‘How Beverley Turner Found a Home on Right-Wing TV’ by Ryan Soames—guest blogger

For the majority of her media career, Beverley Turner was remarkably uncontroversial. Her politics, insofar as they were visible at all, were mainstream and largely unremarkable. What changed was not a sudden, internal ideological "awakening" but the pushback she encountered from specific corners of the UK media and public when she began criticising COVID-19 lockdown measures, and the choices she made in response.

Turner first drew significant backlash in 2021, when she appeared as a guest on ITV’s This Morning. She clashed with presenter Dermot O’Leary after claiming that COVID-19 vaccines were not fully effective and suggesting that younger people might consider refusing them. Following the segment, she was reportedly banned from returning to the programme. A subsequent appearance on the Jeremy Vine Show sparked hundreds of Ofcom complaints. Turner later shared a video of herself crying, describing the experience as being “ambushed”.

These episodes highlight the reputational risks of dissent in mainstream media. Yet Turner’s response was not merely defensive: she eventually moved to platforms like GB News, which amplified opposition to COVID-19 measures and rewarded a more confrontational, oppositional style.

Media ecosystems are not neutral; they shape incentives, tone and identity. Once embedded within a partisan environment, a broadcaster is rewarded for alignment rather than nuance. Over time, heterodox positions can solidify into coherent ideological identities. Turner’s trajectory illustrates how structural incentives and personal choices intersect: while she faced pushback, she also embraced and cultivated the reactionary, grievance-driven style rewarded by sympathetic platforms.

Her early opposition to lockdowns evolved into a broader posture of institutional hostility, and in recent months, she has publicly expressed views that align with far-right talking points, such as supporting Donald Trump uncritically, and supporting his controversial use of ICE agents in Minneapolis. These choices show that she is no longer a marginal figure caught in a media vise; she is an active participant in a polarised, ideologically extreme discourse.

This process reflects a recognisable sequence:

1. Moral exclusion or public backlash in response to controversial positions.

2. Opportunities in partisan media that reward outrage and reinforce identity.

3. Adoption of broader ideological stances, often amplified by audience and platform incentives.

Turner is less an anomaly than a case study in how personal choices interact with structural pressures. Early ostracism does not excuse or justify her current views, but it helps explain the pathway by which dissenting voices can become entrenched in extreme positions. The lesson is not about her as a victim; it is about how polarised media environments create conditions where extremes thrive, and moderate voices are either pushed aside or radicalised.

Beverley Turner did not begin her career as a far-right figure. She has, however, chosen to embrace that role. The structural pressures of media ecosystems may have shaped the trajectory, but her current ideological stance is the result of conscious alignment, not mere circumstance.

‘From Analyst to Advocate: The Polarising Journey of Matthew Goodwin’ by Robert Miller—guest blogger

Matthew Goodwin, a former academic and political scientist, who held a professorship at Kent University, and is now a presenter on GB News, has had a career that has not been without controversy. 

Critics accuse him of being an advocate for populism's more extreme tendencies, with many questioning the objectivity of his work in that field. They argue that his interpretations of data and trends are often overly simplistic and tailored to fit a particular narrative, lacking the nuance required to fully understand complex political phenomena. These concerns are seen as casting a shadow over his contributions to the field, suggesting that his work might prioritise sensationalism over scholarly rigour.

A contentious aspect of his career is his shifting stance on immigration. In 2013, he argued that Britain had extensively debated immigration and that further stoking of public anger would destabilise the political system. This position was in line with calls for a balanced and measured approach to immigration policy. 

However, a decade later, he reversed his position, advocating for a more aggressive anti-migrant campaign and urging the government to mimic the hardline stance of US Republicans. This volte-face has been criticised as pandering to xenophobic sentiments and abandoning earlier calls for moderation. The shift has been viewed by some as a response to the increasing influence of nationalist and populist movements within British politics, as well as a strategic move to align with the more radical elements of his audience.

In his book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, he argues that the UK’s elite is disconnected from the conservative instincts of the majority and that cultural institutions are dominated by cosmopolitan values that suppress dissent. His framing of these issues often aligns with reactionary identity politics, which critics argue distorts the true nature of Britain’s socio-political landscape. Of this, Oliver Eagleton said in The New Statesman on 25 March 2023:

“When setting out these positions, Goodwin often sounds like a duller Piers Morgan. Yet, unlike Morgan, he tends to obscure his most unpalatable opinions behind a dense thicket of polling data—distancing himself from their pernicious implications by informing us that this is simply what the average Red Wall voter thinks.”

Eagleton notes that while Goodwin acknowledges economic factors in the rise of populism, he primarily frames it as a cultural conflict between traditionalism and progressivism, often subordinating class issues to national identity. By emphasising cultural liberalism as the primary driver of populist sentiments, his analysis is said to overlook material grievances that have equally influenced political outcomes. This approach has sparked debate within the academic community, with some scholars arguing that it oversimplifies the relationship between economic hardship and political radicalisation. His critics argue that this perspective fails to account for the nuanced ways in which economic factors and cultural values intersect, thereby limiting the potential for comprehensive solutions to the challenges posed by populism.

Given these concerns, Goodwin’s influence in the field of political science is not without its challenges. His evolving stance on key issues, such as immigration, and his tendency to emphasise cultural rather than economic factors in his analysis have raised questions about the consistency and objectivity of his work.

His approach, which often aligns with reactionary viewpoints, suggests a potential prioritisation of sensationalism over nuanced understanding. As a result, these factors impact the perceived credibility and scholarly value of his research.

Sleep as a Rehearsal for Death

I’ve been thinking lately about dreamless sleep. Not the dreaming state, but the period where nothing at all is experienced. I think that state has something important to tell us about death.

Most people who don’t believe in an afterlife fear death because they fear “annihilation”: the idea of becoming nothing, of there being nothing after. Yet, when we look at it rationally, that fear relies on a strange assumption: that there will still be someone there to experience the nothingness. In other words, it asks us to imagine ourselves existing in a state where we cannot exist, which is paradoxical.

Dreamless sleep is the closest thing we know to genuine non-experience. When we wake from it, we don’t remember hours of darkness or being in “nothingness”. We are aware only of a discontinuity: one moment we are awake at night, the next we are awake in the morning. The interval itself is not experienced

This shows that non-experience cannot be experienced. The fear of annihilation depends on imagining ourselves enduring nothingness, but dreamless sleep demonstrates that nothingness isn’t an experience at all. So it cannot be feared, it cannot be remembered and it cannot exist as a conscious state. It is a kind of absolute neutrality, beyond the reach of thought or sensation.

Interestingly, we already practice “dying” every night when we sleep. We lie down, let go of control and allow consciousness to dissolve, without fearing annihilation. In sleep, we surrender ourselves to an interval that is unexperienced yet essential to life. It is a small rehearsal for what awaits us at the end of life, a reminder that the cessation of awareness is not inherently terrifying.

This does not, of course, remove all the fears surrounding death. We feel sadness at leaving loved ones behind, regret unfulfilled ambitions, and so on. These fears are understandable because they are located in the living mind; in consciousness that cares and remembers. But it does remove the specific terror of annihilation, the imagined torment of being trapped in nothingness. That fear is, as has been mentioned, only frightening if we assume non-experience could somehow be experienced—which is a logical impossibility.

Viewed this way, then, death is not an experience waiting for us at the end of life. It is the end of experience itself. What troubles us belongs to the living mind, on this side of consciousness. Beyond that, there is nothing: no fear, no awareness, only the absence of both. And perhaps that is not something to fear, but something profoundly simple: a return to the dreamless state of sleeping that we pass through each night.

'The Greenland Deal is No Deal at All' by Alastair Leacock—guest blogger

The recent so-called “Greenland deal” is being framed by MAGA as an example of Donald Trump’s hard-nosed deal-making. In reality, it illustrates the opposite. The United States ends up with exactly what it already had: continued access to military bases and mineral resources. Greenland retains full sovereignty. No new concessions are extracted, no leverage is converted into gains and no strategic breakthrough occurs. By any serious definition of power or negotiation, that is not a win.

Trump’s objective was to access minerals and increase the number of military bases, yet those were already in place before his intervention. The U.S. has long maintained a military presence in Greenland and had cooperation with Denmark and Greenlandic authorities. If the goal was leverage—using pressure or spectacle to extract something new—that effort failed outright. Nothing material changed. Rebranding the outcome afterward as “The Art of the Deal” does not alter the facts on the ground.

Some people have suggested that the arrangement could elevate U.S. bases in Greenland to the status of “sovereign U.S. soil”. Even if that were true (which has not been established) it would still represent little more than a legal technicality. In practice, foreign military bases almost never constitute transferred sovereignty; they remain host-state territory subject to special jurisdictional agreements. Where limited sovereign base areas do exist, as in rare historical cases, they rarely alter real power on the ground, because operational control already existed beforehand. The United States already exercised exclusive military control over its Greenland bases and already projected force from them. Formalising that control in legal language would not create new leverage, new capabilities or new concessions. At most, it would convert an existing reality into a symbolic designation—administrative clarification, not strategic gain.

History judges outcomes, not intentions or rhetoric. The outcome here is straightforward: no transfer of sovereignty, no additional concessions, no expansion of U.S. control and no tangible benefits beyond the status quo. Declaring that such an outcome was inevitable or desirable after the fact does not transform failure into success. Greenland keeps control and the United States gains nothing extra. That is the textbook definition of a failed threat, not strategic wisdom.

The Greenland episode produced no shift in sovereignty and no meaningful renegotiation of terms. It did, however, reinforce a basic lesson: bluster without follow-through does not create power. When threats are issued and nothing changes, the credibility of future threats erodes. That is not a strength—it is a cost.

Power that exists only in rhetoric fades quickly. Power that produces concrete results endures. By that standard, the Greenland episode was not a triumph of deal-making—it was a reminder that noise is not leverage, and threats without results are not strategy.

‘The Psychological Legacy of Fred Trump on His Son’ by Ryan Soames—guest blogger

Fred Trump did not raise Donald Trump in isolation. All of his children were brought up within the same psychological environment: authoritarian, success-obsessed, emotionally withholding and openly contemptuous of weakness. Love was conditional and approval was earned. So Trump was not uniquely targeted. What made him different was how he adapted to this.

The pivotal figure here is Fred Trump Jr., Trump’s older brother. He was temperamentally different: he was reflective, emotionally open and less interested in domination. He wanted a different life.

The response from his father was: belittlement, withdrawal of approval and eventual ostracism. This led Fred Jr. to descend into alcoholism and an early death. Trump witnessed what happened to Fred Jr. and saw that resistance does not lead to freedom; it leads to death. Trump, therefore, did not submit to his father out of fear or passivity but out of calculation.

He recognised what the system rewarded and chose to embody it fully. Toughness, bravado, aggression and winning at all costs. In doing so, he did not merely comply with but over-identified with his father. He became louder, harsher and more extreme than his father.

Psychologically, this is known as “identification with the aggressor”. It is not weakness; it is a survival strategy that offers safety through imitation of power. The child adopts the worldview of the dominant figure completely.

So Trump was not manipulated in the conventional sense. He was not gullible, docile or suggestible. Instead, he was conditionable: quick to detect power dynamics, rewards and threats; and willing to remodel himself to dominate within them.

Fred Trump did not need to control Trump directly for long. Once the rules were internalised, external control became redundant. Approval followed dominance, dominance followed imitation and imitation became identity. The result is a man who appears fiercely independent, yet operates according to an internalised code he has never seriously questioned.

This upbringing produced a lasting psychological contradiction. Trump shows intense resistance to criticism, constraint or authority imposed from outside. Institutions, laws, norms; and even reality itself are treated as negotiable if they threaten his dominance.

At the same time, he remains deeply loyal to the internalised values of his father’s world: hierarchy, zero-sum thinking and contempt for vulnerability. That loyalty is invisible to him because it feels like self-hood rather than inheritance.

Trump was not moulded by manipulation alone, nor was he simply a victim of his upbringing. He was the child who “adapted perfectly” to a brutal value system and was rewarded for doing so.

And once that delivered power, protection and success, it never loosened its grip.

'How Grokipedia’s Information on Trump Favours Trump' by Alastair Leacock—guest blogger

Grokipedia is presented as an impartial AI-powered encyclopaedia, but its entry on Donald Trump shows that is is has programmed editorial biases rather than neutral reasoning.

The Trump entry details purported accomplishments and ongoing initiatives, including executive orders, policy achievements and electoral victories, even projecting into 2025–2026. For instance, it describes Trump’s second presidency with highly specific interventions, such as a proposed $1.5 trillion military budget, nationwide freezes on federal hiring and complex cryptocurrency initiatives, all presented as completed facts. These claims are implausible within a real-world timeline and illustrate Grokipedia’s tendency to inflate successes while attributing ongoing or speculative events as historical.

Also, legal and political controversies are framed in ways that downplay their severity or suggest bias against Trump. For example, indictments and civil judgements are described as “politically motivated” or “biased”, even when accompanied by factual outcomes. For instance, the Mueller investigation and impeachment episodes are recounted with emphasis on Trump’s exoneration or partial vindication, while criticism from opponents is framed as partisan or unverified.

It also frequently cites highly precise statistics on voter demographics, election outcomes and policy impacts that reinforce a positive image. Examples include claims that Trump received 57% of Hispanic voters and 13% of Black voters in 2024, or that certain tariffs and executive orders produced large, specific economic benefits. These figures are implausibly precise and lack verifiable sources, suggesting a mechanism to give credibility to favourable narratives while avoiding facts.

Promotional language is also frequently used, describing Trump as the architect of a “golden age” and the leader who delivered the “first Republican popular vote victory since 2004”. Such framing encourages readers to see him as heroic or exceptional rather than presenting events neutrally.

These patterns suggest that Grokipedia operates less like a neutral AI and more like a curated, ideologically slanted aggregator. It collects and reformulates information from existing sources and adds speculative content as if it were factual. This can mislead by blurring fact, speculation and advocacy, making it unreliable for controversial subjects.

Overall, Grokipedia’s coverage of Donald Trump shows that it is programmed to present information through a partisan lens, particularly for polarising figures, where selective emphasis and speculative projections dominate.

'The New York Post's False Claims About Renee Nicole Good' by Robert Miller—guest blogger

Recent coverage in certain outlets, including a New York Post article, has painted a distorted picture of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis mother tragically killed by a federal ICE agent on 7 January, 2026. A careful review of reporting from multiple reputable sources shows that many claims in that story are unverified or false.

Renee Nicole Good, age 37, was shot during an ICE enforcement operation in south Minneapolis. She was a mother of three and a poet, with no known history of violent activism. Federal authorities assert the shooting was in self-defence, while some local witnesses have questioned the circumstances. The investigation is ongoing.

Debunking the False Claims

1. “Anti-ICE warrior” and “trained to resist federal agents”

The Post described Good as a militant activist trained to confront ICE agents. There is no evidence from credible reporting to support this. Family members and community sources describe her as a compassionate parent, not an organised protester or militant. No public records or independent reporting confirm that she received any formal training to resist law enforcement.

2. Involvement through a charter school pushing activism

The article claimed Good became involved with ICE Watch through her child’s school, which it described as politically radical. Reliable reporting confirms that the Southside Family Charter School emphasises social consciousness, but there is no evidence connecting Good’s school involvement with organised resistance to ICE operations. This appears to be speculative and anecdotal.

3. Organized confrontations and calls to violence

The Post alleged that ICE Watch and aligned groups encouraged barricading streets or ramming ICE vehicles. Independent sources confirm that some community groups monitor ICE activity, but there is no verified evidence that Good participated in violent actions, and claims of systematic coordination are unsubstantiated.

4. Claims of a 3,200% spike in attacks on ICE agents

The article cited a dramatic increase in vehicular attacks against federal agents. No government or reputable independent sources support this specific statistic. It appears to be an exaggerated figure not grounded in verified data. 

While the circumstances of Good’s death are still under investigation, the confirmed facts are: she was killed during an ICE operation, she was a mother of three and accounts of her actions immediately before the shooting are disputed. Assertions about her being a trained activist or participating in violent anti-ICE campaigns are unsupported by evidence.

‘Operation Mincemeat’: A film in Need of Suspense

Operation Mincemeat (2022) tells the true story of the British intelligence plan to deceive Nazi Germany during World War II by planting false documents on a corpse. The historical operation itself is clever and consequential, yet the film fails to maintain the tension that made the earlier film adaptation of the story The Man Who Never Was (1956) superior. This weakness is due to the absence of a suspenseful subplot the 1956 film had.

In The Man Who Never Was, the character Patrick O’Reilly (a German agent sent to London to find out if the British are planning a deception or not) transforms the narrative from a procedural TV-style detective “whodunit” into a tense thriller. The viewer experiences the operation not just as a dry outlining of a strategy but as a dangerous gamble. If O’Reilly discovers the deception, the entire Allied plan could collapse. This subplot gives the story a palpable, almost Hitchcockian suspense, grounding the abstract stakes of espionage in real-time danger. Without it, the tension becomes theoretical rather than real.

The 2022 film, though historically accurate, focuses mainly on the War Cabinet’s planning and the interpersonal relationships between the characters, who are largely uninteresting. Also dialogue-heavy scenes dominate the film, and whilst attempts are made to move the story beyond office walls, the film largely remains a series of meetings, briefings and document exchanges. Any suspense relies entirely on the waiting game: will the Germans believe the ruse? This results in what is essentially a “1970s British television play” with a big budget.

Some have defended this choice by emphasising historical accuracy. No German agent actually came to London to investigate. Yet good storytelling requires more than strict adherence to fact; it also requires tension and conflict. In the 1956 film, artistic license produced a story that was gripping. Operation Mincemeat, however, leaves the viewer watching a clever plan unfold with limited emotional investment.

The result is that viewers wanting the thrill of espionage might find the film monotonous.

Why David Sinclair’s Supplement Stack Keeps Changing

When the antiaging and longevity scientist David Sinclair first published his personal anti-ageing supplement stack, I thought it was unusually credible. He was a Harvard scientist telling us about a regimen that appeared to follow directly from his own scientific research: boosting NAD+, activating sirtuins, engaging AMPK pathways and combining these with lifestyle choices like fasting and exercise. At the time, I thought it was coherent, mechanistic and based on a specific theory of ageing.

Years later, however, my confidence has largely evaporated: not because the individual supplements lack antiaging benefits, but because the stack itself has become unstable.

His supplement regimen has changed repeatedly, often on a yearly basis. Supplements are added, removed, reintroduced and removed again. Each change is presented as refinement, but taken together they raise an uncomfortable question: if the science was really driving these decisions, why is there so little convergence?

Ageing science in humans moves slowly, and evidence accumulates over long timeframes. Annual reversals in personal supplement protocols are, therefore, unlikely to be based on decisive new human data. Instead, they show something else: a continual hypothesis-cycling based on animal studies, in-vitro work and emerging trends in the longevity community. While this kind of evidence is useful for research exploration, it is not strong enough to justify confident, frequently changing supplement prescriptions.

This emphasises an important distinction that often gets forgotten in longevity discussions: mechanistic plausibility is not the same as validated intervention. Many of the supplements Sinclair currently takes (NMN, resveratrol, spermidine, fisetin and berberine) have very plausible anti-ageing mechanisms. Some even have sound and encouraging early data. But plausibility alone does not explain why a protocol should keep mutating if it is truly evidence-led. In longevity supplement science, recommendations gradually narrow as weak candidates are discarded and strong ones remain. What we see here is not narrowing, but frequent rotation.

Also, most anti-ageing interventions act slowly, if they act at all, over years, not weeks or months. By frequently changing his supplement protocol, Sinclair undermines the very possibility of knowing whether any individual intervention is doing anything meaningful.

Another factor is Sinclair’s evolving public role. Early on, he spoke primarily as a scientist. Over time, he has also become a central figure in the longevity influencer community. That brings different incentives: visibility, novelty, relevance and personal branding around “what I take”. In that environment, his frequent supplement updates signal progress and authority, even when the underlying evidence has not meaningfully changed.

None of this means Sinclair is acting in bad faith. It just mean that his supplement stack should be understood for what it is: a personal supplement regime experiment that he is conducting on himself, which is continually revised, and is exploratory rather than definitive. It is not a scientifically validated anti-ageing protocol, and it should not be seen as one.

The irony is that his original stack inspired confidence precisely because it appeared stable and theory-driven. Its constant evolution has had the opposite effect.

Reflections on a Lost Cinema

Before I studied poetry, I spent two years studying film; not at a prestigious film school, but at a small college in Liverpool, called South Mersey College. Those were the best two years of my life.

At the college, we watched classic Hollywood films by directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler, alongside European avant-garde films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. We studied American Direct Cinema through the films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. And also the experimental filmmaking pioneered by Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, as well as the underground cinema of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. After each screening, we analysed the films’ themes, visual style, editing and historical context.

We also studied movements such as German Expressionism, Film Noir, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Soviet Montage, Constructivist cinema, Surrealism, British Social Realism and New Hollywood. Our reading list included Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form and The Film Sense and André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?

I was fascinated by the vibrant use of colour in 1940s and ’50s films. Bright, saturated hues made every frame look like a living painting. Music was equally as important to me, producing maybe eighty percent of a film’s emotional impact. At that time, one of my musical muses was Aaron Copland. I had only recently discovered his works, such as Fanfare for the Common Man and the score he composed for the film The Red Pony. Both pieces were life-affirming, and they became a personal soundtrack to my daydreams of the sorts of films I wanted to make. In my mind, I created film sequences, rising and falling with the flow of the music.

Had I known then how cinema would evolve, I might have been less optimistic. The digital revolution has changed everything. Traditional film stock (16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm) has largely disappeared. Cameras have become lighter, and handheld naturalism dominates the look of films, with available light replacing carefully designed chiaroscuro lighting schemes. And long takes have largely replaced montage. Digital detail is sharper, but it lacks the depth and texture of film. The deliberate use of light, shadow and colour (the visual poetry that once defined films) has given way to bland, uniform imagery. Music, too, has shifted towards ambient textures rather than emotional scores.

Maybe this will change, and film will return as a tactile, expressive medium once digital technology matures. But for now, many contemporary films have no magic. Yet when I hear a Copland score, I can still glimpse the wonder that first drew me to film.

Old 'Carrier of the Seed' ebook review

I Just found this very old review of my 'Carrier of the Seed' ebook. I never knew it existed.

Quote from it:

"Those skeptical about the e-book format would do well to peruse it; it is proof positive that e-books are, in fact, both real and legitimate. This is a single long poem; 63 pages long, and its formal characteristics are unique: it features a single column composed of spare, terse lines, going straight down the page. This gives the poem a sleek, lean look, as is customary with Side. Reading the poem is like riding on a high-velocity train; it doesn't get sluggish, and there are no breaks in the continuity of the sustained, brisk rhythm. There is an obvious connection with some aspects of Language Poetry; the primary difference between, say, Barrett Watten's Progress and Carrier is that Carrier does actually tell a story, albeit elliptically. This is a story of love lost: memory associations, forms of consciousness which accrue to it."

https://adamfieled.blogspot.com/2007/12/jeffrey-side-carrier-of-seed.html

‘Death, Taxes and Poetry, or, Poetry is My Disability’ by Joritz-Nakagawa—guest blogger

Unable to bear it any longer, I start splintering . . .

I write this in big letters, my eyesight is fading . . .

When my father in law died I wrote a poem the second line of which was "No one will notice Milton's light has dimmed" and which ended ". . . and none of this is actually visible from the lighthouse."

This poem was published under the title The Lighthouse, in New American Writing, a print journal I am very fond of, although I read mostly online now, and also appears with no title in my 2013 poetry collection titled FLUX.

Of course I was referring to John Milton's famous sonnet ‘When I Consider How My Light is Spent’ also known as ‘On His Blindness’ and ‘Sonnet XIX,’ a poem I taught several times in an undergrad course in comparative poetry here in Japan.

After that, my mother in law died, my sister in law died (in October 2025), and my husband has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My own parents have died, two siblings died of cancer when they are the age I am now, friends died, friends of friends and relatives of friends died, etc. et al.

I survived advanced cancer but it was a kind of devil's bargain: you can live, or you can choose palliative chemo, but your body and new life will be (almost?) unrecognizable in many important ways. But not in this way: poetry is still my disability.

I have written somewhat extensively about death as well as my multiple chronic illnesses and other disabilities and those of others.

When at one of my lowest points, before my third surgery for cancer, I was so frightened of death and further disability that I read Emily Dickinson's poems aloud to myself every night from my bed. Any poem of hers that mentioned psychic pain would do. And there is a great many of such poems by Dickinson, so there was much to choose from! I didn't even have to repeat myself, as I often do!

I am not saying however that disability is bad or necessarily frightening. I don't think that at all, and I was already disabled anyhow before I got cancer. I just became much more so—more disabled I mean. I was afraid of suffering, which is not the same thing as disability, or death, and the unknown, and perhaps a feeling of my own powerlessness in this situation. Please let's not confuse these!

I was net surfing recently and found somebody much younger than myself referring to a group of young persons who are "dark" (their word, not mine!) and inevitably drawn to Plath! I was very surprised to hear this remark! First, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that young people know who Plath is! Although always interested in Plath due to her thematic range, theatricality, power, mastery of verse and stylistic achievements, I didn't really feel the depth of that kind of darkness that appears in some of her late poems until later in life when due to extensive bereavement I felt I was living in it. Or as a Christian friend said to me recently, maybe this life on earth is hell, and heaven is what we get when we die?

But we (= I) also know, if only from opera, that love makes a heaven out of life if only temporarily; love is fragile and can turn to hate or disinterest or disappointment, etc. with relative ease. Can it bounce back with relative ease?

The happiest elegy (actually a so-called "self-elegy" which is why it is more cheerful!) I know is Christina Rossetti's ‘Remember,’ another poem I have taught to undergrads; the saddest is ‘Ending with a Line From Lear’ by Marvin Bell, which I have not. At times of intense suffering (e.g. physical pain, or, bereavement or depression) I have often repeated to myself his line: "I will never be better again" oftentimes followed by the final line, the repetition of the word "never." I was wrong about that, but it helped me to say it, anyway. There's also song lyrics by the band Everclear which begin "I hate waking up, it means I have to die again tonight…" another set of words I have repeated in my head upon waking up during my worst moments in life. As well as the beginning and ending of William Carlos Williams' poem ‘The Widow's Lament in Springtime;’ interestingly, the lyrics to Everclear's ‘Fire Maple Song’ contains a line similar to one in Williams' poem. These poems and songs soothe me somehow during difficult times, although they do much more than that.

Yet life changes, we change, things change.

But poetry is still my disability.

As a person with fibromyalgia, one of the Plath lines I most identify with, from her incredible poem ‘Tulips’ published when I was two years old, is: "The tulips are too red in the first place they hurt me."

I was raised by Plath. No, I don't mean I was raised on Plath or knew her personally. I mean Plath's generation was my mother's generation and they both raised me, if not revived me. A fiction writer friend who also likes poetry once said: "All women can relate to Plath." She meant all women of our generation. Because we were raised by Plath.

When I say "blue bladder" I don't mean the color blue. I mean my bladder is sad. Because it was removed from my body seven years ago.

When I say "There are baroque places inside me" I am quoting someone else.

Poetry is my disability.

NOTES:

“There are baroque places inside me” comes from the poem ‘The Believable Weather of His Baroque Face on a Wall’ by Raymond Farr in the journal Upstairs at Duroc, ed. Barbara Beck, issue 17, 2020, Paris.

A monograph by the author about Plath and other female poets under the title Dying Swans is available online via Argotist Ebooks.

Bob Dylan’s “Jimmie Rodgers” Voice on ‘Nashville Skyline’

Last year I noticed for the first time that Bob Dylan’s singing voice on Nashville Skyline was a direct homage to Jimmie Rodgers. I’d been a Dylan fan for years without realising this; and wouldn’t have, had I not happened to hear a clip of Rodgers singing. I was astounded by the similarity.

When Nashville Skyline came out in 1969, Dylan’s voice was widely remarked upon as being very different from his usual one. The nasal, reedy tone had been replaced by a warmer and smoother sound. This was seen as being more “country music–oriented”, though in what specific sense was never really explained. It was simply taken as a given.

As far as I know, no one has ever identified this “specific sense”, which I now believe to be Dylan’s adoption of Jimmie Rodgers’ vocal style.

Jimmie Rodgers is often called “the father of country music” for his relaxed, storytelling delivery, which helped define the genre’s emotional vocabulary. He was also distinct in his use of yodelling, which, as far as I know, was never used in country music before him.

Dylan, with his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of folk and country songs, would have known Rodgers’ songs inside out. He grew up with Rodgers’ music, and in interviews mentioned owning the album Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers as a teenager. And in The Bootleg Series Vol. 15: Travelin' Thru, 1967–1969 sessions, he sang Jimmie Rodgers medleys with Johnny Cash.

It seems very likely, then, that for Nashville Skyline he chose to base its vocal “sonic architecture” on Rodgers’ voice. Every song on the album can be heard as an homage to Rodgers’ singing.

Though critics immediately noticed Dylan’s changed voice, none remarked on how much it sounded like Rodgers’. That oversight is glaring, given the unmistakable resemblance.

And while Dylan never said outright, 'I sang like Jimmie Rodgers on Nashville Skyline' the parallels are obvious.

This is not to suggest that he was "channelling" Rodgers or mimicking him. It was more a continuation of a lineage. Rodgers’ voice represented the ordinary person singing about their troubles and pleasures in a simple, unembellished way. However, where Rodgers had turned American “work songs” and blues into country, Dylan turned country into something like an “art song”—but without pretension.

Rachel Lisi—Still Remembered

A dear friend of mine died in 2010, aged only 40. Her name was Rachel Lisi. She was an unknown poet who deserved to be known. She was also a photographer and graphic artist, and did a few cover images for Argotist Ebooks.

I just wanted to mention her now, after all these years, to keep her memory alive.

Here is a YouTube video her family put together after she died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbL4R0CS34

Kent Johnson: In Praise of Mischief and Literary Disruption

It’s been several years now since Kent Johnson passed. I had corresponded with him for roughly a decade, from around 2008 until a few months before his death, and I once interviewed him for The Argotist Online. At one point, he approached me about publishing an ebook of his collected writings. I was eager to do so but the project ultimately fell through: the sheer volume of material he offered, and the extensive editing it required, felt beyond my capacity. Still, I was genuinely flattered that he had asked me—and that he had such faith in ebooks as a medium.

Kent was something of a mythical figure in the circles of contemporary poetry. He was someone no one could quite categorise: was he a critic, a satirist, an archivist or a literary provocateur? When he was a child in Montevideo, he played ping-pong with the sons of ambassadors and even had Duke Ellington pat him on the head, and saying, ‘And what is your name, handsome young man?’—which he mentioned decades later with fondness. And in his early twenties, he was a literacy teacher in Nicaragua, living with revolutionaries and translating his first poetry collection in collaboration with Ernesto Cardenal, a priest and poet.

In the correspondence I had with him, I saw the breadth of his vision. He engaged deeply with avant-garde practice, the politics of poetry and the sociology of literary communities. He was always curious about the literary world; and no claim, scandal and poetic controversy was too insignificant for his attention. He questioned cliques, examined complicity and exposed absurdities with a sharp wit, but never with cruelty.

Looking back, I think what fascinated him most about poetry was its potential as a kind of “performance art”. Not in the sense of being performed as in “performance poetry”, but as an “idea” that could be used for performative interventions: mischief, satire or creative disruption. He cared less for poetry as a personal or aesthetic expression than for its capacity to function as a “disruptive element”—a kind of conceptual defamiliarisation that could unsettle, provoke or even create chaos.

Even in his youth, chaos was never too far away. A bowling alley in Carrasco, Uruguay, was bombed by Tupamaros (a Marxist–Leninist urban guerrilla group that operated in Uruguay during the 1960s and 1970s) just a few hours after he'd been there with the two sons of two CIA counterinsurgency specialists.

In the end, his work demonstrates that poetry is not only about the page, but is a performative act, a playground for imaginative intervention. He treated the literary world as a stage, and poetry as the stage directions.

When my friend the poet and photographer, Rachel Lisi, died unexpectedly at the age of only 40 in 2010, Kent commiserated with me, saying that though as a poet she was little-recognised, she would always be remembered. May the same be true of him.

Poetry and Song Are the Same Artform

The debate over whether poems and songs are separate art forms or simply variations of the same aesthetic expression has a long history. At first sight, the difference seems obvious: poems are primarily meant to be read, while songs are experienced as sound, with music and vocals creating a listening experience. This distinction is often taken as self-evident, determining how audiences approach and categorise these forms. Yet this superficial difference overlooks deeper questions about how each affects us emotionally and cognitively, and about the complex ways in which language, sound and rhythm interact to determine artistic experience.

One significant difference is in how we experience rhythm. Poems rely on rhythm, rhyme and line breaks built into the written text, engaging the reader’s “inner ear” as they mentally hear the flow while reading. This internal auditory experience is an imaginative process, determined by linguistic background, prior knowledge and personal interpretation. Songs, on the other hand, deliver rhythm externally through melody, instrumentation and vocal performance, creating a direct auditory impact. The physical presence of sound waves and the nuances of timbre, pitch and volume give songs a sensorial immediacy that written poetry lacks. The performative element (the singer’s voice, the arrangement, even the listening setting) adds layers of meaning and emotion beyond the text itself.

Critics sometimes suggest that poems and songs invoke fundamentally different responses, yet much of this originates from cultural expectation and setting. In many traditions, songs belong to communal gatherings, rituals and celebrations, engaging listeners through shared sound and movement, while poetry is more often associated with solitary reflection or intellectual engagement. Reading a poem draws on the “inner ear”, determining rhythm and tone through imagination, whereas hearing a song delivers these qualities directly through melody, repetition and performance. In both cases, response is determined not only by the work itself but by the way it is encountered: in private or in company, in silence or in sound, in memory or in the moment. The boundary between them is fluid: many songs contain poetic language, and many poems have been set to music, underscoring the interplay between the two forms.

Despite this, the difference between a poem read on the page and a song heard aloud is less absolute than it seems. Poetry, when read, activates the imagination and inner hearing, drawing us in through patterns of sound and rhythm in the mind’s ear. These sonic qualities can evoke emotion and meaning much like music does, even in silence. The pauses between lines, the visual layout of stanzas and the typography of the text all shape its rhythm and pacing, producing effects that songs sometimes echo but cannot fully replicate. This internalisation of sound allows poetry to transcend the limitations of the printed page, creating a deeply personal and intimate experience that varies widely between individuals and contexts.

Whilst formal distinctions remain (poems are lines on a page, songs combine lyrics with melody and instrumentation), both share a common aesthetic foundation of sound, rhythm, voice and emotional resonance. The difference between them lies more in context and expectation than in essence.

Neuroscience corroborates this connection, demonstrating that reading poetry and listening to music engage overlapping brain networks, particularly in processing rhythm, sound patterns and emotion. Brain imaging shows that both activities stimulate regions linked to auditory perception, emotional regulation and pattern recognition; whether the rhythm is imagined through the reader’s “inner ear” or carried to us on waves of melody and instrumentation. At the same time, each form also draws on specialised circuitry: poetry on the page largely utilises language-processing areas, while song largely utilises pitch and melody-related regions. This blend of shared and distinct activation suggests that the mind responds to both with a common aesthetic framework, yet determines that response to match the sensory pathway (silent reading or audible performance) through which the art is experienced.

Ultimately, the difference between poems as read experiences and songs as heard experiences shows how context, perception and mental engagement determine our experience of artistic expression. Recognising their shared aesthetic roots and the fluidity between reading and listening gives us a broader appreciation of how rhythm, voice and sound create meaning: whether imagined in the mind or heard through the ears. The borders between literary and musical arts, therefore, are permeable, shifting with culture, history and individual perception.

'An Insider’s Damning Testimony of the Restart Scheme' by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

When the UK government launched the Restart Programme, it was sold as a bold initiative to help the long-term unemployed back into work. Providers would deliver tailored, compassionate support; the kind that understands barriers, builds confidence and matches people to sustainable jobs.

But according to one former employee of Seetec, a major Restart provider, the reality is far from the marketing brochure. In a candid Reddit post, they describe an environment that’s toxic for both staff and participants, and driven almost entirely by money. See:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DWPhelp/comments/16ct4ta/inside_of_the_restart_programme_during_my_time_5/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

The ex-employee paints a picture of a workplace ruled by intimidation. Advisors are overworked, underpaid and micromanaged to a degree that borders on absurd. From assigned seating to being told not to talk to colleagues outside your “team zone”, it’s a rigid, joyless environment.

Team leaders, they claim, don’t lead; they use their hardest-working staff to prop up the rest, with no extra pay or recognition. Those who raise concerns about workloads or stress are met with hostility, not support. HR, in practice, doesn’t exist. Complain, and you’re out.

Perhaps the most disturbing detail is how participants are treated. Far from tailoring support to people’s circumstances, management allegedly views each person as nothing more than a “job outcome” target, worth up to £3,000 in payment once they’ve earned £4,000 in wages.

According to the whistleblower, this leads to:

1. Pushing people into unsuitable, full-time work, regardless of health conditions or caring responsibilities.

2. Threatening sanctions to force compliance, even on claimants approaching state pension age and those clearly unfit for work.

3. Pressuring participants to travel long distances for irrelevant job starts, simply to get them “off the books”.

They claim management even encouraged threats against participants’ families to intimidate them into taking jobs. And that the Jobcentre forces people into the scheme, and the Restart process often leaves participants more stressed and demoralised than when they began.

Some, they note, start the programme full of hope and confidence, only to emerge months later with their mental health in tatters. Others turn to their GP for sick notes or apply for disability benefits just to escape the pressure.

One of the most alarming allegations is the open sharing of participants’ sensitive information in office meetings. Health conditions, criminal records and personal histories are apparently treated as casual gossip fodder, an outright breach of confidentiality rules.

The post describes a constant churn of staff, with one resignation notice per week being the norm. New hires are often people with no relevant experience, sometimes from completely unrelated careers, given minimal training before being unleashed on vulnerable participants.

At the heart of this testimony is the claim that the Restart Programme is driven by financial incentives, not genuine support. Once a participant hits that magic £4,000 earnings milestone, the provider gets paid and loses all interest in their wellbeing. Whether the participant stays in work or ends up back on benefits is irrelevant.

The post claims that DWP is already facing growing complaints and may remove Seetec’s contract in the future. Whether that happens or not, it’s clear from this insider’s account that the Restart Programme (at least in some places) is failing to deliver the respectful, tailored support it was supposed to provide.

If the allegations are accurate, then Restart isn’t just broken, it’s actively harming the people it claims to help. And that raises a bigger question: when welfare-to-work schemes are built on targets and payments, can they ever truly put people before profit?

'GB News Overrates its Ratings' by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

GB News is claiming a "seismic moment" in British broadcasting. Why? Because in July 2025, it barely managed to edge past the BBC News Channel in average daily viewership. But behind the chest-thumping, the reality is far less impressive, and far more revealing.

According to BARB, GB News averaged around 80,600 daily viewers last month, edging just ahead of the BBC News Channel’s 78,700. That’s a lead of fewer than 2,000 people. GB News has also announced strong performance in key time slots like breakfast and weekday evenings, framing it as a transformative moment in UK broadcasting. But dominating a few hours in the day on a low-reach channel like GB News doesn’t make it a media powerhouse—it simply confirms its status as a niche outlet with a loyal, if limited, audience.

GB News has always styled itself as the underdog ("the channel for people who feel unheard") but what it really offers is a steady diet of manufactured grievance and culture war talking points. If it’s drawing in viewers, it’s not because of journalistic rigour. It’s because it knows how to serve outrage with breakfast and paranoia with the evening headlines.

And yet even within its own narrow definition of success, the victory is hollow. When we look at the broader picture, the BBC remains overwhelmingly dominant.

GB News might have edged a daily average, but the BBC News Channel’s weekly reach still far exceeds it—often more than double. That means more people across the UK are watching the BBC, even if only briefly, while GB News relies on a smaller base of habitual viewers. That is not really growth, but more like saturation.

Then there’s the rest of the BBC's output, which dwarfs anything GB News could hope to match. BBC One’s Breakfast, Six O’Clock News and Ten O’Clock News still reach massive audiences. None of those numbers are included in the News Channel’s BARB figures. And that’s before we even include iPlayer and the BBC’s website and app, which together draw more than 40 million users. GB News online just draws over 10 million.

And radio? The BBC’s network of national and regional stations delivers news to millions more every day. GB News, by contrast, doesn’t even try.

So GB News, despite its claims of speaking for "the people", still trails badly in that department. You can game viewing figures for a time, especially when your programming verges on the sensational, but you can't manufacture credibility.

If anything, this supposed breakthrough shows the limits of GB News. It’s carved out a niche. That’s all. A vocal, partisan slice of the public is watching more intently, but that doesn't mean the channel is reshaping British media. It means it's doubling down on its core audience while alienating the rest.

So despite all the noise GB News makes, it’s still playing catch-up.

Scents Before Modernity

I was a young child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the world I grew up in was saturated with everyday scents that were distinctive and ever-present. These smells, like the pop music of the time, formed the background texture of my life. Most have vanished. Some for good reason: safety, health and progress. Others were lost due to modern manufacturing processes and production methods.

The most noticeable absence is tobacco smoke, especially from pipes and cigars. Those two had a richness I associated with sophistication and gentility. I don’t advocate smoking, and I’m glad it’s gone. But I miss the smell, at least from pipes and cigars. Cigarettes didn’t smell as nice.

Other scents I miss are: petrol fumes, coal fires, the smell of woollen school blazers and caps, the real leather of school satchels, chalk dust, wax crayons, freshly sharpened pencils and rubbers (erasers). Wellington boots also had a smell. So did the diesel from buses, trains and ferries. As did sweets (candy) with their variety of aromas. And bookshops smelled of paper and cardboard.

Everywhere had a smell! Now, virtually nothing has!

Clean air. Sanitised surfaces. Air-conditioned buildings that emit nothing at all. Supermarkets are scentless. Public transport provides no odour, unless something has gone wrong. Homes are heated by scentless electricity, not by gas or paraffin heaters, that had “cosy” aromas.

This isn’t just nostalgia. Something has been lost; faded away without mourning. Smell is the oldest sense we have, wired directly into memory and emotion. The scents of childhood shaped us, or they did so for me. They fashioned a world rich in texture and associations, that you carried with you. Today, we have replaced scent for sterility. 

I miss the world when it smelled of life.

‘The Poetics of Ambiguity: Romanticism, Empiricism and the Modern Mind’ - free ebook

The new ebook from Argotist Ebooks is ‘The Poetics of Ambiguity: Romanticism, Empiricism and the Modern Mind’ by Jeffrey Side.

Description: 

“This book began life as a doctoral thesis written between 2000 and 2007, a period during which I became increasingly disillusioned with the dominant aesthetic assumptions underpinning both Romantic and contemporary mainstream poetry. At the heart of my research was a single question: why did so much poetry—even that which purported to challenge cultural norms—remain epistemologically conservative? Why did it continue to treat language as a transparent medium, perception as unmediated access to reality and the self as a stable, expressive core? The answer, I gradually came to realise, lay in the unexamined legacy of empiricism. What I found in Romantic poetry—especially that of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their successors—was not the radical inwardness or imaginative freedom often celebrated in literary histories, but rather a poetics that remained fundamentally tethered to an Enlightenment faith in perception and observation. Far from breaking with empiricism, Romanticism often perpetuated its core assumptions, reconfiguring them within a poetic vocabulary that lent affective weight to what were essentially epistemological structures of the empirical gaze.” 

Available as a free ebook here: 

https://argotistebooks.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-poetics-of-ambiguity-romanticism.html

'The DWP Restart Scheme Exposed: The Secret Job Searches and Sanction Threats Unveiled by an Insider' by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

Recent insider disclosures from an Employment Advisor (EA) working within the UK government’s Restart Scheme, shared openly on Reddit (see link at the end of this article) in 2023, reveal unsettling realities about how the scheme operates. These revelations highlight the significant power EAs hold over claimants and raise important questions about fairness, transparency and the true purpose of Restart.

The EA explained on Reddit that their role goes beyond simply advising jobseekers. They are actively responsible for securing job starts and outcomes, with their performance closely monitored against strict targets set by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The EA stated, “Part of an EA’s job is to get you into work, we are targeted on job starts and outcomes”.

This performance pressure leads to intensive management strategies designed to move participants quickly into employment, often regardless of job suitability or quality. The EA also revealed they have access to the “hidden job market”—vacancies not publicly advertised—and personally conduct job searches and “reverse market” by contacting local employers directly. “I do job searches myself for all my participants and send through jobs, I will also reverse market and ring local employers to find out jobs on the hidden job market i.e jobs that are available but not advertised in the usual places”, the EA wrote.

While this insider access may seem beneficial, it means claimants may be offered jobs without prior knowledge or choice, potentially being pressured into poor matches, sometimes at considerable distance. The EA admitted they hold sanction powers for non-engagement or refusal of suitable jobs, cautioning that sanctions can be cumulative: “602 [sanctions] is not the main focus, but for someone who is deliberately not engaging it can be a good shot across the bow to show how bad things can get, you can be under multiple sanctions in theory”.

The advisor made clear that their own job depends on meeting targets: “If my job is going to be put at risk by not being able to hit targets then I am going to use every tool I have to enable me to hit those targets”. Although supportive of participants with genuine barriers, the EA expressed a clear intent to push “work ready” individuals into employment quickly.

This insider perspective shines a stark light on why many claimants are wary of Restart, especially older people or those with alternative plans like education. The scheme’s design—focused on rapid placements rather than individual suitability—can coerce participants into accepting unsuitable roles, under threat of sanction.

While Restart offers access to exclusive job leads and active advisor support, the power imbalance and sanction pressures mean claimants should carefully consider whether engagement suits their circumstances. Awareness of this inside information, now available publicly thanks to the EA’s Reddit post, may help individuals navigate their options more strategically or decide that avoiding Restart altogether is the safer path.

Link to EA's Reddit post

https://www.reddit.com/r/DWPhelp/comments/12fo3bc/comment/jfxhk0p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

'How the DWP's Restart Scheme Funnels Welfare Money to Private Firms' by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

The UK government claims to be cutting back on welfare spending: tightening eligibility, toughening work requirements and cracking down on so-called “benefit cheats”. But behind the scenes, billions are being quietly diverted into the coffers of private employment firms via schemes like Restart. These firms are paid not for helping people, but for simply tracking them.

What’s happening is not illegal. But it’s a system designed in such a way that providers can profit handsomely with minimal effort or accountability. In effect, the Restart Scheme turns Universal Credit claimants into data assets. If you’re referred while on UC, and you later go on to earn a modest income (even if entirely through your own efforts) the Restart provider gets paid by the government.

Restart providers are paid in stages, according to a commercial model buried in the DWP's contracts. Once a Universal Credit claimant is referred into Restart (via the PRaP system), a clock starts ticking. For the next 547 days (about 18 months), the provider is eligible to claim job outcome payments if that claimant hits certain earnings milestones:

£1000 earned: First outcome payment

£2000 earned: Second outcome payment

£4250 earned: Final “sustained employment” bonus worth up to £3,000

These earnings can be cumulative, across multiple short-term jobs. And here’s the thing: the job doesn’t have to be found with their help. If the claimant gets work on their own (or even returns to a job they already had lined up) the provider still profits, as long as that PRaP referral is in place.

This is not about employment support. It’s about monetising unemployment. Once you're tagged in the Restart system, your financial movements are monitored for 18 months via real-time data sharing between HMRC and the DWP. This continues even after you close your Universal Credit claim, with earnings still reported for six months.

Restart doesn’t exist to help people into work. It exists to ensure providers get paid when people return to work anyway. That’s why Work Coaches are under pressure to refer as many people as possible.

These outcomes are funded through the Department for Work and Pensions. Restart is part of a vast ecosystem of outsourced welfare services, built on a logic of per-capita capture, automated tracking and staged monetisation.

The public is told that tough love and strict rules are saving money. But the truth is that a significant portion of the welfare budget is quietly redirected into opaque private contracts that are rarely scrutinised and often rewarded for doing little more than watching you earn.

There’s no fraud here, just an exploitative business model that feeds off claimant data. It's technically legal, politically useful and financially lucrative. But it’s also profoundly cynical.

At the same time claimants are harassed, sanctioned and made to jump through hoops for support, Restart providers are cashing in on their efforts, even when they contribute nothing at all to those outcomes. This is the hidden cost of welfare outsourcing. And it’s time more people knew about it.

The Evolution of the Western Film Score

I first came across the music of Aaron Copland in 1989. I already knew that his work had influenced the sound of Hollywood Western film scores, most notably Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven. I had assumed Copland had been the only influence behind this kind of music. I didn’t realise that what we now think of as “Western” film music had developed over time, influenced by several composers before Hollywood adopted it as the sound of the cinematic American West.

One of those earlier composers was Ferde Grofé. His Grand Canyon Suite came out in 1931, before Copland produced a similar sound with Prairie Journal in 1937. Though not written for film, its sweeping orchestration would go on to influence Hollywood composers during the 1940s.

While Grofé wasn’t a film composer himself, his orchestrational style gave Hollywood composers new techniques for evoking the American West. This can be heard in Max Steiner’s score for They Died with Their Boots On (1941), which has strong similarities to Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite.

Before the 1940s, the Western genre had no fixed musical identity. Early Westerns relied on film orchestrations that followed general film music conventions, without any attempt to sound specifically “American” or “frontier”.

That changed with composers like Dimitri Tiomkin and Jerome Moross. Tiomkin’s scores for Red River (1948) and High Noon (1952) incorporated folk melodies, hymns, guitar and harmonica. And Moross’s score for The Big Country (1958) had a spacious feel that matched the landscape.

So far, we’ve looked at how this musical style evolved through Grofé and the film composers he influenced. Now we will look at how Copland’s music fits into this evolution.

As mentioned earlier, Copland’s first foray into the kind of sound we now associate with the American West came with Prairie Journal. While this was not written with Western tropes in mind, it used many of the musical elements (open harmonies, folk-like melodies and a sense of spaciousness) that, as we have seen, would later become associated with cinematic depictions of the American West.

The following year, Copland’s ballet, Billy the Kid (1938), marked a turning point. It used cowboy songs, square dance rhythms, and a more minimalist style of orchestration. Although it was written for the stage, it would define how the West sounded in film, especially by the 1960s, when Elmer Bernstein drew heavily on it for his score for The Magnificent Seven.

Interestingly, though Copland had written a score for the 1948 Western, The Red Pony, it had no influence on Western film music in the '40s and '50s.

What emerges, then, from this brief history is not one clear origin point for Western film music, but two separate paths developing alongside each other. One came from Grofé (lush, grand and pictorial), which dominated the Hollywood Westerns of the '40s and '50s. The other came from Copland (minimalist, folk-based and direct), which became predominant in the 1960s and thereafter.

Exposing the Flaws in the Observer’s Salt Path Critique

A recent article in The Observer called ‘The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation’ has caused some controversy. It presents a damning investigation into Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path, calling into question its truthfulness and suggesting that Winn and her husband “Moth” built their public image on a foundation of legal trouble, financial misconduct and selective storytelling.

While the article presents serious claims, and cites multiple sources to support them, its tone, framing and rhetorical style raise their own questions, about journalistic bias, assumption-laden reporting and what truth in memoir really means.

From the headline alone, the tone is set: “spun from lies, deceit and desperation”, is not neutral language. It prepares the reader for scandal before the evidence has even begun. This isn’t unusual in click-bait media, but in investigative reporting, such language can subtly (or not so subtly) shape a reader’s judgement.

Throughout the article, sources who speak critically of Winn (especially Ros Hemmings, a former employer’s widow) are presented as credible and emotionally grounded, while Winn herself is largely silent, represented only by a short legal statement. The article makes no serious attempt to balance its narrative with a fuller version of Winn’s perspective. The effect is to turn one side of a complex story into a presumed truth.

The article depends heavily on Winn’s past legal and financial troubles, most notably an alleged embezzlement case from 2008, settled out of court with a non-disclosure agreement. It’s a serious allegation, but the reporting treats this as a smoking gun that discredits The Salt Path entirely, without acknowledging that memoirs often include omission, thematic shaping and selective focus.

Similarly, the article notes that Winn and her husband owned property in France during their supposed "homelessness", and later refers to it as "uninhabitable". But this key context is folded into a paragraph mid-article, with little exploration of what "uninhabitable" actually meant in practice. The framing leans toward suspicion rather than clarity. If the property was uninhabitable in the sense that it could not be lived in, then Win and her husband were indeed homeless. The lack of clarity about this in the article, allows for the implication that they had options that they hid from readers. That might be technically true, but without examining the real condition or accessibility of that French property, the reporting veers into insinuation.

An assumption running through the article is that because Winn omitted parts of her past, she must have intended to deceive. But memoir is not autobiography. It’s an inherently selective genre, based around emotional truth and narrative arcs, not exhaustive chronology. Many people who write memoirs, write under pseudonyms, simplify time-lines, or emphasise thematic resonance over literal precision.

The article also assumes that because some readers were moved by the story, they might have acted on it in misguided ways, and that therefore Winn’s alleged misrepresentations could cause “real harm”. That claim is speculative and unsupported by evidence. It functions as a rhetorical device, not a documented consequence.

One of the strongest challenges raised in the article is over Moth’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). Several neurologists are quoted expressing scepticism about the longevity and reversibility of his symptoms as portrayed in the book. Yet even here, the article admits there is nothing to disprove the diagnosis. It also acknowledges that medical anomalies do happen.

Ultimately, the article tries to draw a hard line between fact and fable in a literary form that has never been that tidy. The claim that The Salt Path misrepresents Winn’s life might have merit, but does that invalidate the emotional and symbolic journey that so many readers found meaningful?

The article suggests that Winn’s supposed deceptions disqualify her from telling a redemptive story. But that’s a moral judgement, not a literary one. The uncomfortable reality is that flawed people can write true things, and inspirational books don’t have to be written by saints. Of course, redemptive arcs can be misused or feel too convenient—but that doesn’t mean they’re always inauthentic, or that "flawed" narrators can’t earn them.

The article raises serious questions. It uncovers contradictions, omitted facts and unresolved tensions between the private past and the public story. But its tone is adversarial. 

It’s worth noting that the journalist behind the Observer piece, Chloe Hadjimatheou, was previously found by the BBC’s own Executive Complaints Unit to have breached editorial standards in a separate investigation—specifically, a 2021 Radio 4 documentary that included false claims and unsupported insinuations. The BBC later admitted the programme failed to meet its accuracy standards. Given this prior finding, it’s reasonable to approach her current reporting with caution—especially when it relies heavily on implication and selective framing.

This kind of history suggests a need for caution when weighing reporting that relies heavily on implication and selective framing.

Good journalism should probe. But when it loses sight of balance, it can resemble the thing it critiques.