Does this constitute a breach of freedom of expression?

Having had to issue a formal complaint against several members of staff at the University of Ulster for bullying and harassment I had accusations of bullying leveled against me for highlight the clear inefficiencies and inadequacies in the delivery of a final year module on my blog.

I have been instructed by the University that if I do not remove the comments then I will be suspended.

Does this constitute a breach of freedom of expression? I think so!

Check out my blog:
http://jay-bsccomputerscience.blogspot.com/

Minority Taste

okay that's impossible to read, so here is what is says, c/o Ruskin:

"The opinion of a majority is right only when it is more probable with each individual that he should be right than that he should be wrong, as in the case of a jury. Where is is more probable, with respect to each individual, that he should be wrong than right, the opinion of the minority it the true one. Thus it is in art"

we are presupposing a little hierarchy of taste, hmm?

in which case, it is time to invoke Fake Karl, and also for a little joke:

Q: Why did the formerly rich bourgeois person cross the road?

A: Because TIME magazine did an article on it, and the New Yorker also did an article on it, and their neighbors were doing it, so they wanted to see what it was all about and they heard it'd won an Oscar too...and one of those Nobel prizes, whatever they are. It seemed pretty reputable and they have a greatest hits album coming out.

Rainbow Hair, Winged Shoes

My flatmate brought home this new issue of Flare, and then I realized it is ALMOST JUNE.

That is all.

Harold Bloom, to the rescue!

"Modern poetry, in English, is the invention of Blake and of Wordsworth, and I do not know of a long poem written in English since which is either as legitimately difficult or as rewardingly profound as Jerusalem or The Prelude. Nor can I find a modern lyric, however happily ignorant its writer, which develops beyond or surmounts it debt to Wordsworth's great trinity of Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence and the Imitations of Immortality ode. The dreadful paradox of Wordsworth's greatness is that his uncanny originality, still the most astonishing break with tradition in the language, has been so influential that we have lost sight  of its audacity and arbitrariness" (7).


From Harold Bloom's The Internalization of Quest-Romance.

Another Love, Indeed.

Meet my new frienemy, Thomas Love Peacock. First of all, can we pause and appreciate the amazingness of his name. Oh to be a Love Peacock. He looks a bit too boyish in this portrait for the name, don't you agree? Accordingly, the boy moved to London when he was 16, has no formal education after the age of 13, and writes things like this (! see below !) about my BFF, Wordsworth.

Let's review: the Lake Poets (mostly Wordsworth) are ignorant of every "high" form of knowledge (like history, society, and human nature) because they prefer to write about nature.*

But what happened, according to Mr. Love Peacock (yes! that name!), was that instead of truly writing nature, the Lake Poets actually obscured it with their "mysticisms and chimaeras." They made nature UNNATURAL.

Wordsworth in particular is guilty of importing ghosts and spectres of other writers into what are ostensibly realistic poems. Love Peacock describes these spectres as "phantastical parturition[s]." Ghost Babies. In other words, he accuses Wordsworth of letting his imagination run away with him... And in the terrible poetry of the Lake-Poets-generation (gen LP), this is only natural! (Like the process of parturition, in fact). For, "we know...there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Niads in the Regent's-canal. But barbaric manners and SUPERNATURAL interventions are ESSENTIAL TO POETRY" (The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 334 ..emphasis mine, right). He goes on to say "while the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is WALLOWING IN THE RUBBISH OF DEPARTED IGNORANCE AND RAKING UP THE ASHES OF DEAD SAVAGES TO FIND GEWGAWS AND RATTLES FOR THE GROWN BABIES OF THE AGE" (334).

Well, Mr. Love Peacock, we are fighting.

*pause to enjoy "Rhymesters." Probably the best insult ever leveled at anyone, ever.

Feeling Summer

The Sartorialist often puts up vintage photos, intended as inspiration for fashion of the present moment. This bikini, for example. Amazing.

More than simple fashion shots, these photos are so poignant and arresting, however, because they depict youth and beauty that is necessarily past.

In Defense of Poetry, P.B. Shelley writes

"The social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its

elements, society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human

beings coexist; the future is contained within the present, as the plant within the seed".

I know, right.

I Wish Byron Were Around: to appreciate these STATEments

Romantic aesthetic? This editorial (Lydia Hearst by Elias Wessel for Vixen Magazine 2010) is neither picturesque nor sublime, but it strikes me that Bryon would have loved it. Maybe it's the rainbow hair. Reminds me of the extreme luxuriousness of Byron's Sardanapalus; so much writhing in so many sparkles. If everyone was wearing a turban, all the better.

I love this painting, La Mort de Sardanapale, by Delacroix (1827).