Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

This book by Jen Campbell is very much what it says on the tin: a humourous compilation of zany things that customers have said in the small handful of bookshops whose owners collaborated in the making of this humourous gift-book. I got given this for Christmas (only yesterday) and so hate to be nit-picking so soon, but the majority of these weren't funny. The majority of entries attest, at best, to customers either having a range of toxic views (a handful of racists, a bagful each of xenophobes and homophobes, and a whole lotta sexists) or simply being outright ignorant of what a bookshop actually is or is for (dozens of entries of people who seem to think that a bookshop constitutes the same roles as a library, cafe, creche, general store, or almost infinitely variable helpline services); the more I read, the more I felt that the occasional genuinely amusing entries weren't worth the ever-mounting sense of despair I felt at a society so losing its grasp on literate culture that requests like the ones contained in this book were possible at all. Basically, it entertained me far less than it fuelled my incumbent misanthropy, which at least has a kind of value in that I have always been somewhat put off independent bookshops by their tendency to have very grumpy misanthropes as owners/staff - but now I see why, and if one of the main points of reading is to develop empathy, then I have developed such with a small group of people who I have given lots of money to over the years but struggle to like or understand, but if bookshops truly are plagued by customers coming in and asking things that are bafflingly dim or gobsmackingly rude or both and everything inbetween, then... ugh. Neil Gaiman's commendation on the front calls this book "so funny... so sad" - ditto. I do not recommend this book except as a present to anyone who works in a bookshop themselves, as to read of ludicrous customers whom they themselves have not had to deal with may be vaguely cathartic.

This Is Water

This book is the text of a commencement address given by author (of Infinite Jest, which I will probably get round to reading at some poi- oh, who am I kidding) David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. It also belongs to my flatmate Jack, who has gone home for Christmas, so I figured I could read it, blog about it, and return it all without his noticing in the interim few days of otherwise-festivities. The general thrust of his speech is about the complexity, difficulty, and ultimately the absolute necessity of trying to live a compassionate life. He's talking to a bunch of liberal arts graduates, so he hopes that something of the proactive and critical use of ideas which their education purportedly challenged them to grow in their capacities for might pay off here - that they may enter the world, twisted and nonsensical though it may be, and hold firmly able to interact with it as independent rational agents who are deeply and warmly aware that they are also very much interdependent beings, and they will need others' help just as others will need theirs, and to close themselves off from being able to ask for or offer this is to render themselves less than fully human for the sake of pursuing some insidious constructed lie. I found it interesting that David, though by no means a man of faith, talks at some length in this about the need for finding a coherent centre to one's worldview to help one retain the keenness of their grasp on this truth: "everyone worships... the question is what?" and goes on to include what is probably the most cogent and universal meditation on the nature of idolatry that I've ever read in a secular text. Overall he's very clear that the whole point of this conversation is not one in which anyone really learns anything new, but in which we are constantly having to remind ourselves and each other of the deep old fundamental truths that pervade our cultures and consciences just as thoroughly as they are regularly and easily forgotten. That's where the title's from: he wants us to be so fully aware of the network of moral obligations that hold society together that we become constantly cognizant of it surrounding us, like fish, patiently reminding each other as they swim along, 'this is water,' even though they cannot see it and could very easily forget it was there altogether, swimming about their own business and looking straight through it. This is water. This is water. This is water. David Foster Wallace was an outrageously clever man, and this transcripted speech veritably swells with a perspective rich with clarity and blunt wise truths.

I Believe in Evangelism

This book by David Watson was one I've been reading as part of an ongoing literature review on discipleship in my new job with Church Army's research unit. While perhaps not as practical as other books on evangelism, Watson gives a deeply biblical and thoroughly encouraging exploration of what constitutes the subjective life of the individual Christian - i.e. continual response to the gospel. This should manifest itself in calls to love one another truly and fully, both inside church communities and from within those to outside: and bringing the gospel to people who have not been properly presented with it before is among the greatest acts of love a Christian can perform. Watson's view is a holistic one - effective evangelism emerges from rightly-motivated communities of grace-led people boldly diving into dark and marginal contexts to demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit and God's word against the sinfulness prevalent in attitudes and cultures among the lost. This is not easy work. But ultimately, Watson reminds us, it is not work we do alone: it is God's work in which we share as instruments, and by stepping out in faith and with joy proclaiming the gospel's truth as we love all, particularly in difficult circumstances, the church can be expectant in God's part in this work. Tying up lofty quantified expectations of 'harvests' from cleverly-planned outreach schemes or making-the-church-cool-again events - well, these things can and often do yield fruit, but it is God's work. David Watson in this book gives a deep and potent series of chapters about the true nature of what we are doing in the work of discipleship, church life, evangelism, and all the parts of life in Word-centred Christian witness in which these all-too-frequently-compartmentalised things overlap in gloriously messy simplicity, rest on sustenance of faith and are powered by the Holy Spirit.

Freedom Movement: 500 Years of Reformation

This book by Michael Reeves is a very short discussion about the sheer historical potency of the Protestant Revolution, the first tinder-strike of which flew half a millennium ago. While this may be one of the most fascinating and powerfully-long-reaching threads in the whole of Western intellectual, social, political and moral history (and I do hope to read more on the subject, especially given [somewhat dangerously given my book addiction] that my new workplace is also home to South Yorkshire's largest library of Christian theological and historical texts - hence the relative shortness of this post), the book's aim is not to explore this in much depth. to remind us of the profoundness of the gospel truth which the Reformation was key in effectively democratising: before Wittenberg and Gutenberg the Roman Catholic Church was of unparalled power in controlling public understanding of the religion to which an entire continent was almost forcibly adhered; Luther's rediscovery of biblical grace was a radical return to the church's proclamation and effective witness of actual good news. Reeves plumbs the depths of the mysteries of the gospel for all people in all ages, and thereby shows the revolutionary brilliance of the Reformation in provoking and facilitating individual responses to biblical truth. It made me reflect with deep gratitude for the historical currents that birthed Protestantism (and more roundaboutly, dozens of gigantic and profoundly impactful ideas emergent from post-Catholic-hegemony European thought - the Reformation changed everything), as this heavily shaped our modern world and continues to do so - for better or worse, given the fractal-like nature of its spiralling influences and responses to these, but the fundamental change that sought to establish access to the gospel for all men and women and so helped rediscover the incredible paradigm-shattering truth that salvation is by faith alone: this is worth remembering with celebration. Martin Luther said, "I have done nothing by myself", and he's kind of right - God used him in history to challenge corruption in the church that had grown up to protect itself above proclaiming truth, and kickstart an immense process of rediscovery and reformation.

* Why should it? There's a very thorough wikipedia page, not to mention a pretty good documentary-drama on Netflix about Luther and his upstart protestance's impact. 

When the Game is Over It All Goes Back in the Box

This book by John Ortberg is a powerful and practical exploration of how to maintain our most meaningful perspectives in a Christian life - the eternal. He uses the metaphor of a board game, in which struggling too hard to win is rendered pointless as the game draws to a conclusion and (well, you know the title), and the whole book is structured around this metaphor - with concepts like main rules, being master of the board, getting on with other players, playing fairly, respecting chance, winning the 'inner' game, taking turns properly, understanding priorities, etc acting as springboards for each chapter to build on the same aggregate extended metaphor, and though it might sound like it gets irritating and repetitive Ortberg is a skilled enough writer to couch each reminder in the slowly-updating stream of ideas, and the whole book acts as a deep and powerful series of steps building an extremely well-developed and insightful collection of wise at the things we make life into games of and how such tendencies can be seen, mitigated, and resisted. It's a book that is enjoyable and accessible but, as any gospel-centred book on Christian life should be, is thoroughly uncomfortable at times, because it's written transparently and flexibly enough that readers will be bringing to mind their own struggles on game-boards as they work through each chapter, and confronting places in which we are failing to live our lives truly for the sake of Christ and are desperately still trying to win personal stakes in Monopoly or whatever is never a cosy process - but it does lead us to grace, and so even if we're losing a particular game we can look fondly to the orchestrator knowing that once all the pieces have been boxed away and all is forgotten, we haven't really lost anything, as they we are with them. I don't know, that was a very clumsy sentence, I feel like. It's late and I've had a long week. This book is highly recommended for Christian readers wanting to develop eternal perspectives; it's original, makes practical hints about mindset and attitude, and is biblically-grounded all the way through (although on surface level it may seem to hinge more upon the extended metaphor, this is always merely a springboard into proper discussion of scriptural truth).

Optimism over Despair

This book is a collation of interviews by C. J. Polychroniou with Noam Chomsky about the state of the world in 2017 - and boy, lemme tell you, it's bleak going. I got it chiefly because I hoped from the title that Noam was going to slice through the despair-inducing series of global events and trends dominating the headlines of this past year with a knife made of pure hope, but no, it's basically just a thorough, concise, and horrifyingly well-informed exploration of just how fucked we are, but of course resorting to despair will only make us get more fucked, and so the only morally or politically viable course for all those with progressive agendas to maintain as an attitude is a resigned, stoic, optimism.*

   Throughout, C. J. and Noam discuss:

• Collapsing American hegemony
• Unravelling European integration
• The new phase of the global 'war on terror'
• ISIS, NATO, Russia, and the shitstorm in the Middle-East
• Inequality and unsustainability in the plutocratic model of post-neoliberal 'really existing capitalism'
• Trump and the decline of American civil society
• Republicans (the most dangerous group of people on the planet) and global warming
• US meddling in other countries' elections/societies/etc
• Religion's dogged resistance to separating from politics
• Utter failures of US healthcare and education systems
• The potential of anarcho-socialist democratic change when all these trends/events are placed with optimistic consideration in their historical context

   It is very scary stuff. To be honest, with the level of detail and insight Noam brings to each of these broad fields of discussion, one is left with an overbearing sense of dread at the state of the world far moreso from reading this book than if one had read separate books on each issue or even a potent digest of leftist critique-responses to most of the actual news items comprising these larger problems over the past year. I'd recommend it as an oh-shit-inspirational text for progressive activists, but really most of those already know to a large degree just how fucked we are on all the fronts discussed herein, and so this book effectively just serves as an educational reinforcement from that raspy old prophet of contemporary western anarchism. You would probably learn a lot from this book, especially historical blips of detail that often elude mainstream narratives on these big issues - but overall I don't feel there is as much to be gained from reading this as there is by simply reading the news and maintaining one's dedication to taking action, if one is politically inclined similarly to Chomsky or myself, which if you're thinking of reading this you probably are. But yeh. It lives up to the title in prose conclusion only.

* That's not to say good things aren't happening, because they are. Just nowhere near big or fast enough to substantively offset some of the bigger and more pressing factors in why we're fucked.

The Shack

This book by William Paul Young is a powerful theological novel (a quote on the front claims it has the capacity to do for our times what John Bunyan did for his with Pilgrim's Progress) about suffering, forgiveness, sadness, and trust, wrapped around an exploratory picture of our relationship with God. I've just breezed through it in a few days because though I have read it before (years ago) my friend Charlotte and my little brother Ryan have both mentioned they're currently reading it, and I decided to revisit one of the more poignant stick-in-your-memory stories I've read. The book itself, in terms of the (non-God) characters, the plot, the writing, etc - to be completely honest is pretty contrived and average. Were it not for the fact that the bulk of the book comprises its main character (typical, if jaded, American everyman called Mack who has recently lost a daughter to a random kidnapper-murderer) basically just hanging out with corporeal embodiments of the three members of the Trinitarian Godhead* then I would find very little compelling about this book - but oh boy, the way he writes the character of the trinity is just kind of under-the-skin-tingles familiar and brimming with wisdom and truth. Loads of respectable theologians complained about this book's portrayal of the Trinity as three distinct persons as committing this heresy or that - but ultimately I don't really think it's meant to be taken as a speculative attempt at realistic imagination, more a leap into 'what if God wanted to do this, what would it look like, how could we observe the members of the Trinity interacting in ways that were recognisable to everyday human life?' - and this, I think, it does very well. Mack and God eat together, run across a lake, do some gardening and digging, and have several chapters-worth of extremely poignant gospel-infused conversation about his pain, his faith, the complex nature of right and wrong in a broken world and the God who is right there around him who he refuses to humbly and lovingly accept. These conversations are where the book comes alive and is where the meat of its being worth reading occurs: W. P. Young has wide and deep experience with worldly loss but also knows the character of God well, and this comes across in his writing - ultimately it's a book about how Christians can learn to practice living in joyful awareness of and sensitivity to the presence of God, regardless of how much confusion or trauma they feel separates them from that same grace and love. Many are the lines in this book that I think have a particular, soft-spoken but powerful straightforwardness in making a point rooted in biblical thought that speaks of our relationship with God, and couched in the (arguably heretical but artistically allowable?) interpersonal manifestations of these characters' conversational responses to human questions often deep truths will bubble to the surface and you will think, 'oh, I'd never thought of it like that before,' and you may be prompted to revisit your own attitudes and find them growing in humility and joy. And frankly, what more can one reasonably expect as a good outcome from reading a Christian novel?

* Jesus is portrayed with historical-ethnic accuracy, which is refreshing. God the Father is a motherly Afro-American woman who goes by the name of Elousia. The Holy Spirit takes the form of an ethereal Asian lady who calls herself Sarayu.

Meanwhile, Trees

This book by Mark Waldron is the first book of poetry I've ever bought purely because of its title. I am trying to read more poetry, but aside from the obvious span of classic or well-renowned names, it's hard to discover new ones - so in my last jaunt past a local bookshop I simply browsed the shelf of poets for any titles that sprung out at me, and obviously something about Meanwhile, Trees did the trick. And as haphazard and noncommittal as that sounds (and if it sounds so it's because it is), I actually very much enjoyed this book. Mark Waldron's poems have a darkly kind of twisted character to them, but also a bizarre and often verging on surreal current of playfulness, weirdness, irony and levity. The blurb proclaims, 'these poems may pretend they're joking but they never really are' - and that comes across; one can find oneself laughing out loud at a turn of phrase throwing a stanza headlong into absurdity only for the following lines to drag it back into a larger grimmer picture of, well, still absurdity. Would recommend to poetry-readers with a stomach for visceral imagery and shapeshifting ennui.

Jesus and the Earth

This book by the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, is a powerful short little tract on the implications for Christian environmentalism that can be derived directly from the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament accounts. Long-term readers will probably be aware that Christianity and environmentalism are both very much up my street - and I'd like to devote a longer post to some relatively in-depth discussion of how these two things overlap and converge, but I'm gonna do this in a later post as there's another book I'm reading at the moment that will empower a much juicier wodge of reflection. James Jones here has provided an extremely accessible text both strongly grounded in biblical text and mainstream theology as well as capable of discussing ecological issues without risking confusion or alienation of the average Christian reader (times are changing, but I still often get the impression that many in the church are almost hostile to environmental concerns, or at best actively passive - on numerous occasions my voiced concerns about climate change or whatever have been brushed aside with a deft 'oh well, it won't matter if Jesus comes back before then!'). In the years since this was published, the urgency of environmental matters facing humankind has rocketed, and the church could be doing so much more to pursue a renewed and beneficent stewardship of this one planet God has given us to live on; but such change is always a gradual process, with different persons or parts progressing at different rates - with that in mind, this book is one I'd recommend (as a text to recommend to or give to) to Christian readers who are for want of a nicer word ignorant about environmental issues: Jones' faithful and scriptural approach makes this book probably a good one to nudge those who love Jesus closer to practical up-to-date realisations about what that means for lovingly living in Jesus' creation.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

This book is the fourth in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, Arthur Dent winds up somehow back on Earth, where he meets a young woman called Fenchurch (who turns out to be the person who worked out the meaning of life shortly before being destroyed by the Vogons - or at least, this happened on the previous iteration of Earth). Most of the book is a not-so-sci-fi pretty standard issue English comedy love story between Arthur and Fenchurch, as they try flying together, meet a rain god, win a raffle, and go in search of a madman (Wonko the Sane) who claims to know what happened to all the dolphins (who, I hasten to add, all disappeared - the title is their last message to humanity), before Ford Prefect rocks up in the last chapter with a giant space robot, shoplifts a load of films he'd never got round to finishing before Earth got blown up last time round, and the three of them go in search of God's final message to his creation, which is a tad anticlimactic, although the actual scene is very touching and has Marvin in it.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

Life, the Universe, and Everything

This book is the third in Douglas Adams's cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, having been trapped on prehistoric Earth for about five years, Arthur and Ford escape through an eddy in the space-time continuum (on a sofa, no less) and find themselves at Lord's Cricket Ground, only for evil robots left over from an ancient galactic war to disrupt things - they are rescued by a friend with a spaceship/bistro, and go on to rejoin their Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin to avert the robots from rekindling the enormous galaxy-threatening war. During the course of all this, Arthur also meets his archnemesis and learns to fly. It's pretty zarking hoopy.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

selected poems 1923 - 1958

This book, a collection of poems by e. e. cummings, was just gorgeous. I mean, if you like a good poem then (well there's no shortage of them but) dive right in - cummings's work is modernistic and incredibly inventive in places, but his style is so polished and honed that they are immediately accessible too (perhaps on second or third reading for some of the more experimental ones); you will be swollen with feelings from perfectly-constructed abstractions; you will come to learn the truly immaculate power of well-chosen/placed punctuation; some of the simpler ones are like drinking a warm mugful of springtime sunbeams blended with honey and rosepetals and lovers' embraces. There is blazing romance and raw human joy and natural beauty in these poems, and sword-sharp satire in some of them too. As with it seems most of the poetry books I've done posts about, I don't have any particularly strong reflective thoughts about the book overall, as these like all true and great poems are transcendent, and thus resist being directly digestible by mere intellect: they are to be felt, not made into some ingredient for a hodgepodge mishmash whimwham of ideas none of which could possibly grasp the elusive core of meaning upon which a body of poetic work ultimately rests. And so, to that end, I will conclude this post by copying one out.

no man,if men are gods;but if gods must

be men,the sometimes only man is this

(most common,for each anguish is his grief;

and,for his joy is more than joy,most rare)

a fiend,if fiends speak truth;if angels burn

by their own generous completely light,

an angel;or(as various worlds he'll spurn

rather than fail immeasurable fate)

coward,clown,traitor,idiot,dreamer,beast-

such was a poet and shall be and is

-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend

a sunbeam's architecture with his life:

and carve immortal jungles of despair

to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand

the Dave Walker Guide to the Church

This book is a collection of cartoons by Dave Walker making very Church-of-England jokes about the Church of England and those who are part of it. Though I am not one of those such people, most of the gags are either recognisable enough from watching shows like Vicar of Dibley or Rev or otherwise recognisable enough from general aspects of English church culture and organisation. It was mildly amusing; I would go so far as to say that perhaps a dozen or so did actually prompt me to emit an audible quasi-laughter-noise. But overall, to me the book highlighted (whether unintentionally or not is utterly indiscernable) the crushing depraved stiltedness of English culture, and how poorly this translates into the development of grace-abundant church environments that are properly outgoing, diverse, inclusive, engaging, and generally just good at facilitating basic human community. I mean, fortunately we have the gospel and that arguably offsets the Englishness to a considerable degree but still - I'm not gonna say it's no laughing matter, it just meant that the book doesn't read as particularly funny because lots of the things it's satirising are legitimately endemic cultural aspects of how organised Christianity in this country is clinging to institutions and traditions and whatnot that, bluntly, alienate the average majority in this our post-Christendom era.* The best use I can think of for this book is as a toilet book in a church office loo (tbh I read most of it on the loo anyway); it may bring one or two smiles and prompt three or four vague concerns about missional efficacy or entrenched legalism.

* I write this as one who is not a member of the Church of England,** and despite my devout faith, am strongly of the opinion that the church in this country should sever its historical-institutional ties to the state, for reasons which I can't be bothered to explicate in the asterisk-footnote to a post about a cartoon book even though I usually wouldn't hesitate at all before doing something like that but Giles Fraser basically makes the best case for it here, and links are easier.

** Although on the 24th I will start a job at the Church Army - which is kind of part of the Church of England, but yeh, whatever, dunno.

Ethics

This book (available from that link as a complete ebook from Project Gutenberg) is the best-known work by rationalist philosopher Baruch [a.k.a. Benedict de] Spinoza, and represents perhaps one of the most singularly ambitious acts of holistic thinking in the history of the western modernist tradition: to devise a completely cohesive logical explanation of basic metaphysics, epistemology, metaethics and ethics based on axioms (like Euclid did for geometry, a field widely known for its similar level of complexity to All Of Philosophy). Parts of this book were core readings for a module on the rationalists I took in second-year of undergraduate (wow that was a long time ago now), and something about Spinoza seemed more endearing and/or accessible than the other rationalists whose books I acquired cheaply (in the days before I became wholly reliant on the university library and only bought books I wanted for personal use) - so I kept reading it after the module finished, but it's fairly dense and there were lots of other things I was reading so it fell by the wayside; until September 2016, when I went in pursuit of meaty things to read alongside my [then]-new writing project and this fit the bill - only for my bag containing this book to be stolen from a house party in Manchester that same month when I was only thirty or so pages in (it was a whole ordeal); fortunately, it showed up the next day discarded in a cupboard as apparently the party-crashing thieves had only needed a bag to chuck people's phones left on charge in and were happy to leave behind a classic work of holistic rationalist philosophy. Crazy, huh?
   Anyway - onto the book itself.
   Spinoza lays out his axiomatic philosophy in five sections: on God (which explores the metaphysical nature of all reality and considers how this operates in component parts, including humans), on the mind (which explores from these metaphysical standpoints how self-awareness must be made possible and what the nature of its being is, as in humans), on the human mind's being intrinsically connected to physical existence and therefore subject to all manner of 'affects' (emotional-mental micro-reactions that underlie and inform rational agency) and what these are, how this plays out psychologically, and finally how individuals can transcend their affects to live by reason and find true freedom.
   Now, the intricate detail arguments of how effectively comprehensively cohesive a system of philosophical thought this all is is a question far beyond me, and if you want an answer (probably read this first anyway) then google John Cottingham or just read some of the Stanford commentaries about Spinoza's work and how it stood up to later criticism but basically, while it may be riddled with slight twinges of illogic and feature occasional propositions that do not clearly follow from previous axioms or propositions and seem to spring 'rationally' out of nowhere, likewise the explanations and corollaries and scholiums in each point often seem to harbour nested presumptions that certainly haven't been justified by the previous work - and fair enough, as it was a gargantuan task, attempting to literally distill the nature of reality and the good life into a provable, axiomatic, impenetrably logical system - and the sheer sincerity with which Spinoza goes about this effort is testament to the (in my opinion) incredibly strong ethical centre, and therefore transcendent moral drive, of his work. Cynical readers may think I'm just starting to slap words together willy-nilly with no regard for whether it's a tangibly-meaningful phrase, and well, they'd be half-right. What I was trying to say is that Spinoza inevitably gets a lot of the details and mechanics not-quite-spot-on, presumably because he's not omniscient (although, if you take his metaphysical arguments seriously, there is a case to be made for his being God, at least a bit*); however the general thrust of Ethics elucidates a world that is ordered, rational, explicable, where unity and humility and togetherness and reason are implicitly better than assuming one is already right regardless of psychological context - and these basic thrusts form the heart of his work, axioms and propositions and syllogisms devised and twisted around these to try to form as cohesive and self-supporting system of rational explanation as possible but never quite succeeding because he was, as I am, as you are, a finite being, intrinsically incapable of grasping the nature of the infinite or eternal, let alone penning comprehensive descriptions of its function and nature, but let the tautological nature of some basic truths preclude their being taken by faith as irrationality: that reason and compassion and joy and freedom are good things to be sought in our own and others' lives, and that these facts have some cosmic significance for, at the very least, us, who knows them.
   My edition's text was translated by Edwin Curley and, in prose if notsomuch argument, was actually extremely readable (and it gets easier as it goes along): if you love mindblowing hypotheticals but never even actually read a philosophy book before, Spinoza's Ethics could be an interesting and weird but manageable and inspiringly nice ride.



* I could do a whole post on religious nitpicking with Spinoza - he was denounced as a heretic by his contemporaries, and while there is much of interest and much to like in his philosophy, it certainly does not reflect stable Christian theology, and is more like quasi-humanist transcendental pantheism if anything.

the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

This book is the second book in Douglas Adams' cult classic trilogy (of which there are five parts) sci-fi comedy adventure. In this instalment, the gang go for lunch at Milliways, a restaurant housed in a time-bubble at the literal end of the universe (though their journey there is delayed by an unplanned trip to the Hitchhikers' Guide head offices, where Zaphod totally fails to gain any perspective); after this Zaphod and Trillian meet the man apparently in charge of Everything (a superb character and his shortish scene is one of my favourites from the whole series) while Ford and Arthur wind up with themselves surrounded by idiots in an unseemingly familiar place.

Probably read the post about the first one for a bit of context about how I'm doing posts for the whole series.

the Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

This book by Tim Keller is a potent little* meditation on the nature of Christlike humility, and how we as Christians trying to live faithfully and lovingly for the good of others and glory of God must seek to transcend the whining itches of our own worldly desires: we do this not by putting ourselves down, concentrating on our faults and trying to pull ourselves up by whatever the moral-theological equivalent of a bootstrap is, but by resting in the grace of the gospel, and simply thinking of ourselves less - devoting more mental effort and space to how we can glorify God and serve others. Humility is not something you impose upon yourself, like cold turkey of the soul, but is something that grows naturally in a heart that is day-by-day moment-by-moment reorienting itself to the gospel, which implicitly inspires God-glorifying and other-serving attitudes and actions, and as we grow in this so will the itches slowly subside.
   It's a great booklet, and one I'd recommend church leaders or whoever to pick up a few dozen of to throw people's way when seemly; there are indubitably fuller, more practical, more theologically-enriched books on more or less the same topic out there, but honestly Keller boils it down to its doctrinal essentials here in a work that is simple, applicable, and truthful, and what more can you ask of this kind of book?



* Key word - this is a very short book. One could read it, without rushing at all, in an hour.

the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

This book is the first in Douglas Adams' trilogy (of which there are actually five) of novels based around the radio show of the same name. As I am currently endeavouring to embark upon my own writing of several comedic sci-fi books it seemed prudent to revisit some of my core influences, and well, this is one of those - I read all five when I was nine, and again when I was thirteen and seventeen, and frankly it's been quite a while so they seem pretty fresh to me upon new readings (guess I've read quite a lot of other stuff since), and so it's safe to say I will finish the whole series pretty soon, and I'll save up my more typical reflective passages for the post about the final instalment (as though actual happenings of each book vary wildly, the characters and general themes are the same and should be fairly straightforward to track across all five), instead just summarising the book here.
   And now the point where I realise how difficult of a book this is to summarise.*
   Okay.
   So there's a book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is basically a pan-galactic form of wikipedia, and a roving researcher for it, after adopting the name Ford Prefect and visiting Earth to find out what's going on here, gets stranded here because it's the bum-end of nowhere. He befriends a human called Arthur Dent, but one days picks up a signal that Vogons are on their way to destroy the Earth completely - which they do, but Ford and Arthur escape, only to be caught, thrown into space, and rescued at the last second by Ford's cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (who is also the president of the galaxy), Marvin the manically-depressed robot, and Tricia MacMillan, a very nice intelligent young woman whom Arthur once met at a fancy-dress party in Islington and totally failed to get off with. Together, they then go off in pursuit of both the people who made the Earth and an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.**
   If any of these arrangements of character and plot sound somewhat improbable - don't panic, that's just how the story works. And it does work. This whole series is to my mind among the cleverest science-fiction and outright funniest most inventive popular fiction out there, and utterly indisputably deserving of its massive cult classic status - if this series is alien to you, well, it starts here, and unless you're secretly a Vogon or something you'll probably find a lot to like about it.



* I'm gonna do the summaries for the first four all as spoiler-free as I can reasonably make them, but in the post about the last book, since I'll be doing some more in-depth stuff on the series' overall themes and arcs and things there will probably be a lot of whole-series spoilers in that. Fair warning.

** To which the answer is, of course, forty-two.***

*** It would have helped to know what the actual Question was.

Recreate Your World

This book by Ron and Charity Luce is designed to turn teenagers who are over-obsessed with pop culture into discerning social critics who reduce their unthinking consumption of goods, services, entertainment and whatnot, and start proactively constructively coming up with ways of being and defining themselves as people in God's good world. Now, the actual value judgments underpinning a lot of the argument in this book in my opinion seem to come from a place of dogmatic adherence to traditional norms and ideals - i.e. it is very puritanical, and insofar as it challenges status quo culture it only challenges it in superficial ways and nowhere in the book does it encourage teenagers to critically or proactively think about applying the same radical scrutiny of the values embedded in pop culture to political society at large - but hey, most book-writing American Christian pastors all run megachurches that depend for religio-economic survival on a deformed version of the gospel which neuters its critique of worldly wealth and power, because, duh doy, monotheistic organised religion and liberal-nationalist economics proved to be an incredibly good hegemonic combo - basically it's unreasonable of me to expect this book to be anything less than a philosophically shallow and spiritually half-hearted nudge in the general right direction of becoming skeptical of worldly culture. Anyway, I reread it* because it's really short and, despite my many complaints about it, I'm now pretty sure it's close to exactly the sort of book my fifteen-year-old brother needs to read to puncture his adolescent faith in the Popular - all the niggles and nuances we can try to work out when he doesn't laugh at me for trying to talk about non-fictional non-pop-culturey stuff. Make of this post what you will. I don't really recommend this book, but I am literally bequeathing it to my sibling in the hope it will help him. It may serve a purpose, and its many inadequacies are probably forgivable in that it's meant to be read by teenagers who are unlikely to retain most of it for long anyway.

* Having read it once before as a fifteen-year-old and retained literally Nothing from it, apart from remembering the phrase 'culture zombie' which still sometimes vaguely pops up in the unreliable-haunting-guilt part of my conscience when I'm thinking/talking/doing summat about the kind of pop culture that Ron Luce dislikes.**

** They represent an ilk (sadly not, I fear, a minority) of the contemporary Western post-Christendom church who would genuinely be less offended by a story with persistent and damagingly insidious sexist undertones than by one which uses the word 'fuck'.

the Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

This book by Terry Pratchett is one I love so much I sort of don't want to write a post about it (same way I was with all the Salingers); it's another that I've read multiple times (not even sure how many*) and has been in storage in my parents' house for the last five years (so including all the time since this blog started), finally being liberated alongside a couple hundred dusty assorted books now that I have moved into a post-studentdom flat with enough space for an adequately-sized bookcase for my ludicrous library - and as I found it in the penultimate box I noted, "that is a brilliant book, I've not read it for like nine years", and bypassing the PURP entirely it went straight to the top of the CRRP*** and by the same time less than 24 hours later (so, nowish) I'd finished it again. It helps that my new flat doesn't have internet yet.****
   You may have astutely got the impression so far that I like this book a lot, but would I recommend it? Yes. Absolutely. To pretty much anyone capable of and open to reading books - there is just a great deal to like; it's an unpretentious classic of modern kid's lit, that can be appreciated thoroughly on many levels (see *).
   It's about a cat called Maurice who has befriended some rats that became intelligent after eating waste from the dump behind the wizards' University, and together with a stupid-looking kid who plays the pipe, they have devised the perfect scam - move into a town, the rats put on a plague, the kid offers the mayor his services for far cheaper than the actual official Piper (who apparently is a scary bloke), all the rats scamper out of town along with him and once they rounded the corner meet up with Maurice to count their gains. However, when the gang descends upon a town called Bad Blintz, there are factors they hadn't predicted: the town is suffering a plague of rats and the Piper has been called for already, there seems to be a terrible food shortage but the rat-catchers are doing well for themselves, a fairy-tale-obsessed girl called Malicia inconveniently befriends the stupid-looking kid, the rats can't find any non-intelligent rats anywhere to be seen, and Maurice detects a dark lingering evil in the air... all of which adds up to an inestimably brilliant conspiracy-romp that is also a powerful, morally-charged story with some fantastic characters. Oh man, I want to read it again already.



* At least three, potentially up to five or six, but before this time last reading was I'm pretty sure summer 2008 (on a family holiday, obviously). I first read it from a school library when I was a keen pet-rat-owning nine-year-old, acquired a copy for a subsequent birthday, and just kept going back to it - because the first time I was only reading it because it was about rats and obviously a pre-teen bookworm with a pet rat will go for that (I even named my third (and last) rat Sardines, after my then favourite character), but even though it's written for a younger audience** it's still just pure genre-shattering Pratchett; hilarious and heartwarming and skewed and flippant and dark and silly and common-sense and thought-provoking and utterly mad yet entirely believable within its own world all at the same time, and there was a simplicity and easiness and real honesty and depth to the story that was unlike anything I'd ever encountered in fiction before, let alone kids' fantasy - needless to say, it stuck with me, and with each re-reading my slowly accruing experience of life and humour and whatnot made the book ever more brilliant.

** Good job too - this brought Discworld to the peripheries of my bookshelves' attention much sooner than the series probably otherwise would have entered it.

*** Pre-selected Upcoming Reading Pile and Currently Recreationally Reading Pile; see here for full explanation - basically I'm just enjoying having made-up important sounding acronyms to dish out on here.

**** "Oh so how are you writing a blog post!?" Alright wise guy, I've taken artistic license with the time-prepositions, and am writing this after wifi's been all sorted out here also after having worked through the backlog of dissertation-season posts that this blog had accrued. What difference does it make? I feel like this is getting banal.

Project Öcalan & beyond

Okay, so this post isn't about one specific book.
   (This is my blog, I'm allowed to transcend its self-imposed boundaries.)

   Basically, as devoted readers will know (who are you?), this summer I've been completing my last and biggest piece of uni work ever, my dissertation [for a Masters of Arts in Global Political Economy], and it's involved reading tons of stuff about the Kurdish Question, and truth be told I've built up something of a backlog - there are currently nineteen draft posts with only the title and date I finished each sat in the backstage-area of Thoughts on Books, sixteen of which were dissertation reading and three which because well I had to read something else recreationally right? Anyway, I'm not confident at this stage that I would be able to do full justice to each book were I to attempt giving them a full-on standard-issue reflective post, but since the bulk of these were dissertation reading, I would like to hazard the suggestion that my dissertation itself comprises a synthesis of my thoughts on not only these sixteen books but the three I've already done posts about as well, not to mention the couple of dozen other books that I only read a chapter or six from and so didn't warrant a post at all, further not to mention the forty or so academic journal articles I also read - in short, if I were to do justice to my thoughts on books about the Kurdish Question etcetera, it would probably be best just to read the actual finished dissertation that I wrote having read them for.

   So here's the deal: I have uploaded it as a pdf to my Google Drive and there is a universal access link below, and the sad backlog of sixteen posts will be dealt with in a relatively minimalistic manner (there is quite a lot that I would like to say about some of Abdullah Öcalan's writings, but since his most theoretically-comprehensive book is also the one that I didn't read [The Roots of Civilisation] as it wasn't as directly useful to the dissertation but I am still definitely going to read it at some point, I'll air these thoughts then). The three non-dissertation books I read over the backlog-accrual period will however receive full and proper attention, post-wise.

   Sound alright?

   Good.

Project Öcalan [or, Is post-nationalist ideology reshaping the Kurdish Question?]

You may, astutely, be wondering what I mean by the addition of "& beyond" in this post's title - well, that brings me onto what I am doing now that, dissertation submitted as of yesterday, I am free from postgraduate academic bondage.
   In previous posts I've occasionally mentioned that I'm developing plans for a big creative writing project - this, I may as well (since I've already embarked upon a post that's not of the typical ilk) now confirm, is a sprawling eight-book series called Selected Earthlings - it's partly dark-but-sincere post-ironic comedy, partly haphazard thought-provoking millennial drama, and partly science fiction; and follows the lives of Naomi Harmony Moss, Amina Nadir, and John Ezekiel "Zeke" Smith across a span of about sixteen years, apart from the books themselves won't be in chronological order. If this tickles your pickle, let me know, as I will probably need feedback from the kind of people who would read that kind of thing.
   Anyway.
   That's what I'll be doing now that I've finished being a Masters student of Global Political Economy.

Revolution in Rojava

This book by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga, is one I would recommend incredibly highly to anyone interested in feminism, democracy, liberation movements, and politics in the contemporary Middle East - as it is the most comprehensively detailed single book currently available on the astonishing revolutionary developments that have taken place in northern Syria since 2011 (and as the book was published in mid-2016 these developments only became more astonishing and revolutionary since, see). The authors provide some helpful sociopolitical and geohistorical context for the events, and then walk through how the revolution unfolded, remaining formally unaffiliated with either opposition or regime amid a popular uprising that collapsed into civil war, and expanding in the power vacuum, cooperative and democratic grassroots institutions establishing themselves with remarkable speed and organisation to continue fulfilling the functions (producing economic resources, managing regional security, governing, etc) previously performed by the defunct Syrian state. The developments that have taken place there in my view constitute possible the most morally-legitimate popular revolution that has taken place in modern history, and demands to be more widely-known and supported, as its longevity depends in large part on whether established powerful nation-states will formally recognise its autonomy - but more on that in my actual dissertation.

Biji Rojava!

the Roadmap to Negotiations

This book, the third volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, was produced as a negotiation document between himself and the Turkish state's military intelligence tasked with talking through ceasefire options with him. It comprises a concise explanation of his ideological system (see other posts about his books) couched in a critical discussion of the history of Turkey's (admittedly very patchy) democratization, and thus generates proactive and reasonable compromises for the Kurdish question in Turkey in the context of the PKK's shifting away from militant separatism toward grassroots autonomy.

   Unlike the majority of other dissertation research books I've done minimal posts for, this one wasn't from the university libraries - I found a super cheap copy at the last anarchist book fair in Sheffield, and have only just noticed having held it at a funny angle against a sunbeam that there is the imprint of some biro writing on the front cover from where someone (a previous owner?) had written an address in Leeds: this is almost certainly meaningless but I like noticing little details like that on books.

   For some reason (and yes I am sure of this I've just tried fixing it like nine times) this post is refusing to justify its text body, which is annoying, but I'm assuming you don't mind having a jiggly-edged paragraph for just one post. For some even more inscrutable reason, this very paragraph has now decided that it is going to justify the text body anyway! Urgh. I don't know.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

the PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century

This book, the second volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, is probably (given its author's personal experience at the origin and around the centre of developments) the best book one could read to learn about the PKK in broader geopolitical, social, and historical context. It introduces the theoretical frameworks of Öcalan's ideas clearly, then tracing a cogent and clear overview of how existing dynamic power structures originated in ancient societies (from the Neolithic up to capitalist nationalism), and also presents his ideology of 'democratic confederalism' as a cohesive response to the historical critique: the arguments he makes are interesting, if not compelling, certainly moreso in light of adherents of Öcalan's ideas working to implement them in Turkey and Syria - and these practical activities are the core focus ultimately, as the rethinking of the PKK could never be merely academic, as the PKK existed as an organisation at war with the Turkish state: its rethinking was a pragmatic as well as moral decision to reformulate strategy to best and most peaceably work toward a resolution to the Kurdish question in Turkey, which (on their side, at least - Turkey still seems happy violently suppressing the crap out of pretty much every Kurdish political organisation, PKK-affiliated or not) is an enormously positive step. Most interesting from this book I think though are Öcalan's first-hand accounts of several major events and developments - these obviously include the international plots surrounding his abduction and illegitimate trial, but also go into relatively detailed discussion of how the PKK suffered severe internal power struggles, from loss of control over tribalist and ethnonationalist elements prevalent among its large and disparate militant body, which corrupted its liberation mission and saw leaders exploiting their positions to effectively conduct organised crime or petty warlording - which exacerbated militant and civilian death rates and attracted enormous military reactions from the Turkish state; conspiracies and fear dominated the party's leadership in those years as betrayals, subversions, infiltrations by the authorities, and such, came to swamp Öcalan's day-to-day concerns while the PKK itself devolved into a disorganised terrorist gang. Interestingly this seems to have changed a great deal for the better since his imprisonment, as the programme of democratization as opposed to separatist struggle came increasingly to characterise the wider party's leadership and was heavily promoted among the guerrillas too. If you read one book about the Kurdish question, it should probably be this one.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

Waiting for Godot

This book, a play by Samuel Beckett, was, to be honest, pretty weird and I didn't overly enjoy it. It's about two men called Estragon and Vladimir who occupy the stage with what is obviously-concocted filler and fluff while they purportedly await the arrival of their acquaintance Godot, in some minimalistic subversion of what constitutes a 'play'. In an artistic sense, no doubt, it is a phenomenal work, one that when it was written shattered so many boundaries and expected conventional norms of play-writing that it can hardly not be called genius - but at the same time, it simply isn't very entertaining. It's like having a big dead fish called Nihilism rubbed slowly against your face for half an hour or so. The dialogue is extremely clever and philosophical, the use of language and expectation as playful as can be expected - but because the play as a whole is essentially an exercise in subverting the very form of itself, you end up with a relatively long thing in which nothing particularly interesting develops and nothing particularly engaging or thought-provoking happens apart from in schizophrenic little outbursts,* like sparks burped out of a fireplace, and if you are used to cultural-creative conceptual subversion of the thing itself by minimising the form of it, then even what made the play so special when it first came out is nothing mindblowing - I live in a generation surrounded by reflexive self-aware forms of media, and so a bit of metacommentary or poking the fourth-wall, sorry Samuel Beckett, just doesn't automatically make something great (c.f. Dan Harmon). Don't misunderstand, I cannot highly enough describe the artistic significance of Waiting for Godot in the history of western theatre, but even plays that didn't come out too long after it - for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did very similar things, and far more (in my opinion) successfully, because the self-subverting form was tied to character and plot that enhanced these elements and made them funny and engaging instead of just an on-and-on display of experimental novelty.



* Lucky's absurdist monologue springs to mind. Moments like that do give the play something of a glimmering substance, but for the most part, as I've said, its content is just emptiness and futility circling themselves in a timeless and poignant and ultimately unentertaining (and not even overly edgy or interesting anymore) manner.

the bricks that built the houses

This book, the debut novel from Kae Tempest (you know, that poet who wrote this), was - well, I'd like to say the best novel I've read in ages, but truthfully I've read loads of incredible novels this year, but seriously, this one is a stand-out fresh one. I acquired it at a hippy-run bookstall at Glastonbury and basically read most of it in two big sittings over a family holiday in a hippy-run cottage in the Forest of Bowland in North Yorkshire - sat with a brew and the dog and a thousand midges on an impossibly comfy armchair on a wooden porch overlooking a small lawn which past a rickety fence is a sheer drop through dense brackeny foresty areas down to a river which I could hear all the while; yes, it was a very nice holiday, even though I had to do loads of dissertation reading during it (and also leave halfway through for a job interview), and this book comprised my recreational reading for it. You don't need to care about my holiday, I'm just adding a little texture as this post will be in the middle of all the super-brief academic backlog ones.
   Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
   Read this if you like Very Good fiction.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an exploration of the centrality of women's liberation to any complete and internally-cohesive system of revolutionary practice or ideology. Feminist elements have been present in the PKK since its inception, and through the involvement of many women in it and its affiliated organisations as well as the overt commitments of the leadership toward this end, gender equality has become a defining core characteristic of the Kurdish liberation movement, and in this book Öcalan outlines the importance of this in general as well as specifically-Kurdish-related terms. This would be a very highly-recommended read for anyone interested in gender in revolutionary sociopolitical settings and gender in Middle Eastern societies.

War and Peace in Kurdistan

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an overview of the hugely-damaging war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish liberation movement - chiefly the PKK, led by Öcalan himself. He outlines the history, the costs, and the sheer futility of this war, and reignites a call for a democratic and peaceful solution as he tries to explain is workable through mere extension of human rights and liberties to the Kurds of Turkey - this is couched in the development of democratically autonomous structures to safeguard Kurdish communities until such a time. Overall this booklet would be an interesting introduction to the Kurds' struggle and where it currently stands in context for readers whose interest I may have piqued but who may know nothing about Kurdistan and don't know where to start. Probably start here, if that's you.

Democratic Confederalism

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an outline of the core of his political philosophy - essentially the development of post-nationalist democratic structures that do not seek to overthrow or secede from existing states but to operate with complete autonomy to provide security and liberty for those living within their bounds. It has yielded some pretty interesting results in Syria. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in sociopolitical options of pursuing peace in the Middle East, or generally revolutionary pragmatic ideas.

the Kurds of Iraq

This book by Mahir Aziz is a really interesting (and helpful for me academically) in-depth study of ethnonationalism in the semi-autonomous* Kurdish region of Iraq, exploring it in both geopolitical and historical contexts as well as going through a massive amount of data from a survey of university students on their views toward Kurdishness, Iraq, the predominant political parties, tribal culture, and so on.

* I'm writing this before September 25th, so the referendum on Kexit hasn't happened yet.

the Kurds & the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey & Iran

This book by Denise Natali was incredibly helpful to me academically and would probably be interesting to people super-keen on Kurdishness and deconstructions of nationalism. It traces the Kurds' nascent national identity from subordination under the Persian and Ottoman empires to how the colonial powers' establishment of Arab puppet states Iraq and Syria impacted them as a regional ethnic group, fragmenting their nationalism across borders, and thereafter she traces the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, couched in interested discussion of Kurdistan as an inherently transnational space and thereby contextualising the identity of Kurdishness as something that, even as a relatively straightforward ethno-nationalist movement, defies pre-existing nation-states.

A Modern History of the Kurds

This book by David McDowall is pretty much what it says on the tin, and probably the best single source I've yet used in my dissertation research when it comes to comprehensive overviews of Kurdish history across the twentieth century. Would recommend if you want a single book to provide that. For other, juicier or more contemporary, aspects of the Kurdish question, there are indubitably better books out there (as you've probably gathered from this spewage of backlog posts).

the PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains

This book by Paul White was another that played a huge role in informing key historical developments relevant to my dissertation - particularly, as the title suggests, the context for the origins and militant escalation of the PKK, and the impacts this had on the Turkish state and Kurdish region. White also tracks the attempts from the PKK to seek peaceful constructive options, and the failure of these efforts in light of a movement corrupted by ethnonationalist warlordism and widespread repression; alongside the ceasefires, the PKK's efforts to develop democratic, essentially feminist and inarguably post-nationalist strings to its bow for a more legitimate (and hopefully more winnable) struggle are given scrutiny as what started out as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla cell seems to have undergone a deep and incontrovertible paradigm shift. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the modern history of the Kurdish struggle, or more generally in the nature of terrorism and violent 'freedom' movements and how they constitute themselves.

Good Omens

This book, a novel co-written by none other than two of the biggest cleverest funniest most inventive authors in modern British pop-fantasy comedy - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - is, if you know who they are, exactly as good (if not better) as you'd expect such a collaborative work to be. It's a decently-long novel but I steamed through it in three days (of evening reading, as daytime-reading is still given over to dissertation non-fiction, as you may have gathered from the fact that this blog has basically become just about Kurdistan lately) because it's just so flipping excellent.
   To sum up what it's about - the end of the world is nigh, but the Antichrist becomes misplaced, and so an angel called Aziraphale, a demon called Crowley, the last living descendant of Agnes Nutter (a witch who predicted very nice-and-accurately all the things that would happen in the runup to all of this) and the last living descendant of the witch-finder who burned Agnes Nutter at the stake, all find themselves trying to prevent a cockup of literally apocalyptic dimensions. To say this novel is irreverent would be both completely technically true and a gross misjudgement of the value of being able to laugh at stuff - literally using the eschatological framework of the Biblical account from the prophesy of Revelation, adapted by Gaiman-Pratchett imagination to real-world workings that are as hilarious as they are commonsense and as through-provoking as they are almost throwaway; this novel is just jam-packed with incredibly clever and incredibly funny characters, plot elements, turns of phrase, and just generally ridiculously well-concocted fictional happenings set against the backdrop of Christian world-endingness.
   I don't really have any strong thoughts or reactions to it - apart from that it's brilliant and you would probably love it, given a particular sense of humour. Like, if the idea that the apocalyptic horseman Famine would have spent most of the later-twentieth century developing middle-class hyper-health-conscious diet schemes and supplements to stave off boredom while waiting for the show to begin strikes you as funny, then this is the book for you.



Edit [August 16th]: I don't flipping believe it. I literally finished this book, that's been out for over a quarter of a century, less than a fortnight ago, and then something incredible like this happens... hopefully it will be a better screen-adaptation than Neverwhere.

[edit - July 2019]: I just had to sign up for a free Amazon Prime account to be able to see this, which much like the book I binged in a sitting or two. They did it justice. Still not as good as the book as these things almost never are but it comes closer than most.

A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State

This book by Meredith Tax was one of the best single sources I used for my dissertation. It involves a birds-eye historical overview of the Kurdish struggle and how this manifested differently across different nation-states, also exploring in-depth the conditions that led to the establishment and rise of the resistance-guerrilla movement PKK, particularly how this came to root itself so successfully in the popular consciousness in the context of severe Turkish repression. Throughout, the role played by women in the liberation movement is a key factor, couched in contextual discussion of the sociocultural repression faced by women in Kurdish society - but the PKK network's ideology places their struggle front and centre. Tax goes on to describe how self-governance initiatives in Turkish Kurdistan have been attempting to empower and educate women, and moreso the vital role taken on by female-led militias in Rojava (especially facing Daesh, whose bloodthirst and faux-religious fervour celebrates a brutally misogynistic ideology, and the violent opposition of the terrorist quasi-state by what is essentially an anarcho-feminist revolution surely illustrates the fundamentally different nature of a movement that seeks liberation through gender equality), particularly in the astounding victory at Kobani. This book cuts to the heart of the ideological and practical role gender plays in the current form of the Kurdish liberation movement, as will prove a challenging and enlightening read to anyone interested in the contemporary Middle-East, political freedom and equality, and opposing patriarchy and fascism.

Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan

This book, published by a research organisation called TATORT Kurdistan, comprises a series of in-depth interviews with activists and organisers and citizens in the Kurdish region of Turkey, where the ideology of democratic autonomy is being put into practice though establishing community-level self-governance councils, economic cooperatives, and educational and cultural institutions to help propagate itself as a movement. Gender equality and environmental sustainability are core focuses of the projects, and they strive to be as participatory and open as possible - however, uptake is slow among traditional under-developed civil society of the region, and the movement faces heavy repression from the Turkish state. Overall this is an enlightening book on some revolutionary happenings in a corner of the world rarely heard from in mainstream media.

Beat Poets

This book is, also* an 'Everyman's Library Pocket Poets' compendium, comprised of a wide selection of poetry - between one and eight per poet chosen from major figures in the 1950's/60's Beat** movement, including: Ray Bremser, Gregory Corso, Elise Cowen, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Leroi Jones, Lenore Kandel, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Tuli Kupferberg, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Joanna McClure, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Harold Norse, Frank O'Hara, Peter Orlovsky, Marie Ponsot, Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen and John Wieners.***

   There are almost no poems in this collection that aren't at least good, and most are excellent, a few truly sublime; I feel like most of the names listed above are poets whom I now am inclined to track down individual books from and just drink in most of what they had to write. There's something heady and mad and utterly addictive about Beat poetry; sometimes it buzzes with a pure uncontainable joy, sometimes it slides hot serrated knives of on-the-nose feeling into your stomach, sometimes it is grotesque or hilarious or just strange but never completely impenetrable - it is revolutionary and boundary-shattering and brilliant and honestly I'm not sure whether to recommend it explicitly because it's also something that I'm sure a lot of people**** won't like.

   If you are anywhere near me in enthusiasm for the reading or writing of poetry though, I heartily recommend this book - or at the very least seeking out material by the names listed within its collection. Just something about the Beat style of poetry (see ** &/ ***) echoes of a deep unfiltered humanity and gusto that sets it considerably out from much other stuff. Something about this book in particular that I liked was that it also had (alongside Carmela Ciuraru's foreword which has some good insights into the movement overall) a section at the end with letters, reflections, statements, and such on poetics, from Donald Allen, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Peter Orlovsky - these are such idiosyncratic and purposeful bits that they can be mulled over as much of any of the poems in here, and moreover are not unhelpful in informing how one thinks about the production and reception of poetry, especially in the Beat style and form.

   Anyway that's it.

   Thnak you

* This one was too.

** My thirteen-year-old brother upon seeing the title of this volume was amused & excited as he thought it was a book inciting its readers to literally "beat poets". #edgy

*** So whoever curated this book, which I could find out probably from the inside cover apart from I don't care as it's not the point the poetry is obviously the point, either has the advantage of historical oversight of Beat as an artistic movement, or else disagrees on the finer points of its defined-included-crowd with Kerouac - who writes of "the new American poetry as typified by the SF Renaissance (which means Ginsberg, me, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, Corso, McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen I guess)". It's cool that they were all mates, or at least a bunch of them.
   The more you read of each you can see friendships and influences overlapping and seeping into each others' work, from Allen in Howl harking back to slithers of anecdote so bizarrely specific that they seem like they must have happened during one of their mad adventures because they also have their echoes in Jack's landmark novel On the Road, or fragments of abstract little nonsense that just smells like something one of them said to another when they were off on a jazz-and-drug-fuelled romp across the night and some weird turn of phrase just set itself in their memory such that it encapsulated something that would be perhaps incommunicable except in the shadowball haze of capturing that short sequence of words like a butterfly in a jar and squashing it down onto a page in a creative frenzy not caring whether the reader will entirely 'get it' because they don't need to and it sounds cool anyway and the spontaneity of it, the haphazard whimsical zigzags of thought and image and sound, works regardless, if uninterpretable it will simply be put down to artistic ambiguity and hailed as genius, which it may well be, but one unobserved, unpolished, raw and joyful and gutspilling as the true heart of the Beat Movement and its revolutionary approach to poetry was.

**** I mean, a lot of people don't really like poetry at all. A lot of people don't even read for fun. A lot of people would be genuinely happier in a shopping mall than an art gallery. These people do not read my blog (well, nobody does) so I feel somewhat vindicated in whinging about this utterly blinkered segment of the human population, who have never and possibly never will fully exercise or develop their aesthetic, let alone creative, capacities - because there are so many things it is easier to consume than art, which ultimately is not even something we consume but something we approach tentatively like a wild animal, gaze in the eye, wonder, speculate, ponder, meditate, only for it to run away into the bushes and leave us just slightly more aware of our smallness of self. I say this like the only value of art is the truly sublime experience but in all honesty there are many stripes of art and to start drawing distinctions is needlessly elitist - I enjoy mainstream cinema as much as anyone (or would were I not constantly picking films apart for their patriarchal-capitalist-imperialist biases during viewing). Whatever. I literally just said I feel vindicated in my whinges - why launch into recursive defense? People who can derive more satisfaction from buying a pair of trainers than, say, reading a relatively fresh accessible powerful poem, you baffle me and yet you are no mystery at all.