HARBINGER

And this is the  " Downside " to the proceedings of #WakeyLit19 aka the putative,  ersatz   Wakefield Literature Festival 2019 conceived, planned ,organised and curated by Destiny Poets  ( www.destinypoets.co.uk ). Even more than a decade ago ,when I visited schools on a fairly regular basis to do my poetry masterclass workshops, a common complaint from the teaching staff was that "creativity" was getting squeezed out of the curriculum and that pupils weren't simply getting opportunities such as my rather modest poetry workshop sessions to explore and enjoy culture. June / July with the school year drawing down to a close and all the exams out of the way ,was always the optimum point in the calendar to approach schools with the lure of poetry workshops. I had some reasonably confident expectations that some local inner city schools would jump at the chance of, (a) free poetry workshops and (b) the chance to showcase their star pupils and their school as part ...

The explicit stated aim of  # WakeyLit19  is to put locally based authors and poets at the centre of the litfest. And that the primary aim and purpose of a lit. fest bearing the name of the city,is to firstly promote wider public awareness of locally based authors and poets. Unless someone,somewhere knows any different,clearly Wakefield -its elected representatives and relevant Council departments and officials ought to adopt a positive,pro-active stra tegy of an on-going,enhanced promotion of local authors and poets across its libraries ,schools and the city’s leading cultural venues. This is the third of four blog posts on the topic of Wakefield LitFest. This one is  “The Upside” ,yet to come ,”The Downside”, be warned names shall be named.There will be payback.  The putative Wakefield Literature Festival aka Wakefield LitFest 2019 rebranded as #WakeyLit19 held its media launch on September 2nd. at Destiny Christian Church, with guest of honour, the Mayor ...

It’s Monday 16th. September 2019 and #WakeyLit19 the  ersatz   litfest is getting underway. No funding, no charges ,no fees ,no tickets ,next to no admin. A radical, quasi-improvised grassroots alternative to absolutely no litfest whatsoever following the demise back in 2017 of what was the  ” official ” Wakefield Literature festival. The Merrie City’s version of the some 400 off – the  -shelf lookalike characterless litfest templates where only the geographically specific prefix is all that’s locally authentic and distinctive about them. Being the UK’s 11th.largest city by population – @330k.- counts for diddly squat in Wakefield’s  case when it comes to the pecking order of venues queueing up to get their snouts in the trough of Publicly funded Arts Council monies. That said, for every £8 per head of Arts Council funding that Greater London alone gets ; the entire rest of the UK gets £1 per head!! Still, what can the city expect when you’ve had n...

Just for the record. There are around 400 so-called “Lit.Fests” staged annually throughout the UK. 400.That’s one per day and some to spare. Apart from a very few well known internationally ranked events such as those staged at Cheltenham and Cardiff and Ilkley, most of the rest vary in popularity and standing. Most of the 400 follow a general template that basically is off- the -shelf and with only the prefix of the geographic location to distinguish and differentiate one litfest from any other litfest. Their programme of events, the Arts Council funding,the roster of invited named performers et al are pretty much bog standard. Locally based authors and poets as a rule get the crumbs left over once the named names -the culturally elite privileged performers -have pocketed the bulk of the arts council funding which the Anonymous litfest had applied for. And so once the central funding gets cut, once the metropolitan cultural elitist establishment cronies fail to schmooze...

October 31st. had better eventuate. We had better Leave the EU on that date. Just when you thought the interminably egregious, otiose cant and vacuous moralistic slogans of the EU funded seditionist Remain aka Peoples Vote campaign couldn’t delve any further into uncharted depths of paranoid delusion… Corporate MSM and other platforms announce that, ” A judge sitting in Scotland’s highest civil court has rejected an interim interdict (injunction) to prevent to the suspension of parliament. Lord Doherty said he believed the full hearing set down for next Friday should be moved forward to Tuesday or Wednesday.” The judicial foray in Edinburgh is contemporaneous with virtually similar legalistic manoeuvres in London and Belfast. Parliament is being prorogued.Only this time, for the first time since Oliver Cromwell ,significant and influential sections of our metropolitan domiciled liberal europhile elite are keen to bring the uneducated masses into the polemical fray by dispensin...

Brexit having sucked virtually all the political debating oxygen out of the UK polity these last few years, has as I’ve posted before, curbed my penchant and enthusiasm for blogging from a previous average of 8 or 9 blog posts per month down to a bare average of 5 such posts per month. And even that has me rummaging around , often in previous years for the really substantive posts on Brexit. Even the predominant themes and issues currently holding sway in the West has been reduced to some kind of near-paranoia concerning The Peoples’ Republic of China and its economic prowess. The imbroglio in Syria gets little coverage across the corporate MSM in comparison to what it once did 4 or 5 years ago.Mainly because the Syrian government forces with Russian and Iranian assistance have in large part prevailed.The US and its deluded EUNATO satrapies have neither the will,appetite or logistics any more to seriously alter the ,now seemingly ineluctable outcome.Only quasi-bankrupt Turkey un...

If muskets and halberds were to hand,then all sides in the Brexit debate would by now have resorted to using them. The current version of Leave / Remain -whatever happens next ,has the UK bidding the 27 adieu on October 31st. And,of course the interminable exchange of invective and partisan ideological opinion,half-truth  and intemperate persiflage continues unabated; only the hashtags have changed and continue to do so over time. #Yellowhammer refers to the cache of civil service documents exploring  possible scenarios of economic difficulties the UK might encounter following our actual departure from the EU,were it to go ahead,on October 31. #RecallParliament is the cri de coeur of disparate forces under the Remain banner who are convinced that Prime Minister Johnson will in effect force the UK into what they feel is a wholly precipitous departure from the EU on October 31 via potential machinations involving what might be considered violations of acceptable parliam...