stickies
by uzwi
(1) Gornal, Upper & Lower; also Gornalwood, an area of Dudley.
(2) Two crows chase a young hawk out of their airspace. The hawk peels off & flaps lazily away towards Wenlock thinking: why can’t these crows understand they’re yesterday’s bird? What is it they don’t get about the inevitability of change?
(3) David Copperfield always seems to have too many pasts. His present is an ongoing whirl of pasts. In the end he’s had so many contexts that we see him as quite modern.
(4) “As if it came from some other kind of enterprise.”
(5) When you’re reviewing my next book, you will make sure to ignore everything it’s doing then say it isn’t doing anything at all, won’t you? I should become anxious if you credited me with any kind of intent or consciously focused intelligence.
(6) Parents who seem to need their children as witnesses to (in increasing order of obscuredness) the parental life, the parental struggle, the parental myth or adventure, the primal scene.
(7) Love for Lydia isn’t about love between individual human beings, but about the love between classes. It’s about how that love–along with all its ties and boundaries, carefully binding attractions and even more carefully binding repulsions–was lost between the 1920s and the early 1950s in the UK. (& see this from Bevan, quoted today on Twitter: “How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies whole art of Conservative politics.”)
the m john harrison blog 
As an American I never knew anything about Bevin until recently. I’m belatedly impressed.
“Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.”
Why is there no one on the left who can deliver a quote like that anymore, much less mean it? Also, considering the US and the UK together, why is there no one on the left anymore to speak of?
because in the US the nominal liberals are complicit to the final atom in the smiling war on the poor and marginal. Creatures for whom watching John Stewart is an act of political piety and , in a state of panic at the prospect of dropping into the despair class, make humane mouth noises at short term brutalities and long form power grabs, while identifying with the police and the ape city oligarchs.
Be-van not Be-vin – both made huge contributions to the way we live now but Ernest Bevin was not this poetic.
Thanks, Lloyd Davis. Paste in haste, repent at leisure.