, sisters and mothers. Their personal tragedy soon became a public scandal as the press began to wander aloud about what had happened to all those women – and why. The answers to their questions were shocking. A country already reeling from the revelation that up to a quarter of its population had been physically and sexually abused by members of the Roman Catholic priesthood now had to contend with yet another dark secret.<br />
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The back-story and purpose of the Magdalene Laundries at least was fairly easily discovered1. Taking their name from the biblical figure Mary Magdalene (who was supposed to have been a prostitute turned penitent in Christian mythology), they were first established as a refuge for “fallen women”, intended to take prostitutes from the streets and to “reform” them using the twin persuasions of hard work and religious instruction.<br />
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Originally, these holy washhouses hadn’t just been an Irish phenomenon. Indeed, the first was built in France by the Catholic order of The Sisters Of Our Lady Of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers (known more simply as “The Good Shepherds”) in 1641. That was more than 100 years before the first Irish institution, the Dublin Magdalene Asylum, opened in1767 (some ten years after a similar building had opened in London). Other institutions were built all over Europe and the United States.<br />
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Nor were the laundries an exclusively Roman Catholic. Protestant orders ran almost as many of the institutions in the early years of the nineteenth century as Catholic. However, there were crucial theological differences and these started to affect the running of the asylums as time wore on.<br />
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Because of the Catholic belief in grace and the need to be in a state free from sin before death, the two orders of nuns who controlled the institutions in Ireland - The Good Shepherds and The Sisters Of Mercy - began to steer a new course. It became less and less of a priority to reform the “penitents” (as the women were branded) or to send them back out into the world. After all, the best way to keep them away from temptation and the presence of sin was to keep them under the careful supervision of the nuns in the laundries.2<br />
<br />
Further inducement to keep the women prisoners for life came as the laundries grew increasingly profitable. The fact that they were functioning washhouses was no accident. The women were told that they were literally washing away the stain of their “sins” – as well as, usefully enough, earning money to provide for their own upkeep and for the enrichment of the convents that presided over them. The longer that women stayed in the institutions – any youthful independent spirit broken by a life of drudgery – the more useful they generally became as workers.<br />
<br />
This money-making potential of the laundries, when combined with the peculiarly anti-sex zeal of their Catholic managers, also encouraged mission creep. At first the nuns had only housed prostitutes, but they began to expand their remit, taking charge of many other kinds of women who they labelled as “fallen”. In this task they could count on the easy compliance of the local population whose fiercely traditional brand of local Catholicism was quick to see sin and eager to condemn it and sex outside of marriage was seen in the same category as murder as a “mortal sin”.<br />
<br />
Victims of rape and incest were sent to the laundries, as were women who had children out of wedlock (and there were plenty of those since the Church had banned sex education as well as contraception). Even virgins were taken in; “pretty” girls denied their freedom on the basis that they had the potential to be “temptresses” or, most absurdly of all, because of a “love of dress”. 3<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***** </div>
<br />
Attempts have been made to justify the Magdalene Laundries on the grounds that they were symptomatic of their times. The desire to reform prostitutes in the 19th century was a common one, and the nuns did at least provide the women a place to live and a shelter from the frequent horrors of the streets during the period.<br />
<br />
However, even in the late 1800s, the hypocrisy inherent in the system was easy to see. No one ever suggested, for instance, that the love of dress displayed by female members of the British Royal family (who then had sovereignty over Ireland) was sinful. Fortunately, as time went on, most of the world realised that the laundries were out of step– and most were closed down.<br />
<br />
The sad exception was Ireland. There, in the 1920s, under De Valera’s newly independent Roman Catholic dominated government, the Magdalene asylums actually began to expand. They continued to take in women up until the 1970s. So, while the rest of the developed world was celebrating the Summer Of Love, women in Ireland were having their freedom taken away for looking too pretty.<br />
<br />
This very existence of Magdalene Laundries within living memory is unsettling enough. Many people in Ireland even were shocked to hear that they existed. Certainly, the majority of people I’ve spoken to who weren’t involved with the laundries tell me that they didn’t know anything about them until the scandal broke in the 1990s.<br />
<br />
Other writers, however, have argued persuasively that more people were aware of the institutions existence than like to admit it now. Dr Frances Finnegan, the author of the first major history of the Magdalene Asylums, Do Penance Or Perish, states explicitly that “the idea that society is blameless – that the Magdalene Asylums were so shrouded in secrecy that the public was unaware of what was taking place – is a myth.”4 She says that the phrase “be Good or I’ll send you to the laundries” was common threat to badly behaved children. Furthermore while many of the families who did send their daughters away claimed that the girls had “emigrated”, the truth can’t have been hard to work out.
<br />
<br />
Whether people knew about the laundries before the scandal broke or not, what is beyond doubt is the fact that the revelation of went on inside the buildings horrified Irish society – not to mention the world. They were in short, and in the words of so many survivors, “hell on earth”.<br />
<br />
Discovering this inside story was a slow process. By the time the story hit the news in 1993 with the discovery of the mass grave at High Park, most of the women who had been through the Laundries were old and frail. Few were able to properly express themselves anyway - one of the most upsetting consequences of their life inside the Magdalene Asylums was that they had received very little education. Most importantly, they were afraid: afraid of the stigma attached to publicly declaring themselves to have been “fallen women”, afraid of the continuing power of the church in their communities (or indeed, afraid of the nuns, since they still housed many of the women). Also, thanks to years of religious indoctrination, they were afraid of the consequences in the next life of criticising the church.<br />
<br />
“The shame of being a Magdalene still runs so deep in Ireland nobody would [talk],” explained Steve Humphries, the maker of the documentary Sex In A Cold Climate, and the man who perhaps did the most to eventually uncover the story. His film, first shown in British television in 1998, was instrumental in finally changing the atmosphere sufficiently so that some women felt able to tell their stories.<br />
<br />
Humphries was so successful because he managed to track down four women who had escaped the Laundries and since fled to the UK. Their testimony is devastating.<br />
<br />
One of these women, Martha Cooney, was put away by the local priest and her family after she’d complained to a cousin that she’d been raped. “They got rid of me very quickly,” she said. She’d broken a cardinal rule, as she discovered to her cost: “the biggest sin in Ireland was to talk.” She was made to work so hard in the laundries that she got varicose veins in her hands aged just 15. If she ever did anything the nuns perceived as wrong, she was made to bow down before them and beg for forgiveness. She spent 4 years inside an asylum until a family member came and rescued her in 1945. She has never felt able to marry. “I never wanted anybody to have power over me, or chain me ever again,” she explains.<br />
<br />
Phyllis Valentine, an orphan, was judged a danger because of her good looks, and transferred direct from her orphanage to an asylum. It was years before she found out that this was the reason for her detainment. She recalls punishments and girls being “punched” “slapped” and beaten with a leather belt. “They were very vicious, some of them nuns,” she says. “They were really cruel to us. And we never did anything wrong.”
In 1964 after 8 years incarceration at the Sisters Of Mercy asylum in Galway, and months of determined rebellion, self-starvation and trouble-making the nuns found her so much of a handful that she was released. She married at 25, but her sex life was ruined from an overhanging conviction that the act was “wrong,” a hang up from the laundry. “I felt ashamed every time he touched me,” she says. The nuns had taught us that it was wrong to let a man touch you. They never prepared us for the outside world.<br />
<br />
Christiana Mulcahey went to the same Galway asylum ten years before Phyllis Valentine. Her perceived crime was to have given birth outside of wedlock. She agreed to talk to the program makers only because a recent diagnosis of terminal cancer had freed her from any consequences. Like many other Magdalenes, she had been forcibly separated from her baby while still breast-feeding. She was informed that the baby would be placed for adoption with a "good Catholic family" (many hundreds of babies were sent over to Catholic families in the United States, who were almost entirely ignorant of their original circumstances). When she arrived in the Asylum, she still had milk in her breasts. She went, in her words, “absolutely berserk” when she discovered one day that her baby had been adopted.
<br />
<br />
Phyllis Valentine explains that there was nothing unusual about Mulcahey’s story. It happened often and it was always heartbreaking. The mothers, she says, were “desperate to find out where their children were—absolutely desperate.” But they rarely did. “It was really very sad, but all the girl could do was to cry. There was nothing else to do but cry.”<br />
<br />
The worst of it all was that Mulcahey had been hoping that she could still have a life with the baby’s father. “I lost out on him,” she says. “I would have married him. I loved him." During her time inside, a priest sexually abused her. After three years in the asylum she became one of the few people who successfully escaped, slipping out a side gate when a cowherd was taking cows into the asylum. She fled to Northern Ireland and became a nurse. She never saw her lover again, although she was finally reunited with her baby shortly before her death in 1997, having kept his existence a secret from the new family she started for more than 50 years.<br />
<br />
The fourth woman to talk to Humphries, Brigid Young, managed to avoid entering a laundry directly, but not its influence. She grew up in an orphanage attached to the Magdalene Asylum in Limerick. One say “just for talking to a Magdalene” (she had spoken to a “penitent” at the laundry door and agreed to help her see her baby, who was in the orphanage with her), she was given “a severe beating.” The Mother Superior of the convent beat her with a purpose made black rubber baton and forcibly cut her hair off. Afterwards, she forced Brigid to look in a mirror, in spite of the blood flowing into her eyes. “I’ll never forget what looked back at me,” she says. “Totally devastating. My face all swelled up. Under my chin, all cut up where she had stuck the scissors...” The Mother Superior was triumphant. “And you’re not so pretty now!” she is said to have exclaimed. Later, when a priest masturbated on her dress, Young was so afraid of being sent to the Magdalene asylum that she told no one. In 1956 she left the nuns’ charge. Her later marriage collapsed as a result of the abuse she had suffered. “It haunts you,” she says.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***** </div>
<br />
Alongside these stories of personal tragedy, Sex In A Cold Climate also helped to build up an image of everyday life inside the Magdalene Laundries – an image that gradually became clearer as more people started talking to the press in the documentary’s wake.<br />
<br />
As well as denying them their freedom, the nuns took away the women’s right to their very individuality. When they arrived their clothes were taken away and replaced with drab, heavy Victorian smocks (even in the latter half of the twentieth century) made from course material. They were also given new names (generally taken from Catholic saints, although some, bizarrely, were given masculine titles). This renaming of the girls had the incidental effect of making it harder for their families to track them down – especially because they were frequently moved without anyone being informed. Since a request from a family member was just about the only recognized way of getting out of the asylums, these measures often resulted in the girls being prisoner for life – with no trial, no judgment and often not understanding what they were supposed to have done wrong.<br />
<br />
Strictly speaking, according to Irish law, the nuns had no legal right to imprison their charges. Women were supposed to have entered the asylums voluntarily, but most were sent to them by priests, their families or directly from Industrial Schools (where they were supposed to have been under the protection of the Church and so kept away from the kind of “sin” they were being punished for in the laundries). Even a report commissioned by the Irish government, the 1970 Kennedy report, questioned the validity of the “voluntary” placements and noted that girls were kept unaware of their true rights.
<br />
<br />
Escape, meanwhile, was extremely difficult. The residents were kept inside high walls (more than 20ft in many of the institutions), topped with glass and barbed wire. If they did manage to get outside, the girls were often forcibly returned to the asylums by the local police. And even if they did get back to their homes, they were generally rejected and then returned by outraged family members. The only real escape came in leaving Ireland completely.<br />
<br />
“I would rather have been down the women’s jail,” Mary Norris (one of the survivors who came forward after the scandal broke) told the Irish Independent. “At least I would have got a sentence and would know when I was leaving.”<br />
<br />
Meals were eaten wordlessly to the sound of biblical readings, the “penitents” stationed away from the Sisters, whose food was invariably better.<br />
<br />
Until the 1970s, the women, regardless of age, were referred to as “children”. They had to call the nuns “mother”. A priest writing in 1931 neatly summed up the contempt inherent in this patronizing relationship:
<br />
<br />
"It may be only a white-veiled novice with no vows as yet; and it may be an old white-haired penitent giving back to God but the dregs of a life spent in sin. It matters not. In the Home of the Good Shepherd the one is ever the 'Mother' while the other is always the 'Child'."5<br />
<br />
This quote further highlights one of the greatest tragedies of the whole system: the way the women were indoctrinated with the idea that they were “sinners” and “penitents”. They were taught that they were outcasts, that their natural desires were disgusting and that any sexual abuse they might have suffered was their own fault. The hardship of their lives was said to be no more than they deserved. They were also told that if they tried to leave the asylums they were literally taking the road to hell. Indeed, if they wanted to avoid the fiery Catholic underworld the best course of action was to debase themselves completely, obey the nuns in everything and pray for their souls constantly. They also had to – quite literally in some cases – work themselves to the bone.<br />
<br />
“You’d have to hand wash—scrub,” Josephine McCarthy - who was in a Magdalene Asylum in the 1960s - explained to the makers of a documentary for CBS in 1999. “You’d have no knuckles left. Ironing—you would be burnt. It was just hard work.”<br />
<br />
It was a real slog, with hours of scrubbing (often of bloody sheets - and worse - from the hospitals that made up a large part of the laundries’ custom), hours of hanging and hours ironing (work which gave Martha Cooney varicose veins aged 15). The days were strictly time-tabled with several hours of prayer on top of around 10 hours physical work in the washing rooms, six days a week.6 For most of the day the women were forbidden to speak or even communicate with each other. Nuns were stationed around the work areas to watch for any transgressions. Punishments were frequent and, by all accounts, brutal.
<br />
<br />
“Those places were the Irish gulags for women,” said Mary Norris. “When you went inside their doors you left behind your dignity, identity and humanity. We were locked up, had no outside contacts and got no wages although we worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. What else is that but slavery? And to think that they were doing all this in the name of a loving God! I used to tell God I hated him.”<br />
<br />
Phyllis Valentine too recalled how she had asked to be paid after her first week in the laundry. “They just laughed at me,” she said.<br />
<br />
This failure to pay the women for their labours is thrown into stark relief by the huge profits that the Asylums used to make. The accounts of the Sunday’s Well Good Shepherd asylum in Cork alone show that the laundry was making a profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money each year between the 1950s and 1960s7. The books also show that nearly all this money was spent on the nuns, and their increasingly fancy internal chapel, rather than on their imprisoned work force. The Laundries only stopped making such vast profits from the 1970s onwards, thanks to the advent of cheaply available automatic washing machines and driers. Indeed, many commentators, not to mention survivors, have attributed the Magdalene Asylums’ eventual decline to the arrival of the washing machine. It was money that closed them down, rather than to any ideological objections to their existence, or any realisation of their injustice on the part of the nuns.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***** </div>
<br />
In spite of the horror of the revelations about life inside the Catholic Church’s Magdalene Laundries, next to nothing was said or done by the Vatican. At first, there wasn’t even an apology. Journalists hunting for comment were met with silence. Only Ireland’s outspoken liberal prelate Bishop Willie Walsh of Killaloe publicly recognized the wrong that had been done, telling ABC News “the Magdalene Laundries were in some instances a form of slavery … a source of pain and shame.”<br />
<br />
Even now, if you look on the huge online Catholic Encyclopedia the only reference to anything that might have been awry in the Magdalene Asylums is the comment “this order is no longer in existence.”8 My own attempts to get a statement from the Vatican or the Conference of Religious in Ireland (the umbrella organization for all monastic orders in the country) came to nothing.<br />
<br />
The Vatican was moved to speak, however, in 2003 when the director Peter Mullan released The Magdalene Sisters. This film, inspired by the documentary Sex In A Cold Climate, and made in consultation with a number of survivors, as well as a former nun (who had left the Church in dismay at what she saw in the Laundries), provided a predictably harrowing depiction of the life its young subjects had to endure. It won the best film award at the Venice Film Festival and was watched by a third of the Irish adult population. The Roman Catholic Church was unable to ignore it, so they denounced it. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano declared it an “angry and rancorous provocation” that misrepresented religious leaders. The Catholic League in America labeled the film “anti-Catholic propaganda” and barracked Miramax for distributing it. Elsewhere, the old canard was reeled out that the film was biased because it didn’t do anything to promote the good work that the Catholic clergy do around the world.<br />
<br />
One scene in particular, where a group of nuns mock their charges’ naked bodies, was heavily criticized as exploitation. In fact, the filmmakers and many survivors were adamant that if anything, the film understated the reality. In The Magdalene Sisters, the nude parade is presented as a one off, but according to many survivors, that kind of thing happened to them weekly. Every Saturday night, according to Brigid Young, who also recalls how the nuns mocked the girls lined up before them, laughed at them for being fat and shouted abuse at them. “They enjoyed us stripped naked,” she adds.<br />
<br />
In fact, if the survivors themselves had any criticisms of the film it was the extent to which the reality of their lives had to be watered down to make it bearable for cinema audiences.<br />
<br />
"Plenty of people will think the events in the film have been exaggerated to make it more dramatic," Mary Norris explained to the Irish Independent. "But I tell you, the reality of those places was a thousand times worse. There's a scene in which a girl is crying in the dormitory and another goes over to her bed to comfort her. That could never have happened. You weren't allowed any private conversation. Again, in the film the girls get glimpses of the outside world and even ordinary people who don't live in the laundries. In reality, we were totally incarcerated. You could see nothing except sky.”<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Mary-Jo McDonagh, who spent five years in a Magdalene asylum in Galway (after being molested by a neighbour) told The Guardian: "It was worse in the Magdalenes, much worse than what you see. I don't like to say it, but the film is soft on the nuns. "<br />
<br />
Director Peter Mullan openly admits that he left out some of the most harrowing material for the sake of the audience, and tells the story of how one 65-year-old woman said to him: “It’s not nearly bad enough. You didn’t show it as it really was. We were only babies. It was a lot worse. It was horrendous.”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
***** </div>
<br />
In the aftermath of the film The Magdalene Sisters, the survivors did at least get something of an apology, not from the Vatican or the perpetrators themselves, but better than nothing. It came from the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas – the US branch of the organisation that ran the asylums in Ireland not run by the Good Shepherds. “It's not proper to hide from anything," said a spokeswoman for the organisation. "We're all human, we've all made mistakes. We do reach out and apologize to anyone who may have been abused at the hands of our sisters, or any sisters."<br />
<br />
For a while it even seemed as if the remaining survivors were going to get some compensation for their years of slave labour. In 2002, following on from the numerous Catholic sexual abuse scandals that emerged in Ireland in the 1990s (including the exposure of the systematic mistreatment of thousands of children in the country’s Catholic-run Industrial Schools and hundreds of cases of priestly paedophilia as well as the stories from the Magdalene Laundries) an independent Redress Board was set up with the stated intention to: “make fair and reasonable awards to persons who, as children, were abused while resident in industrial schools, reformatories and other institutions subject to state regulation or inspection.”<br />
<br />
Surprisingly, however, very few of the Magdalene survivors fell within the ambit of this board (the main exceptions being those who were transferred direct from the Industrial Schools).<br />
<br />
“They were completely ignored,” explains Mari Steed, a spokeswoman for the Justice For Magdalenes group, whose own biological mother spent a number of years in the Sunday’s Well asylum in Cork. “Basically, in 2002, it came down to a decision from a chief justice [The Honourable Mr. Justice Sean Ryan] who determined that the Magdalene women were, in fact women” – i.e., they were too old – “and were 'voluntarily’ sent to these institutions. As such, he felt that they were not entitled to the redress given to other victims of institutional abuse.”<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly Steed and the survivors were unimpressed by this decision. “If these women 'voluntarily' submitted to a life doing industrial laundry,” she asks “why when some tried to leave or escape were they dragged back by the gardai?”<br />
<br />
“Many were not legal adults when they entered,” she adds, noting that none of the various scenarios for which women were sent to the laundries (being the victims of rape, having babies out of wedlock, being too pretty or deemed “flirtatious”) “seem very voluntary, either.”<br />
<br />
In addition to this injustice, the women have lately had to contend with further setbacks. Perhaps the most damaging is the controversy following on from the publication of the book Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne. A misery memoir in the mould of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces full of painful stories and horrific accounts of abuse within the Magdalene system, the book was an international best seller.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, claims have been made that Kathy’s Story resembles Frey’s work in more than just its explicit storytelling. The “Good Shepherd” nuns, who ran the High Park asylum in Dublin in which O’Beirne says she spent several years, have claimed that many of the stories O’Beirne tells are untrue and that she did not spend any time in any of their institutions.
Although they had kept an undignified silence when the first attempts had been made to uncover the story of the Magdalene Asylums, and declined all press interviews when their laundries first hit the headlines, The Sisters seized this opportunity to put the boot in:<br />
<br />
"We are very careful about confidentiality as people's reputations are sacred to us whether they are dead or alive. Our girls came to us because they needed help,” High Park’s senior archivist told the Irish Sunday Independent. "Kathy should produce evidence of where she was and when. Where is the child's birth certificate? Why has it taken 30 years to find? I am very sorry, the girl is clearly very traumatised."<br />
<br />
The Sunday Independent was happy to report the story almost entirely from the nun’s viewpoint, portraying them as victims “appalled” by the allegations being made against them, not even mentioning the verifiable suffering about which they have been silent for so many years.<br />
<br />
“It has been very difficult distancing ourselves from the media hype surrounding Kathy,” says Mari Steed, and it’s plain that the controversy has had a negative effect on other survivors and their supporters. When I spoke to Kathy O'Beirne, she did at least make the point that her book has kept the issue of the Magdalene Laundries firmly in the public eye, and like James Frey she pointed out how helpful it has been to many of her readers who have themselves suffered abuse. She is also able to defend herself on the grounds that plenty of other people with complicated upbringings in Industrial Schools and Laundries are unable to produce their correct birth certificates and documentation. O'Beirne also claims that many of her records were destroyed in a fire. Sadly, however, there are several aspects of the book that other more neutral observers have declared, “do not pass the smell test.”
<br />
<br />
“It’s all the truth,” protests O’Beirne. “We know it’s the truth. They [the Church] know it’s the truth.” At the time of writing, she faces an uphill struggle to prove her case. It seems likely that the case will go to court. There is, however, no doubting that O’Beirne carries a lasting trauma from whatever it was that happened to her in her youth, and an enduring hatred for the abusive members of the Roman Catholic clergy. “They’re just sick. They’re the disciples of the devil,” she kept repeating when I spoke to her. “They should be ashamed.”<br />
<br />
As it is, the nuns have shown no sign of repentance, although, unsurprisingly, the asylums they ran still cast a long shadow over many lives today. The survivors, will of course, never forget. Indeed, many of them are so institutionalised by their time in the laundries that they are unable to fend for themselves and still live in the care of the same orders of nuns who used to hold them enslaved. There are also the hundreds (or possibly even thousands) of children who were forcibly separated from their mothers. Most of these will never find them – or even find out who they were.<br />
<br />
There have at least been some happier stories, however. There are the women like Christina Mulcahey who managed to escape the system and went on to lead a fulfilling life and raise a family of her own – not to mention telling her story to a wide and sympathetic public and eventually tracking down her long lost son.<br />
<br />
Others too have been reunited with their lost babies. Mari Steed from Justice For Magdalenes, for instance, eventually found her mother after a ten-year search.<br />
<br />
“I am one of the very lucky ones who met with absolute joy in my reunion,” she says. “My mother had been eagerly awaiting my 'return' one of these days, and was not at all put out by my finding her.”<br />
<br />
She insists that there is still hope for those still looking and encourages them to persevere, albeit with the following warning: “ guard yourself against unrealistic expectations, because sometimes you're not always met with a warm welcome. The shame and stigma of unwed pregnancy in Ireland was so heavy back then that many women have never outed themselves to subsequent husbands or children.”<br />
<br />
So it is that most of the women who passed through the Magdalene Laundries never have, or never will tell their story. As Mary Norris told the Irish Independent:<br />
<br />
"Many survivors refuse to talk about what they went through but I've never been ashamed to have been in one of those places. The shame is not mine; the church should be ashamed. They say now they're sorry — what they mean is, sorry they were found out."<br />
<br />
An estimated 30,000 women went through the Magdalene Asylums (estimated because no proper records were kept). The last one closed as recently 1996. There has been no apology. No state enquiry. Most of the 155 women found in the mass grave at the High Park Laundry still have no death certificate. More graves, still uncovered, are said to be scattered around Ireland.<br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Justice for Magdalenes can be found at: http://www.Magdalenelaundries.com/ . They are running an e-card campaign to express outrage to the Irish government that no official inquiry has been made into the Laundries and that most of the women in the mass grave found in High Park Laundry still have no death certificate. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>FOOTNOTES:</i><br />
<span style="font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">1 Not least because before the scandal broke several of the institutions had handed over their records to the historian Dr Frances Finnegan who made it her mission to bring this shadowy history into the light, talking to journalists, helping to inform the TV programmes that would eventually explain the Laundries to the world and eventually publishing the definitive history “Do Penance Or Perish” in 2001.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">2 </span><span style="font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">This was all explained in the hand-book of the Good Shepherds: “The greater number of our children we know desire to return to the world. The thought that they will be once more exposed to the danger of going astray… is a sorrow for a Religious. We should then, make every effort to induce them to remain in the asylum opened to them by Divine Providence, where they are assured the grace of a happy death…” (<i>Practical Rules for the Use of the Religious of the Good Shepherd for the Direction of the Classes,</i> Mother St Euphrasia Pelletier, 1898 pp 182-3, cited in Frances Finnegan <i>Do Penance Or Perish.</i> Oxford University Press 2001)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="font-size: 11px;">
<span style="font-size: 7.3px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>3</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> As shown in the records investigated by Frances Finnegan, <i>Op Ed</i>, p195 </span></div>
<div style="font-size: 11px;">
<span style="font-size: 7.3px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>4</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Finnegan, <i>Op Ed. </i>p46.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-size: 11px;">
</div>
<span style="font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>5</sup></span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Finnegan, <i>Op Cit,</i> p.42</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>6</sup></span><span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sundays were given over to yet more religious contemplation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 7.3px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>7</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> <i>Suffer The Little Children</i> by Mary Raferty and Eoin O’Sullivan, p290</span><br />
<br />
<br />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-48524165159372249312010-08-14T08:27:00.004+01:002010-08-14T08:35:31.906+01:00The Book Of MormonI've just been reading a really interesting post about Mormonism over on one of my favourite blogs, <a href="http://ageofuncertainty.blogspot.com/">The Age Of Uncertainty</a>. It's prompted me to put up something I wrote a few years ago about The Church Of The Latter Day Saints in my book The Joy Of Sects.<br /><br /><br /><br />The Latter-day Saints, AKA Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints, AKA Mormons<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Founded:</span> 1830<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Country of origin:</span> USA<br />Membership: 7,000,000 plus<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Gods and guiding voices: </span>‘God’, Mormon, Moroni<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Texts:</span> The Bible, The Book Of Mormon<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Famous associates:</span> The Osmonds<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Basic beliefs: </span>America was originally settled by people from the Tower of Babel. After his death on the cross, Christ made an appearance in America where he again preached the gospel. Indulgence in caffeine and alcohol is not good for you. Hard work is. The highest heaven is open only to baptised Mormons. The official church does not believe in polygamy any more.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Main blurb</span><br /><br />In 1820, Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of the Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was confused about which of the many contemporary Protestant sects he ought to join. He solved his problem by asking God directly. ‘None of them,’ He said, appearing before Smith as a pillar of light. It was the first of many visions Smith was to receive in his lifetime.<br /><br />Just over three years later, in 1823, another divine personage, an angel called Moroni, appeared by Smith’s bedside. He was dressed in a white robe, ‘his feet did not touch the floor’, and he claimed to be the son of Mormon, the departed leader of an extinct American race called the Nephites. Moroni told Smith about a set of golden plates that contained a written history of the mysterious races that inhabited America before the time of Columbus. Then he disappeared to heaven in a shaft of light. A few minutes later Moroni reappeared at Smith’s bedside. He repeated everything that he had just said, and then vanished, just as he had done before. Then he came back again and repeated the same words a third time. <br /><br />Smith said that he didn’t get much sleep that night. The next day he was understandably exhausted. He passed out when attempting to climb over a fence on his way out of a field – and the angel Moroni came to him yet again. This time he told him where to find the golden plates, buried in the side of a hill named Cumorah (near Palmyra in New York state). Smith went there right away and unearthed the famous plates. Buried alongside them was a pair of supernatural silver spectacles, the ‘Urim and Thummim’, which Smith was to use to translate the hieroglyphics on the plates. These were written in a language called ‘reformed Egyptian’. (Curiously, archaeologists and Egyptologists say that there is no evidence that any such language existed).<br /><br />Smith spent the next four years preparing himself to do this great work of translation. Then he carried the golden plates home in a buggy (managing to get them there without anyone – not even his wife Emma – seeing them). He then set himself up behind a screen, so that the plates were still concealed, and got stuck into several years’ hard graft. <br /><br />A great deal has been written about the flaws in the resultant tome, the Book Of Mormon (for more on this, see Appendix 3). It isn’t just the inaccuracies and alleged plagiarisms that have offended the Book Of Mormon’s detractors. Its literary qualities are said to leave something to be desired, too. ‘It is,’ said Mark Twain ‘chloroform in print.’ The celebrated author of Huckleberry Finn also laid into Smith’s habit of peppering his otherwise fairly contemporary nineteenth-century prose with biblical-sounding words and phrases like ‘exceeding sore’, ‘yea’, ‘exceedingly glad’, ‘unto’, ‘great joy’, ‘harkening’ and ‘smiting’. If, said Twain, Smith had left out his favourite phrase, ‘And it came to pass’, then his 500-page bible ‘would only have been a pamphlet’. <br /><br />When the book was first published in 1830, it was savaged by the press. No reviewer seemed to have any doubt that Smith was a confidence trickster who had invented the whole story. Nor did Smith’s personal life escape criticism. In 1834 an investigative journalist published a series of affidavits from friends and neighbours who described him as a lazy, untruthful, religious con man. They characterised the rest of his family as ‘illiterate, whiskey-drinking, shiftless and irreligious’. They also suggested that it was no coincidence that Joseph’s father, Joe Senior, was a persistent treasure seeker and that the young Joseph Smith had often accompanied him on his expeditions, hoping to find the loot left by Captain Kidd and indulging their fondness for the occult and fortune-telling on the way. <br /><br />In spite of – or perhaps even because of – the negative publicity he was receiving, Smith soon gathered a considerable following. They gradually moved towards the less inhabited west of the USA to avoid religious persecution – persecution that only increased in 1843 when Smith declared that God had ordained plural marriage. A firm believer in practising what he preached, Smith was said to have gathered 27 wives by the time he died (some estimates put the number as high as 60). <br /><br />Smith’s death came in extraordinary circumstances, when a mob broke into the jail he was being held in, shot him and threw him out of a window. It was left to his successor Brigham Young to lead his followers on the long arduous trek across the deserts of Utah until they finally settled in Salt Lake City. There, safe from too much outside interference, the faith prospered. Brigham Young (also said to be a prophet – as are all presidents of the Mormon church) was a shrewd administrator and by the time he died the city was thriving. He had collected 140,000 followers and no fewer than 25 wives (‘The only men who become gods are those who enter into polygamy,’ he declared). <br /><br />Since Brigham Young’s time, the Mormon ideals of hard work and abstinence have paid off in abundance – as has the church’s levy of a tithe on all of its adherents’ incomes. Since officially abandoning the policy of polygamy in the 1890s (although several pockets of fundamentalists still exist who engage in plural marriages – outside the sanction of the church) the faith has become the apogee of American respectability. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns most of Utah, a large part of Hawaii and land in Canada, as well as the Marriott hotel chain, the Beneficial Life Assurance Company, and TV and radio stations. Its morally austere adherents have some of the lowest cancer rates in the US – and some of the best physical fitness. They promote the boy scouts, have short haircuts and the missionaries they send out around the world are scrupulously neat and remarkably polite. <br /><br />Consequently, the religion is growing faster than any other in the US and spreading around the world at an incredible rate. What’s more, in order to give those unfortunate enough not to be baptised into the Mormon church a chance of attaining the ultimate Mormon goal of divinity (they believe the most devout will get to populate their own planets), the Church is posthumously baptising thousands and thousands of people. If expansion continues at its current rate, by the year 5000, the entire world will belong to the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints. Not bad, considering how it all began.<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Curse of Darkness<br /></span><br />As recently as 1978, black males were banned from entering the Mormon priesthood.<br />Mormon writings had long pointed to a ‘curse’ God put on Cain for the murder of his brother Abel, as told in Genesis. ‘Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to the line of human beings,’ announced the prophet Brigham Young. ‘This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.’ Dark skin was also the curse inflicted on the Lamanites in the Book Of Mormon and there are many passages extolling the splendour of ‘whiteness’.<br /><br />‘Negroes’ are ‘not equal’ with other races, wrote Bruce McConkie, a church apostle, in his book Mormon Doctrine in 1966. The Latter-day Saints have since modified this doctrine, as they have the other embarrassing doctrine of polygamy, although this puts them in the embarrassing position of having to renounce the teachings of men they consider divinely inspired prophets.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Roving Report</span><br /><br />The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints is not a secretive cult. It’s easy to get to talk to Mormons. In fact, I’d recommend it. If you’re ever lost in a strange city, need directions and you see a street preacher with a short haircut, smart suit and black plastic badge declaring him an ‘Elder’, ask him. Chances are he’ll speak excellent English, be scrupulously polite and he won’t steal your wallet. It’s a resource I’ve used on several occasions. Once, when I was in Basingstoke researching my book Crap Towns, an Elder was even kind enough to tell me that he would describe the town as being ‘like hell’.<br /><br />There’s also a good chance that representatives of the church will come knocking on your door. The fiercely proselytising church sends thousands of young men and women out on missions all over the world each year. As luck would have it, a couple of them came to my house just as I was starting to research this book. I asked them in for a cup of tea – forgetting, of course, that Mormons generally avoid caffeine. They politely declined, settling instead for glasses of water, and started to tell me the incredible history of the Nephites and Lamanites. They knew that the book is true, they said, ‘through faith’. ‘But,’ they went on, ‘there is also scientific evidence. In the pyramids “scientists” found a picture of a white god descending from heaven and teaching people. Therefore the Book of Mormon must be true.’<br /><br />I was interested to learn that Mormon communities usually ostracised people who left their church – and that people only generally left it because ‘they are lazy’. This started to make more sense when the young men described a typical day on their two-year ministry. They woke up at 6.30 a.m., exercised and studied until 10 a.m., knocked on doors for a few hours before having a one-hour lunch break, and then hit the streets again until 9 p.m. When they got home, they prepared for the next day. TV is strictly forbidden. ‘We don’t really know what’s going on in the outside world,’ they told me. <br /><br />It’s a tough routine, especially since most people just slam the door in their faces. The travelling Elders often also face violence. The young men told me about a friend of theirs who was chased through Crystal Palace with a blowtorch. Conversion rates can be depressingly low. Although a minister in the poorer, less literate regions of Africa can expect to perform up to 75 baptisms a year, most missionaries in Europe would consider themselves lucky to bring about a single conversion. Still, with 60,000 missionaries out and about every year, even this paltry success rate begins to be significant. Small wonder that the church is growing so fast.<br /><br />Earnest and serious as the pale men sitting across from me at the table were, we never really reached an understanding. In fact, I got the impression that my persistent questioning began to freak them out. However, they left as politely as they came, giving me a copy of the Book of Mormon as they did. In it one wrote the instructions, ‘Read. Ponder. Pray.’ They certainly weren’t your average twenty-year-olds. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">[And here are those appendices... Sorry... The book layout doesn't lend itself well to blogs. Doesn't lend itself particularly well to books either. But that's another story...]</span><br /><br />Appendix 2<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Mountain Meadows Massacre<br /></span><br /><br />The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognise their leaders as divinely inspired prophets and their teachings as sacred. Sometimes, this can be tricky to deal with politically. One of the less well-known Mormon policies is that of blood atonement. The prophet Brigham Young taught that certain sins could only be amended for with a man’s own blood. Killing can be a righteous act. ‘Loving our neighbours as ourselves … if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood … spill it,’ he said. This policy found its most chilling fulfilment in the Mountain Meadows Massacre when Brigham Young ordered his co-religionists to attack a party of emigrants who were crossing Mormon land on the way to California in 1857. One hundred and twenty men, women and children were massacred. <br /><br />Some modern adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints have denied that the policy ever existed. However, many still put forward the idea that certain ‘grievous sins’ place the sinner ‘beyond the reach of Christ’s atoning blood’ as a justification for capital punishment.<br /><br />Appendix 3<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Book of Mormon<br /></span><br /><br />While Joseph Smith slaved away behind his screen producing the Book of Mormon he was largely left in peace. At some point during the process, however, an acquaintance of the prophet, one Martin Harris, called round and Smith despatched him to New York carrying a piece of paper with some of the ‘reformed Egyptian’ hieroglyphs on it. Harris took the paper to a professor named Anton, who issued him a certificate saying they were genuine – but then ripped it up on discovering that the characters were supposed to have been sent by an angel. So, tragically, the only piece of impartial evidence for the existence of the plates – and reformed Egyptian – was destroyed. (Smith returned the original plates to Moroni as soon as he had finished the translation. The book does contain several testimonies of other people who claim to have seen the plates – but they were all church leaders, or the relatives of church leaders.)<br /><br />The work Smith eventually produced, the Book Of Mormon, is the cornerstone of the Mormon faith. Among a lot of moralistic preaching, it explains that America had originally been settled by people from the Tower of Babel, but that these inhabitants had degenerated and perished as a result of their own immorality. A later group of Jews then ended up in South America after fleeing Babylonian captivity. They divided into warring factions, the Nephites and the Lamanites. After his death on the cross, Jesus Christ appeared among these peoples and preached again. But the factions continued fighting and the Lamanites nearly wiped out the Nephites (the price of their victory was a curse – dark skin). After the final defeat, the prophet of the Nephites, Mormon, wrote up the history on gold plates and buried them on the hill – where Smith was to find them more than a thousand years later.<br /><br />Critics have found it strange that, although it was supposedly written many centuries before the 1611 King James Bible, many passages appear to have been lifted verbatim from that book, complete with its translation errors. They also point out anachronisms like references to the ancient Hebrew use of steel and to domestic animals that weren’t around at the time. Similarly, the book describes American Indians using weapons for which there is no archaeological evidence. Oddest of all, Mormon described elephants roaming around in places where there is no evidence elephants ever roamed. <br /><br />Other investigators have found an earlier novel by the Reverend Simon Spalding that bears a marked similarity to much of the Book Of Mormon. There’s also another book, The View Of The Hebrews, by the Rev. Ethan Smith (written in 1824, three years before Joseph Smith started work), which also contains many passages echoed in the Latter-day Saints’ holy book.Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-6045290955671499622010-05-20T11:12:00.004+01:002010-06-07T14:01:11.597+01:00Organic Peas and Orderly QueuesDo please head over to the blog I'm writing about my people, the middle classes:<br /><a href="http://feelthemiddleclass.wordpress.com/"><br />Organic Peas and Orderly Queues</a><br /><br />You might also want to test what class you are by doing this <a href="http://apps.facebook.com/whatclassareyouquiz">nifty facebook quiz</a>.Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-47300777211657701152009-11-24T17:58:00.019+00:002017-08-07T19:14:47.666+01:00Catullus still rocks 2000 years on<br />
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More than 2,000 years after his death, it appears that the poet Catullus still has the power to shock and cause controversy. An employment tribunal in London <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8375511.stm">has just heard</a> that Mark Lowe, the millionaire boss of Nomos Capital sent a work experience girl an email containing the phrase “pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” .<br />
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The lawyers opposed to Mr Lowe suggested that this line was, inappropriate and likely to "violate" the dignity of the email’s recipient. Lowe, meanwhile, claimed the poem: “… is burlesque, it was always light-hearted in the first century and it still is now.”<br />
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Rather wonderfully then, a court case dealing with such specifically modern phenomena as <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6532873/Millionaire-City-financier-Mark-Lowe-brought-prostitutes-to-business-meetings.html">hedge-funds, email communications and Thai prostitutes</a> has stumbled across a question that has been exercising poetry lovers for the last 2000 years: exactly how rude is the poem we now call <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16">Catullus XVI</a>? <br />
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As far as we moderns are concerned, until fairly recently, the simple answer would have been ‘unprintably so’. <br />
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Those plosive-heavy words “pedicabo” and “irrumabo” refer to anal and facial penetration. “I will bugger you and stuff your gobs” is the admirably literal translation suggested by Guy Lee (in the 1990 Oxford translation). Catullus then goes on to refer to Furius and Aurelius, the addressees of the poem with the lovely chiasmus: “Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.” That’s to say, it’s Aurelius who will enjoy the attentions of Catullus’ penis in his mouth and Furius who will get it in his bottom.<br />
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For years, these first two lines were considered so indecent they weren’t translated into English. Even in the 1960s the Loeb edition of the poem, with translations by FW Cornish, rendered the contentious line thus: “…” Cornish also refused to print the last 8 lines of the poem, even in Latin. Other editions have seen it translated into Greek, French or just duplicated the original Latin phrase in place of translation. When they have dared tackle the lines, scholars have come up with curious suggestions like: “Nuts to you boys! Nuts!” or “I’ll show you I’m a man!” or “Furius, Aurelius, I’ll work your/ own perversions on you and your persons.” <br />
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That probably says more about 19th and 20th Century squeamishness than Catullus’ contemporaries. The marvellous “it was light-hearted in the first century” defence put forward by Lowe is not without substance. Certainly, Catullus is making a joke. <br />
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Later in the poem he says that the reason he’s made these threats to his friends Furius and Aurelius is that they’ve suggested his poems may be a bit soft (molliculi) and that he’s less of a man because he’s written a poem addressed to his lover Lesbia suggesting that he’s going to give her many thousands of big kisses. <br />
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The most obvious solution to the poem that follows from that is that Catullus is being heavily ironic. Suggest he’s a softy, both in the sense of being effeminate and unable to perform sexually, and he’ll prove you wrong by making vigorous love to your bottom. An act that becomes even more transgressive since Catullus also suggests that the “pius” poet ought to be “castus” (normally translated that the pious poet ought to be chaste.)<br />
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Of course, this being Catullus, there are further potential interpretations. The poem is steeped in innuendo and ambiguity. That word “castus” , for instance, could be understood to mean “acting correctly from a masculine point of view”. In which case, having lots of sex wasn’t such a problem. Even the famously censorious Cato the Elder had declared it perfectly acceptable for Roman men to frequent prostitutes. <br />
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The joke in the First Century might also have depended on the feminisation of Furius and Aurelius. The important point is that because they have suggested Catullus is a bit of a girl, they are going to become the passive recipients of his attentions. And that could be seen as a serious insult.<br />
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The charge of feminity, to give one notorious example, was at the heart of a 62 BC scandal involving Publius Clodius Pulcher. (Neatly, he was the brother of Clodia - the woman whom many scholars suspect is the real subject of the poems dedicated to ‘Lesbia’. The ones to which Furius and Aurelius objected to in the first place…) Clodius had dressed as a woman in an attempt to get close to Julius Caesar’s wife during a rite from which men were excluded - and he had also been caught in incestuous relations with his sister. A massive bribe got Clodius off the hook in the following court case, but his arch-enemy Cicero would attack him ever afterwards on the grounds that he was lascivious and feminised. Suggestions that were meant to really sting – and which took on extra weight thanks to a wide-spread rumour that when Clodius had been captured by pirates during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Mithridatic_War">Third Mithridatic War</a>, he’d paid the price of his freedom with his anal virginity. A rumour whose very existence proves that receiving anal sex as a Roman man was no laughing matter. <br />
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In such a context, Catullus’ “burlesque” takes on fangs. Yes, he’s being funny, but he’s also launching into the furthest stratosphere of rudery and insult. As far as the modern court case goes, it seems a shame that history doesn’t record how Furius and Aurelius reacted to this metaphorical fucking. But the fact that it remains troubling after all this time (not to mention hilarious) is testament at least to Catullus’ unique and wayward genius.Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-28282088331402471382009-08-31T18:59:00.003+01:002009-08-31T19:04:46.362+01:00Google ego-alert ego-massageMy google ego-alert email service had a link to <a href="http://www.examiner.co.uk/views-and-blogs/columnists/2009/08/31/things-not-to-do-this-holiday-86081-24568184/">this review</a> of Sod That today in the Huddersfield Examiner, by one Chris Mellor.<br /><br />Here's his conclusion:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Walking on fire is over-rated, he says. Ask the 28 people who suffered serious burns during an attempt to break the fire-walking world record in New Zealand.<br /><br />Going shopping in Milan, riding a gondola in Venice and visiting Florence are all kicked into touch, although I actually did visit Florence. Nice girl.<br /><br />“This book is a rallying call for common sense and dignified indolence over hectic, wasteful and morally dubious over-activity. Sometimes staying at home is the best thing to do with your time,” he says.<br /><br />I couldn’t agree more.</blockquote><br /><br />I'm all aglow. Especially since Chris Mellor seems to be a fellow (non-) traveller.Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-56455621581466348602009-06-24T21:28:00.005+01:002009-06-25T09:13:09.854+01:00A fantastically awkward encounterJust got back from The Connecting Worlds event at <a href="http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/worlds-literary-festival/">this</a>.<br /><br />It was an excellent evening, with four moving and entertaining readings. Two of them really brought home the sadness of exile. (Especially a very touching poem from Chenjerai Hove about how you forget to appreciate lovely things when your world is filled with horror). Two of them were really funny. <br /><br />But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the gloriously awkward conversation I had with the last reader Geoff Dyer.<br /><br />After Dyer's reading (typically amusing, with a cruel cliff-hanger relating to an involved encounter with a monkey that is probably going to force me to buy the book, the sod), there was a lot of milling around and shuffling home kind of activity. I was keen to get back to the nest myself, mindful that my girlfriend was home alone with a teething baby and that my bike didn't have any lights. So I'd tucked my trousers into my socks and got out my helmet when my friend Nathan waved Geoff Dyer over and introduced him to me and said:<br /><br />"Geoff, this is Sam he’s a massive fan of yours."<br /><br />Geoff Dyer remained cool, but a brief flicker in his eyes told me he had the fear. Nathan had just landed him with a stalker. With weird trousers. At this point, of course, Nathan walked off.<br /><br />Geoff D: I’m glad there’s one here. Fan, I mean.<br /><br />Me: Hahahahahahaha. <br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(For just a little bit too long).<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span><br />Geoff D: Er.<br /><br />Me: Er.<br /><br />Geoff D: I see you're on your bike.<br /><br />Me: Yes my machine is out there.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(I indicate some bike stands visible through the glass front of the building. I have no idea why I called it a 'machine').</span><br /><br />Geoff D: Nice weather for biking. Bit windy though.<br /><br />Me: It’s okay. When you're going downhill.<br /><br />Geoff D} (Silence)<br />Me } (Silence)<br /><br />Geoff D:Are you coming to the dinner?<br /><br />Me: No. I’ve uh got a wife and baby back home.<br /><br />Geoff D: That’s nice for you. Cosy.<br /><br />Me: Er, yes.<br /><br />Geoff D:Well, goodbye.<br /><br />Me: Goodbye.Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-9587588288698320432009-06-16T09:55:00.005+01:002009-06-16T10:08:37.647+01:00Happy BloomsdayHere's a Bloomsday extract from my book Sod That: 103 Things Not To Do Before You Die... In which the message is don't read Ulysses.*<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Read Ulysses</span><br /><br />If you do as we’re all urged and take up James Joyce’s overlong magnum opus, it is guaranteed to clog up your all too short life. Banned, criticised and suppressed on moral grounds when it first came out, it thereby became far more famous and far more durable than it would ever have been otherwise. Had it been published openly originally, the book would in all probability have been openly ignored, or at least gained wider recognition for the pretentious nonsense it is. The lives of generations of English Literature undergraduates the world over would have been considerably eased as a result.<br /><br />Many readers might experience a strange feeling of guilt at thus disregarding a book that has come to be considered as such an important part of the mythical literary canon. Wading through Ulysses is often regarded as a kind of coming of age. You have to get through it to prove your worth to those invisible cultural arbiters who we imagine sit in judgement of us all. You have to know what happened to Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, even though the answer is, basically, nothing.<br /><br />The other thing to remember about trying to prove your bookish credentials by knowing about Ulysses is that no one who actually possesses a wide knowledge of literature will believe you if you try to convince them you've read every word. They – having attempted to grind through it themselves – will understand what a thankless task it is and won't believe you.<br /><br />OK, there are some fine qualities to the book. There’s some magnificent worldplay, some world beating writing and top class rudery. But a few clever turns of phrase and a couple of pervy passages don't make up for the fact that if you want to understand even half of it you have to lug a dictionary user’s guide around with it – unappealing when the book alone already weighs more than a small child.<br /><br />The only passages that do make sense are the rude ones. So just do what everyone else does and cut straight to them. Skip the rest. Especially skip the 150-odd pages of punctuation bereft prose that starts: ‘Deshill Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshill Holles Eamus’ and ends ‘anyway I wish hed sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeee one more song.’<br /><br />Everything you need to know about this section is neatly contained in the word ‘nonsense’. <br /><br />There is at least one good thing to be said about Ulysses, however. It does at least also have the distinct advantage of not being Finnegan’s Wake. Now that's a book you should die before reading.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Useless Trivia</span><br /><br />On Ulysses’ first release the Sporting Times declared that the book: ‘appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic.’ Paper of record the New York Times opined: ‘The average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it – even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it – save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.’ The popular critic ‘Aramis’, meanwhile, correctly pointed out that: ‘Two thirds of it is incomprehensible.’<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />More Useless Trivia</span><br /><br />A 2007 poll commissioned by teletext discovered that 28% of Britons confessed to being unable to finish Ulysses, making it the third most unread book in the country, following DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">ADVERT!</span><br /><br />Sod That is <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sod-That-103-Things-Before/dp/1409100553/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245142704&sr=1-1">still available at amazon</a> and perhaps even a few good bookshops. (Beware of poor quality imitations!)<br /><br />*I may not agree with everything I have written here.Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-24076948943782929132009-06-10T13:15:00.001+01:002009-06-10T13:15:42.185+01:00Haworth<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3613865862/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3558/3613865862_fabe85de59_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3613865862/">Haworth</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-41299583052063281152009-06-10T12:53:00.002+01:002009-06-10T13:16:53.269+01:00Oh the irony!<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3613030953/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3397/3613030953_5393c7ac28_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3613030953/">RBS: Evil rarely has a sense of irony</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-67221813746470432282009-01-21T16:03:00.007+00:002009-01-21T16:03:49.788+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3198493275/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3380/3198493275_bf637c8d76_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3198493275/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-14493117638938249152009-01-21T16:03:00.005+00:002009-01-21T16:03:46.571+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199335908/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3370/3199335908_41ded5997e_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199335908/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-65572030098222300092009-01-21T16:03:00.003+00:002009-01-21T16:03:43.305+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199338018/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3105/3199338018_2ddbf3bfc9_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199338018/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-48991874983909717022009-01-21T16:03:00.001+00:002009-01-21T16:03:40.342+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3198500025/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3513/3198500025_b31a026293_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3198500025/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-4500463353366416802009-01-21T15:49:00.005+00:002009-01-21T15:49:52.851+00:00On the Marriot's Way...<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199358466/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3099/3199358466_b477938b5a_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199358466/">On the Marriot's Way...</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-55267811069823439872009-01-21T15:49:00.003+00:002009-01-21T15:49:47.904+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199353618/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3393/3199353618_8d005a935d_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199353618/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-68846025621520956502009-01-21T15:49:00.001+00:002009-01-21T15:49:34.574+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199365706/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3513/3199365706_22476a0284_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199365706/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-70310776136653535362009-01-21T15:48:00.003+00:002009-01-21T15:48:54.446+00:00Factory in the woods<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3198534111/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3452/3198534111_4439c9a32e_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3198534111/">Factory in the woods</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-1784625838288178392009-01-21T15:48:00.001+00:002009-01-21T15:48:50.377+00:00Cold water flat<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199383194/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3372/3199383194_819be6ce6a_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199383194/">Cold water flat</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div><br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-19042498971899399112009-01-21T15:45:00.001+00:002009-01-21T15:45:58.352+00:00On the Marriot's Way<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199386384/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3486/3199386384_580f539ff5_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3199386384/">On the Marriot's Way</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div>Another photo from my watery ride<br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-59894925557641385372008-12-15T17:29:00.000+00:002008-12-15T17:32:01.332+00:003AM interview<a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/spatial-awareness/">Andrew Stevens from 3AM asks me about Crap Towns.</a> A nice trip down memory lane... Almost makes me think I'd enjoy doing a follow up. There's still a lot of crap out there...Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-78551011034630167332008-12-08T10:39:00.001+00:002008-12-08T10:39:08.796+00:00Books to read<div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3092529998/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3217/3092529998_4a7106b748_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26173926@N00/3092529998/">Books to read</a><br />Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/26173926@N00/">Sam Jordison</a></span></div>Here's my to-read pile... Thomas Pynchon has been temporarily removed as I was sizing it up to write my blog about it over on GU... Note Staying On by Paul Scott... next booker blog subject! Also I've read Hero Of the Underground, not sure why that's still there. Really excellent book too.<br clear="all" />Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15716380.post-21643687099167423422008-09-29T11:10:00.000+01:002008-09-29T16:38:53.937+01:00My Alan Partridge moment<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Qw8jBbQ4BM0/SOCuZ1uOHpI/AAAAAAAAAAc/srThng6DhUU/s1600-h/52608pw400.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Qw8jBbQ4BM0/SOCuZ1uOHpI/AAAAAAAAAAc/srThng6DhUU/s320/52608pw400.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5251388924454903442" /></a><br /><br /><br />Reading <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/29/radio.regional.local">this Guardian article</a> about Alan Partridge style local radio DJs and author interviews this morning, I had a painfully bright flash of recognition. Normally, I've been nothing but impressed by the DJs interviewing me as I do the rounds when promoting my various book projects. They've been witty, knowledgeable and even kind when giving me the on-air opportunity to punt my wares. But just a week ago, I had my own moment that, no doubt unfairly - as the article suggests - but inevitably, put me in mind of the great chief of chat.<br /><br />Things went smoothly enough in my interview (one of a number I did to promote Sod That!) until I was asked:<br /><br />"Does your book give away a lot about your personal life?"<br /><br />"Well, it might give you some information about my prejudices," I blustered, not sure what the two DJs were getting at.<br /><br />"Well what does your girlfriend think of it?"<br /><br />"I'm..."<br /><br />"What does she think of the entry where it says that you should never be honest with your partner?"<br /><br />At this point, there was an interjection of dead air. There was no such entry in my book. I would never suggest such a dreadful thing, either. Perish the thought. Slowly, the horrible truth dawned on me. My problem was that 'Sod That' has been afflicted by the release of a suspiciously similar work, which was quoted in the Daily Heil a week or so ago. It seems that the DJ team who were interviewing me had read this article, but not my book. Understandably enough, since the rival work is painfully like mine in intent, if not content, they had assumed that I had written it. In fact, that was the next question:<br /><br />"Did you write this book?"<br /><br />"I did, but not..."<br /><br />"Well I was reading this thing in the Daily Mail..."<br /><br />It was at this stage that I was forced to explain that they had been quoting from a different publication... But half way through this explanation I was cut off, in classic Alan Partridge style, my splutterings interrupted by a hit from the 80s... Leaving me alone in the ISDN studio in Oxford, echo-drums pounding in my ears, reflecting on what a giant nob-head I must have appeared to everyone listening.<br /><br /><br />Sadly, I've been unable to find the embarrassment on 'listen again'. Even more sadly, I didn't have the dignity of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO9g39p23rA">Hardeep Singh Koli and bail out</a> of the interview, before it got too late. Hopefully, I at least gave a few people in the region a laugh. Even if it was at my expense...Sam Jordisonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11847113158131387947noreply@blogger.com5