Rip Van Winkle: A Review.

Tomorrow, we will live here. Ryan Van Winkle.

'RIP VAN WINKLE, known to all as a harmless, drinking, shiftless lout, who never would work, but roamed about, always ready with jest and song-idling, tippling all day long.'

Ryan Van Winkle is certainly not the doppelgänger of Rip Van Winkle, but I'm sure he shares some of the personal qualities that this American fairy tale character has. If to be a Rip van Winkle, is to awake suddenly to profound changes in one's surroundings (Thank you, wiki), then Ryan awoke suddenly to a profound change in his personal literary surrounding - that is - he awoke to the publication of his first poetry collection. And so, the dormant literary allusion of his second name has become reality.

(Rip Van Winkle Statue)

Ryan Van Winkle arrived in Edinburgh in 1999, from USA, working in bars, cafés, and the Forest Café. He's came a long bloody way since that beginning. Jesus, I barely know him, but what I do know is he's a pro-active, tireless encourager and organiser, and fair poet

The Crashaw Prize is an international annual prize for a first collection of poetry. It is judged by members of Salt Publishing company. Ryan Van Winkle won the Salt Crashaw Prize for poetry in 2010. 'Tomorrow, we will live here' is the result of that win. Congratulations on that. Winkle is from Branford, Connecticut, and this collection pays homage to that heritage, with a mix of poems from domestic America, memories of private boyhood awakenings, older tangles of love lost, and a host of striving characters (a fat boy/a deviant pastors son/a murdered child/a knot of relationships that need unpicking).

The poems are plain spoken and full of quiet discontent. Throughout there are images and phrases that are unexpected and surprising: 'scrub himself birth pink' 'brother the deer' 'the muscled hills' 'the day is pink meat' 'the ocean is a lung' which always make me stop to reconsider with intrigue. And there are sharp and unusual images that arrive in almost every poem:

'I got a girl up in the attic

the summer I turned ten. Her shirt went damp

and we played a game where I'd strip and she'd slap

my calves with my dead grandma's cane.'

(From; Everybody always talking about Jesus.)

'it was best, what happened. I never

like those buildings: their shadows

froze everything. Mornings, walking

into their long trench coats, was like

walking into slabs of ice.'

(From; I Got Out When It All Went Down.)

In the first there is the unexpected image of childhood, verging on erotic, cruel play. In the second choice we have an image of the Trade Towers and 9/11. The images are strong, loaded with suggestion; the shadows of the trade towers are gangsters coats, the buildings themselves are cold slabs of ice. The poem of 9/11 does not reach for sentimentality or over-state its purpose, it reflects a distaste for the buildings, a spinal shiver directed at the entire event, while focusing on a certain 'Betty'. The unexpected imagery and plain spoken style reminded me slightly of Simic, in that they are minimalist depicted with sparse language, often say something using incongruous imagery. Winkle weaves small narratives throughout, most notably 'Cassella: The Pastor's Son' 'Everybody Always Talking About Jesus' and the five piece suite 'Unfinished Rooms' but it is best displayed, in my humble empirically unverifiable view, in the opening prose poem:

My 100-year-old ghost

sits up with me when the power cuts,

tells about the trout at Unkee’s Lake,
the wood house burned on the hill.

He says he was intimate
with every leaf of grass.

Wore one hat for Griswold,
another for his own field,

the possibilities of the century laid out;
an endless string of fishing pools.

But they never got ahead of my ghost -
he took them like cows, one at a time,

never lusted for the color of trout
in a pool a mile away.

He knew from the smoke in the sky
Mrs. Johnson was starting supper,

and, in March when the candles appeared,
he knew Bobby’s boy had died.

My ghost only ever had one bar
where the keeper didn’t water his drinks,

nor did he feel the need to hide his moth cap,
his potato clothes, or scrub himself birth pink.

My ghost tells me there was a time
you’d look out and not find a Dairy Queen.

You could sit on your porch a whole life
and never think about China.

Sometimes I see my ghost
bringing cut sunflowers to his wife

and it seems so simple.
Then, sometimes, it is dark

he’s just in from work and Griswold says
they ain’t going to raise his pay.

And even back then the power went out,
long nights when they had no kerosene.

And my ghost tries to sell me on simpler times:
the grass soft, endless

lampless nights,
pools of crickets singing.

I imagine the ghost to be a Whitmanesque romantic or Mark Twain creation, with calloused hands and tough spirit; it is a strong poem, it lifts you into its world of the ghosts nostalgia for a bygone community, told to the poet, much like a Grandfather might recount to his newphew, as they sit the front porch. I imagine frontier America, wagons rolling through the Appalachian mountains. The ghost is looking from the perspective of modern America, romanticising past America where the 'possibilities of the century [were] laid out' and 'a time you'd look out and not find a Dairy Queen' existed, or you'd 'never think of China'. I imagine dust bowl prairies, rural farmers in dungarees, hints of a Carson McCuller landscape, that entire lost romanntic America tarmacked over by hungry progress. I think it's one of the strongest poems in the collection.

It's a strong collection, it won't save the world, not that anyone claimed it would, but it might open a few doorways of conversation, exchange impressions the world made upon the poet. It has so many flavours: coming of age sweet, perverse sour, dark chocolate, mint fresh, scandalous meat, stale tobacco, wet paint, dust clouds, and graveyards. It must be said that there are some weak poems in here, but the sucessful poems keep the collection from collapsing into weightlessness. I get the impression from reading that some of the poems were written a long time ago, and you feel some still remain in that amateur setting, or have a certain sophomoric subject matter - parts of 'Unfinished Rooms' 'The Flood' 'The Day he went to war' (which is actually the most comical poem in the collection). Dare I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but there is a certain measured restraint in subject matter and plain speaking. I prefer chaos and psychiatric darkness, and a greater varied of subject matters, but it serves as a reassuring introduction to the developing voice of a Scottish-American poet.

'Tomorrow, we will live here' loosely suggests an optimism, a coming of age, of being comfortable in a a new place, inclusive even a new country. But feeling slightly mooncalf in my way, I thought the title would be quite fitting at the entrance to a graveyard, quite fitting, don't you think? But this book is far from dead.

Ryan Van Winkle is the reader-in-residence at The Scottish Poetry Library, and organiser of the meaty 'Golden Hour' at the renowned and, will-not-be-cut-down-and-shipped-off- as-lumber, Forest Café. He's hyper-active encourager in the Scottish community of writers poets artists, littering the streets of Edinburgh's fringes, and beyond. He's a moustachioed charmer. Aloof but not a loafer.

Buy his book, read or listen to more of his words here.

Precision Engineering: A Review.

This Is Not About What You Think. A Poetry Collection By, Jim Murdoch.

Murdoch is not a poet of excess. Murdoch does not mess about. Murdoch gets to the point, and then gets off the page. In some respects the poems are sterile, not in the sense of imagination, but of being thoroughly clean and free of destructive elements.

And why? Well, they don't need it. As Murdoch says 'Once written I understand myself a little more. I may still be carrying around the same baggage but it's packed a little more neatly.'

That's what I like about this collection – it's compactness, it's neatness. It contains one hundred and four page-poems that do not over-state, or obfuscate. (Obfuscate, is guilty of itself). Each has a simplicity. Each contains a small stone of wisdom. If it's true that 'the idiot talks, while the wise man remains silent' then, Murdoch is wise, for he is brief and insightful.

It is the brevity and succinctness in Murdoch’s poems that make them readable. You can mull over their domestic insights, their wise old mans tale observations; consume them snack size with a moments notice. As Shakespeare wrote'...brevity is the soul of wit...' so I shall shut up, and let the poems speak:

Advice to children V

People are rarely

what they say they are

and never what they think

they are.

Or would like to be.

The first lies we tell

are generally to

ourselves.

Reflections of Glass

Her mirrored face reflected grief

and - in the way that some mirrors do -

twisted it (it's a trick of the light).

And when I came to face her, I looked

and I saw nothing and I realised that,

for her, I was not there, as if I were

glass.

Tunnel of Love

Love is not a thing you fall into

but an experience you go through

like a long tunnel.

Sometimes I just like to sit

in the dark in ours and pretend

I don't see the light at the end.

For My Father

Dutifully I dial the number and ask for him.

He answers and

brick by brick we build a conversation.

Progressively the pauses

become more frequent

and intense.

Finally we replace our recievers,

each regretting not having said

what he had no words to say.

Somehow I love him

yet cannot reach him.

'This Is Not About What You Think' charts a life in seven sections, from childhood to adulthood, the life is not necessarily biographical, but it certianly lends from the life of the author. There is some light inside this collection, but there is a scrupulous meaness throughout too. A depression with life, with the hand that it was dealt. But, it is through hardship we learn our lessons, right?

Throughout this collection there is a bleakness hard to over look. Poems of quiet regret, of failed relationships, in particular a relationship with a father which shared not much friendship, intimacy, or love. There is a nihilistic quality in the content, which is hightened by the strict minimalism of the layout. In the content their is a philosophical awareness that life is short, relationships insufficient, meaning transient and contradictory, and emotional lives are burden, we all leave with much left unsaid, in an existence that is opened ended and unfinished.

Critically, I think it lacks fireworks, lacks experiment/danger/chaos, some of the poems feel incomplete, there is not much left to the imagination, ultimately we have a life revealed through surgically small prose poems. But, I like chaos, private turmoil, confessions, messy life, language paly and there is not enough of it in here for me. I much prefer reading Murdoch's essays, reviews, and Aggie and Shuggie skits. However, 'This Is Not About What You Think' is worth buying for its clear and simple insight, its common share in expressing the fear, dread, and anxiety, that mark every life.

Jim Murdoch is a poet, and novelist, from Glasgow. Read more from Murdoch, buy his poetry, buy his novels here: The Truth About Lies

The Grand Chess Game.

Zbigniew Brzezinski born March 28, 1928, Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish-American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. Known for his hawkish foreign policy at a time when the Democratic Party was increasingly dovish, he is a foreign policy "realist" and considered by some^[who?] to be the Democrats' response to Republican Henry Kissinger.^[1]

Major foreign policy events during his term of office included the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China (and the severing of ties with the Republic of China), the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), the brokering of the Camp David Accords, the transition of Iran from an important US client state to an anti-Western Islamic Republic, encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe and emphasizing certain human rights in order to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union,^[2] the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan^[3] to fight against the Soviet-allied Afghan government to increase the probability of Soviet invasion and later entanglement in a Vietnam-style war,^[4] and later to counter the Soviet invasion, and the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties relinquishing overt US control of the Panama Canal after 1999.

He is currently professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of various boards and councils. - From wikipedia.

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." - Bezezinski.


Berzezinski in Afghanistan:

Brzezinski, known for his hardline policies on the Soviet Union, initiated in 1979 a campaign supporting mujaheddin in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which were run by Pakistani security services with financial support from the CIA and Britain's MI6. This policy had the explicit aim of promoting radical Islamist and anti-Communist forces to overthrow the secular communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan government in Afghanistan, which had been destabilized by coup attempts against Hafizullah Amin, the power struggle within the Soviet-supported Parcham faction of the PDPA and a subsequent Soviet military intervention.

Berzezinski with Osama Bin Laden, allegedly.



On November 17th, 2008, Zbignew Brzezinski, a New World Order architect and a founder of the Rockefeller-controlled Trilateral Commission, addressed Chatham House, (the British counterpart of the American Council on Foreign Relations) and said: "I once put it rather pungently, and I was flattered that the British Foreign Secretary repeated this, as follows: ... namely, in early times, it was easier to to control a million people, literally it was easier to control a million people than physically to kill a million people. Today, it is infinitely easier to to kill a million people than to control a million people. It is easier to kill than to control...."- Analysis by G. Edward Griffin, 2009 August 29

Brzezinkski and Obama:

Zbig said in endorsing Obama: “What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and peoples.” Obama’s alleged global approach and trans-ethnic, trans-racial allure are right out of Zbig’s university textbook, or rather Second Chance, which will be the manual for the Obama campaign and presidency.

Obama is literally a second chance for Brzezinski: having destroyed the Soviet Union and shattered the Warsaw Pact, he now wants to dismember the Russian Federation itself and put the finishing touches on Afghanistan as an impregnable US military base against China, Russia . . . the list is endless. Perhaps Zbig is dreaming of restoring Greater Poland circa 1600 -- from the Black Sea to the Baltic, all controlled by petty szlachta aristocrats like . . . the Brzezinskis?

The Economist blog put it best: “A new brain for Barack Obama! It’s 78 years old [Ed. note: it’s 80 years old] and it still works perfectly. It belongs to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the peppery ex-national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.”

The messianic idealism of the Obama campaign has not been seen since the days of another Brzezinski creation -- Jimmy Carter, who made him national security adviser with disastrous results. Brzezinski’s anti-Russian obsession back in 1976 prompted him to foment the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which he touted as the greatest single bulwark against Soviet communism. Webster G. Tarpley argues that Brzezinski was even a prime behind-the-scenes mover in the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and installing Ayatollah Khomeini in power in Tehran. Brzezinski cared less about the Middle East and its oil than he did about the need for a centre from which Islamic fundamentalism of the most retrograde type could penetrate the soft southern underbelly of the USSR. For Brzezinski, the space between the southern frontier of the Soviet and the Indian Ocean littoral became an “arc of crisis,” and we have his handiwork to thank for the horrors taking place there to this day.

The 1980 Carter Doctrine -- that the US was determined to dominate the Persian Gulf -- is at the root of the first Gulf War, of the present Iraq war, and of the possible war on Iran. Brzezinski’s grandiose schemes of world transformation caused a renewal of the Cold War and gave birth to Al-Qaeda, and without Soviet restraint the results could easily have been far more tragic than they turned out to be. By 1980, disillusionment with Carter led to the nightmare of the Reagan regime. But this was of little concern to Brzezinski -- a mere blip on his radar screen.

- From: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3536.shtml

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V-bxx7OyZ0

- Analysis by Webster Tarpley.

The Road to 9/11

Diagram of 9/11 - Note that there are up 9 buildings dedicated to world trade functioning. Both trade towers were destroyed alongside world trade tower 7 (a much smaller building), which happened after the collapse of 1 and 2. Although world trade tower 7 'collapsed', and has been documented through official video and testimony, it did not feature in the official 9/11 commission.

Professor Peter Dale Scott.

http://www.peterdalescott.net/

Peter Dale Scott (born 11 January 1929^[1]) is a Canadian poet and a former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The son of noted Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he is known for his anti-war stance and his criticism of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Vietnam War. He spent four years (1957-1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994.

The Road to 9/11



Amazon excerpt: This is an ambitious, meticulous examination of how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or total cover-ups of past domestic criminal acts, including, perhaps, the catastrophe of 9/11. Peter Dale Scott, whose previous books have investigated CIA involvement in southeast Asia, the drug wars, and the Kennedy assassination, here probes how the policies of presidents since Nixon have augmented the tangled bases for the 2001 terrorist attack. Scott shows how America's expansion into the world since World War II has led to momentous secret decision making at high levels. He demonstrates how these decisions by small cliques are responsive to the agendas of private wealth at the expense of the public, of the democratic state, and of civil society. He shows how, in implementing these agendas, U.S. intelligence agencies have become involved with terrorist groups they once backed and helped create, including al Qaeda.

Britian's Brainwashing during WW2.

The wholesome fictional face of MI6.

The BBC reports that:

Brainwashing techniques were used by some British interrogators during World War II, according to evidence unearthed by the BBC.

Their methods included the use of drugs, hypnosis and sensory deprivation to extract confessions from suspected spies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk/8361655.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8361655.stm

The historical precedent for using these techniques is clear, but are they continuing today, why would these methods suddenly stop? Would it be niave to assume our military and secret service, do not partake in these kind of metholodies?

From: 'A clockwork orange' - Alex being 'reconditioned'.

UK Officer abuses Iraqi Prisoners: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8362200.stm

It's hard to find empirical facts when secrecy and covert operations are involved.

'The abscene of evidence is not evidence of abscene.'

MK ULTRA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

Project MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects.^[1][2][3] The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. From WIKIPEDIA.

Again, this is the historical precedent for such activities, and can we assume that this sort of activity has simply ENDED! It would be naive to assume so. Clearly more work needs to be done to investigate these issues. At the moment all I can do is link to relevant websites and provide a very minimal critical eye, at this point.

Clearly, like it or not, there was a need for such activities and investigations, but it begs the question - where would our governments draw the line, and just how much evil is hidden behind the banner of allegedly 'free and democratic' countries. Quite simply, free and democratic, is the advertising campaign of our government, but it is not the reality. When we consider covert and secret operations, our secret service agencies can be as horrific as any despot.

NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio.

Read the book by following this pdf link:
http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119640.pdf

Daneile Ganser:

Swiss Historian and Peace Researcher History Departement, Basel University

Research Interests:

• International History from 1945 to today
• Secret Warfare and Geostrategy
• Intelligence Services and Special Forces
• Peak Oil and Resource Wars
• Globalization and Human Rights

http://danieleganser.ch/Home.html?lang=en

From the Back Cover

The CIA and the British secret service MI6, in collaboration with the military alliance NATO and European military secret services set up a network of clandestine anticommunist armies in Western Europe after World War II. The secret soldiers were trained on remote islands in the Mediterranean and in unorthodox warfare centers in England and in the United States by the Green Berets and SAS Special Forces. The network was armed with explosives, machine guns and high-tech communication equipment hidden in underground bunkers and secret arms caches in forests and mountain meadows. In some countries the secret army linked up with right-wing terrorist who in a secret war engaged in political manipulation, harrassement of left wing parties, massacres, coup 'états and torture. Codenamed "Gladio" ('the sword'), the Italian secret army was exposed in 1990 by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to the Italian Senate, whereupon the press spoke of "The best kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II" (Observer, 18. November 1990) and observed that "The story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller." (The Times, November 19, 1990). Ever since, so-called 'stay-behind' armies of NATO have also been discovered in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Greece and Turkey. They were internationally coordinated by the Pentagon and NATO and had their last known meeting in the NATO-linked Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in October 1990.

Operation Gladio emblem.
(Serving Liberty in Silence)

Operation Gladio (1946-1990) - Operation Gladio was the name of a series of hundreds of bombings carried out by Western Intelligence Agencies; such as the CIA and MI6. NATO was itself involved in the bombings carried out in Western Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. These attacks were then blamed on the Communists and the radical left.

Targets of Operation Gladio included trains, subways, and schools. Also targeted were areas in which large masses of the public could be found, and this included schools and school buses filled with children. It is always important for the false-flaggers to target children, as the deaths of innocent children, and photos of dead children, bring about the highest level of outrage from the public. Pictures and videotape of dead children sees the public demanding a solution to a problem that was manufactured to begin with.

Mussolini: MI5 Agent during WW1.

Mussolin: MI5's man in Italy, during WW1, before his rise to power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/13/benito-mussolini-recruited-mi5-italy

Guardian article reveals that Mussolini was an agent of MI5 during WW1. History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

MI5 Emblem: Pyramid of power.

MI5 certianly gave him a taste of a politic he would later become invovled in. I'm curious to know how the relationship ended, did they simply cut all ties, did they have any contact with him before or during his Fascist regime in Italy?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8306475.stm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/15/2714586.htm

MI5 and MI6, as well as, the CIA, have a long and dark history of supporting figures that are politically dangerous, often people we would view as enemies of democracy. They are often supported, funded, trained, by Secret Service intelligence agencies, for their own political geo-strategies. The basic premise being that it is beneficial to support dictators and terrorists if it is in the interests of British and American power agenda.

http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/4905-defending-democracy-with-dictators-and-dosh.html

Saddam Hussien, Osama Bin Laden, Pinochet, The Shah, to name only a few...:O