The Road

This book by Cormac McCarthy will (calling it, yup) go down in history as one of the best and most poignant novels to emerge from the United States of America - ever.*

   A non-specific apocalypse has ravaged everything. All plants and animals are dead, and human civilisation has collapsed, over several years descending into a horror beyond misery, where simply meeting other people can be life or death as you don't know if they'll kill you to take your stuff or rape and eat you. Against this backdrop, utterly bereft of hope and beauty and goodness, a father and his young son follow the road south to the coast, trying to scavenge food (anything but other humans) and survival supplies and avoid raiders and cannibals on the way.**

   The story is extremely simple - so the father/son relationship is given space to become the main character, with heartwrenchingly direct dialogue, illuminating the main theme of the book: that even when all else is seemingly lost, if we have others whom we can trust and love and be loved by, there is hope, and we can carry that fire within us to persist in facing the challenges that may arise in the hope of finding others who are holding onto the same hope and still believing in goodness, the human capacity for helping each other. The omnipresent threat of slow (starvation) and sudden (cannibal-thieves) death looms over this relationship founded on a hope that the boy has little experience of other than through assurance from the man that it exists; several brief encounters with kind people widen this, though several brief encounters with horrifically threatening people narrow it, and ultimately it is ambiguous (until the end but spoilers) whether the boy who has grown up in this bleak world genuinely grasps what the man has been trying to pass down.

   It is also exquisitely well-crafted - everything from description of surroundings to conversation to carefully-warily methodical actions evoke the sense of utter desolation, of a grandly poetic lack of anything grand or poetic, of a constant urgency and dread and fear and slow rasping unworldly decay. The world is as vividly drawn as it needs to be, the atmosphere hanging low and heavy everywhere so even simple details are pervaded with an imagined visualisation of things burned, twisted, broken, lost, dead and gone. McCarthy's construction of such a real-feeling world lends an immense tenderness to the central relationship; we are drawn into the lives and the man and the boy so as to be constantly enraptured by their devotion to each other and constantly terrified for their survival. They are living in a world without nature or civilisation, where the only life is human, and the only life that can be trusted to be good is each other.

   Ultimately it is a novel that shows us how much we have to lose, in a social-economic-ecological context, but reminds us alongside this of what we can never lose if only we are determined to hold onto it - and that is our own decision to try to be good. Even when surrounded by unimaginable hardship and evil. As the man teaches the boy, so the fire is passed onward. We persist.

   Anyway. It is incredible. Read it.

* Instant classic. Yes. The film adaptation of it is also by a pretty long margin the best post-apocalyptic movie (except Wall-E maybe) ever; the bleak visual style echoes the flavour of the book's prose brilliantly and Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee bring the man and the boy to life perfectly. But is it as good as the book? I'm not going to answer this as I hate this question.

** Reading or watching stories set in this kind of world, I am growingly aware that were such a civilisational breakdown to occur, I would struggle a great deal to survive. Our socioeconomic systems of convenience have not prepared me for such a life. My best hope would probably be hiding underground somewhere with loads of bottled water and tinned beans and stuff to read until it all blows over or everyone who might eat me is dead from mad cow disease or whatever you get from eating people... man, I need to start digging and stockpiling

Occupy

This book, an edited selection* of material by Noam Chomsky concerning the movement Occupy Wall Street (which soon sprawled to many major cities across the world** and ended up seeping into the general global left-activist consciousness), is an insightful and heartening peek inside what was probably the most important popular movement in the west this millennium so far.

   The general thrust of Occupy was extremely broad - people taking part cited concerns ranging from climate change to mental healthcare to western foreign policy to institutionalised racism - but at the core of it was the classic Marxian struggle: the disempowered working masses against an entrenched established elite.*** Neoliberalism has accelerated this inegalitarian conflict to enormous levels; our whole societies are increasingly structured so as to benefit economic growth, which disproportionately benefits a tiny clique of investment-holders and financiers at the top, whose control and influence over economy, media, policymaking, and more, is high enough to pretty much maintain their position so long as the people don't realise what's happening, remember they live in a democratic society, and kick off. The first rule of Anarchist Club is you don't talk about Anarchist Club always question power structures to determine whether their authority can be legitimately purported to be for the public good and can be held accountable to be so. Democratic societies, in principle, make this easy; but neoliberalism knows this, and has spent several decades feeding the idols of careerism and consumerism that make people feel autonomous while they're being exploited, without them clocking onto the system that is funneling power that should ostensibly be democratised upwards as wealth concentrates it in ever smaller pockets of control. Unless primary political decision-making power is in the hands of the general public, then issues like institutionalised racism and climate change and everything else will only be tackled when it is either cheap, easy, or politically unavoidable to do so - unfortunately, solving these kinds of issues is rarely cheap or easy, but given the sheer capitalism-induced apathy of much of the western public and the outright irrelevant spectacle of the actual political system, these things are often extremely politically avoidable to boot. Which is why Occupy scared the shit out of the establishment - and of course, the police were sent in, and peaceful groups of people congregating in public spaces to hold constructive discussions about tackling our societies' biggest problems were arrested in large numbers. The 2008 crisis was the beginning of the end for neoliberalism: it became clear that it was a highly unstable system, and one that people are starting more and more to wake up to as having not served the public interest at all. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are now serious prominent political figures, showing that the public has rediscovered its capacity to think past the establishment-preferred disgust/hate/fear reaction to 'socialism' and are seeing how thoroughly congruent with the ideals of democratic society these notions are - not to mention that higher equality helps support progress in a wide range of other socioeconomic issues.

   Occupy, while only really supported by leftish activists at the time, was big enough and loud enough to propel the idea of the 99% and the 1% into wider awareness - and that has had enormous sociopolitical repercussions and hopefully will continue to do so. Things change. Often for the worse, often surprisingly, sometimes for the better - more often if large numbers of people group together, organise, mobilise, and make themselves heard. That is the essence of democracy, and of progressive activism. I am proud to have been a participant (an extremely minor one - see **) this historic movement, and this book by the inimitable indefatigable Noam Chomsky was like an adrenalin-boost to my gusto for activisting**** - and if you're of similar ilk to me it would probably work for you too. So yeh, I'd recommend this book chiefly to lefties, as a potent encouraging reminder of what movements can achieve by bringing people together - even if tangible change is not immediately achieved, it always has longer-term deeper impacts by setting off ripple effects that start provoking conversation that can help to change the general consciousness.

* The selected bits include transcripts of a lecture, a Q&A, an interview, another interview, and a short passage in remembrance of Noam's late fellow radical Howard Zinn, and how the values he espoused in academia and activism were being rekindled.

** Including, at the peak of its spread, a small gathering outside Sheffield Cathedral, which I (only eighteen at the time, and nowhere near as actively political as I am today) tentatively visited for half an hour and had a really interesting conversation with a guy who looked like a cartoon punk brought to life about co-operatives (he recommended Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread to me and I read it on a family holiday - my first anarchist book!) and another with a friendly hippy-type about windfarms. 

*** Occupy's biggest achievement, other than rebooting western leftist activism with a massive surge of cross-pollinating ideas and methods for organisation, and (arguably) spawning anarcho-hacker collective Anonymous, was reframing this class conflict in terminology that made the reality of inequality far more accessible to the generally depoliticised (and often highly suspicious of people who talk like Marxists) public; out with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in with the 99% and the 1% - and then presumably out with the 1% as their obscenely excessive privileges are curbed and redistributed.

**** Which admittedly is why I read it - as you're probably aware, there is a general election coming up soon, and the Tories are probably going to win big, and it's hard to cling to constructive optimism in the face of all the present's turbulent perversions of systematic social and political reasonableness.

[edit - June 9th: ahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, what a night to be the underdog. Jeremy, go and have yourself a well-deserved day off at the allotment.]

Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood

This book, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is one that I will not discuss at length but I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm currently halfway through a several-day essay splurge and am reading pretty much everything about historical processes of democratisation in Turkey and Iran that I could easily find - this book, being as it is a more or less autobiographical account of the author's life from ages six to fourteen in Tehran during the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, the subsequent establishment of the repressive Islamic Republic, and the ruinous war with Iraq, was on the same shelves as many of my required sources and so I borrowed it from the library as a sort of pudding* and have just blasted it in one sitting and I'm hoping to comb through several more academic chapters after this blog post so sorry if you don't like mad run-on sentences. (I love them.)

   Persepolis is gripping, heartwarming, full of as much vivacious humour and character as it is incisive political consciousness - the relatively simple black-and-white illustrations convey a huge amount of emotional context and carry the story really well. Ultimately it's an education in historical empathy: western audiences are rarely exposed to narratives told in the Middle East unless it's a story about war, oil, politics, or all three, in which the main character is a western soldier, businessman, politician, or something, probably fighting cartoonish terrorists. Marjane Satrapi's work in Persepolis (including the sequel which I have not yet read) is the kind of story we need to see, hear, read, whatever, more of - as it helps better show the personal and social realities of what it was like to live in Iran through one of the most turbulent times in its modern history, and bridges the sense of our simply not knowing - though conveyed in the format of a comic, there is a deep and profound humanity in this book, and I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the Middle East, whether or not you like graphic novels - it is a powerful and well-told story that will make you laugh and be sad and know more about Iranian history and what it's like to be a teenage girl with ambitions of punkdom living under an autocratic religious regime.**

   Anyway, that's the post. I'm going to drop this book in the returns bin in the library.

   Fin

* When you've been reading heavy academic non-fiction all week and you need something lighter, or at the very least more aesthetically pleasing.

** I mean, if that last bit doesn't hook you I don't know what will.

the Old Man and the Sea

This book by Ernest Hemingway is an indisputable masterpiece.* This was the third time I'd read it, and the second time I've read it in a single sitting (it's very short). Before I talk about the book I'd like to mention the actual physical copy - because (not wanting to rub it in if you end up tracking down a bog-standard modern reprint paperback) mine is beautiful; it's a pocketsize hardback from 1966, with faintly yellow-browned pages that smell of sitting on a beanbag in a sunlit attic with a full teapot and nothing to do but enjoy a good book, and a dust jacket with an excitingly expressionistic colourful painted illustration of a big fish on the front and a man in a small boat on the back. It was a Christmas present from my brother a few years ago, so cheers Seth.

   Anyway, the book (this next paragraph will contain plot spoilers, but the true worth of the book is poetic rather than 'oh wow That Happened' so decide for yourself if that matters).

   It is, very simply, about an elderly Cuban fisherman. He has not caught a fish for eighty-four days, and a young boy who he sometimes fishes with is concerned for him. One the eighty-fifth day, he sails out, and ends up hooking a big fish - too big to pull up, so he leaves it hooked and lets it pull his boat far away over the sea hoping it will tire itself out, which eventually it does, rising to the surface to reveal itself as a magnificent marlin, the biggest he has ever seen (and he's seen a lot - this is one experienced fisherman, as the narration shows). So when the opportunity arises, he harpoons it, and straps it to the side of his boat because it's too big to fit inside. But then, during the journey back to land, what should happen but sharks (flipping sharks!) eat his entire fish. By the time he hits the beach, exhausted from the three days spent with little food and water sat under the baking tropical sun clutching with desperate hunterly vigour onto a fishing line, there is nothing strapped to his boat but a tooth-scratched backbone with an enormous nose-sworded skull attached to one end and a giant crescent-moon tailfin to the other. The boy is distraught but proud, the other fishermen are cowed with respect and sympathy, and the old man, knackered and feeling both victorious and defeated, goes to sleep. That's it - I told you plot wasn't the main point.

   Hemingway's prose aches with a purity, a simplicity and elegance, that lends to this straightforward little story a depth and grandeur that puts the reader right there in the scene; man and boy and sea and fish all observed, described, but remaining something of an enigma, known truly only to themselves, even when memories of the man's earlier adventures are recalled in narration, these help provide insight into some of what he thinks he is but we are kept outsiders to him, seeing him chiefly through his actions, which are mostly about being a really good fisherman. He is precise, efficient, attentive, strong, patient, resourceful, and persistent, and in him we see reflected the height of human capability in using ones faculties to conquer the natural world for our own needs; in this case, a fish. But unlike another (much longer) story about a rivalry between man and sea creature in which man's pride and sea creature's ambivalence rendered the whole affair meaningless and tragic, it is clear that Hemingway's old man has a deeply profound respect for the fish (even calling it 'brother' at one point), which may not make moral sense to any vegetarian readers but lends his conversations with himself amid the narration of his fishing trip an air of ecological consciousness - this man sees and takes in the splendour of the natural world surrounding him, only conquering what he must to eat and sell. His reaction when the sharks rob him of his catch is (after doing all he can to fend them off, in improbable-badass-fashion killing several of them with a knife tied to an oar) one of resignation - an 'oh well, I didn't really deserve him, I cheated by using human trickery like fishing equipment, so it's only fair enough that sharks cheat me back'. It's a cyclical story then, and though it has elements of tragedy the attitude the man seems to carry throughout is one of profound acceptance of the unpredictability of nature and yet our dependence on it - and this robs it of being ultimately tragic, as the old man has had such a long life with many adventures that he is happily able to eke out a simple existence doing what he does best and taking humble pride in it.

   But really I don't think it's so much a story about human relationships with nature as it is a story about being a Good Man (in Hemingway's eyes); the old man's lifestyle and mindset are completely cohesive, and though he is past his prime he is still an excellent practitioner of a trade that blends the practical-primal peaks of everyday human endeavours well - good enough to catch the largest fish Havana had ever seen, but not good enough to save it from sharks; and therein lies the rub, try as he might, man will never conquer nature's indifference, and accepting this, knowing where we truly sit in the world and accepting it with stoic graceful willpower, is the kernel of energy that keeps the old man keen in his respect for nature even as he strives to defeat individual fish. Similar parallels about this sense of perspective being an importance mediating force in men's mindsets to pure masculine activities are revealed in conversations the old man and the boy have about baseball - the stardom of Joe DiMaggio is puzzled over when they read in the newspaper that he has a bone spur in his heel, and the old man wonders (when his hand cramps up after a day of being towed by the fish) whether Joe's minor pain would be a comparable hindrance in his field, or whether he'd just man up and get on with it and hit a home run. Basically the Hemingwayan view of masculinity is one of direct simplicity and purpose, strength of body, of mind, skill and will, but one that knows its place and its limits - chief among which is the sheer indifference of much of the world around us, including the natural world, to us. What do real men do faced with that? They persist.

   Enough of my eco-feminist ramblings. This is a really good book and nowhere near as thematically convoluted as I've probably made it sound. It is a book about nothing necessarily more than an old man catching a fish, and yet there are unfathomable oceanic depths to its simplicity. It is one of the most perfectly executed long short stories (or maybe short novels) to grace the many stacks of my bookshelf, and you'd probably like it.

* He won a Nobel Prize in Literature for it, which is kind of as indisputable as masterpieces get.

the Year of Living Danishly

This book by Helen Russell is a journalistic diary charting her experience of living for a year in rural Denmark, a country which has in many surveys and studies on general happiness in different countries come out on top - and so she seeks to delve into their lifestyle, culture, and social systems and stuff to work out whether this is robustly true, and, moreso, she and her husband* put into practice as many of the Danish quirks and habits as possible to see if they have an impact on their happiness. From hygge to communities coming together at the start of spring to watch how excited cows get when they get let out of the barns to joining clubs to having an excellent work-life balance to pastries to bizarrely-specific traditions to excellent state support for parents empowering women to  - there seems to be a great many of these quirks and habits that constitute what it means to live 'Danishly', but Russell places them deftly within a straightforward and cohesive view of roughly what kind of society it's like to be in, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether such a life seems enticing. It certainly seems so - there are aspects that strike me as slightly bonkers, but I'd probably say the same about any culture (especially Englishness), though also warmly endearing and conducive to carefree and well-grounded lifestyles that I imagine would make one pretty happy once you found your feet in it. Happiness is something I write about quite a lot on this blog (cos I read quite a lot of books about it I suppose) - it's the essence of what I think everyone is on some pragmatic everyday level pursuing with their lives, and yet our sociocultural climate is one that sends us incredibly mixed signals about how to get there.** So it's nice to have something not abstracted out of statistical research or philosophising or psychological theory, but reported first-hand from a befuddled self-deprecating Englishwoman trying her best to experiment with the happiness homegrown in Denmark - she interviews quite a few relevant people to flesh out these insights, and honestly from reading this book I am more or less convinced that Denmark has pretty much cracked (not completed by a long shot but got enough of the gist to be currently leading and probably continue making strong progress) the socio-politico-cultural-economic recipe for making a country full of people happy. I learnt a lot from this book, and also enjoyed it a lot - Russell writes with an adroitly wry humour that pervades everything, and the largely anecdotal format makes her and the Lego Man's joint pursuit of Danish-style happiness read like a holiday memoir that turns out to be highly informative. And, if you're anything like me, makes you want to visit Denmark as soon as plausible.

* Whose getting a job at the Lego factory was the prompting reason for their moving to Denmark - he is referred to throughout the book as 'the Lego Man' and seems pretty happy all the time, which I imagine you would be if you worked at the Lego factory.

** Is the pursuit of happiness a quest for finding true spiritual meaning? Or the reasonable development of social and relational perspective so we feel at ease with our place in the world? A delicate neo-utilitarian balancing act between finding purpose and deriving pleasure from our lives? Or is it just a matter of just not caring about stuff that isn't helping us feel like things are swell? Even after Helen Russell's move to Denmark, the objective jury is still out on this one, because happiness is, first and foremost, subjective, and so studies of specifically-happy mindsets (such as Danish) are probably the best way to further develop insights into how we can make societies happier. A big part of the Danish case seems to be highly effective public services - with great work protections, social care, welfare, education, healthcare; basically just having well-oiled effective apparatus for dealing with the kinds of problems that commonly make people's lives worse and for improving the kinds of potentials for people to make their and others' lives better. Personally I think true (as in solid dependable unshakeable joy) happiness is an introspective metaphysical state to be reached by insight and mindset, one which cannot be replicated or brought upon people en masse - but the basic steps for providing good systems for people to live their whole lives in with as little worry as possible can be observed empirically and so give clear indications as to the effects of such investment in society. Secular liberalism's primary quest is to provide good free lives for people, and Denmark is (as are the other Scandinavians) literally doing that better than other countries by operating a political economy that is pretty much a democratic semi-socialist model. Capitalism doesn't make people happy as equitably or reliably.

Fahrenheit 451

This book, a dystopian masterpiece by Ray Bradbury, is probably one of my all-time favourite novels (this is my third reading of it), being as it is largely about books, which astute readers of this blog will be aware I am quite fond of on occasion.

   In a futurised America where they're at war all the time but nobody really knows what for, where nobody talks to other people except shallow exaggerations of people beamed onto omnipresent screens, where sadness and anxiety and distrust permeate everyone's social consciousness too deeply to ignore such that all anyone can do to stay sane is distract oneself with meaningless jingles, entertainment, racing cars, self-medicating drugs; where (and this is where I am definitely talking about the novel and not hyperbolically describing the actual state of modern western society - oosh) totalitarian propaganda has persuaded everyone that freedom of thought and the existential quandaries one may think oneself into is the truest and deepest evil, and so to minimise sadness, items that prompt this kind of constructive, introspective, philosophical thinking - i.e. books - are to be disposed of. This is where our main character comes in. Guy Montag is a fireman; it is his job to go to locations where members of the public have notified him and the other firemen that there are books present, and upon arrival, burn them. (Point of trivia - the title is what it is because apparently 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the exact temperature at which paper catches fire.) Anyway, Guy encounters a weird* girl called Clarisse who doesn't care about the typical conformist norms entombing their society - and through conversation with her (plus probably some other things but SPOILERS) he finds inklings in himself awakening that plunge him into a thrilling and thought-provoking conflict with the culture he plays a part in upholding.

   This book is just jam-packed with beauty and horror and wisdom and humanity; it is superbly written,** with concise descriptions of nuanced emotional and psychological angles sometimes just twisting knives into the reader - I've enjoyed this more each time I've read it. Its sci-fi world (which technology-wise could feasibly be 2005 had America become a totalitarian state when this was first publish) is drawn sparingly, but broadly, and with enough tantalising detail to give a clear impression of what it is like - and boy is it bleak. Guy Montag's world scares me more in many ways than that of 1984, because there is such a veneer of superficial saccharine positivity draped over the hollow habit of its citizens lives. Dystopian fiction has always been an incisive means of worming out the most insidious, most harrowing, most potentially-ruinous characteristics of the societies that produce them - and in Fahrenheit 451 we have a staunchly-liberalistic poetic defense of intellectual freedom that cuts to the heart of many of the cultural tensions in the modern west, especially now in the era where the lines between Black Mirror episodes and actual possible implementations and implications of technologies are blurring.

   Basically, books are important but what's more important is what's in them - and this is something that can be in many things,*** but it is also something that can be suppressed. Free-thinking individuals should seek to resist and oppose such suppression wherever and whenever it may occur, even if that means memorising chunks of scripture and going to live with a gang of well-read meandering tramps in the woods to stay off the radar of the thought police. Even if that means, more plausibly, thinking for oneself and questioning and challenging commonly-held views, never fearing reasonable discussion. The reign of such dangers as ignorance and closed-mindedness are far more commonly down to individuals just not being bothered about the truth than authoritarian suppression or censorship of it. There's been a lot of use of the term 'post-truth' about our current political climate - we live in an age of social media echo chambers and 'fake news' mainstream propaganda machines. Dystopian states of affairs don't spring up overnight - they develop out of political exploitation of exigent sociocultural trends, and currently it feels like western society has walked straight off the cliff-edge of postmodernism and is plunging toward the rocks of utter anti-intellectual anarchy. If you are a reader, a thinker, join me and Ray Bradbury and Guy Montag and Stewart Lee in resisting these trends - or else who knows, we might end up with the democratically-elected President being an orange neo-fascist demagogue who people have only heard of because he used to fire ambitious businessnoobs on television.
   Oh, wait

* Weirdness is always relative. Clarisse is probably one of the most normal people in the book's whole world by our standards, but what a world.

** During a nine-day rush of creative effort on 10-cent-for-30-minute typewriters in the basement of a library. There's a great little epilogue by Ray Bradbury discussing the conception and construction of the novel.

*** The conversation Guy has with Faber about this has more solid-gold truth nuggets in it than some entire books I've read.

YOGA [teach yourself]

This book (okay not exactly that one, I got an edition from 1960 that I can't even find on Amazon, having found it in the 50p second-hand bargain bin of a bookshop near the park) by James Hewitt is pretty much what you'd expect from a fifty-seven year-old introductory guide to yoga: full of extremely deep New-Agey guff about mind over matter and expanding your consciousness (there's a chapter entitled 'Psychic Powers'), a few dashes of pseudo-scientific-sounding health benefits of meditation (which admittedly I've googled and there's a lot of science backing up the benefits), some good quotes selected from a variety of scriptures,* several highly-dubious claims about what masters of yoga can do (e.g. drink poison, bury themselves alive for two weeks, go a year without water); and FAR from the best thing for anyone who wants to start practicing yoga to turn to. I mean, seriously - the prose is clunky and inaccessible, especially when giving directions; there are a few sparse illustrations but they just made me laugh. The sections of this book about yoga in general seem overstated but also do definitely connect with the appeal of it; however, the chapters about meditation, breathing, stretches and postures, even dietary and lifestyle aspects, all smell far too academic for this to qualify as a 'teach yourself' book in the 21st-century. I mean, for something I picked up out of a bargain bin, this has definitely swayed me with my prior inclinations of trying to start practicing yoga once I've got my own place (currently living in a student house where my room isn't big enough to do much without banging into stuff, which is never very zen) - but as far as learning yoga goes, I guarantee you'll be able to find resources more helpful than this on the internet for free.** This might've been a good book for it in 1960, but times change, dude.

* I appreciated this - this book made it very clear that yoga, despite traditionally helping facilitate aspects of self-knowledge, self-control and meditation for many faiths, is not intrinsically spiritual but physiological: simply physical and mental exercises that help one develop physical and mental faculties and therefore congruent with pretty much any belief system.

** If your googling fails herein, simply pop down to a nearby wholefood shop and check the windows for flyers from self-employed yoga teachers.