Hi Alison, Thanks for the "add," as they say on Myspace. I thought that the JM Coetzee comments on the "war on terror" (at least Gordon Brown deleted that one from the British lexicon) and Guantanemo were interesting - although I don't think that Stalinism and the Soviet Union ever posed any real threat to "the west." By contrast, the threat posed by al-Qaedia is real, a creature (in part) of failed western foreign policy but grossly exaggerated by our respective governments to service domestic and foreign policy agendas. Certainly, Guantanemo and the policy of extraordinary rendition are obscene and (apart from anything else) the greatest recruitment sergeant that al-Qaeda could have dreamed of. I'm currently writing the sequel to my retrospective crime thriller (ENEMY WITHIN) set during the 1985 miners strike and published in April. The sequel is set in 1997 (between Euro 96 and Blair's election victory) and about football violence and police corruption - using the crime novel again as a medium to explore what ails our country socially and politically. Concurrent with this, I'm writing a film script about a Bosnian asylum seeker who gets drawn into a vigilante conspiracy in Birmingham and ends up (unwittingly) killing a police protected witness. However, my NEXT project is going to be about extraordinary rendition, the arms trade and Iran-Contra. Your group on Latin American Literature looks really interesting although I don't speak or write Spanish. I've been trying to track down this book written in serial form, on the Internet, by this Mexican noir crime writer and one of the leaders of the Zapatistas
Thanks for the "add," as they say on Myspace. I thought that the JM Coetzee comments on the "war on terror" (at least Gordon Brown deleted that one from the British lexicon) and Guantanemo were interesting - although I don't think that Stalinism and the Soviet Union ever posed any real threat to "the west." By contrast, the threat posed by al-Qaedia is real, a creature (in part) of failed western foreign policy but grossly exaggerated by our respective governments to service domestic and foreign policy agendas. Certainly, Guantanemo and the policy of extraordinary rendition are obscene and (apart from anything else) the greatest recruitment sergeant that al-Qaeda could have dreamed of.
I'm currently writing the sequel to my retrospective crime thriller (ENEMY WITHIN) set during the 1985 miners strike and published in April. The sequel is set in 1997 (between Euro 96 and Blair's election victory) and about football violence and police corruption - using the crime novel again as a medium to explore what ails our country socially and politically. Concurrent with this, I'm writing a film script about a Bosnian asylum seeker who gets drawn into a vigilante conspiracy in Birmingham and ends up (unwittingly) killing a police protected witness. However, my NEXT project is going to be about extraordinary rendition, the arms trade and Iran-Contra.
Your group on Latin American Literature looks really interesting although I don't speak or write Spanish. I've been trying to track down this book written in serial form, on the Internet, by this Mexican noir crime writer and one of the leaders of the Zapatistas