Semiotics: A Graphic Introduction

This book, by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz, is another in the series of graphic introductory guides to enormous complex topics like logic or critical theory. If you don't know what semiotics is, you should probably get out of this post before it's too late.* If you do, then this book, I can guarantee, will provide a helpful overview of international academic trends and disciplines influential within and upon the field of semiotics - i.e. the study of signs. It's a relatively new field for me to be reading much into, and it's like discovering metaphysics all over again - somehow, everything leads back to it, and however much sense it makes there's nothing in the middle and nothing holding it together. Language and communication and concepts and objective reality and subjective perception all spiral away together in an inexplicable tautological circle-shaped puzzle.

   This book, indeed this whole intellectual field, has added a dense and complex extra layer onto my own mentally-experienced-and-rationalised self, which is always exciting, but means I can't really write anything substantive about it right now.

   A decent introduction, then, I suppose.

* Google it. I know, right?

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume three

This is the third and final volume of a box-set (this) comprising the whole roughly-a-decade span of newspaper comic Calvin & Hobbes, of which I've already done posts for the first and second volumes. In the post about the first volume, I try to give a general overview of what, superficially the comic is about - in this post, I'm going to go into more depth about some of the recurring themes Bill Watterson explores through the world he's created in this comic, and try to give some shape to why I think it's so timelessly special as well as timefully poignant as an enduring body of artistic work.
   Okay...
   I'm returning to this post having left that first paragraph sat as a neglected unclosed tab on my browser for a full week. I simply don't know where to start. There's too much that could be said about this comic and it's too dear to my heart to devise a deconstruction, so I'm just going to do what happens to a small (lol) proportion of my posts and gonzo it. Or whatever the term is.
   Reading the comic in its entirety, a ten-year span, had somewhat of a Groundhog-Day-esque feel, in that Calvin is, of course, perpetually a six-year-old, but Watterson, as part of his construction of a real-feeling world to a daily-newspaper-reading audience, allows the change of the seasons to permeate Calvin's environment, activities, and moods. You watch him spend ten years in first-grade, struggling to restrain his over-active imagination for long enough to learn simple addition, struggling against alienated boredom within an education system that genuinely fails to engage lots of children, his brief respites at recess and lunchtime hampered often by the bully or by his own weirdness driving away his only real friend (Susie Derkins - well, both would deny being the friend of the other, but they live on the same street, and she's the only kid in the comic who Calvin regularly talks to who doesn't tend to end their encounters by thumping him and stealing his lunch money; arguably as a know-it-all she is on a similar popularity level to the out-and-out weirdo with a stuffed tiger that he fights with (and loses to sometimes), Calvin). Much of the comic explores the regularities and routines of a child's life as part of an incomprehensible structure of disappointment - evident in everything from waiting for the bus to performing household chores to bathing to keeping oneself entertained around the house - and Calvin's imagination provides gateways to 'play his way out' of these all-too-commonplace scenarios. But the comic strikes a careful balance between his reality and his dreams, such that the adult sensibilities of the boring traps laid out for Calvin's everyday experience and the childlike excitements of escaping these are both avenues for the comic: his parents, I think, provide an extremely important presence of normality. The burden and joy of parenthood, the thankless domestic life of the stay-at-home mom and the paper-weight drudge of an office-working dad, are shown through the admittedly extreme prism of raising a kid who is just as likely to be found sitting quietly reading a comic by the fire as he is hammering nails into the coffee table, assembling some sort of catapult to fire rocks at Susie, or trying to sell glasses of pondwater to passers-by - he's a handful, to say the least, for all the good his father's attempts to get him to do 'normal' (i.e. unpleasant) activities to 'build character'. Calvin's imaginativeness lets the comic take some brilliantly broad-ranging directions in terms of illustration (the dinosaur ones are often among my favourites), but it is his real-world high-demand six-year-old-style selfishness that forms the core of the comic's capacity for social commentary, of which there is a lot, neatly diffused into it bit-by-bit over the decade of its run. Bill Watterson, if it be his own worldview that he allows to flourish in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, has a considerable uneasiness around the political, economic and cultural trends that were becoming all-but-unstoppable in the years the comic ran (late '80s to early '90s; basically the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly everyone in the world was an American style democratic liberal capitalist, a universal consensus masking neoliberal hegemony, which had been developing an extremely strong base of consumer culture in the West for centuries, and the '80s was when it centralised itself as the Western way of life); work was unproductive and unfulfilling, advertisements for stuff people didn't need was everywhere, supplemented by sociocultural pressures to feel needs for the stuff being advertised; people were losing their connection with nature, their capacity to trust each other and the media, and their capacity to actively care about anything substantive or meaningful in a world where suburbia could become everything, where TV replaces thought, and kids are primed to expect to find a place in this world where they can follow their dreams - even when their actual dreams (of day-to-day imagination) are constantly shattered and grounded by representatives of the same grown-up community perpetuating their being kept in the dark about the vacuousness of the whole endeavour. That was a horrific sentence, I know. But some of the hardest-hitting strips are simply Calvin watching television, or his dad's thoughts on the drive to work, or his mom's thoughts upon receiving junk mail ads; surprisingly subversive for a comic that was printed in thousands of American popular newspapers. The anti-consumerism critique* ramps up toward Christmas each year in the comic, alongside, interestingly, vaguely theological and moral ponderings about the nature and possibility of being good in the hope of a reward (from Santa). The winter periods also see Calvin making many bizarre, grotesque, or as he calls them 'avant-garde' snowmen - these ones are as visually amusing as they are littered with topsy-turvy commentary on the world of art that any aesthete would appreciate. Likewise Calvin's summers are crammed with school-free romps around the wilderness, riding carts down perilous hills while making casual existential chitchat, throwing water-balloons at Susie, finding frogs, meetings aliens, holding club meetings in a treehouse - all of these elements are completely dependent on the comradeship of Hobbes, who, ostensibly self-evident to everyone except Calvin, is an inanimate stuff tiger, and also the voice of Calvin's self-doubt in the comics - which means the things Hobbes says (Calvin's self being one of TV-raised fantasy-embroiled narcissistic noise) tend to be on the wiser side. As well as enabling exploration of a child's developing understanding of his place in the world through Hobbes taking up one side of the inner dialogue, Hobbes is Calvin's constant playmate - they scheme together, invent games, explore, argue, snack, fight, find new uses for cardboard boxes, rest, and muse. It is through conversation with Hobbes that the depth and nuance of Watterson's voice in the comic shines through best - this is not a strip that shies away from big questions, and though it doesn't claim to have answers, reminding people to ask them is often good enough.
   This comic achieves more, artistically, in terms of both writing and drawing, than any other newspaper-daily comic I have ever encountered. It is well worth discovering, even if you don't plough through it in its entirety like me - this post has been a structureless shambles, but I hope it gives some insights into the sheer breadth and depth of what makes Calvin and Hobbes such endearing characters at the heart of this lovely comic.



* Something that Bill Watterson stuck to his guns about IRL - he spent years fighting his publishing syndicate for the rights to the characters so they couldn't be used for corporate merchandising.

the complete Calvin & Hobbes: volume two

This is the second volume of a three-book boxset (this) of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson - introductory comments are given in my post about the first volume (here) and all (well, at least some) my actual reflective thoughts about the series will be given once I've finished reading it in its entirety after the third volume (this). I'm using it as 'comfort reading' while I read loads of dense and depressing stuff for an essay about environmental political economy, and lemme tell you, it's doing the job.

Have a nice day

Living High & Letting Die

This book, by Peter Unger, I've just finished in a several-day spurt after it being unexpectedly recalled by the university library (I've had it out since late 2014) - is one of the hardest-hitting tracts on practical ethics I've ever read. Utilitarianism on steroids.
   It opens with a simple factual statement: that a relatively small amount of money, sent by the reader (who is, in all likelihood, a relatively affluent American academic philosopher)* to a humanitarian charity, will be able to substantively extend the expected lifespans of tens or hundreds or thousands of children in developing countries. However, when readers encounter donation-requesting-leaflets from such charities, it is not widely considered morally reprehensible to ignore what, upon reflection, seems to present itself as an unshakable moral obligation. Unger goes on to develop an ethical position he calls Liberationism, whereby such obligations are laid bare through a thorough scouring of our responsive processes and painstakingly weedling out all the common psychological, social, and behavioural hurdles of irrationality (i.e. half-thunk excuses) that we have to learn to leap before we can join him in assenting to the Liberationist's ethical position.
   This development of an admittedly extraordinarily challenging view of ethics is demonstrated at regular intervals by thought experiments, which Unger devised and threw out at a sample group of Moral Agents (i.e. people) to see how they responded, then comparing general responses about right and wrong behaviours to the Liberationist position. These thought experiments are varied and colourful - there are bombs rolling down hills, fat men in remote-controlled rollerskates, the spare and easily-hijacked yachts of selfish billionaires, and more innocent children tied to train tracks soon to be crushed under a runaway trolley than you could shake an envelope from UNICEF at - and ultimately do serve to demonstrate, develop and gradually expose the Liberationist ethic extremely well, also serving tangible detailed examples where the irrationalities of non-Liberationist ethics become murky or troubling. That's all I'll say about the content of the book: it's one the core message of which I am enthusiastically-but-shrewdly for, yet I would not recommend this book** - unless you're an academic philosopher (of course including students of this) who shares my fascination with altruism.
   Nor do I have many particularly original reflective responses to the book. (However, it does fit nicely into my personal map of ideas, so prepare for a final paragraph chock-full of hyperlinks to old posts.) Liberationism is a strong ethical position, sure, but not too dissimilar from that advocated by someone whose moral teachings I take quite seriously - Jesus Christ (google him if you must).***
   As a Christian, I believe the nature of God as purely good means that the entire of reality is structured around and toward goodness, including ethics, including socioeconomic justice as a necessary pursuit. But the nature of God's holy loving goodness so far surpasses our capacities to imitate (as explored beautifully by Kierkegaard here) that we are prone to blind spots; the ultimate blind spot is other people in need when our needs are our priorities - the fundamental tendency toward selfishness is innate to our brokenness, and corrupts our worldly understandings of good and right. Economics is a great starting point - despite having originated as a field with just as much moral concern as material, it is now largely unreliable, and at worst, the academic arm of neoliberal hegemony's ongoing reign. Neoliberalism is a philosophy that fundamentally feeds off the selfishness of the already-successfully-selfish, and then basically just kicks everyone else in the self-esteem their whole lives unless they strike lucky (and then probably even moreso). This means the person-level blind spots of the real needs of others (generally on a socioeconomic scale this whole element can just be referred to as 'the poor') are elevated to social-level blind spots, rampant poverty and inequality goes unaddressed, despite the obviousness of a solution - give them money. This book seeks to make the non-theistic philosopher's ethical case for the worrisome undeniability of such an obligation (which is also tried-and-tested one of the best ways to actually help). Our world's richest economies are living well beyond their means, using resources unsustainably to prop up grotesquely wonderfully convenient lifestyles while billions live precariously on the brink, and that brink is only growing nearer and less predictable given the economic-ecological crisis we face - I believe that richer nations have a duty to both massively reduce their own impacts and support less-developed neighbours in mitigating the worst of climate change and transitioning their economies through huge transfers of money to the poor (this idea comes from not-too-far down the degrowth rabbit-hole, see this and this). While making a lot of sense to me in a political-economic sense, it also neatly brings to bear the demand of Christian ethics on the way our economies operate - a demand that is radical, costly, and difficult, like Unger's, but there doesn't seem to be a way out of it but for irrationality or selfishness.



* Unger states this 'target audience' himself. This book is not written for the layman.

** He states himself that the purpose of the book is not to convince a general reader, as it would far more likely alienate them - he's trying to further the debate within academic philosophy, in the hope that straightforward hard-talking solutions such as his may bloom longer-term and lay the socio-cultural groundwork for radical economic altruism.

*** As I'm aware, readers may well just give up on a paragraph offering only my own opinions which have been hewn into the imperfect chambers of my worldview by many a book, conversation, or short period of time staring at walls; if you can't be arsed to read it, fair enough, and so as an alternative (or, if you did read it any only just got to this bit, consider it a reward), here's another Vulfpeck.

2016 overview

Every year on this thing I do a recap of the project, and while it's very early in the late night and I'm knackered having been travelling back from London most of today before going to a pub quiz (priorities), 2016 has been an absolute shitter* of a year, I'm sure many will agree, and I wanted to get its review over and done with, because in terms of books I've read it's actually been a pretty good year. My blog has endured its third year of my spewage of thoughts about stuff I've read cover-to-cover, and while this year has seen the fewest completed books since the project started, I feel this year I've read a lot of really good books - certainly ones that were right for me to read, being where I currently am, in terms of life and worldviews and everything.

   Excuse #1 for this relative lack (actually there are no 'excuses' as I don't owe this blog anything, it's a personal project, but whatever) is that lots of the time I'd usually spend reading I've spent writing (more info here - link also, incidentally, leads to the book that page-by-page brought me the most immediate joy all year). Excuse #2 is that through a variety of complex causes that I've given up trying to decipher, for a lot of last year I was (mildly? moderately? dunno, wasn't diagnosed but wasn't well - but these things come in waves) a bit off-key, and I ended up reading quite a few books about happiness. These included:

• Happiness by Design, by Paul Dolan - blandly good for the well-structured mind.
• Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton - slightly-less-blandly slightly-less-good for the slightly-less-well structured mind, or anyone with general angst.
• The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, by Sarah Knight - samey and not as blunt as you'd probably like it to be if you like the title.

   However, the two books** that genuinely deeply helped me in this time were:

• Kierkegaard's Works of Love - a must-read for Christian intellectuals.
• Emily Dickinson's selected poems - just pure transcendent beauty.

   Anyway, time to start handing out singular end-of-year recommendations from out of the twenty-nine (a contestable figure given some of the 'books') I read last year.

• Best word-to-picture ratio - the Snowman, by Raymond Briggs.
• Best novel*** - How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid.
• Another must-read for Christian intellectuals - Paradoxology, by Krish Kandiah.
• Highly-recommended for Christians who feel they are on the verge of becoming more mature in their faith - Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, by Paul Tripp.
• A commonly-praised extremely boring 'classic' that I recommend you avoid - Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
• Must-read for anyone with, or wanting, a leadership role in groups of any kind, especially activism - the Consensus Handbook by Seeds for Change.
• Disarmingly universal religious-smelling poetry - the Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran.
• Strongly recommended for anyone interested in psychoactive substances - Drugs Without the Hot Air, by David Nutt.
• Strongly recommended for literally everyone - Teaching Critical Thinking, by bell hooks.

   I've read books about Jeremy Corbyn and Kanye West (both of which I'd recommend if their names stir anything within you), but core to much of my non-fiction book choice is an attempt to build up a coherent holistic understanding of how the world works and how it needs to change. And this year, through my studies**** as well as my independent reading I feel I have, for the time being, settled on a system of ideas which more or less make sense of the world and give me tangible goals and ideals in a political-economic-social sense: degrowth.

• Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson, is an excellent case for this radical and unpopular but ecologically-urgent and sociopolitically-appealing idea.
• Kathryn Tanner's the Economy of Grace lays out a Christian view of economics which seems to me highly congruent - but further reading is probably required on that, as it is on most topics one is trying to learn the truth about.  

   Accessible, digestible, applicable truth, now more than ever, is oh-so-important, and if you are a regular reader (you're probably someone I know anyway) then please at the end of 2016 may I implore you, having witnessed the horrors capable of being brought about by mass ignorance, to think for yourself, to read for yourself, to run away with ideas and fight them until you know where you stand, because the truth is always out there but it is rarely simple, and never irrelevant.

   Peace & love,

   Isaac J. Stovell

[edit - I've just realised that my last post of 2016 promised that this post would include a longer explanation of my writing project, but honestly I can't be bothered at the moment and will provide one of these once my plans are more properly in place.]

* I know I don't usually swear on this blog, but if you're more offended by the term 'shitter' than you are by the current state of the world given how it's changed in 2016, go read an online overview of everything that's happened this year and have a good long think. And then, because it has been a stressful year, here's a brilliant thing to offset the upset.

** Except the Bible, obviously, but as I said in this blog's founding post, that doesn't count. Also, this book was a good help in bringing together calming behavioural practices that help reinforce one's rest in the truth of the gospel.

*** Hands-down. I usually really struggle to pick one. Helps that I didn't read many novels last year but honestly that one is just brilliant.

**** I'm shortly entering my final semester (before a dissertation) of a part-time Masters in Global Political Economy, and honestly, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this course but also how much I'm looking forward to not being a student any more.