I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan

This book, the warts-and-all 'autobiography' of Alan Partridge, undoubtedly one of Great Britain's national treasures of TV/radio/general broadcasting, was an absolutely cracking read. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular man, he is a fictional character devised by Steve Coogan (and portrayed by him too), Armando Iannucci and a team of comedy writers (most of the same as those who did this) over the last two decades or so, who has become such an iconic monument of British culture that he more or less exists as a real person in his own right. With all the repressed rage and frustrated class-entitlement of Basil Fawlty yet all the desperate compulsion to be loved and admired as a worthy entertainer of David Brent (if you're not getting these references you've got some serious learning to do about British comedy), Partridge's status as a true titan of Little England is far broader and has an incredibly deep background. For a man who isn't real, the details of his life are wrought with a richness of detail and nuance that humanise him, though such a ridiculous character, effectively being as he is just an irredeemable dick, yet through the wealth of radio and TV projects he's been slotted into and the sheer coherence of this autobiographical backstory* as a way of tying it all together, I am left marvelling at the skill of the writing team. When watching or listening to any of the shows that made Alan Partridge famous, be it his ill-fated chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You or the cringe-sitcom following his floundering career I'm Alan Partridge or the radio shows he was sports presenter for way back before he really took off or even the current mid-morning radio slots he hosts on North Norfolk Digital, I was always left as a viewer/listener thinking "this is hilarious because of how closely it treads the line to what someone like Alan Partridge could actually be like if they existed" - but having read this book, I now feel like that hypothetical wondering might be vindicated. Coogan, Ianucci et al have truly created a living breathing insufferably-boorish bigoted boring bellend from Norwich. Obviously he's still fictional but his life (of course, narrated in his voice** which given his massive insecurity is far from a reliable narration***) is drawn out so well that it's given my a much deeper enjoyment**** of all things Partridge. Alongside the perfectly-written narrative accounts (anecdotes aplenty), the book features two inserted sections of pictures from Alan's life, the explanatory subtitles to which are a pure treasure, as are the utterly inane footnotes spattered throughout the book (some of which direct the reader to 'press play' on a given musical track - yes, this book has a tracklist, as the autobiography of any respectable Disk-Jockey would, and though I did not listen to these songs as and when commanded by Alan, I feel that doing so would certainly improve the reading experience somewhat, so there you go).

   I should probably start a new paragraph.

   Another for good measure. Anyway, if you're not a Partridge fan, you probably won't get this book, but please please please acquaint yourself with him, and if you find he tickles you in any way, devour everything there is to watch or listen to of him, and then read this. You'll love it. Alan Partridge is one of the greatest artistic creations in the history of human civilisation. (You can quote me on that.) Likewise, if you a Partridge fan, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It yielded more laughs-per-chapter than anything I've ever read, while also being an outstanding work of writership on part of the team behind it, and also provoking occasional moments of actual thoughtful sadness on the reality that people like Alan may exist. This is the less-gushing part of the post so I've saved it for a final paragraph.

   Alan Partridge's existence at all is a masterwork of sociocultural satire. In the same way that The Thick of It (by most of the same writers, remember) explores the dark twisted nexus between democratic politics and the liberal media, I think Alan's 'life and work', taken as a whole, can be seen as a grand and complex insight into a variety of unfortunate factors floating about in Britain today (or at least, in the 1989-2007ish period). Geographically and historically he can definitely be said to be a product of his environment. Alan Partridge grew up in the decades where traditional British modernism and community structures were giving way to individualism, and while he as a character is not in any substantive sense 'postmodern' he's definitely been able to shape his life according to the opening-up that this current had in enabling people to more aggressively determine the shape and trajectory of their own life - ultimately a decline in top-down social purpose bestowed upon persons, which for people like Alan merely empowers an unnoticed but pervasive lifelong wrestle with purposelessness. These decades also saw the diffusion of higher education on a bigger scale, empowering the lower-middle-classes with new outlooks on life - in Alan's case, a classless unfounded snobbery that he's quite good with general knowledge. Also, the economic development of these decades meant that traditional career paths were no longer a given, and as mass-entertainment became something to which society oriented itself with passive resignation, the excess of material and intellectual wealth accrued in Britain started to find itself being wasted on things produced for the sole purpose of bottom-of-the-barrel lowest-common-denominator drivel - like chat shows. These are, I think, symbolic of the roaring emptiness of late-20th-century western culture, and it is telling that it is Alan Partridge's lifelong ambition to be a broadcaster of the type who hosts one such avenue of background noise, convinced, as so many who chase these careers probably are, that presenting a pinnacle of vacuousness is a legitimate alternative to attaining true usefulness, fame, or love. From the 1970s onwards, the British public started sitting in sofas staring at TVs and vaguely forgot about everything else that they weren't directly obligated to partake in. Culture, religion, art, any form of wisdom? Meh, whatever floats your boat, but if it doesn't float my boat, then who cares. Politics and social issues? Meh, I'll side with whatever floats my boat, who cares about yours. The trajectory of Alan's career and the views he voices reveal a complicated indictment of our media, which seems to spout utterly empty tripe so as to maintain an utterly empty audience, and the only people who would strongly desire to be the face of such a media are utterly empty people like Alan Partridge, people without a clue, petty materialistic reactionary bigots who desperately crave attention, and they do get it, but only in its most primitive, pointless and soulless form.

   These are my own personal reflections on the cultural titan that is Alan Partridge, his life and work; the writing team may have had completely different ideas. But hey ho. Alan is, alongside everything already said about him; sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, ableist, actually a fairly rubbish broadcaster, and an all-round horrible git. Yet this book, in a handful of well-placed passages, does, with unexpected clarity of human insight, make us wonder how a person like him could exist with the 'life that he lived' and the 'shows that he made' and still be able to tolerate living in his own skin, and in those passages where Alan's self-reflection is activated in a genuine sense we see a giant wall of ignorance and denial, blocking this somewhat-clever man's view of the fact that absolutely nobody wants him to be doing what he's doing, and this wall enables him to proudly, cheerily even, keep doing it. Ahaaa to that!

* Unlike his first autobiography, Bouncing Back, which experienced shockingly poor sales (for an autobiographical work of such high calibre by a respected public figure in the Norfolk area) and sadly had to be pulped.

** It's available in audiobook form, read by Steve Coogan in Alan Partridge's voice. Get in!

*** I strongly recommend watching Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge and perhaps even listening to some of his radio stuff before you read this book. They're all on Netflix (or DVD boxsets are pretty cheap if you want some awesome Christmas ideas). You'll find it thoroughly amusing, and the horrific awkwardness of some of the scenarios he finds himself galloping into through his sheer social ineptitude will be at stark contrast to the ways he recounts these events in the book. It ties all the loose nuggets of his life that we've seen in shows etc. together brilliantly, fleshing out the realer (and actually deeply sad) life underpinning them all in intervening chapters. I only wish that this book had come out two years later so that the events depicted in the film Alpha Papa (a comedy-thriller marking his debut on the big screen, whereby the broadcaster we all love to hate so much somehow ends up being solely responsible for defusing a hostage situation), as that time revealed Alan not only to be a top entertainer of the people but also a man of action, much like Roger Moore or someone, and reading his telling of how it all happened would've been amazing. Ah well.

**** And I already did have a pretty deep enjoyment of all things Partridge. I'd grown up with a dim cultural awareness of him, but in my third year of university, my close friend and next-door neighbour Charlotte (same who gave me this - yeh, we share a broadly bizarre sense of humour) broke her leg. This meant that a lot of her time had to be spent basically not moving and being kept company to avoid depressive boredom, and during the two-or-so month period it took for her to regain the skill of walking, we must've watched every episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You and I'm Alan Partridge at least three times each. I'm not joking. We binged and re-binged and we have no regrets because it provided some of the funniest evenings of studentdom.

The World We All Want

This book, a short introduction to Christianity written by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, is a great resource for doing its job, something it does with aplomb and regularity in church circles I'm used to. (It probably helps that both of its authors are both of the founding leaders of my church but it's caught on elsewhere too.) 'TWWAW' (pronounced 'idk') for short, rather than the kind of book you can give to a non-christian and expect them to engage well with it (they might, but only if they've already got a vague familiarity with what Christian-ness: a better resource for letting someone read as an introduction would be 3-2-1), it's designed as seven studies, observing a passage of scripture and running some investigative questions, best worked through in small group discussions. I've just finished going through it with a handful of seekers, as I was one of the supporting facilitators in the studies - not that it needed much, as if led by someone who knows Christianity well, TWWAW pretty much drives all the sessions itself. It's structured around the whole biblical narrative, from creation to fall to redemption to new creation, tracing how Jesus succeeded the various transitional steps required to complete this progress that Israel failed at. It's well biblically grounded but doesn't go into a huge amount of theological depth, which makes it very accessible, but it does have the potential for the sheer massiveness of the story presented and the well-poised questions invoking responses from seeker readers to prompt questions that do go into considerable depth (which is why it's probably advisable to have a pretty experienced Christian leading this study, rather than just giving the books out). Anyway - as a resource that I've seen many a time over the last decade prove its effectiveness in communicating the gospel and linking it well to individual concerns about God and sin and such, I wholeheartedly recommend TWWAW for any Christians to use in study groups with friends who are seeking, and pray that in any such efforts God uses these well-structured little studies to bring people closer to the truth.

The Thick of It: the Missing DoSAC Files

This book, an expansion on the darkly-satirical BBC political sitcom The Thick of It written by the same writers (chiefly Armando Iannucci) as the show, is just brilliant. If you're already a fan of the show, you can quit reading this post already - just acquire and devour a copy ASAFP ("F standing for...?" "Feasibly, I should imagine"). You'll laugh hard enough to burst, or at least considerably strain, several minor organs. If you haven't seen the show, you may as well quit reading this post already too and go and watch the show in its entirety* and then come back, having been nourished with some serious entertainment and better-equipped to make the most of the remainder of this post.
   The continuation of the show's content and tone into book form is pitch-perfect, picking up the same cast and themes from the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship and its chronically-hazardous encounters with the press. Comprising the book is a vast assortment of all kinds of texts; formal, informal, printed, sent digitally, transcribed, scribbled angrily on post-its: the variety of these and how well the writers have adapted to each signifies ingenious authorship (imho) and makes reading the book a consistently-amusing but haphazard jigsaw-like experience. We get to see the correspondences of Glenn Cullen and Julius Nicholson as they spout endless needless whims, respectively those of a redundant grump and an air-headed careerist; Terri Coverley's appraisal forms testify a formidable blindness to her own ineptitude; Nicola Murray's attempts at drafting policies or 'coming across like a human' in interviews dazzle in all her gaffe-prone glory; Peter Mannion and his Opposition team's out-of-touch frustrations make whiteboard planning matrices and email chains a vindictive delight to read. At the heart of the book, as the show, is the terrifying spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, using brutal (if creative) verbal abuse and intricate manipulation and everything in-between (including anything he can make his quasi-compliant hand-puppet, Ollie Reeder, do) to maintain the government's image. And it's Tucker and his enormous twisted spiderweb that underpin the humourousness and interestingness of the book/show.
   Ultimately, The Thick of It is fantastic satire because of how deeply it explores this nexus at the heart of modern politics and the media: the relationship between the free press and the democratic state. One side desperately trying to remain profitable by bringing audiences big surprising stories, the other desperately trying to remain electable by maintaining a basic veneer of respectability and competence. We end up with, in extreme form in The Thick of It but oh-so-recognisable in real life, the only-human fallibility of our ministerial class leading to a complex treacherous war over what journalists are liable to say. So political parties resign to unambitious low-risk centrism, the press resign to hyperbole and speculation, and the general public, with no power over either side, can do little but resign to sit and watch what they rightly perceive to be a government whose first priority is not social justice in any substantive sense but winning battles of spin. No wonder modern westerners are so apathetic - disillusionment and cynicism are probably the most natural responses to realising such a state of affairs. Armando Ianucci and the other writers of this brilliantly clever show/book have exposed this sad tangle incredibly well.
   Like all truly excellent satire, it can be deeply thought-provoking; it's an insightful socio-political commentary, a lament for the decline of objectivity in the public sphere (both the state's commitment to ideology-reasoned leadership and the media's commitment to impartial truth) at the hands of populism. Also like all truly excellent satire, it's very very very fucking funny.


* It's on Netflix I think? This book came out in 2010 which was before the fourth season (which lampooned the Coalition government marvellously) so there are a few characters and elements who don't feature unfortunately, but hey, it's still hilarious. Note: those easily offended by swearing might not warm to the show.

Economics of the 1%

This book, an eclectic polemical skewering of everybody's least favourite social science, is another that I'm writing a proper review for on the Rethinking Economics blog. I've just finished reading it in a mad splurge, having realised that this review was due about three weeks ago (fortunately they haven't noticed its absence yet). John Weeks, the author, is unsurprisingly a big fan of the student movement to 'rethink economics' (oh hey yeh that's why it's called that) - hence his bestowing upon us this copy for free. He's scrawled "CHANGE THE PROFESSION!" inside the front cover, which I love; it's lent the book purpose in the context of my involvement with leftyism generally and RE specifically. Anyway, I'm currently away on RE's nation-wide campaign planning weekend in Edale - everyone else is arriving in a couple of hours but I had nothing to do all day so I got an early train with the intent of going for a walk in the hills but it's been chucking it down, so I slinked off to a pub where I read the last few chapters of this punchy little book, begged for the wifi code, and am now writing up a rudimentary explanatory post on my phone over a pint. Don't worry, I'll write up a proper review for the RE blog when I get back to Sheffield, and will insert the address into
THIS LINK TO THE FULL REVIEW

[Edit November 2016: it appears that during a recent re-vamp of Rethinking Economics' website, the entire blog has been lost into the Error 404 ether - so pasted below is my review's text.]

Mainstream economics, as communicated to the masses by private media, is a series of pseudo-scientific explanations for neoclassical theory that prop up a status quo in which the rich prosper at the expense of everyone else. If this sounds like quite a hard-core Marxian take on the dismal science’s place in modern capitalist society – well, it is. This is John Weeks’ central point. If this review comes across as aggressively leftist, I assure you it’s only because I’m emulating the book.

   Unabashedly polemical, Weeks writes with an indefatigable fire (sometimes even spilling over into sardonic jokes about ‘fakeconomists’ or our corporate overlords) that would get quickly tiresome were it not for the sheer quantity and quality of compelling arguments he makes for his case. With a Ha-Joon Chang-like humour and clarity, he applies real-world pluralism and common-sense against the abstract tenets of neoclassical ‘fakeconomics’. It’s readable, it’s illuminating, and if you’re a generally-left-wing reader you may find yourself (as I did) swept into a deeper critical suspicion of mainstream economics than you ever thought possible.

   In the majority of the book’s chapters, he tackles a major myth propagated by the mainstream, exposes its flaws and fallacies, and deconstructs it to show how these ideas are constructed as ‘truths’ because of how they benefit the rich and powerful. He thus engages the finance sector, free trade, resource scarcity, unemployment and competition, government intervention, deficits and debt, inflation, and more. At the core of making all these chapters work are his ongoing threads elucidating upon the facts that all markets have socio-political origins and structures, and that some people have more power within these structures than others. That is; firstly that everything a capitalist society flourishes upon from its economic activity is dependent on structures being in place to allow fair and free market activity; and secondly that some individuals may be better placed to privilege from these structures in ways that others aren’t. These arguments seem so vaguely agreeable that they are hard to deny – sure, we can define ‘fair’ or ‘free’ or ‘better placed to privilege’ in a variety of ways, but ultimately, if we accept these reasonable points, then vast swathes of plutocratic propaganda (i.e. mainstream economics) go out the window. We reopen arguments within economic theory to political critiques, which have always been more sympathetic to the real world than economic theory itself.

   These chapters are bookended well. The first chapter lays out an idea of what good (or at least realistic) economics is, as opposed to the ‘fakeconomics’ purported by the mainstream, and which is far more susceptible to hijacking by vested interests. The penultimate chapter, following the thrust of the book as discussed above, is a focused study of austerity – a perfect example of policy that makes the poor poorer, the rich richer, and has almost no grounding in sensible well-thought-out economic theory. Once one understands the basic Keynesian principle of managing aggregate demand, then the rationale for the slow painful ‘paths to recovery’ via cuts to public services and the sale of public assets completely dissolves and these policies are seen for what they are: barely-concealed power-grabs by wealthy corporate actors. Western austerity is a bleak testament to the relentless grip the 1% holds and moulds their populations’ opinions in.

   In the final chapter, Weeks lays out some rough ideas about what an economics for the 99% would look like. His propositions are grounded in an approach that, while broadly pluralistic, bears its primarily-Marxian heritage proudly, and I think constitute some familiar and important pointers for where economics as a subject needs to be taken – chiefly, democratised, politicised, and opened to plurality and interdisciplinarity of debate. Robert Cox, a political economist, wrote “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”: in any social science we should maintain a somewhat-critical lens, as the theories we seek to apply can’t be neatly abstracted away from the social phenomena we’re applying them to, nor from the moral or normative implications of engaging with real people’s issues. Cox argued for political economy as Weeks does for economics that we should strive to reform the disciplines into emancipatory efforts, not explaining away structures that support those with wealth and power but constantly intellectually challenging the status quo so as to yield pragmatic outcomes that benefit, rather than exploit, as many people as possible.

   One of the key next-steps for economics then is to widen public understanding and participation in the subject. Neoliberal hegemony was able to take root, and maintain its legitimacy, by providing ‘economic explanations’ for its actions, which Weeks has argued are in large part patently false, but democratic society allowed these a free pass because they were also clad in the impenetrable mathematical jargon of neoclassical economic theory. We need to challenge the preconception that because something is widely-taught and respected by journals it is right: we need to push for critical discussion and pluralism within economics. And more importantly, we need to dismantle the ‘far-too-difficult-for-normal-people’ label attached to understanding of socioeconomic topics, to produce and disseminate accessible resources to empower non-economists to engage in these debates. Self-education is not just something Post-Crash societies do – it’s something everyone needs to do, to understand how the society we’re part of works so we can best act as political individuals within it. Just as Weeks highlights in his introduction, erasing public ignorance of economic reality is crucial if we want democratic societies to be steered by the educated masses rather than a manipulative handful.

   Hopefully the relevance of this book to the Rethinking Economics movement will be evident. Our aims are to demystify, diversify and reinvigorate economics: politicising the subject as much as John Weeks proposes will certainly do the third; the implied necessities of public understanding and pluralism tick off the first and second too. While this book is altogether more radical than RE (which I should restate is non-political), if you’re curious I would argue that a reasonable and realistic economics would find itself far more closely aligned to such strong-left positions than it would to the current neoliberal orthodoxy. And I’m not going to argue this point here, because John’s written a whole book full of brilliant points as to why.

The Opposite of Loneliness

This book is a compilation of fictional and nonfictional works which I borrowed off my housemate ages ago and have been reading very slowly (sorry Jack, fortunately I know you don't read this).

   It's by Marina Keegan, an aspiring (and starting to be successful for proper) writer and Yale student who tragically died shortly after her graduation. The introduction, by Anne Fadiman, a teacher, mentor and friend of Marina's, sketches her vibrant personality and ambitious talent, and the narrative of her cut-short life in context of her work. It's heartbreaking. We feel we are getting to know this wonderful person, post-mortem; and this feeling only deepens once you start reading through her actual writings, which (short stories and essays both) swell to almost bursting with the marks of an incredible human soul. A powerful intellect, a penetrating emotional insight, a myriad unexpected nuances of attitude or relationship expressed in her arguments and characters, a deep undercurrent of optimism and hope and above all a joyous youthful sense of delight in possibility: even though most of the works here range from quite to extremely sad, Marina Keegan's bubbling positivity and brilliance as a writer keep them from sinking the reader. The effect of each individual short story or essay is gutwrenching and heartwarming, often at several points throughout, sometimes simultaneously. She has a subtle sense of humour that doesn't evoke laughter but rather a forced intensive burst of empathy.

   What can I say? These short stories and essays are so diverse in tone, content and voice that the collection stands as a remarkable achievement, a testament to the sheer skill and specialness of their author. Without the neat page-partition between fiction and nonfiction I'm not entirely sure I could've stated which was what, so overlapping in style and themes are these works. The fictions cover such different stories and genres as the final days of people trapped on a broken-down submarine, a man's fleeting doubts about proposing to his girlfriend while reclaiming baggage, a housing developer facing worsening conditions in Baghdad (written in form an email chain); several others are more grounded in typical young-westerner-life-experience - and while I enjoyed these latter type more, all are immaculately crafted and poignant pieces. Cold Pastoral, the first short story in the book (also, don't tell the publisher but it's here online for free), is by far the most memorable and moving, though I also enjoyed The Ingenue above the rest. Same for her nonfiction: memoirs about the nostalgic value of clutter in a teenager's car, a sympathetic portrait of an exterminator who loves his job but is wounded that nobody else does, a reflection upon coeliac disease and maternal perfectionism. Similar to the short stories most closely about young westerners, it is those few other essays that are less topic-oriented and more openly reflective and exploratory of one's place in the world that truly shine: Putting the "Fun" Back in Eschatology and Song for the Special read one after the other are awe-inspiringly idealistic, Even Artichokes Have Doubts (my personal favourite, a rallying cry of 'is this really what we want?' having surveyed the bleak corporate landscape of graduate prospects, check it out) an interesting train of thought, and definitely, the titular and introductory essay, The Opposite of Loneliness (also online), which emulates in almost pure form the frozen-in-time sense of what Marina Keegan felt like to be a privileged smart happy twenty-two year-old.

   Even though each particular essay and short story is brilliant, I found myself growing mournful as I neared the end of the book, as each chapter adds another layer to the delicate mental-origami-sculpture of Marina Keegan's personality that readers can't help but construct, so well do these works seem to introduce us to a real human sensitivity and wit, and knowing the actual fate of the author set against these varyingly-polished but consistently beautiful gems that she's written, well, it's saddening, and yet somehow invigorating. That she should be dead when her work is so tangibly brimming with life. It stings. I dunno. You should probably read this book.

The Catcher in the Rye

[Apologies in advance for this - I am writing this post, to the best of my ability, as I imagine Holden Caulfield would, were he taking over my brain for the duration of its composition. Like method-acting for writing a book review. I feel his first-person narrative voice is so integral to the way this novel works that imitating it will help with the largely explanatory and self-justifying aim of this post. Another thing I should apologise in advance for; most of what I'm going to talk about are more like defences of the novel against several of its many major criticisms, which I will argue are unwarranted and unfair, given that this is one of the most beautiful works of fiction ever crafted in the English language. Please excuse me a healthy measure of sentimentality on my rereading it too; it was my gateway Salinger book when I was a miserable confused little fifteen-year-old, and though I revisited it repeatedly in subsequent years and also read (several times) everything else by its author, this was the first time since that I've read it all the way through. Anyway, over to Holden...]

Listen, so I've been roped into telling you all about this book I re-read recently (and was the narrator of, to tell you the truth). It's a novel by this guy called J. D. Salinger, he became sort of a big deal because of it but hid away living in a cabin in the woods by himself for most of his life after he got famous and all. It's one of the best-selling novels of human history too. Something crazy like at least sixty-five million people bought a copy since 1951 when it came out. I think though if you write a kind of sad book and suddenly everyone in the entire goddam world knows who you are and gets to see something of how you think and goes mad about it, especially if they're sorta phony and don't quite get it and a lot of people get angry or critical about it too, then I can see why you might want to go live in the woods and not see anyone or anything. I got quite a bang out of reading it though. Anyone who's not too judgmental, or doesn't demand to be easily or cheaply entertained, would probably enjoy reading it, maybe even grow from it. You really would.

   Instead of going into too much detail about the story and myself and all, since this is a book with so much cultural baggage I kind of want to talk about that. One of the big things is how controversial people think it is. Lots of people who haven't even read it think, oh yeah, that The Catcher in the Rye book, I've heard of that and that it was controversial, be wary. Part of what made it controversial might have been how famous Salinger got for writing it, especially since he then practically became a hermit afterwards. Another thing was people said it was provocative. In the novel I sort of blaspheme and swear quite a bit, and I guess there are a few sexual references, but nothing that bad happens, honestly it doesn't, just horsing around. Post-war American readers were pretty conservative though, so I guess they took it prudishly, and lots of schools and libraries banned it, and lots of public officials spoke out against it being a corrupting influence. If they'd ever actually been someone like me and felt or thought things I felt and thought while all that stuff was happening in the book, they probably would've changed their mind about all that. I mean, once they knew what it was like to be in my shoes, like a lot of people who read it and liked it did, then maybe they would have taken more seriously the problems that I was all upset about throughout instead of just getting riled up and trying to ban the whole goddam book. And that reminds me.

   Blasphemy, well, I can see how lots of religious folks find that offensive. I don't do it on purpose though, like I want to stick it to their beliefs, it's just a natural way I've learnt to use language, and maybe it's not too nice, but even religious people can't say it's all that bad. If anything it's a helpful signal maybe for who they can direct their love to. In my experience people who are wound up enough to be spouting blasphemies all the time just need someone nice to talk to. Maybe even God, who the hell even knows. But pointing a blamey finger just because of that language use doesn't help anybody, especially when it means you end up banning a book that might've helped a lot of people learn how to not be quite so sad.

   I should probably tell you what the book's about - the guy who usually writes these things seems to try to do that a bit - but a lot of people hate this book, or pretend they hate it, because it lacks 'compelling plot'. Christ, what unimaginative unsympathetic phony rubbish. Compelling plot, that kills me, it really does. The book, okay, it's about some crazy stuff that happened to me back when I was a teenager. I don't really feel like going into too much detail but basically I flunked out of this school I was at that was absolutely terrible, and it was only a few days before we were due to break up for holidays anyway, so instead of waiting around or going straight home, I went round New York by myself for a few days and tried to have fun. Mostly I didn't though. People kept messing me around or whatever and I just ended up wasting a load of money and time, and getting made sad. People I knew either didn't want to talk to me that much, or they'd say something phony and ruin our conversations, and sort of the same thing happened with strangers I tried to get to know. There was no intense action or crazy conspiracies or big surprises. A few nice things happened but it was mostly just kinda depressing. I guess if you're looking for compelling plot in a story like mine then you're gonna have to be disappointed, life isn't an adventure or anything, even if you're sixteen and run off alone in an enormous city, most of what happens to you isn't going to be the kind of action worthy of going in the movies. You might just find yourself trying to talk to people or keep yourself distracted, and maybe the worst thing that could happen is that people just don't want to spend time with you or anything. I don't know. That's more or less what happened anyway.

   Let's go back to the whole controversial side of it. Another angle on that is that the book's linked to some shootings. This isn't half as bad as it sounds though. Like, if you tell someone a food is 'linked to some shootings', they might initially be horrified - you know, "oh my god I can't possibly eat this, it might draw me into a similar set of circumstances as that shooting". This is basically just bullcrap. Two of the cases, where Ronald Reagan was shot (he survived) and Rebecca Schaeffer was shot, in both of those cases the only thing connecting the book to the crimes was that the shooters owned a copy. Remember this is one of the highest-selling novels of all time. Saying that these shooters owned a copy is like saying they both preferred a particular brand of bread and then implying that their shootings were linked to this suspicious bread. Yet some people get all concerned about this - some guy even wrote a book about how it could've been a literary conspiracy with J. D. Salinger remotely activating hypnotised assassins.

   The most famous case though, is where this guy called Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon, you know, from The Beatles and all, and not only did he own the book but he explicitly stated that it was 'his manifesto'. He bought a copy on the day that he planned to shoot John Lennon and went and wrote inside it "To Holden Caulfield, this is my statement, from Holden Caulfield", and then after he shot John Lennon five times he just sat by the body and read the book until the police came and arrested him and all. And when they were asking him why he did it, he just kept telling people he wanted to reject what he saw as Lennon's phoniness, the same way I did in the book, but clearly Chapman didn't even get my point or the ending. Poor sad bastard. It makes me feel terrible to think that one of the world's best-loved peace campaigners and musicians could have been done in by such poor literary interpretation. Also, the whole misreading thing was vastly exacerbated by the fact that this Mark Chapman guy was seriously psychotic. Five of his assessors before trial diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, in such an extreme form that he probably would've responded badly enough to any story to decide that it was telling him to go out and shoot somebody. It makes me really uncomfortable and all but you just can't blame something like this on the novel that a madman uses as an excuse for murder.

   Enough controversy. People try to slate the book not only plot-wise, as I talked about a bit earlier, but because they just don't like me. I actually get that. Most of the people I interact with in the book didn't like me either. I'm a hard person to get to know and even harder to get to like - nigh on impossible when I was sixteen and in distress. But that doesn't mean the book isn't good, or nice, or interesting. I think you have to be the kind of reader that appreciates real human idiosyncrasy to properly enjoy it, you know, taking things like 'sad' and 'funny' not as prescribed nuggets of forced feeling, but as distilled from understanding, or at least seeing, the complexity of things that are going on. It makes me sound like a dick to say so but people who read this novel and finish it and can only think 'well that was boring' are kinda ignorant and lacking in empathy. They really are. I mean it. The same goes for people who say 'I didn't like the narrator's style or tone'. Imagine someone like that, and some spotty awkward kid who's sort of sad and lonely comes up to them and tries to talk to them, and the whole time that they're trying to make conversation, this goddam phony is just thinking furiously to themselves about how much this kid's voice is irritating or their breath stinks, and so they don't bother to extend their listening enough to care or understand. People do that with this book. It makes me sick. They complain about how the dialogue and narration is always full of what seem like random disparate digressions - they're probably itching for some 'compelling plot', ha. To tell you the truth, J. D. Salinger was great at getting to know what I was thinking and feeling while all this stuff was going on, and reconstructing the narrative and dialogue in ways that looks natural (it sounds like me and all) but reveals subtext too, you know, the underlying literary themes and whatnot. I can't say I put much effort into those myself, I was just the protagonist, but my story was similar in some of the core themes to lots of Salinger's other works, and so I guess that's why he asked me if he could write mine too.

   I guess I'll finish by talking about those themes a bit then. The guy who usually writes these blog entries, in a post about one of old Salinger's other books, talks a lot about social and valuative alienation. I can't be all that bothered to explain the whole thing afresh so if you really want to understand what I'm on about read that post about Franny & Zooey too. Anyway, in the novel I display a pretty textbook case of these kinds of alienation - hence both my loneliness throughout and my preoccupation with phoniness. Because these kinds of alienation are complex and hard to pin down to any one thing, a lot of people percieve them as me just being fussy or whiny or entitled. And I guess in some ways my selfish streak does come out through those disillusionments, enabling me to act 'too pure for this world' without a twinge of self-consciousness about it (which is weird, as I get extremely self-conscious about every other damn thing). So people who get all irate at me being a privileged little kid tossing his life away haven't learnt two big things. Firstly, I don't think they understand these kinds of alienation (dammit, if you haven't already, go read that post I linked above), because if they did they sure wouldn't see 'phony' as some illegitimate made-up complaint. Phoniness is a super-powerful shapeshifter that's been around forever, taking over all modern life and culture and community and replacing it with ego, most people don't even realise and some of the only ones who do think it's a good thing.

   The second thing that these phonies (allow me) need to learn though, is that I know now that who I was as a teenager needed to grow up, and I have grown up, largely. Growing up means accepting that the world is full of crap, that people are full of crap, and that in several places in every building full of children in the world the words 'fuck you' are probably written on the walls somewhere. When you're a kid, these things don't make sense to you. You can go on being more or less innocent - without experiencing the full depth of these kinds of alienation. In the novel I talk about lots of kids playing in a rye field on the top of some cliffs, and how that would be perfect if they could just stay there and play in bliss and every time one of them strayed too close to the edge I or someone would have the job of being the 'catcher in the rye' and stop them to keep them safe. But it's a regrettable biological fact that people do grow up, a related sociological fact that people do experience conflict, a related psychological fact that people do get blasted by forms of social and valuative alienation at many points throughout their lives. And these things obviously aren't great, but they're facts. When you become a teenager and start to realise these things, lots of people get all angsty like I did when I was sixteen, lots of people let their lives sort of slide away from them because of it. But just because these things are sad doesn't mean your life once you know about them has to be defined by that sadness. You can step back and decide to just keep going. This doesn't mean ignore them or deny them or even compromise your standards for how much you dislike them - growing up just means you can't let them paralyse you. For example, Seymour Glass, who you may remember from another of Salinger's books and so of these blog posts, was a beautiful character because of how dedicatedly he clung to the ultimate wisdoms at the bottom of his ideals - but in that exact same way he never grew up. Ultimate wisdom without everyday wisdom makes you a sage, a poet, a Seymour Glass, but it doesn't help you forge relationships or do jobs or even enjoy life in any meaningful pragmatic sense. Maybe in part because he was depressive, but whatever the reason for his mental nonconformity, he stayed put-under by the overwhelming tides of these forms of alienation and everything that's bad about the world, and it drove him to suicide (oops, arguably minor spoiler alert).

   But anyway - as a teenager and for most of the events of the novel I was like that, using my sadness under experiencing these sad aspects of normal life to avoid participating in normal life. I was all set on running away, hitch-hiking out west and living by myself in a cabin in the woods. It was my little sister Phoebe who talked me out of it by trying to come with me; I realised that she couldn't come with me because it was important for her to stay, to be in school plays and practice dancing and making friends, even though these were all things tainted to some degree, especially as she'll grow older, by phoniness. But if I thought it was important for her to stay then maybe it was important for me to stay as well. To get over the bad stuff and just get on with life. It's a stoic sorta compromise, one we all have to make at some point when we realise it if we still want a shot at a functional existence, and even though it means sometimes we'll have to do things we don't like or allow other people we care about to do things we don't like, there's a kind of freedom in that, because that's just how reality works, and we can't opt out. That's what I kind of learned from everything that happened anyway, and I think J. D. did a fine job turning my several days in New York into a masterfully-crafted fable about how to grow up. Ol' Salinger himself used to sometimes talk about how when he was the age I was when all this that he wrote about happened to me, he was fairly similar to me like in terms of his personality and whatnot. He felt slightly put out by the world in the same way I did. But just like I learned to make that decision to just put up with the crappy bits, not like them or anything, but don't let them stop you from living your life properly and all - basically to grow up - and that's a helluva painful but good thing to learn.
   Anyway. This is the lengthiest goddam post on this blog now, by a long shot. Whichever phony bibliophile usually runs this crumby thing is gonna have quite a proofreading job on his hands.

     - Holden Caulfield

Boo: the Life of the World's Cutest Dog

This book is a compilation of content from a facebook page ran by J. H. Lee about their dog, a weird shaven pomeranian called Boo, who is, in that bizarrely specific way that only freakish-looking-cutish animals can be, famous on the internet. You can probably imagine what kind of book it is. Photos of the dog with poorly-formatted but neat captions in Comic Sans saying things like "Hi. My name is Boo. This is my life." and "Sometimes I sit in things. [photo of Boo wedged lopsidely and adorably in a dog-basket] But I don't always fit!" My friend Charlotte gave me this as a birthday present because she knows me well enough to know that, in the right moment, I find things like this side-splittingly hilarious. She was right. It's a deplorably needless book. The dog isn't even that cute, it's so weird-looking, and the captions are so bland, so twee, so downright moist, that I can't quite imagine who in their right mind would deliberately buy something like this. I mean, literally all the content is available on the dog's facebook page anyway, who on earth would spend real money on a hardback book with close-to-a-hundred pages of pictures of this chickpea-headed tiny-faced probably-lobotomised little inbred canine? Unless you're buying it as an event. Not for the content or to hold in any memorable regard whatsoever, but for the experience of showing it to a friend, to know that they'll find it as disarmingly odd like it deserves to be responded to as such, to laugh together at that oddness. I don't know why I'm doing a post about it really, I guess I've not been reading much lately (having started my MA there's a lot of chapters and articles that I have to read academically instead of full books for leisure or interest), sorry, but this thing is technically a book, and a ridiculous one at that - this is not something I could ever envisage a sane person buying to read. But let me restate that it was a brilliant present. All the best presents are, to greater or lesser extents, more about the implications of the giving than about the gift itself, and shared laughter at a weird dumb dog is great and was the gist of this. So, thanks Charlotte - and to any readers who find stuff like Boo funny, please buy this book as a jokepresent for your weirdest friend.

Critical Theory: A Graphic Introduction

This book, a breakneck tour of the rambling complex labyrinth of ideas that is critical theory, part of the 'Introducing' series, written by Stuart Sim and illustrated by Borin van Loon, was actually a very good introduction. I borrow-stole it from my housemate (thanks and sorry Chris) as I've just started a MA in politics, and having never properly studied political theory before, thought it might be helpful to get a general introduction done. All theory I've studied prior has been either philosophical (which asks questions brilliantly but in a very distanced manner, so even profound conclusions often come across as merely academic) or from economics (which has so many problems, the academic discipline being more or less completely overrun with restrictive neoclassical theory without pluralism or critical engagement, which is terrible for debate and does not make for interesting or useful theory: see this or this or this for further discussion of this point). Political theory, on the other hand, is power-oriented, which lends itself quite naturally to radical implications.

   Critical theory is not the same thing as this. Critical, sometimes also called radical, theory, is the attempt to systematise a theory of everything: all aspects of reality, psychological, philosophical, politico-economic, sexual, moral, linguistic, sociocultural, and so on, woven up in an explanatory framework. The general aim is to critique this reality's features that stand out as significantly negative, and figure out a way of overcoming them, leading society and culture in the general direction of moral progress and liberty. Emerging in the 19th century from the political and philosophical works of early feminists, socialists (chiefly Marx), and existentialists, the intellectuals engaged in this poorly-defined but rampantly-expansive field soon came to realise the impacts of culture and independent thinking on the systems they were criticising. Rather than being simply 'about political society' or 'about justice' in any tangible way, the practice bulged to encompass new ways of thinking about and within this weird tangled web of normativity. Psychoanalysis (chiefly Freudian), linguistic analysis, structuralism, literary theory, various aesthetic schemas, concepts such as ideology, hegemony, patriarchy, privilege, and so on, as well as philosophical shortcuts past these ways of thinking in themselves - leading to strands of thought like postmodernism and post-structuralism, deconstruction as a form of analysis, the increasing tendency to prioritise considerations of the subjective in forming true judgments. The development of critical theory is one of explosive depth and breadth since the second half of the 20th century, and to be honest, it's making it harder and harder to get any clear answers to sociocultural issues. But this is good. Frameworks of thinking are emerging that do help us dig closer to finding clear answers and solutions, to share understandings across barriers and work to remove those barriers, breaking down privilege in all its forms. Truth is not necessarily simple: in fact, more often than not, to properly uncover useful truth is extraordinarily complex and difficult. But through critical theory, we lead our thought in the right direction, asking more and better questions, working for universal justice and liberty for the individual. There is a distinct humanist-libertarian agenda driving critical theory, so it may surprise some readers that I seem so keen on it - needless to say my economic views are far from libertarian, and my theological views far from the agnostic individualism carried along by the torrents of theory (funny, the last Christian book I read was a primer against relativism. Sorry Clive), but in a political and sociocultural sense, I fully endorse getting behind critical theory. Its capacity for picking apart systems, institutions, and structures, and showing where they could be improved, is almost unmatched by anything else I can think of as a normative force (except maybe Christianity, science and philosophy, all of which can tie into critical theory quite well anyway but are very different as intellectual and social movements or whatever). I also love how intrinsically pluralistic it is - there is so much critical theory knocking about and lots of it contradicts a lot of the rest, so anyone wishing to use it as a tool must carefully select and synthesis their own approach (which makes for some pretty funny-long descriptors to dogmatic thinkers: one could be a post-feminist post-Marxist post-structuralist post-psychoanalytic postmodernist, if one were so inclined, but you wouldn't be much fun to talk to). One thing it's helpful to remember is that the possibility of existing plurality of truth does not imply the impossibility of existing objective truth: i.e. I can very much appreciate inter-subjective facets of reality as true in my conception of the world, while also holding Christianity and certain other things as definitively true above and against all subjective thought otherwise. My thinking so doesn't make it true, I'm just saying that it's perfectly consistent to be a critical theorist and believe in something other than your own perspective, even in cases where that something you believe would have to override other peoples' perspectives.

   That was a long, dense paragraph - sorry.

   Let's start a new one (again) to feel a bit more spaced out.

   Anyway. Critical theory is incredibly exciting - it's lent a new-found depth and scope to my thinking about identity, politics, fairness, society, art, gender, minds, literature, community, and so much else. The fact that a bog-standard-looking little introduction could have brought me into such enthusiasm for the field is testament to how good of a graphic guide this is: Stuart Sim has done a fantastic job of summarising, not dumbing down but overviewing immense ground in remarkably little text, core theories and thinkers and strands of thought, placing each into their historical and intellectual contexts so we see not only where critical theory is currently leading but where it has come from and why it developed thus. Borin van Loon's illustrations I wasn't mad about but they space out the pages nicely. Would be a great read for someone with a bit of an intellectual edge regarding culture, society, politics, gender or sexuality or race or division generally, language, art, mental behaviour, or pretty much anything really - it's a very slow read for such a short book but that's because the ideas are so huge and complex, but you can engage with them, and the book presents them in a very accessible but non-patronising and relatively neutral way. Overall, it's a great little book that I would 100% recommend to basically anyone who thinks - hopefully it'll get you into critical theory and soon we can have a conversation about bell hooks or Roland Barthes or something.

the Abolition of Man

This book, a small primer against relativism by that intellectual giant of 20th-century Christendom, yes, none other than Clive Staples Lewis, wasn't as good as I'd expected. An interesting but entirely supererogatory pair of facts about the particular copy I read are that it (a) is 60 years old and (b) belongs to Portrush Presbyterian Church: my friend Dave accidentally stole it, brought it back from Northern Ireland to Sheffield where he goes to uni with me, read it, lent it to me, and now presumably intends to return it quietly to its rightful place across the narrow sea.

   The book itself is more academic and targeted than Lewis's usual nonfiction; rather than writing an uplifting and convincing Christian message to a general audience, here he seeks to resolutely sort out an important argument for a more educated audience. While he was without a doubt a formidable intellectual, I don't think this is his forté - especially given the subject matter. At the height of modernism which gave rise to post-modernism and the explosion of critical sociocultural theories that make winning arguments so much the harder, here we see him writing about the dangers of subjectivism in a compelling, but nowhere near tight enough, little mess of three essays.

   His first essay concerns education, and how values of subjectivism secretly embedded in texts will yield a nefariously relativistic pull on the consciences and judgements of the educated in years to come. His second essay considers how, through the modernistic reduction of things with values to mere things for scrutiny, such a relativistic hegemony could grow and win; he frames such a process as the continuation of man's dominance over nature into man's dominance over metaphysics. His third essay laments this predicted victory, as the prevalence of relativism as an intellectual and moral habit for human thinkers would, he sees it, be 'the abolition of man', as by separating from absolute value (a set of fundamental moral truths that he refers to, interestingly, as the Tao) our own capacity for decision and analysis, we're effectively surrendering to a free-for-all, a constructivist postmodern landscape in which anything goes, which means nothing goes. In an appendix, he leaves us with a compilation of snippets of wisdom* from a variety of civilisatons round the world, that he considers to contain something of the Tao: these universal values underpinning human moral agency, thinks Lewis, are something that have been noted and prized by almost every society, and that is reflected in their great wisdom texts.

   It's worth pointing out that largely, I agree with him. Objective truth does exist, modernism did seek in its quest for progress and human flourishing to prod questioningly at it, and this was reflected strongly in educational and intellectual developments. However, the breadth and simplicity of the points Lewis makes in this book reveal that he is actually just quite weak at doing analytical philosophy and very weak at writing about critical theory, so we can't expect his attempt to bring down major trends in both of them from within to be a resounding success. Even though a lot of it seems to make intuitive sense, his arguments are sloppy and even his framing and understanding of the philosophical and theoretical trends he's lambasting not nuanced enough to take seriously as a full critique. His style, which strives for openness and clarity while at the same time verging on metaphorical phrasing and depending too much on imagery and convention, doesn't help here at all. Subjectivism (not to mention its myriad offspring schools-of-thought) isn't, I don't think, the correct or best broad view we should have about morality or any sociocultural issue, but rejecting all critical and postmodernistic theories out of hand because they smell of it simply isn't an option. Reality, especially in this kind of normative realm, is incredibly horribly multifariously complex, and we need subjective viewpoints, we need a wide array of theories and responses, not only just to try to work out answers to these kinds of issues but to understand them in a helpful way at all.**

   So, this is a pretty interesting read, but I'm not sure what for. For a defense of objectivism, especially regarding morality, there are others that far better engage with the real intellectual climate and may even be easier-going. For a critical discussion of modern theoretical developments in the general field, there are literally thousands of better books. Christian readers might appreciate it as an often-unseen philosophical facet of the brilliant accessible apologist, though be warned, this is nowhere near as brilliant and nowhere near as accessible as his Christian writings. I'm not sure if it's even in print anymore, but here's a link to the full text online if you want to have a read:

https://archive.org/stream/TheAbolitionOfMan_229/C.s.Lewis-TheAbolitionOfMan_djvu.txt

* Some of the implied 'wisdom' here I find a bit suspect, but that's not a new surprise: C.S. Lewis's thinking has a few tendencies that I, were he alive and predisposed to converse with 21-year-old Yorkshiremen who think they're cleverer than they are and far less intellectually intimidating, would press him on. His writings reflect a patriarchal, militaristic, patriotic tendency that sit quite at odds with my effeminate cosmopolitan pacifism. Most of the 'wisdom' he's picked seems pretty legit though, and I do appreciate his sourcing it from more places than just Leviticus and Locke.

** I was a philosophy student, can you tell?

Albert Blows a Fuse

This book (sorry if the link's dodgy, this proved to be a hard one to track down online) was one that I read at least a dozen times as a child, lost (I think it was left behind when we moved to Sheffield when I was eight), didn't miss very much, but remembered fondly enough to buy the second-hand copy I found in a charity shop's bargain bin last week without a moment's hesitation. It's written by Tom Bower, also the vibrant illustrations by him are what brought this book to life to my younger self; neat-looking characters in busy colourful spreads - they're fun pictures.

   I'm gonna tell you the whole plot because I quite like it and you're unlikely ever to read it. The book's about a simple old man called Albert, who likes gardening and listening to the radio with his cat, but one day, his radio's fuse blows. Unable to find another one in the shop, he is coerced into buying a TV - and he becomes addicted to the glow of the small screen. He drinks in entertainment-based consumerism, rampantly buying more and more TVs and aerials and satellite dishes so he can get more channels and more entertainment, even selling his previously-beloved garden to fund his descent into couch-potatodom, of which he hits rock bottom when he moved a fridge and microwave into his television-room. At the book's low point, he has a wall of televisions blocking out the sun, and he just slouches there, watching/eating/sleeping/repeating. But then lo, he awakes one day and a bird has somehow flown into his room. It presents him with a flower, reminding him of his lost garden and his love for what had been his normal life, and then it starts pecking at his remote controllers, turning off each and every screen. Albert rushes downstairs, and with the neighbours' (his garden's now owners) help, tears down the fence and agrees to now share it with them, which they do, for the happy-ever-after of the book. The dozens of defunct television sets become reused as plantpots.

   It's a blatant cautionary tale, one that was needed when it was published in 1991, and one that's definitely needed in our current Netflix-age. Entertainment addiction, capitalist-driven materialism, the loneliness epidemic - these are all serious and densely-interconnected issues. Our culture is being moulded, twisted, by economic forces pushing distraction above mindfulness, isolation above community, endless acquisition for personal gain above contentment with enough for sharing. Exactly how these processes occur is far beyond the scope of a children's book (or for that matter for my blog post about aforementioned book) to explain fully, but the powerful gist of Albert's story, which I think had a somewhat underhandedly-profound influence on me as a kid, is that the solution to these problems comes down to the individual. Maybe our circumstances do drive us to loneliness, to laziness, to a passive screen-watching existence that barely resembles personhood. But we can choose to turn off the screen, to go outside, to start being productive and sociable again. And rightly. Maybe Albert needed an enigmatic bird to prod him in this direction, but we would hope that children, having read this, would learn to recognise with disgust when their lifestyles are veering too far toward that depicted but that which sadly resembles a great many people nowadays (including, I'll admit so as to avoid hypocrisy, myself at times). So, it's a very good cautionary tale and is also quite an entertaining read for children (assuming they're like me when I read it as a kid, cos I enjoyed it). Worth getting instead of another cartoon boxset for your attention-spanless nephew's next birthday, though you might be wasting your money. Cautionary tales, I find, seldom work on those who have already fallen off whatever cliff the book warns them about. Do kids even read nowadays?

Franny & Zooey

This book, the third by Jerome David Salinger to grace the pages of this blog and, no less, upon my third reading of it, is comprised of a long short story and a short novella that together explore a messy emotional incident that occurred, and was more or less resolved, between the two youngest siblings of the Glass family. Of Salinger's four books, it is I think the most spiritual in theme and content, if not in tone (though all of his works are somewhat spiritual in tone). In this post I would like to start sheafing through the hundreds of scribbled pages of mental notes that I've accrued over years of loving Salinger's writings, and organise them into a rough explanation of what I think makes his work so special, so unique, and how it can help its reader grow. I'm doing this in this post because I've already done a Salingeresque bleeding-heart post on the other Glass family novella-pair, and a cursory reviewer's overview of his collection of shorts, so I'll take this one to be my punchy, philosophical, hopefully insightful, tremendously precocious attempt at some literary insight, at least of how I've read him. Astute readers will note that I have not yet reread Salinger's most famous work and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, but rest assured I will do soon (it's currently under my pillow with a bookmark nestled just inside the front cover, waiting). Seeing as his novel is more self-contained than these other three works, I'll here discuss how Franny & Zooey, as well as the other two, help us build up a framework in which to understand the driving motors, the soul, of Salinger's writing, which I feel manifests itself more tangibly in the other works - but understanding which is the key to properly getting any of them, including his novel, which works well as a stand-alone, but seen in the context of the worldview revealed by his others is an almost incomparably brilliant book.

   Note - if you're sketchy on the following point you'll probably have stopped reading already, but please bear in mind that I am not a scholar of literature by any measure. The following analysis is that of a purebred amateur (I haven't even read the Sparknotes for it, though to do so would be thoroughly against the spirit of the Glass family so who cares), and so please, dear reader, take no shame or pride in disagreeing, but I hope you find my thoughts on the matter at least interesting, as I feel that thinking them through has thoroughly deepened my appreciation of Salinger's books, and has thus also built character; and it may also do for others. But before I dive into self-indulgent theory I shall fulfil the chief obligation of this blog: to summarise the book and recommend it.

   There is first a long short story, called Franny, concerning a terrible date that Franny Glass, the youngest of the Glass siblings, has with her boyfriend Lane Coutell on a short return from college. She despairs at his ambitious student-like normalcy, rants against egoism and pretense, shrugs off any proper conversation and neglects to eat throughout their lunch date. The only thing that seems to perk her back into life is talking about a book that she's been obsessively reading, called The Way of a Pilgrim, about a Russian peasant who tries to learn a mystical method of prayer, and then travels, humbly sharing it with others. Lane doesn't pick up on the fact that this is the only thing his clearly damaged girlfriend is currently able to find any genuine interest in at all, and he doesn't listen to her explanation. She has a nervous breakdown in the bathroom and later faints.
   There is secondly a short novella, called Zooey, concerning the attempts of the second-youngest Glass sibling, Zooey, and their mother Bessie, to rouse Franny from some kind of emotional crisis that she's fallen into on the family sofa. He is depicted first bantering at his mother harshly from a bathtub, later neatening up to go to a meeting to discuss a poorish script he's been talked into acting in. Before leaving the apartment, he drops into the lounge, and talks to Franny at length about her predicament, angering and upsetting her considerably with his incisive tactless analysis of why she feels the way she does. After a couple of other fruitless tactics (pretending to be one of her other brothers by disguising his voice over the phone, dredging up many a memory of previous philosophy-induced breakdowns within the enigmatic precocious Glass family, briefly even attempting a vaudeville performance), he finally launches into an inspiring finale about the nature of faith and joy and the objects of these two phenomena, and though he delivers this with a rather blasé academic bent, it does seem to work in fixing his sister's mind.
   Summarising a Salinger text is more or less completely pointless. These are two of the most human, most thought-provoking, most honest, rambling yet blunt, raw yet verbose, sad and hilarious and weirdly engaging, pieces of writing that you will ever read. If you have a brain and a heart and a pair of eyes, please, I urge you, read these, as well as the other books.
   Well, now; what makes Salinger's books special? What is it about these works of literature that so imbues them with unique soul and personality, so able to perfectly bridge the gap between the mundane and the ripely spiritual?
   Disillusionment is the core theme, following two main threads. Firstly, an ideal for human relationships: sincere, mutual, trusting, spontaneous, positive, and fundamentally functional. We see this interpersonal approach embodied in classically Salingeresque characters; who are almost always sentimental and needy. The sad reality of our broken world means that this ideal model of relationships struggles, never quite clicks into place, and so in encounters, dark and mundane, with the egoism and pretense that taints social life with 'phoniness', these characters become alienated and cynical. Children feature heavily in Salinger's writings because they can be presented and understood as of an age whereby they haven't yet outgrown naivety and innocence: they much more naturally emulate this ideal.
   The second thread through which we encounter disillusionment is harder to pin down: an ideal for all value-laden pursuits that comprise a individual human life, seeking truth and beauty, striving for perfection, expressed most commonly through art and religion. Alongside the wounded childlike cynics mentioned above, Salinger's larger characters are often aesthetes or mystics of some kind; striving to capture, or even merely glimpse, absolute values that they know to exist. However, as with those trying to live in social harmony, those trying to acquaint themselves with perfection are far from indefatigable. Pretense and egoism pervade and spoil these spheres too, clouding the purity of the characters' pursuit, leading to further disenchantment.
   Evidence of both these prongs is evident in all of Salinger's notable characters. Holden Caulfield and Buddy Glass, his two most significant narrators, seem to embody a relatively neutral middle-ground between them, Holden veering more toward the former type of disillusionment and Buddy the latter, but ultimately not too burdened by these weights as we rely on them as narrators more to be apt describers of human character, which they are, in ways that do go on anyway to reveal much about these themes. Seymour, as he is presented, seems to me to completely capture the full tragic depth of both prongs. Franny and Zooey, both child-celebrity intellectuals struggling under the weight of their older brothers' ridiculous schemes of philosophical education, have both been dragged by the former into a deep antisociality, and pushed by the latter into a state of angst (which Zooey has come to terms with, and his helping Franny come to terms with it too is the main plot thread of Zooey). Non-Glass family characters bear much of these marks too: just flip through the short stories. Eloise, Selena's brother Franklin, the Chief, Jean de Daumier-Smith, Teddy - in varying states of joy and sorrow, these characters' lives stem from these twin motors that drive Salinger's works.
   His strong spiritual themes are present because of religion's capacity to underpin, justify and obligate these kinds of perfection and value that his characters crave; similarly his occasional sardonic references to psychoanalysis as a 'cure-all' for characters' problems shows a faith that rather than having to scientifically or therapeutically restructure our minds we can overcome these forms of alienation to some extent by collectively deciding to be nicer; his frequent use of unusual but fairly mundane social situations likewise demonstrates the all-invasive lack of these perfections in human life and thought. So his overall tone comes across as cynical; we know of truth and beauty and yet it is never quite here, as in reality, the world often does just suck. This disappointment runs deep and J.D. knows it. This is why his work has such an endearing quality to those who stick with it and listen to it: humans are seekers, we feel our existential absurdity and it stings, and this deep-cutting fact has massive implications for our character, behaviour, the way we converse and conduct relationships; and his unmatched eye for minute quirks enable him to capture and draw out these implications in scenes that come across as real with characters who seem neurotic and insecure enough to be like genuine people, just as self-conflicted, just as happy and sad at the same time. The brilliance of Salinger is that he connects the universal wont of humankind - as sketched out above - into the details of unique personality and circumstance. He does so gently but never open-handedly, in a complex but not obtuse manner, and the result is writing that clicks on a fundamental level with what it's like to be a person.

the Remains of the Day

This book, Kazuo Ishiguro's many-prize-winning novel about, as my dad (who is not a literary critic) put it, actually quite aptly, "a boring butler who realises he's lived a boring life and gets sad", is an immediate contender for the best novel I've read all year.
   Straight to it!
   Mr Stevens is the butler of Darlington Hall and has been for several decades. He takes immense pride in his work, having learned from one of the best; his father, a butler of truly great standing in that profession, the key and elusive characteristic to which being 'dignity'. (Extensive sections of the novel are, admittedly, about being a great butler. However, unlike those gratuitous portions of Moby Dick that are just about how to identify, capture and dismember sperm whales, these are both [a] enjoyable to read thanks to the amusingly impervious politeness of Mr Stevens's narration, and [b] essential in building up our understanding of Stevens's identity as a butler, which is precisely what begins to slip in the novel's more poignant parts). In July 1956, he receives a letter from Mrs Benn, formerly Ms Kenton, who was the housekeeper at Darlington Hall for many years until leaving for marriage long ago. Stevens, on pretense of 'trying to persuade her to retake her position' following a troublesome staff plan, decides to visit her in Cornwall - having been more or less told by his American-nouveau-riche employer Mr Farraday to take some time off for a holiday, something Stevens has basically never had. So, our dignified narrator drives from Darlington Hall to Cornwall, rekindling along his way aspects of a humanity that he had, for the sake of professionalism as a butler, kept buried for most of his life. He begins to learn how to interact with strangers, converse in a non-servile manner, how to properly enjoy things for their own sake without quite so much concern for their organisation or efficiency.
   And, most importantly, he reflects on previous times in his life where he had failed to embrace these aspects of his personhood. A considerable bulk of the novel is comprised of flashbacks upon Stevens's life and career as a butler: the grandiose and perhaps-questionable political orchestrations of Lord Darlington (his late employer, the original owner of Darlington Hall); the professional glaze lent to any and every relationship rendering it stilted; previous times in which he was deeply proud of his work and other deep disappointments; the loss of his father; occasional odd little anecdotes; and the unpicked fruits of a possible friendship (or more) in his working relationship with Ms Kenton. It is in the jumps between these remembrances and Stevens's slowly shifting perspective in his present adventure that we see him begin to realise, with dawning immensity of regret, how much he has missed in his life by being too devoted to being a butler. Here he is, a decade or two from death's door, the best of his career behind him, few friends, no family, and nothing to show for himself but a lifetime of impeccably good service to gentlemen and their guests in stately homes.
   What is left for Stevens and people like him? 'The remains of the day', all the time we have left after we decide to start making the most of life outside our work, is all that we can make the most of, and so we should embrace that. Of course, that's not to say we shouldn't take pride in our work - Stevens's life is meaningful to him precisely because he has achieved so well within the spheres of butlerdom - but we cannot be confined to that. Ultimately this novel is a parable of how we enjoy our lives by living them, including our work, but never letting work dominate us such that it becomes an irremovable identity, locking us out of so much else that is special, as being a butler did to Stevens.
   There is also a fair deal of thought-provoking content about a variety of topics; class identity and how it changed in Britain between the '20s and the '50s (quite a bit), the boundaries between gentlemen and persons worthy of political decision-making, what it means to take pride in something, the ubiquity of etiquette, and what we choose to place our identity in and how that can hurt if misplaced.
   I may have made it sound deep but it's a relatively easy read. Extremely moving in parts, bubbling with restrained humour in others (one part fully gave me the giggles; Stevens's awkward endeavour to relay a certain piece of unexpected news to Mr Reginald Cardinal - you'll have to read it to find out), and throughout narrated by Mr Stevens's perfectly-pitched English propriety. It's a truly delightful book, although as noted by my dad one that has far much more character and emotion than it does plot, which personally I adore in a novel but lots of people find boring - if you're one of those people who does find that boring in a novel you probably shouldn't be reading this blog. In fact, no, I'm outright banning you. Read this novel and love it or get out.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

This book by Jeff Kinney was 'alright'. It's my younger brother's. I was invited back to my family's house for tea but when I got here three hours ago they'd forgotten and were all out, so, naturally, I let myself in and found something to do, which in this case was unexpectedly enjoy (yes, I'm a snob, I often expect books, children's or not, that have had immediate commercial success and get turned into movies, to be rubbish) a novel written for people half my age. The book's about a weak, unpopular, socially awkward kid called Greg Heffley, who struggles with - whfff, everything. He's a typical post-childhood pre-pubescent boy, in that he's basically just despicable; he spends his whole life avoiding bullies, vaguely longing after unattainable girls, hungering for artificial screen-based entertainment, inexplicably irritating his parents, and politically planning incremental progression of his own popularity. He has one friend, a dude called Rowley who actually seems to have it more or less together. The diary charts his day-to-day failures at these and other goals, across the time frame of a year. He illustrates his diary with cartoons that help narrate the specific events in which he fails to not get beaten up, fails to make cool friends, fails to do that well in school, fails to conduct a functional respectful relationship with his family or friends. I'm making it sound pretty bleak, aren't I? Greg Heffley's life and diary perfectly encapsulates that weird pre-young-adult bleakness, where one is on the verge of adolescence but hasn't yet left childhood behind, and finds oneself unable to do anything properly. Props to Jeff Kinney for so ably replicating what it feels like during the two or three years that boys spend in that pit before they emerge as marginally-less-weird teenagers - and despite how dark I've been in this post, be assured that the book is a very non-existential wholeheartedly-if-sardonically-amusing read, perfectly appropriate for young readers. I found the realistic presentation of that 12-year-old mindset funny to read, especially given the overall quite 'nice' plot, but then on reflection realising that that's what 12-year-old boys are pretty much actually like, and how depressing is that. Anyway, I wrote this in a massive rush as like I said I'm at home and am writing this on my phone on the toilet and my poo finished ages ago and I heard my family come home about ten minutes ago but they don't know I'm here so I really want to end this post, go downstairs and have the tea that I came here to have. If this were a fantastic and thought-provoking book, I would edit this post later and do a much more thorough treatment, but it wasn't, it was just a fairly funny and disproportionately well-selling (told you I was a snob) children's novel in which the defining climax was that someone eats mouldy cheese. Should you read this book? Meh. Like I said, it surpassed my expectations, but it's just not what I would've wanted to read when I was the age that the people who are expected to read this book are. Boys who are Greg Heffley's age don't want to read about themselves, they want adventure, mystery, excitement, intrigue, magic, horror. It's like Adrian Mole but for kids, and that takes most of the fun out of it, albeit leaving most of the bleakness in. It'd be an alright present for a selfish socially-awkward 12-year-old, but then, it might just be too close to home and depress them. Dunno. There are definitely better ways to spend three hours. Aaaaaaaaaaand, paragraph.

   Flush.