nothing in the rulebook

A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!

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Tag: capitalism

  • Creatives in profile: interview with Joseph Alexander

    Creatives in profile: interview with Joseph Alexander

    Joseph Alexander is a writer from a mixed Romani / white working class background. He went to Oxford for grad school and PhD, where he also taught for about 5 years. At Oxford, he had a one-sided feud with Richard Dawkins for stealing his vegetarian lunch, until they sat next to each other at dinner…

  • The Poetry of The Communist Manifesto: a combination of past and present

    What would have happened if Karl Marx had become a poet? In this article, Peter Raynard takes The Communist Manifesto to new, poetic levels. 

  • Remembering Ursula Le Guin: never forget her call to imagine alternatives to capitalism

    News of the death of Ursula Le Guin at the age of 88 has hit the literary world hard. The sharp-minded, large-spirited, incomparably brilliant Le Guin  brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy, and for many stood as a triumphant champion of the written word – and books in…

  • Literature for change: vital reading for the left-wing optimist

    We live in difficult and uncertain times and the world around us seems increasingly full of fear and terror: it is easy to lose hold of hope and grow cynical and weary. But this is the sort of attitude that suits only those who would seek to exploit these feelings to push agendas that nobody…

  • Poetry as protest

    We live in a time when language is deliberately misused and manipulated – frequently for malicious purposes – to serve and support those in power. This is a time of ‘alt-facts’, an Orwellian landscape in which language is a tool of deception and demagoguery. The cries against this state of affairs are often silenced or…

  • On the commercialisation of literature

    Why do we write? Litterateurs throughout history have often taken time to reflect on this question. Yet with the advent of neoliberalism and the proliferation of commercialisation that has taken place within most capitalist countries in the 20th and 21st centuries, it often seems as though the only purpose of fiction, of publishing, of writing…

  • One letter from Charles Bukowski will make you want to quit your job and become a writer

    “The kind of life that makes one feel empty and shallow and superficial, that makes one dread to read and dread to think, can’t be good for one, can it?” asked literary legend Willa Cather when pondering the trade aspiring creatives must so often make between pursuing their creative passions and working to pay the…

  • The best literary stocking fillers

    The average British family is set to spend over £800 this Christmas. It’s possible that quite a lot of that will be splurged on some of the wide range of Star Wars: The Force Awakens merchandise currently piled high in every shop window – from your Lightsaber BBQ tongs to your BB-8 oranges. While we’ve…

  • Is the commercial media machine killing creative culture?

    As prophetic dreams go, few are as discomfiting – due to their close proximity to reality – as one nocturnal epiphany John Steinbeck conjured up in the mid 1950s. A rare writer of uncommon integrity, with a deep resistance to commercialism and a supreme faith in the human spirit, Steinbeck felt the need to pen…

  • All the laurels in the world, and you give me these?

    I woke up this morning thinking I’d won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. This is where love and capitalism has got me, having me on that I can win a horse race in Paris, when it’s obvious that I’m only any good over the jumps at Wolverhampton. About the poet Rishi Dastidar has worked…