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Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags

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What do people make of Paul (in then out of Workers' Power) Mason's introduction to Discordia?


Why. why. why did I give them that book? When I handed Laurie Penny a copy of
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Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism anthology, it was only to show how the masters of the craft of reportage wrote.
That chapter where Hunter S. Thompson and illustrator Ralph Steadman hit the 1970 Kentucky Derby, amid a haze of racism, pepper spray and blind drunkenness was meant to be a case study, not an instruction manual.
Anyway, they went to Greece - Laurie and Molly. What they've produced is guaranteed to make the old men in cardigans who write for the mainstream media cough up more spleen, and the art critics shake their postmodernist heads.
For the first duty of journalism is to record reality. To do that you have to go to ordinary places and see them in an extraordinary way.
Greece is no longer an ordinary place. But in the summer of 2012, once the left had failed to win the election and the fascist terror against immigrants was in full swing, it was a place that seemed to defy conventional reporting by the mainstream media.
How do you record despair, fear, the slow exodus of the talented and the entrepreneurial to somewhere else' How do you record the kind of sporadic protest that its proponents call 'beautiful trouble'. You go. you write, and
in the case of Molly Crabapple. you sketch. Before she went to Athens I sent Molly a link to three sketches by Daniel Urrabieta Vierge of women soldiers in the Paris Commune. They are images without rhetoric: Vierge simply catches the ordinary woman amid the extraordinary circumstance. To the social historian they are worth more than 100 propaganda posters, and maybe in future so will be the work herein. I recognise in Molly's work the landscape I have run through, masked against tear gas. trying to report for TV: but it's rearranged, surreal, darker than I remember it.
However, for journalists like Molly and Laurie there is a second duty, which is not calculated to get them major accolades in the primetime media. It is to throw yourself into the fray: to write and draw for a cause, while at the same lime confronting with brutal honesty the limitations and problems with that cause.
At a time when about one third of the column inches in the dead-tree media are wasted on ass-covering caveats, records of calls made but not returned, the irrelevant language of the 'non-denial' press release, it may come as a
shock to read journalism that does not give a shit about impartiality.
This is how Orwell. Isherwood and Hemingway worked - and since Athens feels a lot like the 1930s, and nobody else in the English language is producing work like this about Greece. I have no hesitation in making the comparison. I look forward to reading its mirror image too. from the right, the centre, from the
male-dominated traditional left. This is not a new genre - long-form reportage with drawings but it's been neglected.
And there is a third duty, self-imposed, that even those tied to the demands of 'fair, balanced and impartial' corporate rules should occasionally subject themselves to. That is to observe the impact of the first two activities on yourself. Orwell was the master of this, and Laurie's prose here does not flinch from examining her own responses to the scrappy, dangerous and hedonistic events recounted here.
The fourth duty is totally optional: to go socially crazy with beautiful strangers, with drink, with drugs: to write and scribble against deadlines while struggling with the mind-bending impacts of the above. This was a duty
faithfully performed by Thompson and Steadman at that Kentucky racecourse, and it was meant to be a cautionary tale to modern journalists. Not, like I say, an instruction manual! Paul Mason. September 2012
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Hemingway is not really someone i'd be recommending for politically engaged reportage either. He didn't even bother making stuff up, he just reported what he was told to by those buying his booze.
 
I don't like to say it because I quite like Mason but I suspect there's some mutual backscratching involved - he looks like he's plugged into the latest young activist circles and radical feminist/queer politics, and she looks like she has some kind of connection to serious analysis and the voice of the manual working class. That's the idea.
 
what the fuck does this crap posted by sihhi ^^^ have to do with ordinary people and their day to day struggles in this country.

it is just tourism bollocks. i am in no shape or form what many of you would consider to be very leftwing but ffs this stuff is just fucking terrible.

if you really believe in this then yeah do some journalism, but do some organising, some activism in your local communities. don't ponce around the globe creating abstract bollocks no fucker is going to read outside of your own circle of wankers. how the fuck does that help someone whose vital services are being withdrawn or privatised around them, who can't afford to eat. any of that real stuff. its not glamorous though is it, dealing with deprived pensioners in Yorkshire or immigrants living in over crowded housing in Newham. Has the progress of leftwing politics in Greece been progressed one jot by this crap? Did Greeks on the left not realise their country was fucked? That they have a resurgent rightwing? Did anyone who didn't know any of this read any of this shit?

and then to put yourself on the pulpit of being the 'future of the left' and crack the shits when you get pulled on it.

mind truly blown.
 
articul8 said:
I don't like to say it because I quite like Mason but I suspect there's some mutual backscratching involved - he looks like he's plugged into the latest young activist circles and radical feminist/queer politics, and she looks like she has some kind of connection to serious analysis and the voice of the manual working class. That's the idea.
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Kenneth-Williams.jpg
 
Dan U said:
don't ponce around the globe creating abstract bollocks no fucker is going to read outside of your own circle of wankers. how the fuck does that help someone whose vital services are being withdrawn or privatised around them, who can't afford to eat. any of that real stuff. its not glamorous though is it, dealing with deprived pensioners in Yorkshire or immigrants living in over crowded housing in Newham.
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spot on.
 
Mason agreed to do a talk for us earlier this year but ended up in Greece with his day-job instead. The lad who contacted him was very impressed by how willing he was to help in any way possible, wouldn't take any money (even expenses iirc) tried to sort out a replacement etc whilst being totally down to earth and not floating above the norms.
 
butchersapron said:
Mason agreed to do a talk for us earlier this year but ended up in Greece with his day-job instead. The lad who contacted him was very impressed by how willing he was to help in any way possible, wouldn't take any money (even expenses iirc) tried to sort out a replacement etc whilst being totally down to earth and not floating above the norms.
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Fair play - I wonder why he thinks the sun shines out of her arse though. Maybe it's just his effort to be supportive to a younger generation.
 
butchersapron said:
Mason agreed to do a talk for us earlier this year but ended up in Greece with his day-job instead. The lad who contacted him was very impressed by how willing he was to help in any way possible, wouldn't take any money (even expenses iirc) tried to sort out a replacement etc whilst being totally down to earth and not floating above the norms.
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i've generally got a lot of time for Mason but that is one of the worst bits of psuedo wankery i've read in a very long time
 
Is stuff like this not wanted any longer:-


LP is Laurie Penny said:
My favourite bits of the book were actually the conversations between you two. For instance, the one where Laurie says “People don’t want women with swagger.” Is this book a response to that sentiment?

LP: The sad thing about today's world for women artists and writers is that people are going to be vicious and try to tear you down whatever you do. But that's also a little bit liberating, once you realize that no matter how good and small and quiet you try to make yourself, no matter how much you shy away and try to stick to your permitted boundaries as a woman, people are going to hate on you anyway. So you may as well just go for it.

“Molly Crabapple is her name, though it isn’t the name her mother gave her” is a fabulous line. Is there an element of conscious self-mythologization in Discordia?

LP: Oh, of course there is. I rather enjoyed having someone to mythologize in a way I would never dare to write about myself—it's one reason I'm so keen to work with Molly again, because I admire her so much and I'm not afraid to let that admiration show through in my writing. I think it's important for women writers and artists not to shy away from doing big, proud, ambitious things and talking them up.
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http://bitchmagazine.org/post/democ...rdia-authors-laurie-penny-and-molly-crabapple

Anyway, the conclusion after that heady summer was this in November 2012:

150504_10151175681448673_711767234_n.jpg
 
SLK said:
I was going to write "the best that can happen from this thread is that LP reads some criticisms of her, evaluates her position, and realises that the working class can be educated too. The worst is that she turns against said people and becomes more openly entrenched in her milieu"
Then I thought that the "best" and "worst" are not that far apart.

Then some people decided they own the thread, and decided that now that LP has arrived, they have to police the contributions. They didn't think that before; no-one was told to leave the thread before LP turned up. Anyone could post anything.

Perhaps the most telling thing about this thread is how serious it has become to some posters since the person they ridicule turned up.
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Who's been told to leave the thread, and by whom?

Oh, and "fuck off" or similar don't count. They're merely expressions of pissed-offness.
 
This quote complements that vote pic very well.
dave said:
These people believe in American Democracy and their place in it in the way that some people believe in the Holy Ghost or Father Christmas. They believe in it desperately, childishly, because they need something to believe in, and the fact that they have little to no evidence that it’s going to do anything for them if it exists at all just makes belief more precious.
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Also, the quote is way back but she must have been the only person on the twitter that thought Obama was thrashing Romney in the 1st pres debate. All over the place.
 
she's been back on twitter but has clearly decided to sail on majestically from the racism debacle in the hope it'll go away.
 
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