Daily Archives: January 9, 2022

Utopia Gymnastics Club was originally formed in 2017 in Brighouse and proved a success with 500 members participating each week.

Through the Club Capital project, they were given the opportunity to expand and provide a second dedicated facility for local residents to be able to experience gymnastics and dance, promoting a healthy and active lifestyle particularly for young people and a new site in Wakefield was chosen.

The site can be found on Caldervale Road and it is Wakefields only dedicated gymnastics facility and the first offering artistic gymnastics programmes. It is already a success with almost 500 members joining since it was opened in 2021.

Utopia Gymnastics was created by ex-Yorkshire gymnast Kirstie Limbert and husband Luke, with the goal of introducing the sport and more importantly, the opportunity for anyone to participate in physical activity to the local community.

Going beyond simply providing the sessions, Utopia have focused on an inclusive practice to ensure that gymnastics remains accessible and enjoyable to play a key role in aiding the development of young people.

Kirstie reflected on the clubs approach:

We are very much a grassroots club, but its fantastic to have a new and dedicated facility where you can best deliver community outreach and give every young person the best experience in gymnastics possible.

We have already seen a really positive impact on the children and young people, particularly with the social and mental health benefit. This site has helped us to serve the community and provide for more young people than ever before the growth has been about double what we expected initially but its fantastic to see the enthusiasm that the local area has for gymnastics.

We are also working hard to continue developing our relationship with local schools where we are able to go in and deliver sessions to those who may never have had the chance to experience the sport at all.

We wouldnt have been able to open without Club Capital. After being turned down by quite a few different lenders, we spoke to our facilities support officer at British Gymnastics who helped us get it off the ground.

As soon as we heard about the opportunity, we were interested immediately and were just desperate to realise our vision, and Im so glad we have got there.

Without the necessary affordable loan, it would not have been possible for Wakefield to have this new facility.

Remarkably converted from an aging industrial unit, the project needed 320,000 to transform dead space into an outstanding leisure space, including an all-new reception, communal area, gymnastics floor, podium pit, as well as an additional dance studio which includes further gymnastics space.

British Gymnastics Club Capital gave Utopia the opportunity to develop this dedicated facility in Wakefield, also handing an opportunity to hundreds of young people who before did not have the same access to sport and wellbeing activities.

Dave Marshall, participation director at British Gymnastics and at the forefront of the Club Capital initiative, visited the club recently and was delighted to see the remarkable community outreach since the new facility dream became reality.

He said: It is absolutely wonderful to see Utopia Gymnastics making the most of their new facilities, and continuing their brilliant work in ensuring everyone has the opportunity to get involved in gymnastics and experience the joys of the sport.

Gymnastics is considered a foundation sport because it has so many benefits that are integral to wider development, whether thats supporting cognitive development, co-ordination and flexibility, or skills like teamwork.

We are passionate about supporting clubs and it is extremely important that funding does not stand in the way of clubs who want to develop or move into their own facilities.

We have been working hard to create as many opportunities in gymnastics through our Club Capital project, as well as providing stability to clubs whilst they rebuild through our Covid Recovery fund, which includes a 1.5 million recovery loan to help clubs who have been impacted by the pandemic.

Utopia Gymnastics is open to anyone who wants to give gymnastics a try for the first time, to find out more you can visit http://www.utopiagymnastics.co.uk

Here is the original post:

Utopia is right here in Wakefield thanks to British Gymnastics' funding programme - Wakefield Express

American democracy is in peril and nearly everyone paying attention is trying to find the best way to say so. Should we in the intellectual classes position our warnings in satire, in jeremiads, in social scientific data, in historical analogy, in philosophical wisdom we glean from so many who have instructed us about the violence and authoritarianism of the 20th century? Or should we just scream after our holiday naps?

Some of us pick up our pens and do what we can. We quote wise scribes such as George Orwell on how there may be a latent fascist waiting to emerge in all humans, or Hannah Arendt on how democracies are inherently unstable and susceptible to ruin by aggressive, skilled demagogues. We turn to Alexis de Tocqueville for his stunning insights into American individualism while we love to believe his claims that democracy would create greater equality. And oh! how we love Walt Whitmans fabulously open, infinite democratic spirit. We inhale Whitmans verses and are captured by the hypnotic power of democracy. O Democracy, for you, for you I am trilling these songs, wrote our most exuberant democrat.

Read enough of the right Whitman and you can believe again that American democracy may yet be the continent indissoluble with the life-long love of comrades. But just now we cannot rely on the genius alone of our wise forbears. We have to face our own mess, engage the fight before us, and prepare for the worst.

Our democracy allows a twice-impeached, criminally inclined ex-president, who publicly fomented an attempted coup against his own government, and still operates as a gangster leader of his political party, to peacefully reside in our midst while under investigation for his misdeeds. We believe in rule of law, and therefore await verdicts of our judicial system and legislative inquiry.

Yet Trumpism unleashed on 6 January, and every day before and since over a five-year period, a crusade to slowly poison the American democratic experiment with a movement to overturn decades of pluralism, increased racial and gender equality, and scientific knowledge. To what end? Establishing a hopeless white utopia for the rich and the aggrieved.

On this 6 January anniversary is it time to sing anew with Whitmanesque fervor, or is the only rational response to scream? First the scream.

On 6 January 2021, an American mob, orchestrated by the most powerful man in the land, along with many congressional and media allies, nearly destroyed our indirect electoral democracy. To this day, only Trumps laziness and incompetence may explain why he did not force Vice-President Mike Pence to resign in the two months before the coup attempt, install a genuine lackey like Mark Meadows, and set up the formal disruption of the count of electoral votes. The real coup needed guns, and military brass thankfully made clear they would oppose any attempt at imposing martial law. But the coup endures by failing; it now takes the form of voter suppression laws, virulent states rights doctrine applied to all manner of legislative action installing Republican loyalists in the electoral system, and a propaganda machine capable of popularizing lies big and small.

The lies have now crept into a Trumpian Lost Cause ideology, building its monuments in ludicrous stories that millions believe, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer. If you repeat the terms voter fraud and election integrity enough times on the right networks you have a movement. And replacement theory works well alongside a thousand repetitions of critical race theory, both disembodied of definition or meaning, but both scary. Liberals sometimes invite scorn with their devotion to diversity training and insistence on fighting over words rather than genuine inequality. But it is time to see the real enemy a long-brewing American-style neo-fascist authoritarianism, beguilingly useful to the grievances of the disaffected, and threatening to steal our microphones midway through our odes to joy.

Yes, disinformation has to be fought with good information. But it must also be fought with fierce politics, with organization, and if necessary with bodies, non-violently. We have an increasingly dangerous population on the right. Who do you know who really wants to compromise with their ideas? Who on the left will volunteer to be part of a delegation to go discuss the fate of democracy with Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy or the foghorns of Fox News? Who on the right will come to a symposium with 10 of the finest writers on democracy, its history and its philosophy, and help create a blueprint for American renewal? As a culture we are not in the mood for such reason and comity; we are in a fight, and it needs to happen in politics. Otherwise it may be 1861 again in some very new form. Unfortunately it is likely to take events even more shocking than 6 January to move our political culture through and beyond our current crisis.

And if and when it is 1861 again, the new secessionists, namely the Republican party, will have a dysfunctional constitution to exploit. The ridiculously undemocratic US Senate, now 50/50 between the two parties, but where Democrats represent 56.5% of the population and Republicans 43.5%, augurs well for those determined to thwart majoritarian democracy. And, of course, the electoral college an institution more than two centuries out of date, and which even our first demagogue president, Andrew Jackson, advocated abolishing offers perennial hope to Republicans who may continue to lose popular votes but win the presidency, as they have in two of the last six elections. Democracy?

And now the song? Well, keep reading. Of all the books on democracy in recent years one of the best is James Millers Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. A political philosopher and historian, Miller provides an intelligent journey through the turbulent past of this great human experiment in whether we can actually govern themselves. He demonstrates how thin the lines are between success and disaster for democracies, how big wins turn into reactions and big losses, and how the dynamics of even democratic societies can be utterly amoral. Intolerant new ruling classes sometimes replace the tyrants they overthrow.

Democratic revolts, like democratic elections, Miller writes, can produce perverse outcomes. History is still waiting for us. But in the end, via examples like Vclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Miller reminds us that the ideal survives. Democracy does require the best laws, Havel intoned, but it must also manifest as humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural. Miller does the history to show that democracy is almost always a riddle, not a recipe. Democracy is much harder than autocracy to sustain. But renew it we must.

Or simply pick up Whitmans Song of Myself, all 51 pages, from the opening line, I celebrate myself, and sing myself, to his musings on the luck of merely being alive. Keep going to a few pages later when a runaway slave enters Whitmans home and the poet gazes into his revolving eyes, and nurses the galls of his neck and ankles, and then to his embrace of primeval, complete democracy midway in the song, where he accepts nothing which all cannot have. Finally read to the ending, where the poet finds blissful oblivion, bequeathing himself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. Whitmans sign of democracy is everywhere and in everything. The democratic and the authoritarian instinct are both deep within us, forever at war.

After 6 January, its time to prepare thee to sing, to scream, and to fight.

Read more from the original source:

Trump has birthed a dangerous new Lost Cause myth. We must fight it - The Guardian

Call it an Intrigue of the Seas, but are cruise passengers getting a hint at the possible names of Royal Caribbeans upcoming ships?

About three weeks ago the cruise line registered dozens of names with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). While the registration doesnt specify them distinctly as vessel names, they all carry Royal Caribbeans signature naming convention for its ships:

Names include Intrigue of the Seas, Unity of the Seas, Bliss of the Seas, Eternity of the Seas and more.

All were registered on December 16, 2021 under a 1B filing basis with the patent office. This status indicates that a filer has a bona fide intention to use your mark in commerce with your goods and/or services in the near future, according to the USPTO.

To be sure, it doesnt mean that the names have to be used, but going through the process of trademarking means they are more serious than just brainstormed ideas.

So what are the new names? Here they are in order as listed on the patent offices website:

To be sure you can see some theme patterns in the trademarks. For instance, Joy, Bliss, Awe, & Splendor all feel as if they could belong to the same class of ships. Melody of the Seas certainly feels like a sister ship to current Oasis-class ships Symphony of the Seas and Harmony of the Seas. And Nirvana, Utopia, and Paradise all seem to belong to the same group.

The cruise line generally has ship names that tie into a central theme surrounding a class. For instance, its Freedom-class ship names include Freedom of the Seas, Liberty of the Seas, and Independence of the Seas. Having multiple names in the trademark list that revolve around a theme is not surprising.

So will all these names ever see use?

The sheer number of trademarks means that even if they do use them all, it will be a long time before all these names start sailing. Even at a rate of one new ship per year, it would take more than two decades to go through the entire list.

As of now, the cruise line has four ships on order through 2026. This includes an unnamed Oasis-class ship that is planned for 2024. It also includes three ships in the cruise lines new Icon class. The first ship in that class is dubbed Icon of the Seas and is scheduled for 2023. Two more ships in the class have yet to be named.

One other hint? A user on a CruiseCritic message board posted images of a survey asking which name they preferred for the upcoming unnamed Oasis-class ship. On the list were most of the trademarked names, including Melody of the Seas, Utopia of the Seas, and Unity of the Seas.

From the looks of it, Royal Caribbean has plenty of ideas on what to call its upcoming ships.

Read the original post:

Intrigue of the Seas: Will Royal Caribbean's Next Ship Name Come From This List? - Cruzely.com

Their concept was helped along by high-profile digital premieres that occurred during the live-theater interlude. Diana: The Musical aired on Netflix in advance of its Broadway opening. The original production of Hamilton aired on Disney+ in the summer of 2020. HBO Max streamed David Byrne's American Utopia, which was playing on Broadway pre-shutdown and has since resumed. Apple has Come From Away.

As a result, a surge of theater-starved subscribers joined the BroadwayHD platform, which costs $11.99 a month or $129.99 annually for an all-you-can-watch ticket to shows.

Lane and Comley's first digital production was The Will Rogers Follies, filmed at the Palace Theatre in 1993. At the time, they were both producers on Broadway and filmed the performance against the going argument that no one would buy tickets if they could watch a Broadway performance on television.

Their idea was bigger than that. In normal times, 30 shows might turn over during the course of a Broadway season, even after spending millions. Just 1 out of 5 shows recoups its investment, Lane said.

Lane and Comley thought they could hedge that financial investment at the same time as they widened the potential audience for the best performances in the world.

"We feel that if a show makes it to Broadway, it's worth being seen by the world," Comley said. She likened the digital capture to an original cast recordinganother asset related to the show's brand but nothing that would prevent a fan from buying a ticket when in town. "You can't argue with the production value."

Read more:

Broadway finds a new audience in living rooms - Crain's New York Business

In another timeline, Travis Scott would have begun the year by teasing his highly anticipated fourth album, reportedly titled Utopia. However, due to the tragedy that took place at his Astroworld Festival, which left ten dead and hundreds injured, much of his focus has been on working with victims and dealing with the mounting lawsuits that have come as a result. Despite this, Travis has apparently found time to work on that album, which producer Wheezy revealed during an interview with Billboard.

Wheezy, who has worked with the likes of Future, Young Thug, and more, sat down with Billboard to discuss his work on Gunnas new album, DS4EVER. During this conversation, Wheezy was asked about his work with Scott and if he was back to working on his next album. Yeah, still working on it and putting the finishing touches on that, Wheezy replied. Hes back in Cabo working on it and Im going out there soon. Im going out there probably in the next two or three weeks to link up with him.

Based on Wheezys comments, new music from Travis could arrive in the near future. It would be the rappers first drop since he released Escape Plan and Mafia last fall.

You can read Wheezys full interview with Billboard here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Read more:

Travis Scott 'Putting The Finishing Touches' On Next Album - UPROXX

A green-winged teal forages near Alewife in December. Adult males have a narrow white stripe extending on the shoulder. (Photo: Jeanine Farley)

In this tale of two kinds of wildlife, Thomas Morton, sea captain and pirate Richard Wollaston and a couple of other profiteers came to North America in 1624 with 30 indentured servants as part of a trading venture. They formed a trading post called Mount Wollaston on land shared by the Massachusett people in what is now Quincy. There they began trading guns and liquor with the Massachusett for furs and supplies.

In 1626, Wollaston traveled to Jamestown, Virginia, where he sold some of the indentured servants to tobacco planters as slaves. This angered Morton, who urged the remaining servants to rebel. According to William Bradford, Morton said:

You see that many of your fellows are carried to Virginia; and if you stay you will also be carried away and sould for slaves with yerest I, having a parte in the plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociats; so may you be free from service, and we will converse, trad, plante, & live togeather as equalls, & supporte & protecte one another.

This seemed like a good idea to the servants left behind, so they collaborated with Morton. Wollaston never returned to Massachusetts. Morton renamed the colony Ma-re Mount (Merrymount), a play on the Latin for sea (mer), the mother of God (Mary) and the emotion (merrie).

Thomas Morton set up a maypole in his Merrymount colony where residents danced and drank and frisked, angering Pilgrims and Puritans.

According to the governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, the settlement suffered under Morton:

After this they fell to great licenciousnes, and led a dissolute life, powering out them selves into all profanenes. And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme [atheism].

Despite Bradfords disapproval, Mortons settlement and trading post became quite financially successful more successful than the settlements of the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Bradfords pilgrims in Plymouth. Morton was not steeped in the religious conservatism of the Puritans and the Pilgrims. In fact, he was quite the opposite, celebrating both Anglican and pagan English traditions. In the spring, Morton set up an 80-foot pine maypole in Merrymount dedicated to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and merriment. There his men danced and drank and frisked with Massachusett women.

This heathen behavior angered the Pilgrims and Puritans. Bradfordwrote of this debauchery in Of Plymouth Plantation:

They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together Morton likwise (to shew his poetrie) composed sundry rimes & verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, andothers to thedetraction & scandall of some persons, which he affixed to this idoll May-polle.

Morton described the festivities this way in a song he wrote himself:

Lasses in beaver coats come away,Yee shall be welcome to us night and day.

The Puritans told tales of debauchery and heathenism at Merrymount. Morton felt he had set up a multicultural utopia, or at least a successful trading outpost. Its not clear how the Massachusett felt about all of this, but William Bradford had had enough. He demanded that Morton stop selling guns to the Massachusett. Morton refused. Bradford then sent Myles Standish to arrest him. Morton surrendered peacefully. According to Bradford if they had not been over armed with drinke, more hurt might have been done.

Morton was taken away without food to a deserted island off the coast of New Hampshire. Soon, he found a ship back to England, only to return the following year in 1629. He was arrested again by the Puritan leader John Endicott of New Salem, who chopped down the Maypole and burned the settlement, including Mortons house. Morton again was sent back to England.

And now to the teals

Females are brown and look much like mallards. You can just barely see a patch of green on the wing. (Photo: Richard George)

What does any of this have to do with the green-winged teal (Anas crecca), you ask? Well, after Thomas Morton was exiled to England, he wrote a three-volume book, New English Canaan, about his experiences in Massachusetts. The first volume was about the history and beliefs of the indigenous people he encountered: I found two sortes of people, the one Christians, the other Infidels; these I found most full of humanity, and more friendly then the other.

The third volume was an unflattering denunciation of the Pilgrims and Puritans and their policies in the colonies. In it he refers to Myles Standish as Captain Shrimpe because of his short stature. Of course, this book was not well-received in New England and became the first book banned in the Americas.

The second volume, though, was about the plants and animals of New England.

It is here that Morton writes about green-winged teals: Teales there are of two sorts, greene winged, and blew winged: but a dainty bird. I have bin much delighted with a rost of these for a second course. I had plenty in the rivers and ponds about my howse. This is the first recorded documentation of the green-winged teal in Massachusetts, and in the 1600s at least, the birds were plentiful.

More about the teal

Male and female teals have green wing patches that are mostly hidden when not in flight. (Photo: Jeanine Farley)

The green-winged teal is a small duck that feeds by dabbling for plants in the water. The males have a vertical white stripe on their shoulder and chestnut brown heads with a green stripe. Females look much like a female mallard, although slightly smaller. If the duck flashes a wing, however, you will see a shiny emerald wing. These ducks nest near water.

There are two kinds of ducks: dabblers, who upend themselves to feed from submerged plants, and divers, who swim underwater to find plant food. Green-winged teals are dabblers. Dabblers skim food from the surface of the water or use their bill to filter mud from mudflats. More than any other type of duck, green-winged teals like to eat from mudflats. Dabbling ducks can also take flight directly from the water; diving ducks need a running start along its surface.

Green-winged teals begin to nest as soon as the snow melts. A female usually lays six to 11 eggs, which she incubates for three weeks. A few hours after they hatch, the chicks leave the nest. Green-winged teal youngsters have the fastest growth rate of any duck.

A green-winged teal in January in Alewife Brook Reservation. Males have a chestnut brown head with a wide green stripe behind the eyes. (Photo: Brian Rusnica)

The chicks sometimes return at night for a few days, but they find all of their own food. After about 35 days, they are able to fly.

Green-winged teals can be found in Eastern Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island during the winter. In spring and summer, they breed in most of Massachusetts, as well as northern Vermont and Maine. In other parts of New England, you will see these birds only during spring migration (which can begin as early as February) and fall migration.

Although green-winged teals were abundant in the 1600s of Thomas Morton, they were heavily hunted in the 1800s and over time became rare. In the 1900s, the birds were protected, and since then their population has increased. Today, however, green-winged teals depend for survival on undisturbed wetlands, which are threatened by increasing human developments.

Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographers name and the general location where the photo was taken.

Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.

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Thomas Morton annoyed Puritans and Pilgrims before telling the world of the green-winged teal - Cambridge Day

IN LATE JANUARY 1941, Bucharest, Romania, was overrun by a barbaric pogrom that resulted in over 120 deaths, the looting of thousands of Jewish shops and homes, and the desecration of numerous synagogues. Sixteen-year-old Isidor Goldtein, an administrative secretary, found himself rounded up alongside 200 other Jews at an Iron Guard headquarters near the citys Jewish district. For several days, they were beaten savagely with clubs, planks, and crowbars; if they asked for water, a basin filled with blood was kicked their way. Between beatings, the depleted and weary Jews were forced to do exercises for the amusement of their torturers. Insults like dirty Yid and folk songs about how the popor (people) was seizing control of its national destiny by exterminating the Jews filled the air. When even the Legionnaires tired of all the beating, two groups were formed: one, in line for further abuse, was eventually released, while the other, numbering nearly 90 souls, was taken to a forest where bullets ended their ordeal.

By mere chance, the young Goldtein was placed in the group that survived, but the memories of that night, as Andrew Hussey argues in his riveting biography Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou, were the impetus the emotional core behind the strange, expansive, and ultimately overwhelming body of work that would appear under the name Isidore Isou. Having confronted certain death and witnessed indescribable savagery, Isou vowed not to die anonymously as so many of his brethren had. His trademark megalomania as the inventor of Lettrism It is a name and not a master that I wish to be [] the Name of Names: Isidore Isou. [] The Messiah is called Isidore Isou? is less ludicrous when seen as a response to the calculated extermination of European Jewry. I will create, he proclaimed, the ambition, the blazon and the armor of my race, and it will be ennobled. In a subversion of Aryan values, he anointed himself Isou the Jew. For the project of annihilation could not be complete if one Jewish name lived on; those who had killed the people of the book, either with their own hands or through their silence, would have to acknowledge him.

Almost five years to the day from that fateful pogrom, on January 21, 1946, Isous improbable plan was put into action when, having arrived in Paris several months earlier, he stormed the stage during the premiere of Tristan Tzaras La Fuite. Tzara had been Isous idol (and a perfect mirror: a bourgeois Romanian Jew with an alliterative pseudonym who led the avant-garde), but now it was Down with Dada, let us speak of Lettrism! With the papers delightedly scandalized by his howlings, Isou went from being a stateless Jew who was surviving thanks to a combination of charity (Zionist flophouses and soup kitchens), prostitution (elderly British ladies paying a few hundred francs for company), and thieving (which was an art, Isou insisted) to a Left Bank figure with two books contracted to Gallimard. This was truly an astounding feat for someone in his early 20s even more astounding given that Isou was writing in a foreign language that he barely mastered (and spoke oddly, as can be heard in the voice of Ltranger in his 1951 film Trait de bave et dternit [On Venom and Eternity]).

Introduction une nouvelle posie et une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music, 1947) established the principles of Lettrism, which Isou claimed was at the avant-garde of the avant-garde, while LAgrgation dun nom et dun messie (The Making of a Name and a Messiah, also 1947) was a novel-cum-memoir that fictionalized Isous formative experiences in Romania (without explicitly naming that cursed land). Because those books, along with the vast body of his later work, from the hypergraphic novels to the 1,400-page La Cratique ou la Novatique (19411976) (The Creative or the Novatic, 2004), have long been out of print or difficult to find in the original French (little has been translated into English), Isou remains the least well known of the major avant-gardists of the 20th century. Following upon a major retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2019, Andrew Husseys rich biography aims to correct that oversight, providing an engaging, readable narrative of Isous multiple dimensions and sprawling ambitions.

After Futurism, Dada, and surrealism, Lettrism was the last of the total avant-gardes to appear, the end stage of arts decomposition before a new art would arise. Dada had reduced poetry to the word; Lettrism whittled it down to the letter. An alphabet of bodily sounds hisses and growls, cackles and coughs, snores and sighs was elaborately systematized to create sound poems that purified the form. For Isou, Lettrism was more than invented hieroglyphs and brute noise; it was the starting point for a creative methodology that would be valid for the plastic arts, architecture, economics, mathematics, medicine, psychiatry, even sex (there are Isouien methods of kissing, of fucking, even of masturbation). An elaborate jargon mca-esthtique, esthaprisme, art infinitsimal, cadre supertemporel, polythanasie esthtique, and so on provided a veneer of intellectual heft to the impenetrability of Lettrism. While a number of disciples moved in and out of the group over the years, it was in many respects a closed shop with Dieu-Isou (God-Isou) at its absolute center.

Hussey seems to be frankly torn about the intellectual value of the entire project. Of Isous first book laying out Lettrist principles, he writes: [F]or most readers, including assiduous followers of the latest avant-garde trends, the book was convoluted, fragmented, and largely unreadable when it was not incomprehensible or possibly even insane. Of the series of new alphabets Isou invented: They seem like the obsessive creation of a madman. Of the hypergraphic novel Jonas: [I]t is a work produced by someone who knows that he is unwell, possibly quite mad. Of the 1976 novel Lhritier du chteau (The Inheritor of the Castle), a sequel to Kafka: In truth the book is a discordant mess [] a visceral and disturbing account of a mind in free-fall. Isou had indeed suffered a psychotic breakdown during the revolutionary fervor of May 1968 he was convinced that the uprising was indebted to his postwar theories about youth culture and even attempted to have himself proclaimed its leader and spent the latter part of his life in and out of mental hospitals. But the madness inherent in the entire project of Lettrism was there from the start, only it was a calculated response to the rationality and order that had spawned the Shoah.

Hussey has no doubts, though, about the rollicking tale of Isous life and times. Born in 1925 in the provincial city of Botoani, in Romanias northeast, Isou settled in Bucharest with his well-off, assimilated family. As a precocious teenager he immersed himself in the capitals Jewish literary circles. After the war, Isou crossed a continent in ruins to get to Paris (for a while, he wondered if he should go to Israel, but since Paris was the absolute center of world culture, he decided that was where he needed to be). His charisma, good looks, and unbounded confidence won him a gang of devoted admirers. He managed, as a stateless Jew barely out of his teens, to secure meetings with Jean Paulhan, Gaston Gallimard, Jean Cocteau, and Andr Gide. When his genius was not immediately recognized, threats were issued: Each generation brings with it a mass of new values which old bastards like you try to stifle. Im warning you now that my friends and I will come and smash your faces in if you dont publish my work which will create great upheavals. I do not salute you, Isidore Isou. He accosted movie producers to get his then-unfinished Trait de bave et dternit screened at the Cannes Film Festival (that film announced the start of discrepant Lettrist cinema, which cut the tie between the image and language, influencing Jean-Luc Godard and Stan Brakhage; it also brought Guy Debord into the Lettrist ambit before an acrimonious break). Isou and his band physically attacked an orphanage to free a young admirer; another scandal involved a Lettrist priest taking the microphone during Mass at Notre-Dame to spout an anticlerical screed. Orson Welles was reduced to an earnest, aw-shucks Midwesterner when Isou and some Lettrist pals recited a sound poem for a BBC documentary on Saint-Germain-des-Prs.

At times, the scandals and adventures so captivate the biographer that Hussey does no more than renarrate Isous own tellings of those exploits. Yet Isou could hardly be taken for a reliable narrator and he was upfront about that: when an editor at Gallimard asked him to change the ending of a chapter in LAgrgation, Isou demurred, saying that he would not add yet another lie to a story already full of lies. Despite admitting that it is impossible to separate the real from the fantasies within fantasies in Isous writings, Hussey treats Isous own work as a true document of his life and era; a precise eyewitness account (this of LAgrgation, a novel creating the myth of a character named Isidore Isou) or a true account of what Isou had lived through and seen (of an erotic novel set in a mental hospital). The mistake is compounded when considering the books inconsistencies and errors, from minor things like dates (the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was signed in 1939, not 1938; Guy Debord and Isou were not close friends in the 1940s, as the third line of the book has it, having only met in 1951), names (it is Mihai Eminescu, not Mohai), and geography (the city of Oradea is in the plains and hills, not the mountains; there could not possibly be a night train going the 40 kilometers from Constana to Mangalia) to larger errors in cultural history (Paris, liberated a year earlier, was not in the midst of the puration sauvage when Isou arrived in August 1945; to state that five of the original founders of Dada in Zurich were Jewish exiles from the same part of Romania as Isou is wildly off since only two Romanian Jews were among Dadas founders and one of them came from Bucharest). When writing about Romania, Hussey relies on accounts in translation or by foreigners; original sources are largely missing (I counted four in seven chapters).

Whatever the documentary faults of Husseys book, his subject is riveting, and he tells the tale well. Isou was that rarest of things, a sensitive soul who remained stubbornly convinced of his genius and asserted his right to venture into any field of thought, without a care for traditions or established principles. Some of the results were, as Hussey freely concedes, off the mark, but there was a freedom to Isous mind that strongly rebuked the culture of experts and rationality that had once decided utopia would be Judenfrei. If Paul Celan, a fellow Romanian Jew whom Isou befriended in Paris, answered in his own way Adornos famous remark about the fate of poetry after Auschwitz, Isous whole way of being with its madness and delirium, its wild excesses, sexual energy, disaggregation, and decomposition was its own form of justification. In a world where no one is master of his destiny, as Isou put it in Trait de bave et dternit, where the idea of dying peacefully in ones bed is a fairy tale since violence surrounds us all in this inhospitable world, the only thing left is creation unbounded, godlike creation.

Marius Hentea, a professor of English at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), is the author of TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (2014).

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Madness as Method: On Andrew Hussey's Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou - lareviewofbooks

No satirist could have plotted it better. The residents of Bandhapari village, in Odishas Kalahandi district, invited their MLA, BJD leader Pradeep Kumar Dishari, to inaugurate a telecom tower. Only, the tower was a rickety bamboo structure, bearing a banner that read BSNL 4G. This was the angry villagers way of protesting against the lack of response to their repeated requests for a mobile tower the absence of which makes it necessary for them to travel 4 km to another village in order to make a simple phone call.

This is how Indias dream of zooming down the digital highway to arrive at some kind of technological utopia, where people buy groceries using payment apps, run entire businesses on their devices and children learn in virtual classrooms, stumbles against reality. While the hardship faced by the residents of Bandhapari is particularly unfortunate, the frustration they feel over being denied what has become a basic necessity to live and work in the 21st century would be familiar to many. Indians may have access to all the latest smartphones that hit the market, but none of the hype that accompanies a new launch can offset the discomfort of dangling precariously on a window ledge or off balcony railings to catch a signal. Or trying to make the Hobsons choice between service providers who are technically different, but offer exactly the same patchy network connectivity and indifferent customer service (until one threatens to port to a trade rival, in which case the red carpet of undivided attention and special offers is suddenly rolled out).

While Dishari said that he understood their frustrations, he couldnt do much, as clearance for a new tower would have to come from the Centre. As for the Bandhapari villagers, they have threatened to boycott all elections until their demands are met. Perhaps they are hoping that will send a message even clearer than the bamboo 4G mobile tower.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on January 7, 2022 under the title Network unavailable.

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Unable to text or call due to lack of mobile tower, a village in Odisha finds a unique way to send a message - The Indian Express