For me Jim's comments on Shakespeare suggest that he has, despite his long associations with the political left (a history which I to some degree share, though I am younger and was never a communist), never come to any kind of critical analysis of the way that particular playwright has come to be lionised as a 'great' of British history. This is about various things including patriotism, selective readings of his plays, and what might crudely be described as British Cultural Imperialism.

I think he is now - even perhaps subconsciously - setting out to portray himself as culturally sophisticated and discerning because this backs up his claim (which is relevant to the credibility of his claims to be the Big I Am relating to the current state of folk music in the UK) to be qualified in terms of bourgeois art appreciation to pontificate on which folk songs are 'great art' as produced by the lower orders as opposed to 'crap' produced by men of middling rank who got paid for it (leaving out Irish Travellers who got paid for it, who don't count as producing crap, apparently).

And yes, he contradicts himself all the time, and his famous definition of folk is a cumbersome and unwieldy composite. This relates to several things including a) his insistence on including MacColl within it and b) political bias and c) the element of subjective 'aesthetic' judgment which is the main basis for his decisions about what songs are and are not folk music. If he likes them they are, if not, not.

What I first noticed about this Jim Carroll who I first encountered through these threads, having never heard of him before, was his aggression and rudeness, his frequent use of metaphors relating to violence and toilets and such like, coupled with a tendency to go into sorry for himself mode when anybody really stood up to what looks very much like bullying. I speak as somebody who resigned from below the line as a result of insults heaped by this man.