On Borders (No, not the defunct bookshop)

SVA news section:

• Sadly, Clive has decided to leave the group. He may possibly return in the future but in the meantime we wish him well.
• Annie has written the text for a children's illustrated book and hopes to submit it to a specialist agent shortly.
• Tony is working on more mental health articles for specialist magazines.
• Linda is at the literary equivalent of the marathon runner's 'wall' with her novel. She is being nurtured through this by her mentor from Gold Dust. Linda worried all of us by retelling the advice she has been given that a rewrite should be exactly that - a full rewriting of the whole book not an edit or selective re-drafting.
• Chris's publishers for Why Don't You Fly? have sold the Chinese rights and the initial print run is 12,000 copies! He also has an essay being published in New Zealand. Chris always was a globe-trotter.
• Rob is working on the final edits for No Mean Affair. He gave as an example that the one-page sex scene has been edited down to three lines and Linda remarked that this would be much more realistic.
  

Politics raises borders and economics demolishes them

In the main part of the meeting we critiqued another extract from Chris's project, Karl Marx and Careful Driving. Linda, employing the 'feedback sandwich' praised the piece's flow and informative content but she is still doubtful about the density of parts of the philosophy. Tony noted the excellent aphorism: Politics raises borders and economics demolishes them, and Chris modestly owned up that it was all his own work.Tony and Annie spoke with high praise about the vivid descriptions and clever technique in the driver experience sections and Rob joined them in saying that the philosophical content is much more easily understood now Chris has relegated Marx's turgid text to the footnotes.
At some stage during the discussion, we compared the progress of crabs and their sideways scuttling with chessboard bishops and their diagonal peregrinations.
In response, Chris gave a short account of the opposed philosophies of Plato and Marx - the all-powerful state versus the no-state. He continued to the end of our allotted time with an explanation of the irony that the Russian cold-war system was Platonic rather than Marxist and we left the meeting with Annie's yawns ringing in our ears. (She was forgiven, this being her first week back at work as a schoolteacher.)