Best of this funny old year’s reads: Reads of, if not from, 2016

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Book Review, Books of The Year, Soapbox

A strangely old best of the reading year: Top reads of 2016

It has been a very weird year, both ‘out there’ within the wider world – which, of course, paradoxically seems set on being a smaller, narrower, meaner world obsessively devoted to self-harm in a foolish attempt to numb its pain – and, reflected in my reading world

I have read (though in some cases, abandoned in disgust) 113 books. Now some of them are still to be reviewed on here : I am regrettably behind on my reviews. But I haven’t posted anywhere near treble figures on reviews. My ‘won’t make the blog unless it is at least a CLEAR (not rounded up) 4 star’ tells its own story. And a goodly number of the books read have not been reviewed anywhere. Books so drearily derivative or, just so abysmal, that I abandoned time spent with them as soon as indecently possible. And that included any time spent explaining their dreariness. Better to head off quickly to time spent with a wonderful book.

I note that a goodly proportion of my ‘best ofs’ were not just reads, but re-reads: books so good half a life-time ago, that it was a treat to dust them off and say hello again. And also, books by authors never read at their time of writing: older writers, discovered.

I think what has, in some ways, sadly, impressed me about those mainly dead and gone older writers is their discipline and craft with language, character, setting, style and narrative. Writers with things to say, and the ability to say what they said memorably and with authenticity. We have a fast-book culture, and sometimes I think, that like fast-food, we have surrendered ourselves to ersatz, sitting heavy in the gut, and with little memorability or feeding much at all.

Now I HAVE read some most enjoyable new books this year, and a small number have crept into my ‘best of’ but, in the main those older reads were more powerful at keeping me thinking and admiring, weeks after closing their final pages.

But I’m still quite shocked to discover (getting into the stats thing) that despite reading 41 books published this year, only 1 of the 2016 novels got into my top fiction reads. Though I race to also say I read some very very good new fictions indeed. It’s just those earlier writers took centre stage

I also had to leave it at top 9 and top 8, as they were clear, and having spent several days agonising over which titles should get the final places, particularly the fictions, as some 5 or 6 were together at the finishing line, I thought I’d podium place the smaller number. If I had to rank, I’d still be here by midsummer 2017, constantly rejigging!

So In no ranking order, just in the order they were read :

Non-Fiction – I had a great NF year, including, inevitably some NF standout re-reads (Oh, Virginia! Oh, George! You delighted me a lifetime ago and you delight me more, and still)

Bee Wilson is an utterly engaging writer on matters historical and foodie – together. I love the history of the domestic, but with First Bite, she soared to new heights, as she wove other passions of mine together – the psychology of food, the relationship we have with food, the politics of the food industry, childhood and the development of taste

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City as ever, with her reflective, soulful writing about the arts and her relationship with them, delighted me. This book explores mainly American artists, some known to me, some not, and the role of solitariness, alienation and the ability to observe both one-self, and the society one inhabits, in artistic creation. It was also a book which had me blessing the internet as I could search for every artwork she was describing so eloquently

Martin Stevens’ Cheats and Deceits was a fabulous book about the evolutionary ploy of Cheating and Deceiving, and the myriad ways in which it manifests and works. In a year where cheating, deceiving political figures appear to be on the brink of taking us to regrettably dangerous places, it has been quite salutary to think of Trump, Farage et al as particularly obnoxious blister bug larvae, and the populace as a sadly duped Habropoda pallida, taking (to mangle a metaphor beyond recognition) these vipers to the bosom of their children’s nests. Whaaa? Habropoda Pallida is a bee species, and the obnoxious blister bugs hop onto the duped HP, so that they will get carried back to bee nest. Their favourite food is young bee grubs – i.e. they destroy the next generation and its world

On the heels of my snucking in the politics of the present, came a re-read of the wonderful George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Orwell, like many in his generation with a sense of idealism enlisted for the left in the Spanish Civil War. This was part of Kaggsysbookishramblings 1938 Club. I have loved Orwell’s writing since first discovering him in my teens. And I loved what his writing revealed to me of the man. He still seems an unusually honourable figure

Svetlana Alexievich’s harrowing Chernobyl Prayer allows those most directly affected by the blowing of the nuclear reactor, ordinary Belarusians, to tell their own stories and the land’s story. This is compassionate journalism as witnessing.

I needed some non-fictional joy, following a couple of painful recognitions of what our worst can lead to, and I got it in John Powell’s enthusiastic, playful, erudite Why We Love Music. Another read outrageously enhanced by the benefits of the internet, as I could roam around listening to snippets of illustrative sound

The January Man, which I read in the summer as an ARC from Amazon Vine has not yet been reviewed on here, as there seemed little point to whet appetites when its publication day is the 12th January 2017. The link therefore is to my Amazon UK review. Suffice it to say Christopher Somerville’s wondrous book is much more than a book about walking through the landscape of these isles, it’s a journey through time, through relationship, through music, and it made my heart sing even whilst it made me weep. Curiously, it also reminded me, in the compassionate tenderness of Somerville’s writing, of the very first Olivia Laing book I read, To The River. It will be appearing here closer to publication date with some entrancing media

Jeanette Winterson was my big find of the year. How could I have missed her, how? Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the autobiographical story which provided much of the material which formed the narrative of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Here is a woman with a childhood start which is unbearable to contemplate, but whose fierce, fierce, glittering intelligence, and whose capacity for joy sing out. She had me laughing so hard through my tears and anger

And my non-fictions end with Virginia. It’s easy to think of Woolf through knowing her end, and the mental illness she suffered. But she was another who burned with intelligence, humour, joy. A Room of One’s Own takes to the barricades of feminism; singing, wit, creativity and incisive argument its weapons. Again, one I devoured in my twenties, and though much has been achieved since its writing unfortunately it still has relevance, and is not a purely historical read

So to the fictionals – and, as you will see, Virginia and Jeanette take their places on this podium too

It seems kind of fitting that Virginia Woolf should have been my last top non-fiction, and turn out to be, late in February, the first of my top fictions. I re-read – or probably re-re-re-re read To The Lighthouse, as part of Ali’s Brilliant Woolfalong. What can I say? Any time I re-read this one its going to make a best of list. Is it possible (yes!) that it continues to get better, that I continue to find more, with each read. Looks like it,

Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, first read, most potently, in my adolescence, was another re-read. I approached it slightly nervously, as with any book which had glowed out, and been remembered, for decades. Could it speak to a much older reader, or would its delights be limited to youth. Well, good heavens, there was again so much to discover and to re-discover. A shifting focus, a little more ability to stand outside so that, on this read, Fournier’s extraordinary craft and magic delighted my more critical, intellectual appreciation.

Meaulnes led me to another favourite, more modern author – John Fowles, whose The Magus owed a deep (and expressed) debt to Fournier. The French Lieutenant’s Woman plays majestically with the novel’s structure. He was using ‘meta-fiction’ devices quite early. Everyone does it now, but it was a wonderfully playful, sly thing, when I encountered it first (yes, another re-read)

Finally we get to a fiction published this year, Eowyn Ivey’s To The Bright Edge of The World. In part, her inclusion is because her first, The Snow Child, was such an extraordinary first novel that she had set herself a dangerous peak to attain with her second. So I was delighted to find that this book was both very different from her first, but had elements of the strengths of her first – the potency of myth and magic, and, oh yes, the wonderful, cold, mysterious setting of the frozen North

H.E.Bates was an author I thought I had read but in fact, never had. Love for Lydia (which had been a TV adaptation which I never saw) was a sheer delight. Luscious writing, restrained writing, in this story of the interwar years.

Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains was another re-read. Once again, I think in part it is the lurch to the right which has made many of us think uneasily of those major conflagrations of the twentieth (and of course we are moving through the hundredth anniversary of the 1914-1918 War To End All Wars) Isherwood’s part autobiographical part-fictional narrative of his time in Berlin as the world of the 30s was doing its own inchings to the dark places, as dangerous demagogues were making their appeals to hatred, fear and castigation of ‘the other’

Oh, Virginia again! Her magnificent cross-gendering historical fiction Orlando was my very first Woolf, in my teens. And this romp from Elizabethan England to the twenties crossing geography and gender, mixing historical personages with invented ones stays so pleasurable – another book where I wasn’t only re-reading, but re-re-reading

I discovered Jeanette Winterson’s 1997 novel through some chance or other, this year. Gut Symmetries was my first Winterson, in late August. I am currently reading my fourth, so, perhaps, expect more Winterson’s to imperiously demand inclusions in best ofs, for 2017. A marriage of the story of an affair and the Grand Unified Theory of particle physics. Rarely does a writer make me think about maths and physics so delightfully, and force a mental work-out without making me whimper

And there, sadly I have to leave it. There were just too many books fighting really really hard for the final two places. I could briefly decide to place one or two, but the others started screaming ‘Me! Me! deservedly, so I would substitute, but the screaming never died down.

At least all the ones chosen meant that the unchosens stayed respectfully silent and stopped yelling at me that they deserved the podium instead.

Duelling Banjos were menacing enough, with or without the presence of Voight and Reynolds, without the nervousness of duelling books at dawn, fighting for places!

And, of course, I wish you all the very best for you, yours and all your books, in 2017. I hope we might have some chance of living in ‘less interesting times’ as far as ancient Chinese curses go. I wish you all a harmonious year, and excitement, derring do and much ‘interesting’ firmly within the pages of your books!

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On Wolves, Roses and the Russian Revolution

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Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Oddsocks, Romanovs, Roses, Soapbox, Wolves

Now my third birthday is over and I am feeling the effects of quaffing too much of Margery Sharp’s champagne, inevitably this book blogger’s thoughts turns towards her reads, not to mention her posts on her reads. And idly looking through WordPress stats to see which posts have been most viewed, yielded results which intrigued me a little.

Far and away my most viewed post was the hardly mainstream non-fiction book by Mark Rowlands, the title of which gives away the contents The Philosopher and The Wolf Rowlands is a philosopher, with a passion for wolves, and his book explores what it might be to be human, and what it might be to be wolf. I posted this review shortly after I started blogging, when, to generate some bloggy content I was cannibalising some of my most loved reads which I had raved about, sometimes years earlier, on Amazon. My review of Rowlands book has been viewed (and continues regularly to attract viewers) over 1160 times in my 3 years of blogging – though a miniscule number of likes!

In a shifting competition for second place, with 650 and rising views each are two other non-fiction books.  Currently ahead by a whisker (at the time of writing this post) is Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, which he wrote back in 1967. Admittedly, it is more directly about the Romanovs than the progress of the revolution, but of course, the journeys are entwined. And Massie wrote the book largely because his own son was born with haemophilia, which of course had devastating effects on the last Tsar’s family.

It may be that the third book, by Sharman Apt Russell, published in 2001, Anatomy of a Rose which, unsurprisingly is about Roses, will have knocked the Romanovs into third place by the time this goes live, as these two continue to jockey with each other.

Apt Russell is a Pantheist and a writer who is much concerned with the environment. Her writings about the natural world are plenty full of science, but laced with a poet’s, mystic’s sensibilities, so they are the very reverse of drily factual, objective laying out of unemotional fact.

A much needed quality – the Peace Rose

Curiously (or not) the Wolf and the Rose books have attracted their many visits from image searches, not from the titles of the books. I have no idea whether those who landed on my blog following their viewing of a page where a picture of a wolf, or a botanical drawing of the parts of a rose appeared, were pleased or irritated by what they found.

The three continue to steadily get viewed, and it is a rare day when none of them feature in my visiting stats

We are a patterning, narrating species, drawn to making connections and looping together this and that. The web, the net, both wonderfully named, offer new kinds of connections, and can begin, in the mind of the viewer, to tell new stories. Quite possibly, the wolves, the Romanovs, the roses connect not at all, but as the weaver of particular junctions on the patchwork quilt of my own blog, I have rather embarked on an idea of connections. This journey has meaning to me, even if the conclusions have no resonance for anyone else.

Let’s start

The wolf, that creature of the wilds, particularly of the shadowy fastnesses of forests, has long inhabited our dark dreams, our nightmares. Canis lupus exists as the shadow side of man’s best friend, the domesticated sub species Canis lupus familiaris, which we have made safe and beloved. But, maybe, a little bit of wild exists in the memory and genepool of even the most civilised and tamed of little doggies, who satisfy our days by honouring its tribe, pack, heritage by offering its human, leader of the pack status.

But, those untamed ones, what of them? They, like us, are a top predator. They, like us, are a tribe, pack, community animal. They, like us, are highly intelligent. But, unlike us, (or, perhaps, like us?) they are untamed. Once the wolf threatened our attempts to make our world safe and domesticated. When we became agriculturalists, the wolves were predators on our gathered flocks. Wolf was a story to scare our children with, the dangers of roaming through those dark forests – and what a field day those twining, tendrilly, loamy, mushroomy forests offer symbolically to post-Freudians. And what symbols the voracious, hungry wolf, confidently rampaging through those forests might hint at, lurking in hairy fashion under our buttoned up clothing. Whose are those slavering bloodied jaws?

Who could forget the transformation scene from American Werewolf in London

It’s no wonder that one of the staples of gothic horror fiction is the werewolf. Man (and woman) rips through the civilised and restraining veneer to become a creature of howling unrestrained desires at the full of the moon. Not our fault, of course, instinct overcame and possessed us. Jekyll and Hyde, each one of us.

But the wolf fascinates, because they are creatures of more than just the savagery we like to tar them with. Wolves are fiercely loyal to their pack. They are the tenderest of parents, the most intelligent of hunters, they symbolise a power, an honesty, a freedom. They live on the edge, and we envy and fear them for that. There are those who hate and fear them, and are opposed to re-wilding. And there are those who perhaps yearn for them. We half fear, and half long to find our untamed, unconfined wolfishness.

The unearthly sound of wolves howling is one of the most popular recorded soundscapes. We respond to them in a way beyond intellect. And some of us want, however foolishly (we might be made mincemeat) to run with them, to run, run, run with them

And what do you know – wolves are good for us, wolves are very very green indeed. I’m indebted to another blogger, Jilanne Hoffman, for reminding me of this wonderfully charged and wondrous video, narrated with such enthusiasm by George Monbiot.

The rose might appear to be the antithesis of the wolf. Although wild roses exist – we have tamed, named, brought them into the garden, into order, pruned and civilised them. They smell sweet, and, we might think, are a million scent miles away from the musky animalic odour of wolf.

Interestingly, the wild rose is also known as the dog rose, Rosa Canina – so we can see a botanical wolfish connection. I wonder where that connection to dogginess came from. Does it refer to the fact that delicate though the petals of a rose may be, the plant can fiercely defend itself, sharply stabbing with its little canine tooth shaped thorns?

But, to go back a little to the rose, now beautifully cultivated in gardens, possibly shapely, possibly highly scented. However, that succulent, seductive, rose perfume is actually rich in some extremely musky, urino-faecal odour notes, containing pheromonal notes (that’s what acts as the chemistry of desire to pollinators) the indoles. Indoles occur in faeces, (nice!) and have a faecal note – but at very low concentrations – are perceived as floral. Some of the most heavenly and expensive essential oils and floral absolutes – for example, rose, orange blossom, jasmine, contain indoles. The whiff of sex adheres to roses. Roses are, of course, above all other flowers, the flower that symbolises love, sexual love, the I love you gift of lover to lover. But roses are not only symbolic of sexual love and Eros.

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma Tadema, 1888, Wiki, Commons

In Christianity, the Rose is synonymous with the Virgin Mary, and symbolises spirit incarnating, surrender to the divine. The rose with its thorns also symbolised Christ’s wounds. In Sufiism, the connection between rose and love became translated to symbolise the desire for union with the divine.

Roses, particularly red roses, symbolise the heart, heart’s blood – and by a sideways jump, adopted into the red rose of socialism, the red flag of the people, deepest red, shrouding oft the martyred dead.

Stirringly sung here, by Pól Macadiam with solidarity poster accompaniments

And the Rose can be militant and warlike too, in English history, where the Plantagenet succession battles between the Yorkists (White Rose) and the Lancastrians (Red Rose) were known as the Wars of the Roses. This delicate flower here standing for strife and conflict, later the heraldic Tudor Rose, a composite of the white and red, symbolised the end of the Plantagenet conflict. Henry Tudor (Henry VII) was a descendent of the Lancastrian side, and marriage to Elizabeth of York, and the children of that marriage, marked the formation of a new dynasty.

Henry VII’s son, he of the six wives, created a kind of revolution in the religion of the land, mainly because of his following that doggy-rutty-overwhelmed by deepest desires. That man well in touch with his inner werewolf, I feel. Not to mention how fervent ideological belief led to the potential for further over-throwings and rebellions, if not quite revolutions, in the generation of the children of that much marrying king.

Which gives me the sew-up to the Romanovs, and yet more blood, yet more brutality.

I think all I can say on that, whether dwelling on the history of the bloodiness of Roses Wars, the Tudor succession, or how blood itself (haemophilia) contributed to that Russian Revolution is a quote from the Scottish play, used to justify further bloodshed. Something I feel drives escalations of all violence

I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er,

I am so sorry–this post has turned out to be dour and bloody. I should at least offer some refreshment!

Glass of bull’s blood, anyone?

To lighten things a little, before you all leave the morning after the night before birthday party early, do at least have a nice bunch of roses. I will make certain the wolves stay in their pens till you all get home, and that the ghosts of queens with severed heads and others somewhat bloodily despatched stay within doors

Blame those visitors doing their searches, not me, ‘twas they that started me thinking along these roads

And I can’t resist one of my favourite chanteuses, the magnificent June Tabor, here with the driving rhythms of Oysterband. Staying with an earlier, bloody connection between Russia, (by way of France) and Roses, the flower symbolises the United Kingdom, in the folk-song Bonny Bunch of Roses. Here,  from their album, Ragged Kingdom, the driving rhythms can accompany your journey home, clutching your bonny bunch of roses-oh!

(Apologies to Welsh listeners, who might or might not feel a little aggrieved at how the song-writer’s need for metre and rhythm has done strange things to ‘our United Kingdom’ to quote the current political-speak)

Drum roll for the top 10…11….10….11 of 15

Tags

Book Review, Books of The Year, Reading, Soapbox

Another terrific year of reading, and a hard choice to get it down to 10 + 1. In the end, the criteria for inclusion came down to the fact that all these books continued to make me think about them and talk about them and be not quite ready to let them go and start something else. Book nags, the lot of them!

In no particular order, but more or less the order I read the books in, though two of the books I found were in, out, in, out with each other, and by the time Ginger finished a final decision was not forthcoming, which would seem to make them joint 10, as none of the others budged a millimeter from inclusion. 4 of these books are non-fiction, the rest fiction. Books by dead Americans loomed large this year.

Links to original reviews within the text.

C.J Sansom’s Lamentation was the first of two books in my list this year which gave me certain nightmares about what it might have been like to live in the reign of that much-marrying man Henry VIIIth. A terrific book, a proper page-turner, and one which had me worrying intensely for the central character and his friends, as much as if I was back in the day, and Sansom’s characters were real. This was a book which made me cry, lots, and also terrified me, was instructive, and gave much exercise to the heart too

Helen MacDonald’s extraordinary book, H is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson prize was a clear and unforgettable inclusion in my list. Written in searingly powerful prose, MacDonald’s book encompasses grief at the loss of her father, a transcendental exploration of the natural world, an assessment of T.H. White, and, most of all a kind of intensity about what it means to be human through engaging as searchingly as possible in attempting to inhabit the being of a non-human living creature.

Patrick Hamilton was described by J.B Priestley as one of the best minor novelists writing in the interwar (and beyond) years. That sounds like being damned with faint praise, though I don’t believe it was meant in that way. I think, over time, his stock has risen, and that perhaps his difficult personal history may have prevented his peers from seeing quite how good his writing is. He is particularly fine in being able to give authentic voice to ‘little people’ – and, especially, to women. The Slaves of Solitude, set in 1943 is wonderfully funny, as well as making the reader wince with true empathy and recognition, often in the same moment. A light touch writer

American author Dorothy B. Hughes 1963 Golden Age Crime Thriller The Expendable Man makes my list for similar reasons to the three other American books. Not just a well-crafted book, and a strong narrative, but a book which lays bare much of how society, in specific times and places, is faring. Novels, creating the imaginary lives of imaginary individuals, can really bring home, powerfully, something which statistical analyses of information about attitudes from questionnaires and studies, fail to do. I can’t say too much about Hughes book. There’s a journey the reader needs to make for themselves with it, but I do recommend it highly. The fact that it was re-published by the excellent Persephone Press is also a recommendation!

Sean Michael’s Us Conductors was a delight. Canadian Michael’s between the two world wars and beyond, USA and Russian set novel, won Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s Man Booker equivalent. It is a kind of fictionalised biography of Leon Termen, a scientist and inventor who invented the teremin, an electronic musical instrument played by the performer’s hands between the circuits of two oscillators. The book, like the instrument, and like Termen’s life, is a weirdly wonderful thing. This was another book which was instructive, as well as being beautifully written, thoughtful and engaging. It was one of two books I had my in/out tussles with. I couldn’t bear to drop it, nor could I bear to drop the other which was as equally needing inclusion. Published 2015 in the UK

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , a flawed, raging, book about the exploitation of migrants, the disenfranchised, an impassioned polemic for the righteousness of socialist politics, and against the putting of profits above fair pay and working conditions, was always going to be high on my list. Published in 1939, as war began to provide a terrible solution to the stock market crash of the late 20s, this is another book which uncomfortably drags the reader to the mirror, making us examine ourselves, and the society we live in. Steinbeck pulls no punches, and his writing is sometimes sublime and sometimes punches the reader round the head to ensure he gets his point across. It’s a far from comfortable, far from easy read, but good heavens, it is an awakening one

And I’m staying Stateside with Richard Yates Revolutionary Road. Originally published in 1961 Yates’ book is a portrait of a suburban marriage, and of corporate America, the American Dream and its underbelly. It is set in the mid-50s, in Connecticut. Though it was made into a fine film, directed by Sam Mendes, with Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, which at some point I mean to positively review, what the film can’t do (outside using dialogue taken from the book) is to do justice to Yates’ stunning use of language, and the way something which is described in the book, like the building of a rockery path in a garden, encapsulates, in a very unforced way, metaphors as well as close description. In this, there is a kind of poetic sensibility in his writing, which is full of layers, whilst being absolutely accessible

Having spent quite a lot of time on fictions set earlier in the twentieth century this year, it became time for two non-fiction books about history to occupy my ‘best books’ slot. Alison Weir’s The Lady In The Tower connects back to my first read book of my top reads, the C.J. Sansom. Weir explores the last few month’s of Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. This is history, not historical fiction, and she uses the book to also explain what historians can and cannot do with their research. As well as piecing together documentary evidence she also explores how the thinking of the times in which a later historian is writing, will influence interpretations of meaning. So history has changed its view of the principal players, over time

And then there is the wonderful children’s history book, A Little History of the World, written by the art historian E.H. Gombrich in the 30s, which follows ‘history’ right from prehistoric times with a wide-angled view of the world. It has been updated to end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in the recent translation into English. Less about a view of an individual country across the millenia, there’s a global view of ideas, dreams and nightmares of attempts at world domination. It’s like the historical version of the evolution of mankind. Gombrich may have written it for children, but it proves to be a book of immense interest and edification for adults

I returned to Stateside reading in the first book in my ‘Reading the Twentieth’ Challenge. And what a book Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie turned out to be. Dreiser was looking at concerns which would come to dominate again, later in the century – how women (and men) are exploited by capital, the hypocrisy of society towards women’s sexuality, how much we can be said to have free choice, given the power of the unconscious, and the need for peer acceptance, toeing the line, fitting in: the influence of the thinking of the times upon us. A great, rich, weighty tome of a book. I’m keen to engage with Dreiser further, if I can ever penetrate further into the century!

And my final book, one published this year, was also the other one of the in/out tussle. Sara Taylor’s assured debut novel The Shore is a collection of interweaving stories about a community within the geography of islands off the Virginia Coast. Told in distinct voices, and in a back and forth timespan between 1876 and 2143 this is a strange and powerful book. Violent at times, it is never gratuitous, though punches are not pulled. I found myself quite amazed at the strength and assurance of the writing. Taylor is certainly a writer to watch; this is a first novel of great finesse, brutal and beautiful all at once

It only remains to wish you all a very happy 2016, and may your TBR’s grow ever more unwieldy, as magnificent books demand to be added!

Peter Doggett – Electric Shock

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Book Review, Culture, Electric Shock, Modern music, Music history, Peter Doggett, Pop Music, Popular Culture, Soapbox

The medium and the message

Peter Doggett’s comprehensive, detailed and engagingly written account of 125 years of pop music, was an immersive and fascinating read for someone whose main musical interest is in classical music, and mainly in dead classical composers at that, so I expect this would be an even more wonderful read for someone whose passion is some, if not all of the musical history he covers.

This is more than just a history of pop music though – it is a history of what happened to music when a method of recording performance happened. How did music itself, and our reaction to it, begin to change once we could recreate what once could only have been heard  as it was being performed. How did the medium of recording and storing music begin to change that music, and how did musical demands change the machines themselves?

Doggett throws down an important gauntlet, right at the start :

The invention of recorded sound transformed music from an experience into an artefact, with physical and psychological consequences which reverberate to this day. It imposed a distance between the moment when the music was made and when it was heard. It allowed for endless repetitions of what would once have been a unique performance.

This is an extremely powerful truth.

Once, we were only able to hear music as it happened, and unless you were a musician yourself, would not be able to create or recreate it from sheet music. Perhaps a more musically silent world (hiss, boo) but perhaps also a world where the power and effect of music hit an audience more potently.

Familiarity does breed contempt. Hear a piece of music which hits the heart, the guts, the soul once, and its power is astonishing. Play it again and again and it begins to diminish. And then if it is picked up and becomes part of a background when you are no longer actively listening to it – used in ads, heard in lifts and shopping malls, belted out from passing cars, then it gets quickly reduced to wallpaper

Every marvellous gift has its sting in the tail, and ubiquitous background music noise means, I suspect, we settle for easy hearing, but may not be listening. Surrounded by constant musical noise, there is no longer a space without music for the freshness of music to arise from. Doggett refers to the earbud generation wrapped in their random playlists as users of ‘the technology of solipsism’ Cool is no longer the music, but the technology.

A queue: not for bread, not even for music, but for a kind of freshly baked pie and custard

But, back to Doggett and his great journey. Something which comes up, again and again, throughout this book, is the wonderful subversion of popular music, right at the start of any new movement, be it blues, jazz, swing, rock, punk, hip-hop or techno. When the sound is underground, when the sound is on the streets, as it were, the music beats out a new rhythm, it arises in reaction to what has gone before and has become tame. There is an electiricity there. Part of that electricity is sex, pop music is an invitation to the rhythm of movement.

The book is crammed full of wonderfully outraged quotes from ‘the parents’ and ‘the moral guardians’ of church, state and media, bemoaning the disgusting and dangerous effects of new music on the young.

As an example, in 1902

As a habit, ragtime ranks with cocaine and morphine

Right up to 1992’s jacket quote

Rap music has no place in our society

In fact, another marked trend in that 125 years is the evidence of unease which the establishment felt about music arising from black communities.

And, there is a ceaseless watering down of the subversion of a constantly new and evolving pop music. The shock of the new starts from the bottom up (except when technology creates changes from the top down) and is cult-y to begin with.

Then, as it becomes clear that this ‘new’ is tapping into the pulse of the young and rebellious, business moves in. The new becomes sweetened, toned down, softened, blander, homogenised into the basics of its nature – and grows indulgent, stale, sellable.

Sorry, Pink Floyd : this is tired, with every strum and strobe. Self-indulgent spectacle excess. Strip away the shimmer clad dancing girls and the megabucks light show: is this really listenable to for 7 long minutes?

And a slightly younger group of teens will be looking to find something else. And so it goes on

Doggett works through the initial excitement of practically every musical genre from the 1890s to date. Not to mention, amongst the small evolutions of musical change, the moments of seismic shift

And, as said previously, there is also the relationship between the medium of recording – shellac, 78 rpm discs, through to vinyl, the alteration of speed, 45 rpm for singles, 33 rpm for the LP, moving on to tape, reel to reel or cassette, through to the CD, and then to the whole revolution of the internet age, MP3, streaming, the rise of video and MTV, techno, synthesisers, as new ‘instruments’ the rise of the DJ, the VJ, dubbing, scratching, – the technology itself changing the music – and the tie up of music as dance, something not to be listened to, something to be moved to.

With more evidence of that truth of ‘no such thing as free lunch’ or ‘gift with a sting’ Doggett points out that the restrictions of vinyl – approximately 20 minutes a side, 40 minutes of music in all, and having to turn the record over, whilst a pain, did impose a certain discipline on the album. Enter the CD, and inevitably, knowing MORE music can be carried, means that the consumer may indeed resent paying the same price for 40 minutes as for 80, and the result may be a surrender to musical self-indulgence, bloat and filling

This is a fabulous book.

I have one criticism (which won’t knock me down from love to like) – pictures would have made this perfect. And this book definitely needed to exist in some sort of new reading experience, – a dedicated eReader but with embedded links so the reader could play the music they were reading about, preferably with pictures of the musicians as well!

Sure, I know the internet can be searched for all of this, but, maybe by the time the second or third edition of this comes out, that technology will exist!

A strong suggestion to those wanting to buy this book, which I was lucky enough to receive as an ARC – indexing, sourcing and bibliographical information on a non-fiction book with LOTS of this, which this is, is far more easily done in hard copy

Now, all you eager readers out there will have to wait. This marvellous book is not released until August 27th in the UK, and likewise in the States, and is only showing on that date as a Kindle release in the USA. But I’ll do a ‘publication day’ to remind you all! I was a lucky popper and got this as an ARC from Amazon Vine UK

Peter Doggett Electric Shock Amazon UK
Peter Doggett Electric Shock Amazon USA

A little previous, but books of my year……………

Tags

Book Review, Books of The Year, Reading, Soapbox

Someone in my on-line book club suggested we compile a Top Ten list of the fiction, and the non-fiction books we read this year – and re-reads counted too, if the re-read was this year. This gave me much happy thinking time, though I was pleased that we were satisfied with just the two lists, rather than ranking WITHIN those lists, else the arguments with myself and the shufflings up and down could have taken me into daffodil time next year. All, being books I loved, were reviewed on here, follow the links for those gushy, enthusing reviews

So, in no particular preference order but more or less the ‘as I read and reviewed’ order here are, Ta Daa………..The Fictions

1) The Wall. Marlen Haushofer. This has nothing to do with Pink Floyd, though it was also made into a film!

Marlen Haushofer was an Austrian author who wrote this rather extraordinary post-apocalypse book in the 60s, later made into an equally wonderful movie, prompting the welcome reissue of the book.  It has been mis-described as an eco-feminist Utopian novel. Eco-feminist it may well be, but some people have a remarkable idea of Utopia, is all I can say!

2) Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. This is a chiller/thriller set in the far far North. And how I love books with a setting in the freezing cold of Nordic isolation. Beautifully written, Madness, class and utter isolation and things which can’t be named, set in the 30s. Genuinely terrifying, a one for the short days as long as there isn’t a power failure!

3) Night Film Marisha Pessl What to say! Donna Tartt’s michievous younger sister (not really, but that is what her writing is like) She has Tartt’s intelligence, but is infinitely more playful. Here are noir god games and solving a mystery all hooked in with indie film making

4) Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See is a beautifully written book, with some ‘magical realism’ touches, set in the second world war in Paris and Berlin The central character is a young blind French girl, and a rather gentle young boy in Germany who is swept up by the Nazi machine, into being part of the invading army. The story is told in alternate chapters by the two protagonists, and is wondrous, heart wrenching and stunning

5) The Magus John Fowles I have been reading and re-reading this every 5 or 10 years. This year was one of those years, as reading the Pessl sent me enjoyably back to it. Iconic book, hugely influential. A literary page-turner, I recognised its influence in the Pessl book. Yes it has the flaws of the time, a rather patriarchal elitism but Fowles a novelist who was absolutely extending the literary form, whilst creating a page turner. This was also made into a film. A dreadful one.

6) Bodies of Light Sarah Moss. I’d read her earlier Night Waking, with some reservations, but she had fallen off my radar, till a book club member  raved about this one. Which grabbed me without any reservations. Indeed it sent me on to further Moss reads. Stunning. Feminism and much more 1850s-1880s and the fierce women who fought for us to get education

7) The Visitors Rebecca Mascull This might almost be my favourite of the year because it took me so by surprise. Nearly missed it as the dust-jacket makes it look a bit marshmallow. Anything but. Set mainly in Kent and South Africa, at the time of the Boer war, the central character is a wonderfully fierce deaf-blind girl, and how. I’m chomping at the bit for Mascull’s second book to come out in 2015. With this book, she joins the ranks of writers whom I find myself on literary crusade for. I was so impressed by Mascull that offered the chance to interview her by the publsiher, I jumped

8) The Bone Clocks David Mitchell Not his best, but I can never pass a Mitchell book by, and he always leaves me thinking hard. Some real pyrotechnics, a mash-up of times, places, genres and some absolutely stonking writing A writer who seems to have a whole army of voices inside him. A huge novel in scope, style and genre-bending. Some of the sections miss the mark, but others are extraordinary. He hits the bulls-eye so unerringly that the fact that sometimes he clumsily breaks things is forgiveable

9) The Narrow Road To The Deep North Richard Flanagan The Booker this year, and one of those lacerating reads about war – this time Australian POWs in Japanese camps, and the building of the Burma railway, but there is much more to it than that, despite the real horror there is a huge sense of humanity and tenderness rolling through it. Curiously, though I have no stomach at all for the inventions of gore, I continue compelled to read books about the evidence of our atrocities. Writers making us look into the mirror of who we are, for good and ill.

10) This is Life Dan Rhodes As a complete break to my preferred diet of heavy lit fic, this is a delightful bubble, set in the art and performance world in Paris. it’s some kind of romantic fantasy, fabulously written, audacious, utterly joyful and good-humoured and I grinned, smiled and laughed my way through it, which makes a change from weeping my way through a book!

Non-Fiction
I was fairly shocked to see that I hadn’t read that much non fiction this year – and a lot of the books I had read (or re-read) were biographies or autobiographies, particularly – most of which were written by fiction writers. Even so, I did have to work hard to whittle down to 10 specials. I think the autobio subject matter reflects the fact that I am inveterately curious about individual stories, and the way one life can illuminate many. I need to be grabbed by the warmth and immediacy of heart, and the felt sense of in-the-gut truth, as well as the wrestles and weighings up and judgement of mind. So, reflections and stories written by writers, about aspects of their own lives are more likely to engage me than a more academic and distanced study. It also probably illustrates that though i have been through academia, I lack the intellectual rigour of academia, and remain greedy for the subjectivity of individual story

1) To The River Olivia Laing A combination of nature writing (which I love) and writing about literature (which I also love!) Laing walked the length of the River Ouse (where Virginia Woolf drowned herself) there is a lot about Woolf, and other writers and artists with a connection to the area, but also the history, geography and culture of those connected to where the river runs. And as with my love of the immediate story of the author within the subject (providing you resonate to the authorial voice) I like Laing’s relationship to her subjects

2 A Spy Among Friends Ben Macintyre This is the closest I get, in this list, to conventional biography, where the author does not engage in relationship with his subject matter but tells a story (Kim Philby’s) via traditional journalistic research, whilst standing outside the subject (which of course we can never completely do, as the writer/researcher of course arranges material and writes from their own subjectivity

3) Foreign Correspondence Geraldine Brooks Brooks is an Australian author who sets out to discover the penpals she had corresponded with from the 60s, some 30 years later. Lots about history and culture across the world. Its a bit of a detective investigation into her own past, and the lives of those penpals. Full of individual life stories.

5) My Salinger Year Joanne Smith Rakoff. Rakoff worked in an old fashioned literary agent’s – Salinger’s agent and this is a lovely meander around the changing face of publishing, a great book for someone who loves reading about writing, publishing, and all things bookie.

6) Listening to Scent – An Olfactory Journey Jennifer Peace Rhind Okay, a brilliant book about an area I specialise in, lots of stuff about chemistry and developing olfactory skills. I was delighted to find a book which taught me a huge amount of new information in an area I think I know quite a lot about! Probably not so compelling for wider audiences though

7) The Spirit In Aromatherapy Gill Farrar-Halls. Another ‘with my professional hat on’ This time, it’s actually more about the nature of the therapeutic relationship than anything else, even though the title says its about the oils. She’s been a Buddhist most of her life, and there’s a lot of very pertinent stuff about how that has profound effects on how the client/therapist relationship cab be handled. I do like books written from a Buddhist perspective which are not overtly ‘about’ Buddhism

8) Limonov Emmanuel Carrere Back to the territory I normally keep for fiction – disturbing ambiguity. Limonov is an extremely complex,Russian political activist, criminal and writer, often deeply unattractive in some of his actions and ideologies. Carrere is a campaigning French journalist, of Russian ancestry, and uses Limonov’s life to explore Russia in the twentieth century – and also approaches his subject matter from a Buddhist perspective. It’s not a traditional biography, since the writer inserts his own autobiography into the mix

9) How to be a Heroine Samantha Ellis Wonderfully witty account by Ellis, a playwright, of the fictional women who shaped her. It’s another book about reading, the power of literature and would make a great book club read, as you can’t help arguing with Ellis about YOUR favourite heroines which she missed out!

10) Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee (this was a re-read) In some ways reading the Olivia Laing sent me back to Lee, who also later set out on an epic walk, this is about the Gloucestershire he left, and is one of those wonderful books where the connection to ‘what it means to be English’ is passionate and beautiful, a sense of landscape and culture, a recording of ways of life and community  which were already dying when Lee recorded them, in the 30s. A pride and ownership of the roots to time and place, without jingoism

So…………did any of these make your ‘best reads of the year’ lists? And, as pertinently, will any of them have a chance of making your 2015 lists!

Bret Easton Ellis as a launching pad for a Rant on the beauty of dapple!

Tags

Bret Easton Ellis, Chaim Soutine, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Flanery, Soapbox, Stephen Sondheim, William Blake

I have just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules Of Attraction, which will not appear as a review on this blog, as I only blog what I am recommending (for the interested, the Amazons do carry reviews of what I disliked as well as what I raved about)

And I cordially loathed ROA. The choice of adverb is crucial – I loathed it through the heart, because it has no heart. Yes, I see what Easton Ellis is doing, laying out the spoils of a wasted, superficial, whining, shallow, self-obsessed, privileged group of Fratters at an American campus university in the 80s, but the problem is that Easton Ellis exposes their puerile, meaningless, unlikeable mass persona through an endless and superficial sneer mask.

One thing my reading did do, however (so well done, Ellis, there) is that it gave me days of impassioned debate and self-reflection on many things, thus fulfilling one of the purposes of art – to awaken, to make the reader/listener/observer notice, to make them think, respond, debate, engage.

And sometimes, what is perceived as ‘not good’ by the consumer of the art-work challenges much more than what reinforces or deepens one’s existing philosophies

Rules of Attraction is an unending expose of superficiality. The unlikeable characters are unvarying in their endless progression of barfing, whining about getting meaningless leg-overs or not getting meaningless leg overs. Pretty loathsome, there is no sense of the writer engaging with them, going below their surface. I guess he dismisses his characters as being no more than their boring and self-indulgent self-obsessions. A couple of thoughts surfaced on this, Firstly, I have never met anyone who is unremittingly one-note.

What is fascinating about living creatures, and the more complex those creatures are, the more they become fascinating in this way – and a self-aware being most of all – is the ‘dappleness’ of them. For what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘Pied Beauty’

All things counter, original, spare, strange

No one is either/or; all are and, and, and then more and. Take the time to explore any individual, and this leads to constant surprise, and anyone and everyone will yield they are more, much more, than the sum of their perceived parts – whether you have placed them on the side of the angels or the devil-with-all-the-best-tunes.

Where I say my loathing of Easton Ellis’s book is ‘cordial’ it is precisely through its shallow, superficial view. I really don’t like or have much time for those anguished over-privileged souls who are going through that stage where they are living in a constant in your face scream of over-indulgent self-mutilation. But Tell me, or better still, show me something NEW about them Mr Ellis – dismissing the ‘other’ is so very easy to do, smugly judging from my own superior sensibility is effortless. What I want from art is to shock me out of complacent dismissal of other – and make me see and feel them, make me walk some distance in their shoes. Take me to that uncomfortable, challenging place, rather than the easy, superior dismissal.

Great writing, in my book, humanises the subjects being written about – however base or noble they may appear, they need fleshing with the complexity of us all. We all know that we are not ‘just’ whatever facets of ourselves are visible, even to ourselves. Complex living creatures are full of surprise, and self-surprise

One of the facets I most valued in a sadly underrated, under-hyped book I read earlier this year, Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Land, is that he was able to take an extremely unlikeable central character, and without in any way condoning him, wrote him (indeed, possesses the gift to write all his characters) from within their experience, rather than the lordly creator god in judgement. Flanery writes ‘dapple’ – inhabiting a character both from outside (through the eyes of other) and from inside.

Ellis is writing, I think, from a sensibility of ‘life is nasty-brutish-and-short’ – and moreover, sometimes ‘life is nasty-brutish-and-short-but-feels-as-if-it-endures-painfully-for-an-aeon’

And, of course, this is  A truth – this is indeed (the awareness of our mortality, existential despair and unease, sometimes overwhelming) part of what drives the nasty, and the brutish (the endless barf, the endless meaningless leg over as an attempt to deny that awareness, or escape it), but is only a very partial truth. The Hollywood bows and happy wrap ending is, sure, superficial and childish, immature – BUT so is the unremitting savagery and wastedness. The all dark and the all happy clappy equally missing – by miles, the infinitely more complex and difficult, challenging and confusing, nature of reality

I am more interested in art which makes me see within the surface of ugliness to find the surprise of beauty. The French painter Soutine, endlessly painting decaying meat, performed this  feat, rendering the response of disgust into seeing  something new, some vibrant life in death

Sometimes it seems as if our tastes have become so very jaded that all we are able to respond to is the shock of being relentlessly beaten over the head with a hammer. Shock is relatively easy to achieve – just shout  ‘Boo’ in the ear of the unwary – surprise is something rather more subtle.

Sometimes it seems as if being edgy, in your face and shouting a lot gets mistaken for the voice of authenticity; reality seen as only the nasty.

Show me the maggot at the heart of the Rose, the invisible worm, fine. But do at least show me the Rose as well.

Life affirming art is neither the chocolate boxy saccharine nor the unremitting display of meaningless degradation. Rather, life affirmation connects with reality (whether in that affirmation as lived, or created in art to show us the affirmation) precisely because it accepts the all-that-is – the deep despair that lies beneath the curiously unquenchable joy, the sweet intensity of an incandescent moment which is incandescent precisely because ‘this too will pass’ We are all on borrowed time.

kuddlyteddybear’s 2004 photostream, Flicr, Commons

What is it that is so compelling to us, about sunsets but the sense of blaze and despair combined, at the dying of the light – something primeval gets touched. I believe in oppositions, rather than the easy way of this OR that, as I see the oppositions and the reconciliations which they contain, all around.

I think of the wonderful, life affirming musical by Stephen Sondheim, Sunday In The Park with George, which captures so beautifully what it is that is important – the embracing of the fullness of the moment, finding a way to touch, with meaning, the little space and time allotted to us. The song ‘Children and Art‘ illustrating this perfectly

And (how wonderful) – someone has uploaded the TV version of the production, starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, in its entirety on You Tube! What i appreciate about Sondheim is the edge between the pain and the joy of the moment, and the acceptance that both ARE.
(the music does not start till after the titles and scrolling introduction)

However, it took the ire I felt at the dead inhumanity (as i see it) of Ellis’ vision to bludgeon me into a meaningful (for myself, at least) reflection on reality, and creative vision. So, if not quite respeck, at least thanks.

By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them – The Giveaway of Corporate Speak

Tags

Brand loyalty, Business, Company, Corporation, Linguistics, Marketing and Advertising, Soapbox

I am fascinated by what might lie behind concept holding words which come into common usage, perhaps replacing words which were previously used.

A particular such, which makes me SPIT in disgust and contempt (ok, I don’t really spit, but the disgust and contempt is very real) is the concept of BRAND as in brand loyalty.

            Parson’s Dance Company and East Village Opera Company

I can understand the concept of company loyalty, based on the meaning of a word. Company, whether or not a PARTICULAR company in the organisational, business field embraces these concepts or not, is a lateral, inclusive, equality imbued concept. Linguistic connections abound – ‘com’ with ‘comme’ like/alike – companion, companionship, compadre, comrade. It is a concept which is about live, living beings – generally human. We don’t think of company as a group noun for inanimate objects. A company of shoes, or saucepans, for example.

The above image is an illustration of the creativity, the individuality and the collectivity of ‘com’ – the with, equal nature of company. Not that every company dances and sings, but still……………………

I CAN have loyalty to a company I might work for because my companionship will be linked to those compatriots I work with. It is a human, shared, concept, holding the intangible – fellow feeling (that other, powerful, com word – compassion)

Leiden Museum Pedro Layent Photostream, Flicr, Commons

Companies grow and often then become corporate. Conceptionally, in my mind, a bad move. Already, there is a diminishment in the human scale. Corpus, of the body. The intangible is already leaking away, dead (corpse) What happened to the dynamic warmth of company? All we have now is something which is more mechanical. The corporeal is  easier to objectivise, Company is a you and me, an us. Corporation is subject, object.  Where is the spirit of companionship in that corporation?

Without any sense of irony, the corporate speak talks not about loyalty to ‘the company’ – that is you and me, compadre, but loyalty to ‘the brand’ Somehow, the human has become the thing. So ‘brand loyalty’ becomes not just wanting me as a consumer to buy what she sells rather than what he sells, but working within an organisation, workers may be asked also to demonstrate ‘brand loyalty’. ‘My brand right or wrong’ Brand used as synonymous with what once was company

However……

The brand implies something owned. Its about possession. It reeks of authoritarian hierarchy. The rancher brands his cattle, to show he owns them. Convicts were branded to show the crimes they had committed that offended those who judged them.

The brand is a mark of humiliation

Cattle branding, Wiki Commons

How curious, and how very very apt that The Brand is the concept of the corporate world.

No, I have no brand loyalty. Only to my own spit, and of course to my compadres.

The Prescient View of Science Fiction writers

Tags

Book Review, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Science fiction, SF, Soapbox

Ray Bradbury –  Fahrenheit 451

Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.

It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.

Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.

Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!

Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago

Reality TV where we all become content not only to watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.

He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble.  You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:

 People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else

He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering

 Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these

I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.

There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity

How do we live having let go of  the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing  challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?

 If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom

 Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving

He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.

What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis

We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders

Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK
Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK

Singing from the same hymn sheet, jargon, and the poet’s view

Tags

Philosophy, Reflection, Soapbox, Writing

I’m currently reading a book written by a Western Buddhist, and struggling with it a lot. It is not, however, the teaching which is the source of my struggle and irritation. It is the writing.

More and more I find it is less and less what something is ABOUT that matters to me; it is the voice itself. This may mean that in the end I am doomed to be forever style over substance, and on one level this is true. However another way of experiencing this is that what interests me is the story, and can the storyteller make me experience the story.

This is as true for me in ‘texts about facts’ as it is in fiction. It is always an illusion to say a fact is devoid of an interpretation of it. Our subjectivity is always within the objective.

What has this got to do with the book about Buddhism?

It is this – any ism way of viewing the world, faith based, political, philosophical carries its own jargon within it, which means something to the cognoscenti, and is of course a very useful shorthand. But one of the major problems of jargon is that over time, its well-worn grooves move further and further away from the immediacy which caused their initial creation. And so the writing connects less and less with the experience.

There is a particular strand I come across in a lot of Western Buddhist instructional – I suppose vaguely ‘self-help’ writing which is intensely (I really mean over intensely) pragmatic salt-of-the-earth writing (or speaking) It’s the ‘monkey mind’ ‘loving instruction of a puppy’ the ‘be-here’ which is all about the (apologies to the easily offended) ’you have to smell the shit, taste the shit’ approach. Once, maybe with the first person who spoke those words or wrote those words, their effect was immediate, direct and wake-up. Now (for me) they are without power and jaded. Singing from the same hymn-sheet can mean singing by rote on auto-pilot, a mindless musical mumble of a well-worn groove.

The best writers, it seems to me (on anything) are those with poetic sensibilities. And by that I am not talking about intensely lyrical writing. What the poet does, because of the strictures imposed by form, is to carefully make words work. The best writers (in any medium) do not take their words lightly. Writing can be extremely plain and pared down to the bone, and yet be poetical in immediacy. What poetry and poets (if they are skillful!) does, and do, is to freshly mint the experience for the reader or listener. Poets (whether they write poetry or not) shake us awake into sharing the experience. They take the cliché of Moons/Junes/Hearts/Flowers used as symbols of love (or whatever) and break them apart.

Back to the self-help Buddhist book. What I suppose irritates even more is the unremitting focus on being pragmatic, on escaping the trap of illusion, facing things as they ARE. Well, life may be full of shit – but it is also full of stardust, mystery, the unfathomable. Personally, as reader, neither the shit nor the stardust in writing will work when their description relies on cliché.

Which is not to say the writer needs to try and forever shock or be ‘new’. But the writer does need to find a way to make sure they have not placed cliché between the thing itself and their truthful experience of it

I do like reading books which come from various – vexed word – ‘spiritual traditions.’ Which I suppose means books which grapple with what is not ultimately tangible. And some of these are written by atheists.

Perhaps in the end it comes down to personality – who finds the words that ignite you into really being here, waking up, and being able to hold (metaphorically, I think!) the shit and the stardust together.

Nothing is new, everything has been said before – but maybe a way of saying what has been said before makes it new enough to be heard, or seen, as if for the first time.

Paradoxically, some of the writers who have connected most with the ‘is-ness’ have not been writing from any ‘spiritual’ or instructional place. And the one I come back to, as sure pointer, is the Scottish poet Andrew Grieg, whose At The Loch of The Green Corrie is a deep delight. Michael Mayne, a Christian cleric, and Richard Holloway, one time Bishop of Edinburgh, and now atheist, are others. The nature poet and writer Kathleen Jamie is yet another. None say anything which has not been said before (philosophically) except, through the immediacy of language which is from their own tongues, this reader experiences the matter of their writing in immediacy.

R.H. Thouless – Straight and Crooked Thinking

Tags

Argument, Book Review, Logic, Philosophy, R.H. Thouless, Soapbox, Straight and Crooked Thinking

A tool for examining my OWN thinking as much as anyone else’s

This is a brilliant little book. It clearly, cogently, and with use of easily understood and often amusing examples, shows the various flaws in thinking and analysis which many of us (I’m sure its not just me!) may be prone to when arguing for our convictions. Many arguments turn out to be about words themselves, not necessarily the ideologies behind them. Often we, or others, make statements which are about extremes ALL thises are thats, when the truth is some thises are thats, or we deconstruct our opponent’s arguments and expose their logical flaws, without being willing to do the same for our own. Many of our deeply held beliefs of course, more than we maybe like to own, come from our subconscious prejudice. WHO we are, and our experiences, often determining what we believe, and then we are selective in taking note of the evidence which bolsters our beliefs, whilst ignoring the evidence which refutes it.

This is such an excellent book. It avoids heat and emotionalism, shows how flaws in thinking happen from both sides of seemingly impenetrable divides – eg, left-wing and right-wing, rigidity across the divide between faith and atheism. The authors look at the types of arguments which are flawed through being poorly structured – and those which whilst being well structured logical arguments are based on false premises.

Bust of Socrates, The Louvre

I wish this had been part of my syllabus in school. Indeed, in a world where we are bombarded with blustering opinions from all sides, it could be said a book like this should be part of the curriculum, helping us all become better qualified to see where the arguments of public figures are flawed and manipulative but also, even more usefully, giving us tools for self-examination

This classic by English academician and psychologist Robert H. Thouless. has been re-edited by C.R. Thouless. I originally received it as an ARC from Amazon Vine UK

Straight and Crooked Thinking Amazon UK
Straight and Crooked Thinking Amazon USA