Critic Cal

Quite what the professional (ahem) activities of Karren Brady  had to do with the anticipated proceedings of an away match in the West country remain a mystery to me even now. Nonetheless, defamatory speculations on this particular theme, resounding to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, comprised the central substance of the prologue to Swindon vs. Leyton Orient , which I attended, in great earnest, earlier this month. Once the action centre stage kicked off, the accompaniment subsided into the popular and versatile refrain most famously exampled by the 1998 classic Vindaloo : "Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urgh, Ori-urgh, Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urgh, Ori-urgh, Ori-urrrgh". I must confess I'm not entirely certain of the spelling. There followed a relatively uneventful twenty minutes or so, but for some mildly rankled recitative between a polite young lady spectator who wished to be seated, and a row of youths in front of her who preferred...

There's this great bit in Brave New World where Helmholtz inadvertently re-invents the lost art of poetry. In a lecture 'On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement', he introduces a technical example of his own: 'Pure madness, of course; but I couldn't resist it.' He laughed. 'I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,' he added more gravely, 'I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!' He laughed again. 'What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I'm a marked man.' 'But what were your rhymes?' Bernard asked. 'They were about being alone.' Bernard's eyebrows went up. ( Aldous Huxley , Brave New World , 1931) Being alone -- or feeling any type of mental or emotional 'excess' -- is some achievement in Huxley's imagined world of r...

America. The near future. Society has run to seed. Promiscuity, prostitution and sexual degeneracy are rife. Abortion, contraception, nuclear radiation, toxic waste and STDs are taking a worrying toll on birth rates. Women are objectified, degraded by pornography, at risk of sexual violence. This unwholesome nation is in desperate need of the reinstatement of some good old-fashioned Biblical values. And so (according to Margaret Atwood 's awfully superb work of dystopian speculative fiction ' The Handmaid's Tale ') a subtle coup is staged. An apparent terrorist attack destroys the President and most of Congress, and throws the country into a state of emergency. The Constitution is suspended. The "Sons of Jacob" movement sets to work "restoring order". Non-white people are shipped to "appropriate" homelands. Women are returned to their "rightful" stations, as baby-makers and domestics. It becomes illegal to employ them, and at a...