Feminism: Issues and Arguments

This book was the core textbook for the feminism module (if any longtime readers remember?) that I took in my final year of undergraduate study, written by Jennifer Saul, a prominent philosopher in feminism and language use and the lecturer for that module.* It's been almost two years since I completed that module but there were five chapters of this book that I'd never read - so up the currently-halfway-through-pile it went (easy extra blog post; also an extremely interesting jam-packed book, worth sharing).
   In it, Saul walks us through nine of the biggest topical areas of debate in contemporary feminism, in explorations that are primarily philosophical but draw on political analysis, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and many case studies from real women. These nine chapters are:

1. The politics of work and family
2. Sexual harassment
3. Pornography
4. Abortion
5. Feminine appearance
6. Feminism and language change
7. Women's 'different voice'
8. Feminism, science and bias
9. Feminism and multiculturalism

   Remember, this is a textbook - so Saul isn't ploughing through all these topics blasting her own arguments. Each chapter is an accessible and balanced overview of key issues, questions, and thinkers within the debates; she lays out opposing sides, weighs them up, presented in both as much empirical and intellectual context as possible. It is often heavy but it is far from preachy, and would serve anyone new to feminist thought extremely well as an introductory volume.

* A module which, may I now say, was one of the more interesting in my whole degree and certainly the one that challenged me to question and revise my own views the most. I went into that module not really knowing what I thought about feminism, having grown up in (admittedly relatively egalitarian-value-minded circles but still) a patriarchal culture as a male, it was simply not something I was prompted to think about at all - but thanks to the political consciousness of several female friends, I started to see the systems of oppression for what they were, and wanted to learn more. By the end of the summer the year I'd taken this module, I'd consumed an enormous breadth and depth of feminist political, social and philosophical thought, having seen how the patriarchy manifests in often-insidiously-subtle and often-hideously-unsubtle forms of day-to-day sexist oppression to this day in society. Having grappled with how it intersected with my Christian faith (much mainstream writings by/for Christians on any topic involving gender has a lot of explaining itself to do), I feel I eventually reached a fairly (intellectually) satisfying conclusion, spelled out here. Of course, this would be pointless without coinciding with expressing actual solidarity, and trying as best I can to limit uses of my male privilege to those times that it can be used to get another male who doesn't realise his own privilege to sit down or shut up. If you're a man reading this and you're feeling vaguely angry, case in point - you got learning to do.

On Anarchism

This book, an edited selection* of title-fitting work by esteemed intellectual (as well-known for his radical political activism as for his revolutionary work in the field of linguistics) Noam Chomsky, serves as an accessible, engaging, and surprisingly broad (for such a slim volume - Noam knows how to pack his sentences) introduction to its titular family of sociopolitical viewpoints - anarchism. Now, anarchism has an unfair baggage of connotations in the modern industrialised world, largely as a result of intensive efforts by established elites to discredit and marginalise those who align themselves with it to clip the wings of any movement of the masses that may take on board its core, which is truly dangerous to those established elites: underlying anarchism is a radical skepticism to all authority structures. If relationships entailing power inequalities** cannot be morally justified, which in most cases they cannot, they should be dismantled and replaced by structures in which all participants have equal stakes. Anarchy is the fullest and truest expression of democracy. This book is one I would recommend for any progressive leftist types - even if you don't identify yourself as an anarchist, there is definitely much in there you'll be sympathetic to, and engaging with a thinker as heavy-hitting yet accessible as Noam on the topic will leave you both with a revitalised spirit for activism and some new thought-provoking angles from which to consider yourself, your communities, your society, and the unjust power structures we struggle against.

* The selected bits include:

• Some introductory notes discussing anarchism's place in modern politics
• Excerpts from Understanding Power, discussing in more detail how anarchism challenges and demands participatory change in existing political structures
• Part of a book called Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship, in which Noam reviews mainstream academic assessments of the Spanish civil war's revolutionary anarchist movement, cross-referencing the earwax out of it to demonstrate how mainstream accounts all-too-often airbrush over/out the positive popular role played by this movement, and what this implies about political-economic elite power over academia that anarchism should be sidelined so
• Extracts from an interview with Harry Kreisler about how Noam came to develop his political consciousness
• An incredibly juicy little essay on Language and Freedom

** Edit - April 28th: I've just watched Noam Chomsky's documentary Requiem for the American Dream. It's on Netflix and is definitely worth a watch - he walks us through how over the last century these elite forces have shifted the blame, indeed even the public attention, away from themselves, and following the onset of neoliberalism continue to ever-further secure their stranglehold on wealth and power, with ruinous consequences for the rest of society. It's like watching an enormous conspiracy theory play out, backed up by What Actually Happened In, Like, History.

All My Friends Are Dead

This book, written and illustrated by Avery Monsen and Jory John (who did which? I don't care enough to reopen the book to find out), is another that I've just breezed through out of a five-minute span of unoccupied time at my friend's house. It was on the sort of under-tabletop surface-shelf thing on the coffee table, which upon reflection I feel is the perfect place for this book if one were to own it. It's not long or varied enough to be a toilet book, it's not universally-accessible or pleasant enough to be a coffee-table-top book, it's not really enough of a book that you'd intentionally Sit Down And Read to warrant a place on a shelf.

   It's basically just one joke - death. On repeat. A variety of cartoon characters (ranging from dinosaurs to clowns to cassette tapes to just plain old Old People) announce in bold friendly writing that all, most, many, or whatever, of their friends, are dead (though this varies slightly as the book goes on, venturing into several puns that, in my opinion, narrowly avoided being outright non sequiturs). It's not particularly funny and it's not even particularly bleak.* If you know someone who thinks they like dark humour but in reality is a bit of a tame lame membrane, this book would be a decent present for them. However, as much as I enjoyed the neat style of the illustrations, there is an enormous potentiality of powerful existential absurdity in the topic of death and I don't feel this book even came close to properly milking it. So, overall my response to the book would have to borrow its own blurbline - "have you ever laughed and cried at the same time?"

   Yes.

   But not reading this.

* If your interest has been partially piqued but nowhere near enough to acquire a copy of this book, then I shall recount for you the single funniest bit. It involved a tree saying, "all my friends are end tables," followed by an end table saying, "I was never friends with that guy," followed by another picture of the tree looking sad.

the Bonfire Folk

This book by Enid Blyton was probably aimed at readers between 18 and 21 years younger than me, but hey, I read it, and rules is rules - it gets a post. I was visiting my friend in Manchester and this (among several others) was on a communal bookshelf in the lounge of her new flat, so I've literally just read it because I didn't bring any books with me and I hate my smartphone and I don't know where my friend is and I'm bored. It's about two kids who have a bonfire in their garden, and having heard stories about fairy-folk who sometimes come out with the nocturnal animals to warm themselves by the bonfire, the kids decide to leave out some pinecones and kindling and whatnot - and sure enough, that night, a gnome, a fairy, and all manner of British woodland creatures (rabbit, hedgehog, badger, those kinds of things) come and make friends with them around the bonfire. I mean, it's quite nicely illustrated, and would probably make a half-decent (if extremely vintage) tale to read to a small child to get them to shut up fall asleep.

Howl, Kaddish and other poems

This book, the first volume of poetry published by beatnik legend Allen Ginsberg, completely fulfilled all expectations I had of one of the most influential collections of poems seen in the twentieth century. It was this volume that cemented Ginsberg's status as an edgy icon of counterculture, and while I don't know anywhere near enough about the history of Western poetry to be able to say with much veracity "and rightly so", but I'd like to heartedly endorse that sentiment nonetheless.

   The first titular poem, 'Howl', is a riotous thirteen-page romp through the abject squalour and grim hedonistic self-destruction of what we can only presume was life on the cutting-edge as a Beat poet. The second, 'Kaddish', is a slow-burning twenty-five page lament for his deceased mother, recalling vividly some of the less-than-pleasant times she had toward the end. My personal favourites from the collection are 'Poem Rocket' (sending a poem out into the infinite space-time void as though it were a rocket - quoted at the end of this post), 'America' (basically just rips the USA's consumption-war-empire-industry to shreds - poetically), 'Laughing Gas' (an extended meditation on the blink-into-nothingness that consciousness goes through when taking nitrous oxide), 'Ignu' (which it's just a delight to read and wonder which exuberant acquaintances he had in mind when writing this characterful catalogue of charmingly-bad tendencies), and 'Song' (which is just beautiful). Needless to say, each and every poem in this collection is worth reading several times - if you're the unsqueamish adventurous sort of reader.

   I can't really think of any overarching reflections - these poems between them deal in varyingly-great depth and breadth such topics as death, love, eternity, birth, sex, the meaning of life, disgust, the nature of consciousness, the transience of identity and experience, aesthetic value, transcendent and spiritual insights, the decay of religion, state oppression and violence, industry, consumerism and alienation, writing and the creative spirit, and probably dozens of other things that could qualify as topics Allen Ginsberg sheds some sort of poem-opinion-light on through these works.

   They're also just extremely enjoyable. I tried reading some of them aloud as I do with poetry that I'm trying to milk maximum enjoyment out of, and would recommend this very highly - the richness of Ginsberg's language and the idiosyncratic nature of his verse make these the kind of poems that play in your ears - they have an eccentricity to them, a lopsided but unstoppable rhythm. A beat, I s'pose. (Hahaha.)

   This is the third poetry-book post I've done in April alone. Admittedly I've been on a bit of a binge, as poetry makes great substitute-reading for when you're doing a relatively dull essay with the remainder of your time. Also I started writing poetry back in November (did I mention this on here? I don't know) so am engulfing inspiration left, right, and centre. Whatever. Poetry is awesome - and if you don't believe me having never delved much into it - well, Allen Ginsberg probably isn't the best place to start, but hey, you might love it! "the speeding thought that flies upward with my desire as instantaneous as the universe and faster than light / and leave all other questions unfinished for the moment to turn back to sleep in my dark bed on earth."

   Bye.

Let Them Eat Chaos

This book by Kae Tempest is comprised of a single 71-page poem, also released as an album of spoken-word-with-music,* by the same title.

   It is utterly brilliant.

   They takes us on a journey through the nexus of what it means to be an interpersonally-connected and socially-aware human amid the complexities, injustices, small joys and small hardships, big hopes and big losses, distractions, and whatnot, of the 21st-century world. There is a lot of incisive (punchy not preachy) political commentary and calling out of individualistic apathy. The bulk of the poem is a portrait of a street, in London, at 4.18am, in which place at which time exactly seven people, strangers to each other, are awake, for different reasons. Each of these seven, after a two-or-three page descriptive introduction, is treated to four-to-six pages of verse voicing their internal struggles. These vary massively in tone - from despairing at the gentrification of one's lifelong neighbourhood forcing one soon to move to bafflement at one's own incapacity to not fall into the same holes in a low-pay high-sesh lifestyle - but the thread connecting them (other than all being awake at 4.18am on this London street) is these individuals' disconnection from others. The poem climaxes with a surprise thunderstorm striking, and all seven rush into the street in wonder and excitement, see each other, and laugh, dance, hug, in the torrential rain. Kae ends the poem with an uproarious cry of pleas to the reader, to all humans, to wake up and love more - to value the stories and struggles of others, even those we don't know, to fight for justice against the powers that neglect it - because what is striving for justice if not effectively loving people who may be affected by injustice? Its language and imagery and juxtapositions reveal a great many of the intricate deceptions of politicised global consumer capitalism, culture under neoliberalism, and our socioeconomic relationship with our planet. Its portraits paint familiar pictures of kinds of people who live and struggle in London, as in the UK, as in most places, in this day and age - a world where community is being made redundant - and remind us that empathy is the key. The world is a complicatedly broken and brokenly complicated place, and any effort to make it less so requires that we, ourselves, first start genuinely respecting the lives, needs, narratives, struggles, contradictions, and basic human legitimacy, of others around us. Before the flood comes.

   This is a poem that, in anguish and rage and indefatigable faith in human goodness, tells us we can do better and we know it so we fucking should do better. It avoids being bleak and cynical, facing real problems through recognisable characters, and (also in the non-character-bits) walks the line such that the darkness is never being held too far from our knowledge of the possibility of light. It is an immensely challenging and ultimately heartening poem - a radical fireburst call-to-arms.** And it is fantastically fun on the ears.

   Yeh. Read this poem.***

* Worth listening to - the poem, heard in their voice and accompanied by the music, takes its fullest power. I can attest to this having seen them live in what was probably the largest and sweatiest venue hosting a spoken word performance in Birmingham that night. (Spoken word performances tend not to be in large sweaty venues.)

** Okay, not arms, the opposite of arms, love, but call-to-arms is the phrase. Just don't get the idea that this is supposed to kickstart some violent revolution, it's about genuine human connection being the root of both community and meaningful social justice. Perhaps a nonviolent revolution then? God knows we need one atm. Peace and love, dude.

*** In one sitting, out loud, if possible.

Summer Requiem

This book is a collection of Vikram Seth's poems. They explore themes of the individual's connection to nature through our own life cycles and those of the world around us - birth, death, decay, rebirth, renewal - how these are experienced psychologically as states of our being just as they are realised in actual natural processes and rhythms of seasonal change. This collection makes powerful poetic statements about transience that are quietly poignant, and delicately written. There are several strong* poems in this collection, and so overall I'd recommend this book, and probably** the other poetry of Vikram Seth, to anyone who enjoys a good meditative verse.

* My standard for a strong poem is pretty flexible - usually it just means one that was so enjoyable and/or heavy that upon finishing it I close the book upon my thumb, stare at the ceiling wide-eyed and make a noise life "whfff" for a couple of seconds before then re-reading the poem, aloud.

** Having never explored him as a writer, really. My parents got me this for Christmas.