Cancelled in Paris

Posted on September 2, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

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Boy, was that a nasty experience. No joke. I got cancelled in Paris, teaching young women who were appalled that I showed performance art without a trigger warning. I was teaching 18 women, half under 30 and mainly from the USA and Canada, and half older and European. I had explained that I felt younger people were very concerned with their work having “meaning” – improving society, or making the person experiencing their art “feel better” – so, although I would introduce the basics of a performance grammar – stillness, repetition, inconsistency – I wasn’t going to stick to abstract performance aesthetics and technical know-how. We would address making art with deliberate intention, as well as therapeutic, political and moral art.

On the second day we did a “niceness” workshop – in groups of three. One witness to another person being nice to someone, then rotating the roles. It was suggested that the performers should increase the intensity of their niceness until it turned toxic. This workshop was a great success. Later I talked about the rivers of art – that art was not all niceness and beauty, that Aphrodite was depicted as with a curve from her vagina to her head as part of the Fibonacci curve, a platonic ideal, but below – well – Theseus established the brothel below the Parthenon, dedicated to Aphrodite as a whore. I explained that art was ambivalent, enigmatic in this way – not only could it be innocuously formal or classically grand, it could be immoral, grotesque, uncanny or capricious.

I had shown examples of my work each day, and on the third day I showed Objects – without a trigger warning. I deliberately showed it that way, as I don’t think trigger warnings are appropriate for performance art, and anyway I wanted to discuss what trigger warnings implied: a frame that contextualises the art prior to it being watched, which weakens its impact to my mind. Besides, I have never in my life given a trigger warning. As for meaning, I guess Objects appears to be about a ghoulish man who keeps floppy naked women in coffins while hypnotising fully dressed women into rigidity.

Scroll down on THIS LINK to watch ‘Objects’ on vimeo.

Half of the class, mainly the under 30’s, decided to walk out of this performance within a minute of its starting and cancel me with furiously justified vehemence because I had not given them that trigger warning – so the whole workshop became a battle-ground from then on. Since they all pay for their education, the student client culture now prevailing means that as a client you expect to get the education you prefer to get – just as one expects to get any item purchased in a shop. And today, young people have been groomed to be empathetic and extremely sensitive to each other’s sensitivities, gender needs, pronouns, previous traumas. Nowadays a young person’s authentic experience is more than equal to a teacher’s learning, and so, as a teacher, you are expected to teach only what young people already know, or want to know. So no empathy for the eighty-year old teacher who toddles off to Paris for the week, worried that his prostate will last out and that he can get his seizure medication.

Seeing it as my job to talk from the point of view of devising a performance (which was what the entire month’s workshop was ultimately about), I explained that when I made the performance I was broke, and so I had asked two performers to just let me move them around. No rehearsal. I paid for their transport. They agreed. I thought about humans as objects and came to the conclusion that people can be either floppy or rigid. So I decided on one of each. From here on the performance created itself – as the best performances do. It was obvious that it would become more loaded if the floppy object was naked, and if both were women. In other words, the significance accrued during the evolution of the piece from concept to result. Naturally this explanation offended those offended even more!

We went out onto the streets of Paris the next day, in order to explore protest as art, but discovered that there was a police station near every public space that might have been suitable, and the police told us that one had to apply for prior permission in order to perform or protest in public spaces in Paris. This in itself was a learning experience – though it seems that single singers in front of cafes are exempt from this edict.

By then I was well and truly ostracised by the offended group, which was half the entire class. It was pointed out that I had used the word “whore”. The person who pointed this out to me was the director’s airy-fairy and possibly anorexic assistant who was in the habit of making gazelle-like dance gestures as she talked. I came to feel she was actually in cahoots with the cancellation mob. She told me that the whole week had got off on the wrong foot because I had not initially asked everyone their names. I took that on board; but I never do it because I always forget names and feel embarrassed if I have previously asked for them. I often ask, when a question is raised, because then I can associate the name with the question. I also am very strict about answering all questions asked.

I began to feel like the one person in the class who is bullied and ostracized at school (well, I have a fairly-thick skin actually, but this very cancelling seemed part of the workshop’s subject matter as we had already talked about the “cancel culture”).

One of the students who had walked out had they/them as their pronouns. And the rest of these young people would all describe themselves as feminists, (and I guess they all support Palestine). However they get furious if you offend their “sensitivity” – or might have offended the sensitivity of some hypothetical other who might have had a trauma revived because of the absence of a trigger warning. It was as if they were “sensitive plants”. I said this to the lissom assistant, and she became tearful and hid her face in the organiser’s sympathetic shoulder. Is this the new feminism? Whoa! It’s more like the new femininity. It’s anti-feminist in my opinion – an insistence on a new gentility – and for women a retrograde step. I don’t think it would impress my suffragette grandmother who chained herself to the railings of Buckingham Palace, or Aunt Jean who went to prison for CND. After all this, I felt distinctly unwelcome. Luckily the older, European half of my class were very supportive – several did powerful performance solos on the last day, and one told me that she had become intensely irritated by this young clique that had dominated their month-long course. The rest of the last day’s performances were basically abstract contemporary dance. So performance art was cancelled as well as its teacher. Feedback was obviously not desired, though the individuals who had created solos came up to me privately and appreciated my response. And while the older students (over thirty-five) thanked me for what I showed them, the younger ones spent the remaining part of the week ignoring me – except for one Irish girl who thanked me for the issues I had broached and said it had given her much to think about.

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An Argument for Re-capitalization of the First Letter of the Line in Poetry: First Published in The High Window, Summer 2025

Posted on August 16, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

Capitalization of the first letter of the first word of any line of poetry went out, as I recall, in the 1960s. It was deemed artificial to come across a capital letter within a sentence, should the sentence carry over onto the next line. Modern poetry needed to look contemporary. That meant that it had to look as much like prose as possible. John Ashbery once told me the precise date that he eschewed capitalization, and I think it was in the late sixties. Poets who continue to capitalise the first letter of the line are often regarded as throw-backs and dismissed as old-fashioned, however innovative their writing may be.

I returned to capitalization in the mid-seventies, when I moved on from abstract writing to description without significance (as I saw it then) – since I felt that modernism concerned the absence of significant meaning as much as a deliberately abstract mode of writing. A poem I wrote in Australia exemplified this notion for me – influenced by a conceptual work in words by Richard Long – which simply listed the objects in his line of sight. I decided to write a poem describing what I saw directly beyond my type-writer:

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THE AGE OF THE STREET

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Here is the passing of an uneventful hour

In a backwater of the town, above a backwater of the bay

Behind the containers brought to this faraway shore.

Wall-to-wall carpet, sweet-smelling dust in the air,

The gloss of doors, each knob a scintilla of day,

Rackets and hats, glimpses of sash and pane

Through the blinds, flaws troubling the picture-plane:

Then lengths of railing, kerb and the grey camber

Levelling off into gutters lead the eye away

With the newsboy’s whistle as he tugs his trolley of papers

Up the shallow incline punctuated by some blooms.

An hour between darkness and light for overcast portions

Of changeable afternoons; monochrome, khaki and amber

Moments with no more definition than a reproduction

In the discarded volume: vacant chairs and rooms,

Reticent gardens, phones unanswered, pasted-over heaven,

Locked factory gates. The blinds obey the suction

Or suspension of the breeze, exhale or hold their breath in;

Blinds gathered up or closing jerkily to obliterate

The criss-cross canvas view permitted through a mosquito net

Gridding the surface – before, or exhausted after

A storm out of season, watched through the slits in Venetians.

A print smears the sheen of dust on an outer wing,

The texture of macadam alters, rain or shine,

As wobbly birds with a few feathers begin to sing

Wibbly-wobbly songs, and a weeping willow caresses

A Volkswagen in the otherwise uninhabited street.

Then a motorbike, or a girl casually shouldering tresses

Turns the corner, hardly in sight before gone

Past fronts incurious as to whether prompt or late.

Thinnish cloud, inconsequential wind, a sagging wire,

While a bit of colour is provided by the parked car.

Here, what’s on the air is just preferred a little softer:

Loud noise-makers are locked behind factory gates.

Different hours obtain for dogs than do for cats.

Across the bay there’s a stillness about the black lifter.

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Once, when transferring the text of this poem from one file to another, I lost the formatting. It proved easy to re-set because the first letter of each line was capitalized. And this is the crux of my argument for capitalization. In this computer age, formatting is vulnerable and it has become increasingly vulnerable with the advent of mobile phones with narrow screens. Many poems now just look like pieces of prose chopped up in some arbitrary way. If the formatting gets lost the poem proves difficult to reassemble. Capitalization mitigates this risk. Partly because of this risk though, lines may become more conventional; the line breaking very obviously at the end of a phrase or sentence. Thus non-capitalization pushes the poem towards the conventional, rather than away from it.

What does the line “mean” anyway? Why do we break our poems into lines? Basically, there is a slight pause before we move onto the next line – and in traditional terms this is matched by the caesura, an even more subtle pause within the line – so that in pentameter you might get two feet/three feet (i.e. a pause after the second foot) or three feet/two feet (a pause after the third foot). The very last word of a line can be emphasized precisely because it is that last word. I enjoy adding a “What” to Thomas Edward Brown’s poem MY GARDEN:

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Ferned grot–

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not—what,

Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign;

‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.

As you can see, the added what gets hugely emphasized by its position as the final word in the line. What I am getting at is that if you want to emphasize a word for effect, it is good to break the line after that word. Capitalization of the first letter of the next line guarantees that you can restore that emphasis, should your poem’s formatting get lost, which, in this digital age it very well may.

Anthony Howell: An Argument for Re-capitalization of the First Letter of the Line in Poetry
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Drawing with the Eyes Closed

Posted on August 10, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

I first began drawing with my eyes closed after visiting Khao Sok – in March 2023 – a large artificial lake in south Thailand, with great towers of limestone emerging from the waters. My friend and I were in a boat that was moving quite swiftly and I was unable to draw these amazing pinnacles at the time. That evening, when I got back to the coast, where we were staying, I decided to draw the towers of Khao Sok from memory, but I realised that my memory would never be sufficient, nor would copying a photograph do the experience of seeing them justice. So I started drawing what I remembered of these great, rugged pinnacles with my eyes shut. The results were, in my estimation, the best drawings I had ever done.

Because bereft of sight, I relied on the tactile experience of exerting pressure on the pencil in my hand. My marks were stronger than usual. Because there was no way of being accurate, my marks were less tentative. I was drawing with my feeling for my subject.

For the next two years I drew almost exclusively with my eyes shut. What was of the utmost importance, in those days, was to have a subject in my head. Often the subject would be a notion – the notion of war, for instance, or love. I became keen on drawing sequences that attempted to tell stories – the Story of Ares and Aphrodite, the Story of Samson.

People often mention other artists who have drawn with their eyes shut, as if I should have a problem with that. I reply that there are as many ways of drawing with the eyes shut as there are drawing with the eyes open.

Here are some links to other eyes-shut posts

Drawing Khao Sok

Samson: Suicide Terrorist

Aphrodite and Ares

Other slide shows can be found at my Video page on Youtube

God of War
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The Cyst – from The Runiad, Book 14

Posted on August 6, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

From The Runiad – Book 14

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… I have been afflicted by a growth. It has taken root

In my face, just above my right eye, exactly where my forehead

Would make contact with my partner’s in a dance.

At first I thought it a mere cyst, i.e. part of me.

I applied all sorts of treatments, Nivea, bee-venom, patches.

Later I grasped that the blip was born of a seed and I was the soil

In which it had chosen to grow. Soon the size of a bush, it has gone on

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Enlarging. All attempts to hack it out have proved in vain.

At the same time, there is some diminishment of me.

It seems to gain in stature from what nourishment I may provide.

I was its equal for a while, when it emerged from being a sapling

And attained the status of a tree, small at first, admittedly.

But not so small today, now that it has crushed me underneath

Itself, and developed roots that go beyond me.

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I am just a blemish though, an irritating spot of life

Attached near the base of this giant of the forest; tiny sore

That would annoy it, were it sentient, but of course it’s not.

It’s purely vegetable. Glories in aerial roots and tendrils,

Sprouting leaves that multiply exponentially, darkening the earth

Around me. Me, the tiniest of zits now. Miracle

That I retain awareness of myself and what I have become.

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What have I become? Now the cyst has turned into a tree,

I am merely mistletoe, something parasitical. Will the tree’s irritation

Cause it to apply a salve to me? Will it try to scrub me off its root,

As if I were some equivalent of what a verruca would be

For a tree? I am the sign that something is wrong with it.

Remedies must be found, applied. Something is eating the tree,

And I’m the indicator of its malady. I have to be.

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Anthony Howell, for Dr Bashir THE RUNIAD – an epic poem – https://heyzine.com/flip-book/1dff8a7467.html

I sent this to the excellent doctor who has just removed the thing.

Mistletoe
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Colonels Blake and Carroll

Posted on August 4, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

Britain’s Covert War: The Illegal Deployment of UK Officers in Ukraine and the Crisis of Accountability

In a case that has ignited international scrutiny and sharp criticism, the United Kingdom stands accused of flagrantly violating international law through the covert deployment of military officers into active conflict zones in Ukraine. The recent capture of two British Army colonels—Edward Blake and Richard Carroll—by Russian special forces has laid bare a pattern of duplicity by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), and further exposed the British government’s clandestine role in escalating the Ukraine-Russia war.

Initially, the UK MoD insisted that Colonels Blake and Carroll were in London. However, photographic and forensic evidence presented by Russian authorities showed both officers in full military uniform, operating in a contested zone in Ukraine. The UK government quickly shifted its narrative, stating that the officers were simply “tourists visiting battle sites” — a claim met with international incredulity and domestic mockery.¹

Contrary to the UK’s assertion, Russia publicized that the captured officers were in possession of classified NATO military planning documents and diplomatic passports—direct evidence undermining their civilian cover story and highlighting an organized military mission likely sanctioned at the highest levels of British command.² The diplomatic passports raise troubling questions about whether these operatives were acting under a false flag operation or were engaged in sabotage missions within Ukrainian territory under direct UK orders.

When challenged further, the UK MoD pivoted once more, demanding that the captured officers be treated as prisoners of war (PoWs). However, the Russian Federation has formally rejected this classification, citing the Geneva Conventions and the illegality of unacknowledged combatants operating in a sovereign conflict zone without proper declaration.³ The Kremlin has designated them as unlawful combatants—a legal distinction with grave consequences. Russian legal officials have publicly declared that the planned sabotage operation uncovered from the officers’ materials could warrant capital punishment under Russian military law.⁴

In a last-ditch effort to reclaim the captured officers, the UK reportedly offered a prisoner exchange, hoping to trade them for detained Russian personnel. Russia refused. A senior Russian security official was quoted stating, *“Planned sabotage does not warrant leniency. This is not a game of diplomacy; this is war. The noose is what they’ve earned.”*⁵

Compounding the crisis is the revelation that a third British national—believed to be an MI6 officer—was also detained, although Russian sources have withheld personal details. The opacity surrounding this third detainee suggests a deeper, ongoing intelligence operation that the UK government is actively working to suppress from public discourse.

This incident does not merely reflect rogue military adventurism; it reveals a disturbing normalization of unlawful foreign intervention by the British government. The deliberate misrepresentation, the invocation of diplomatic immunity, and the demand for PoW status for what were clearly covert military actors amount to a gross abuse of international norms and treaty obligations.

If substantiated, these acts represent not only a violation of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, but also a brazen effort by the UK to fuel proxy warfare under the guise of NATO solidarity. The case of Colonels Blake and Carroll must be understood as part of a broader pattern of illegal hybrid warfare tactics employed by Western powers that continue to undermine global stability and erode the integrity of international law.

References

1. United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, Official Statement Archive – 2025.

2. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Press Briefing on Captured Foreign Operatives, July 2025.

3. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Legal Status of Unlawful Combatants, 2024.

4. Russian Military Code of Justice, Section on Espionage and Sabotage, Revised 2023.

5. Kommersant News, “Captured British Officers to Face Trial for Military Espionage,” July 28, 2025.

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Atalanta

Posted on August 1, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

Atalanta

Thus it is on this planet.

Self-importance may suggest posterity will grant us

An immortal empire, that we shall rule the waves forever, but

Nothing, nothing whatsoever can be relied on,

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Not even one or two relics. It can all be swept away,

Drowned in the cataclysm of your own grief, buried under

The sediment of a thousand later scenes, never to be visited again,

While doomsday after all falls upon some community somewhere

Every day, when the occupiers destroy your kith and kin,

When the missiles strike, when your home is reduced to rubble.

Shiva stands at the axis of it all, balancing delight with trouble.

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Shiva helps us understand how suffering engenders hope,

How joy must tumble into grief. No halt sign impedes the inevitable.

Hats off to wise Canute who proved this to his flatterers

Placing his throne on the shore at low tide and waiting for the swell

To soak his feet. Atalanta, maybe, might manage to outrun a tsunami.

Dafne Schippers looks as if she could, with that muscled abdomen

And Graeco/Nordic features, being both a sprinter and a steeple-chasing gal.

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I can see her as an archer and the first to get her shot in

On the Caledonian boar: an Amazonian beauty walking tall among

The Argonauts. But even Atalanta was unable to outrun her fate,

Once her fate resolved to cheat her out of beating Hippomenes,

With Aphrodite chucking in those apples Atalanta had to have.

But after all, her fate was far from cruel, in my estimation,

Overcome by the urge to mate so that she and Hippomenes

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Got transformed through sexual bliss into lion and lioness,

Hunting and fucking together for all time…

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From Book 3 of The Runiad.

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Candace Owens Fights for the Truth

Posted on July 31, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

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DIZAINS FOR DONNA

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Me too, I’m upset about the verdict.

Overwhelmed by the evidence, I am not.

Hordes of accusers weaken a case

When a bag of gossip proves material.

Think of a gang of young bullies of either sex:

How they like to fabricate a plot,

Tilt full steam against a predictable butt.

We told Yately about the backs of his knees.

How he needed to shave them.

And he did and we laughed and he had a nervous breakdown.

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Yes, we’ve all read The Deer Park. Just because you featured

In your daddy’s movies doesn’t mean

You have what it takes, especially when you have tats

Up to your eyeballs, not much charisma

To speak of, and over-dramatize. If we are going to generalise,

I would say that women experience shame

As a pain, but have scant sense of guilt.

Hubris plays a very large part in rejection dramas.

Harvey’s skill is to see you for what you are.

And a 1 a.m. nymph in a prize-fighter’s room deserves five years for stupidity.

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Donna Rotunno, lawyer for Harvey Weinstein

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Intrepid reporter and commentator Candace Owens has been digging out the shocking truth about Harvey Weinstein for quite a while now. And I am so ashamed of myself. I wrote this poem at the time of his trial, but then felt I risked too much unpopularity if I published it – so it went into my “rejections” file. I have always admired the fine libertarian films Weinstein produced, and back then I thought his conviction unsafe. But I just didn’t have the guts to come out with it at the time. People talk about having the courage to stand by one’s convictions. Well, I didn’t stand by mine.

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Thank you all. This blog has had over 50,000 visitors

Posted on July 26, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

I am so pleased. My journal has now hit over 50,000 visitors and over 80,000 views.

Thanks to all of you for your interest. It means a great deal to me, and makes me feel I am by no means working in isolation!

Anthony

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Just a Selection of Images

Posted on July 24, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

Incoming Gale

Hum of Bees

Barges on the River Lee

Victoria Embankment Gardens

Villa in Rio

Western Rock Nuthatch on Tholos in Delphi

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Svetlana Beriosova and Rudolf Nureyev

Posted on July 18, 2025 by anthonyhowelljournal

Two dancers I adored when I was at the Royal Ballet School, back in the Sixties.

Horrid little bow though. I was once in the wings at Covent Garden, watching Nureyev in Swan Lake. At one point, he has to put down his cross-bow (in the wings) in order to catch the swan-queen before Von Rothbart mounts the ramp. I did not realise that he had put it behind my legs, and then the evil magician appears and Nureyev grabbed his cross-bow that had got caught behind my ankle. There was a crack. He cursed in Russian as I leapt to the side. Luckily for him (and for me) it hadn’t broken, but I retired from the wings and just heard the rest on the tannoy in the dressing-room.

Thinking back to Swan Lake…John Rider, a quite heavily-built dancer, was once playing Von Rothbart, and someone had forgotten to screw down the ramp to the floor. He rushed up it, struck an imposing pose, and the ramp tipped completely over. He told us, “I just breast-stroked off, my dears!”

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