We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

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Christine Kelley

Christine Kelley writes about speculative fiction and radical politics from a queer revolutionary perspective. Currently her main project is Nowhere and Back Again, a psychogeography of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Her first project was the now semi-retired blog Dreams of Orgonon, a song-by-song study of Kate Bush. Support Christine on Patreon.

4 Comments

  1. dm
    July 15, 2020 @ 4:06 am

    Excellent essay.

    Weird personal recollection- when we listened to this one on family drives, I thought my grandmother was singing it. Somehow Bush’s mock irish accent very closely (at least to me 6 year old brain) mimicked that of my belfast-born grandmother.

    Reply

  2. GLA Groundworks Limited
    July 19, 2020 @ 4:47 am

    According to my perspective about any place can be good. If they provide some tremendous knowledge to its readers who are just coming with some hope.

    Reply

  3. John Dutton Vest
    July 21, 2020 @ 4:58 pm

    Thanks for the nice blog. It was very useful for me. I’m happy I found this blog.

    Reply

  4. niggle
    June 27, 2021 @ 4:12 am

    Yes Kate’s message is more generalised than just the story of one bereaved mother, it is “Army Dreamers” i.e. plural and she actually sings “what a waste of all those army dreamers” at one point, plus I also agree that her usual personal, female and family perspective is effective, however I don’t know on what you are basing your assertion that she was not very knowledgeable about the lives of working class people or indeed of the Troubles.

    Maybe she lived in a privileged bubble, or maybe, like me, she read/saw the news and saw what was going on juxtapositioned with slick armed forces recruitment campaigns and high unemployment rates (with army “careers” officers embedded in the dole offices as I recall).

    Is it not possible that a middle class person can be more politically aware than someone from the working classes, due to the benefits of education, which papers they read and what gets talked about among friends and at home?

    Certainly this was the case with my parents, who were teachers with left leaning politics and a long history of activism in the peace and nuclear disarmament movements (and I don’t know why you mention her race or gender at all).

    Add to that the heightened awareness of people on the British mainland of the Troubles at the time, due to the bombing campaigns there in addition to news of what was going on over the Irish Sea. I remember the sense of this, around that time, when travelling in or through London, e.g. with tube station bomb scares when luggage got left behind.

    Reply

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