Millions follow the frenzy of 20-20 cricket, but tomorrow’s Test match at Lord’s is a celebration of the game’s subtle pleasures
Mike Marqusee
The Guardian, 16 May
The coming weeks will see the two contrasting faces of global cricket on show. While the Indian Premier League’s sixth season reaches its frenzied climax, over here England meet New Zealand for an abbreviated but intriguing two-Test series starting on Thursday. Both are recognisably forms of the same game, but as cultural, social and aesthetic phenomena they are worlds apart.
A brightly-coloured, fast-paced and unashamedly commercial spectacle, IPL is a 20-overs-a-side competition played by nine privately-owned franchises, each based in a major Indian metropolis and staffed by a mix of local talent and international stars. TV viewers will have noted the cheerleaders (a North American import) but the major innovation is the corporate ownership, common in other sports but until IPL unknown in cricket. read more…
Seventy years ago, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was crushed. In London, Szmul Zygielbojm took his own life in protest. He was a Polish Jew, a socialist and the representative of the Bund (the Jewish workers’ party) in the Polish government in exile.
He left behind a letter in which he explained his action:
“The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out. read more…
Spanish translation of Red Pepper column ’1200 BC: The world’s first industrial action … rescuing the past for the future’ (see below)
Translated for Rebelión by Christine Lewis Carrol
La ciudad de Luxor, en el sur de Egipto, fue noticia en Gran Bretaña a finales de febrero con ocasión de la muerte de 19 turistas en un accidente de aerostato. Aquella tragedia sintetizará los infortunios de la industria turística egipcia, en otro momento fuente principal de empleo y entrada de divisas y ahora en estado de languidez ante la falta de turistas extranjeros ahuyentados por un temor -erróneo y exagerado- a la inestabilidad y la violencia. read more…
Five decades ago, in the pages of The Cricketer, John Arlott dubbed Beyond a Boundary “in the intellectual sense… quite the ‘biggest’ book about cricket” ever written. That judgement stands, but it’s almost a disservice to a book that is, among so many other things, hugely entertaining.
CLR James’ Beyond a Boundary remains uncategorisable, a one-off blend of memoir, social history, philosophy, politics and cricket reportage, an intellectual adventure that takes the reader from the Trinidad of James’ youth, through industrial Lancashire, Victorian England, ancient Greece, making a stopover in a cricketless USA before a grand coming home to a Caribbean on the brink of independence. It’s a bravura performance by a multi-dimensional man, whose distinctive voice knits together the disparate elements. James’ prose feels alive, partly because it’s animated by a sense of purpose. Beyond a Boundary was the fulfilment of a lifetime mission, personal and political. He wanted to do justice to the game that had meant so much to him and to the people who played and watched it. read more…
The Guardian
6 April 2013
Receiving a cancer diagnosis, and with it, at times, a harsh prognosis, is inevitably a strange and disorientating experience. It poses awkward challenges for everyone concerned – doctors, patients, loved ones. There is in the end no one “right” way to breach news of this kind, which in any case takes time to sink in. And just as there’s no proper way to tell someone that their time on this earth is being cut short, so there’s no proper way to respond to this information. When you’re addressing realities of this scope, and of this intimacy, you need some kind of higher poetry, and since that’s not possible for most of us, we stumble along with the formulas to hand. read more…
Contending for the living
Red Pepper, April-May 2013
The city of Luxor in southern Egypt made the headlines in Britain at the end of February, when 19 tourists were killed in a hot air balloon accident. That tragedy will compound the woes of Egypt’s tourist industry, once a major source of employment and foreign currency, now languishing as foreign visitors are driven away by (misconceived and exaggerated) fears of instability and violence.
Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes, the principal capital of the Egyptian New Kingdom (1550-1050 BC), is studded with colossal carved temples and richly decorated tombs. But the most revealing and moving of its many ruins may be the least spectacular. Known as Deir el Medinah, these are the low-lying remains of the workers’ village, home to the artisans who built the tombs and temples. read more…
Street Music brings together more than 60 poems, written between 2009-2012, with a prose introduction by the author. The poems, including the long sequence, “Multiple Myeloma, a suite”, weave together personal and political themes, home thoughts and thoughts from abroad. Available from any good bookshop or online. Details: Street Music: Poems by Mike Marqusee. ISBN 10: 0957208804 / 0-9572088-0-4, Clissold Books.
You can order a copy from Blackwells here.
Comment on Street Music:
“Mike Marqusee’s Street Music is a kind of manifesto for the London streets, a noisy republic where the sun ‘sprawls in the street like a lazy cat’ and ‘Lorca’s moon’ floats over Hackney ‘full-faced, round-eyed and speaking Spanish.’ read more…
The Hindu
6 April, 2013
Like travellers since Alexander, we started at the pyramids. After a spell in Cairo’s medieval quarter, followed by a visit to the New Kingdom tombs and temples in Luxor, we ended in Tahrir Square, where we joined thousands in a demonstration against President Morsi and his government. read more…
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, February-March 2013
When CLR James’ Beyond A Boundary was first published fifty years ago, the sociology of sport and the politics of popular culture had no place in the academy or on the left. The book had to create its own subject, define a new field of intervention. James aimed to establish cricket as worthy of serious study and to expose the failure to study it as an unacceptable omission. As he says at the start of the book, he could no longer credit an account of Victorian society that found no room for WG Grace. Like that other seminal work of 1963, EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, James’ book aimed to rescue the culture created by the lower orders “from the condescension of posterity.” read more…
“Dare to fail, dare to win”
Spanish translation (for Rebelion) of Red Pepper column on “Success, failure…”
En la lucha por el cambio social, el éxito y el fracaso son a veces difíciles de determinar. Sólo si aceptamos que podemos fracasar asumiremos los riesgos que podrían conducir a un mundo mejor. Traducido para Rebelión por Christine Lewis Carroll. read more…
The recent conflict within the Socialist Workers Party over allegations of serious personal misconduct by a leading member has brought back sharply my own rupture with the (then) SWP leadership, ten years ago, and how this was handled by the party (of which I’ve never been a member).
To explain. read more…
Audio recording of Mike Marqusee reading poems from Street Music at Housmans Bookshop, 12 December 2012. With questions and comments on topics poetical and political. read more…
The Guardian, 11 December
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics confirm that more people are recovering from, or living longer with, cancer. Welcoming the news, Mike Hobday of Macmillan Cancer Support observed that for many patients, “cancer is now a long-term condition rather than an acute disease”. And there’s the rub. Surviving, it turns out, is a complicated, demanding business, posing fundamental questions for the individuals concerned and for society as a whole. read more…
CONTENDING FOR THE LIVING
Red Pepper, December-January 2012-2013
As we approach the tenth anniversary of the global anti-war protest of February 15th, 2003, people are bound to ask what it actually achieved. Certainly it failed to stop the war, a failure for which Iraqis paid and are paying an exorbitant price. So was it a waste of time, an exercise in futility? There are answers to these questions, but to be persuasive they cannot be glib. read more…
Spanish translation (from Rebelion) of Mike Marqusee’s Red Pepper article, “1792: This what revolution looks like” (below):
La segunda revolucion
El año 1792 fue testigo de cómo las demandas de democracia social e igualdad crearon un impulso revolucionario que se sintió mucho más allá de Francia …
Level Playing Field, The Hindu, 17 November
I woke early on Wednesday morning to check the results. First, I was relieved. Romney had failed, and more importantly the bigots and obscurantists who backed him had failed. Then I watched Obama’s victory speech, and what I felt was something other than relief.
The speech was dubbed “magnificent” on the Guardian’s front page by Jonathan Freedland, who hailed it, as did others, as a return to the bold, inspirational style of 2008 and a harbinger of a more ambitious second term.
I understand why people in the US clutch at straws, but I wonder how many times Freedland and other liberal commentators will clutch at this particular straw before they realise that it is in fact only a straw?
What struck me about Obama’s “soaring rhetoric” was just how rhetorical it was, and especially how heavily it leaned on the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. read more…
‘Street Music: Poems’ with Mike Marqusee
Wednesday 12th December, 7pm
Entry £3, redeemable against purchase
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road, King’s Cross,
London, N1 9DX
tel: 020 7837 4473
shop@housmans.com
www.housmans.com
read more…
Contending for the living
Red Pepper, October-November 2012
In France, 1792 was the year of “the second revolution.” On 10 August, the King was overthrown, bringing to an end three years of uneasy “constitutional monarchy”. For months the Legislative Assembly had been locked in conflict with Louis XVI, while at the same time fighting a war against invading Austrians and Prussians. The Parisian masses resolved that conflict by direct action, invading the Tuileries palace and arresting the King. In response, the Assembly called a general election – the first ever election in Europe conducted under universal adult male suffrage. Eighty years would pass before the exercise was repeated. read more…
[This is a companion piece to my upcoming column in Red Pepper, which chronicles the hopes and frustrations of the revolutionary year of 1792.]
In the voluminous writings he composed during his eleven years imprisonment under the fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci repeatedly cites the aphorism, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (which he ascribed to the novelist Romain Rolland). In one of his letters, he expanded the idea: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned … I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” In the context of Gramsci’s life and work, the phrase had a particular resonance. read more…
For a long time I was perplexed by the phenomenon of “survivor’s guilt”. While I recognised it as a reality, a terrible affliction, and I could see its logic, to me that logic seemed perverse and alien. I couldn’t get inside it.
Now five years after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma (cancer of the bone marrow), I find myself, against the odds, enjoying a period of remission. And with it a more intimate understanding of “survivor’s guilt”, at least as it applies to cancer survivors. read more…
