Blast No. 1. June 20th, 1914.
Once this consciousness towards the new possibilities of expression in present life has come, however, it will be more the legitimate property of Englishmen than of any other people in Europe.
Beginning of World War No. 1. July 28th, 1914.
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Bless All Ports
Brussels is clamping down on 82 free ports or free zones after identifying that their special tariff and duty status has aided the financing of terrorism, money laundering and organised crime.
(Daniel Boffey, Guardian EU News, Mon 10 February 2020)
This week, alliances of port owners, businesses and local authorities […] submit their bids to establish free ports, competing to set up zones exempt from normal tax and regulation. […] Support is found predominantly among those who voted – and campaigned – to leave the EU; backers call it a Brexit dividend enabled by the final deal. […]
These ports are expected to bid:
Thames
Felixstowe-Harwich
Liverpool
Bristol
(Gwyn Topham, Guardian UK News, Thursday 4 February 2021)
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CURSE
THE BRITANNIC ESTHETE
BLAST all products of phlegmatic cold
Life of LOOKER-ON.
CURSE
SNOBBERY
(disease of femininity):
The young lady opposite
Has such beautiful hands
That I sit enchanted
While she combs her hair in décolleté.
I have no shame whatever
In watching the performance,
The bareness of her delicate
Hands and fingers does not
In the least embarrass me,
BUT God forbid that I should gain further acquaintance,
For her laughter frightens even the street hawker
And the alley cat dies of a migraine.
(Ezra Pound)
‘It is the creative force of hands which talks to our feelings, for it is in the hands that mind and soul of the dancer are revealed in total purity.’ ‘The Art of Dance and the Play of Hands’, Die schöne Frau (The Beautiful Woman), March 1928.
In 1930, Wyndham Lewis married Gladys Anne Hoskins (1900–79), affectionately known as ‘Froanna’. […] In the 1930s Lewis kept Froanna in the background, and many of his friends were simply unaware of her existence. It seems that Lewis was extraordinarily jealous and protective of his wife, owing to her youth and beauty (she was eighteen years his junior).
(Blurb next to Lewis’ painting of Hoskins, entitled ‘The Artist’s Wife’ (1937), National Portrait Gallery)
‘A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There's no room for her if she's not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter.’ (Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs 1 No. 4, 1976)
