Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

This book, a play by Tom Stoppard which I acquired a secondhand copy of years ago after seeing it on-stage (at the Lantern Theatre in Nether Edge with my mum) and being so blown away by the sheer inventive ridiculousness of its utterly droll, meandering, angsty script - to be honest, I probably shouldn't have read it today, having just finished it in one sitting despite having the bulk of packing and cleaning to do as I'm moving out of my student house on Friday - but whatever - anyway. The play.

   If you're not familiar with William Shakespeare's (possibly?) best-known work, Hamlet,* this play would just be basically two guys chatting drivel about them not knowing what's going on. But even if you are familiar with Hamlet, that's kind of all it is. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's roles in Shakespeare's opus are so negligibly small, so devoid of agency and history and identity and context, that we can only speculate as to what those characters are like, how they reacted to the bizarre improbable circumstances in which they found themselves, and what, if anything, they could have tried to do to make things happen any other way. Of course, the unstoppable narrative train of Shakespearean tragedy rolls the plot inexorably onward and our two protagonists never really have a say in directing or even muchwise understanding it - they are simply happened to - all the way up to, as the title of the play (and the events of Hamlet) dictates, their unexpected, undeserved, and more or less meaningless deaths.

   The genius of this play lies in Stoppard's constant looping around this aimlessness of both its protagonists, their complete lack of individual decision-making (and even small occasions where they do try, their efforts yield little fruit or are foiled by other characters just confusing them) and even distinct identities (they don't remember their personal histories or trajectories, because Shakespeare never wrote them one - they for all intents and purposes exist to play a tiny role in the drama of their friend who was the heir to the Danish throne); buffeted about on the winds of chance, not knowing what is worth caring about or why or how they would even determine that, questioning whatever they see and hear and say and remember but having so little to go on in terms of determining what's going on around them that they have to just take everyone else's word for stuff anyway - they are bound to an objective deterministic fate, almost by chance and effectively out of their control, and all they can do is play their parts. Other than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern**** the only character from Hamlet who plays a largish role is the head of the troupe of players - allowing for some pretty meta and thoroughly amusing explorations of the existential quandaries which R & G find themselves in and how it in many ways reflects the condition of the actor generally.

   Dunno. I don't want to say too much - I just think this play adds so much extra brilliant depth to a pair of otherwise entirely unremarkable characters in what is probably one of the best plays of all time. If you know Hamlet already, read this; you will be bemused and enthused and most certainly amused. If you don't, well, they do say it's not for everyone, but who's they? Not whoever's writing this blog. I say, it's a flipping classic, so get it down you and then give this a go because it's incredibly funny, and to my mind the most unusually (almost lazily) thought-provokingly incisively little banger of a stageplay I've ever had the privilege of seeing. It was also a hoot to read.

* I don't want to do spoilers because it's great and you should read/watch** it and then also read/watch*** this, because it's so much grander in context.

** There are so many excellent screen adaptations of Hamlet that it doesn't even bear to list a handful of good ones. Google it or something.

*** There's a really good film adaptation starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman.

**** Years ago I got a pair of fishtank shrimps named this, because they were impossible to tell apart, and a recurring joke in the play is that nobody can tell the difference between R & G (they often fail to even properly differentiate between each other).

the Lexus and the Olive Tree

This book by Thomas Friedman, despite my having been working my way through it for literally nineteen months,* will not be treated with a long post, because it really annoyed me.
   It is a book seeking to provide a clear, objective, accessible overview of globalisation - but anyone reading it with a modicum of awareness of the actualities of neoliberal capitalism or America's hegemonic distortion of political-economic foreign policy to its own ends will be struck by how utterly blinkered it is. Bordering on propaganda for the corporate empire; it is full of oversimplification, ham-fisted analysis disguised in colourful (and often quite apt) metaphors that nonetheless wash over the true complexity and nuances of the issues he discusses,** highly reliant on anecdotal and conversational stuff to support his points instead of actual assessments of reality,*** resorting with alarming regularity to even making his case by walking us through entirely hypothetical imaginary scenarios,**** barely any hard data or robust models of how any of this actually works, and all of this sickery in buckets. It wouldn't be so bad if he were merely spouting the glories of American-hegemony-led global capitalism - he does also take care to point out some of the shortfalls and flaws in its current mode and pace - only to shortly after, each time he brings these up, discard them as "we'll be alright the market will soon adjust" or "this is something people are starting to notice and so there'll probably be a political solution soon." His picture of the global political economy is one of resigned delight in the grand impenetrable inevitability of American consumer capitalism spreading itself ever further and entrenching itself ever deeper.
   Please, for the sake of your own self-respect as a thinking individual,***** do not read this book - and I ask this not because I don't see the value of reading viewpoints with which you disagree, that was literally the reason why I read it - but there must be better advocates for global neoliberal capitalism than this shoddy compendium of travel-writing extracts peppered with weird clunky metaphors and made-up situations all blended together with relatively reasonable explanations of how global capitalism works. One simply cannot, in this book, easily separate fact from sort-of-fact from ideological propaganda from outright fiction.

Just to feel more constructive, I'm also now going to include a list of books that deal well with many topics relevant to the book's content that Thomas Friedman entirely neglected:

• the entirety of practical economic theory
• the co-opting of mainstream economic theory by plutocratic interests
• common misconceptions about capitalism
• the fact that American hegemony isn't actually 100%
• how the global north messes up development in the global south
• the role played by gender in political economy
• the fact that aiming for infinite growth on a finite planet is dumb/dangerous
• any properly contextualised discussion of anti-capitalist movements

Remember, kids - they'll always tell you it's just the way things are and always will be if they have vested interests in it remaining so.

* Two of the chapters in it were key readings on liberalism for my core module last year, and I decided for the sake of understanding more in-depth the case for a view of the global political economy much at odds with my own it was worth reading the whole thing. Boy was I wrong (see above). Anyway, I'd got about three quarters of the way through, but have just finished it in a don't-really-care-anymore speed-reading spurt, because I need to get loads of books out of the university library for my dissertation but apparently I've hit my maximum amount of loaned items - so this one's going back to the returns bin after a year and a half in my 'currently reading, sort of' pile.

** For example, the 'electronic herd' being the global flow of money to wherever financial and investment opportunities seem liable to spring up; or the 'golden straitjacket' as the set of deregulatory allowances a society much make for free market operations so as to not get left in the dust-wake of our rapidly globalising world economy.

*** The most damning criticism of this book, I think, is that it is 475 pages long, purports to be a well-researched highly reliable account of the way the world ticks, and has not got a bibliography or any references. This isn't academic snobbery - this is the simple principle that arguments, especially about large highly-contested convoluted things like, oh I don't know, the world economy, should be supported by evidence that the person arguing has tried to get to grips with the subject in a way somewhat more accountable than just flying round the world asking people what they think and cherry-picking quotes and stories to suit the paragraph's topic. There isn't even an index! Of course, this doesn't matter to his target market, which is presumably Americans who just know that capitalism is all fine and America is awesome and who needs to understand what's going on in critical depth, this guy's talked to lots of important people, he clearly knows what he's on about (and I believe he does, he's just very dedicated to his role as Laymans'-Intellectual Defender of Pure American Neoliberal Hegemony).

**** I shit you not, chapter twelve concludes with a full four pages of entirely fabricated conversation between Warren Christopher and Hafez al-Assad... in what school of writing robust non-fiction has he been told this is acceptable!? The man has a Pulitzer Prize for goodness sake!

***** I mean, I assume you are, if you're reading this blog. Who are you people? Please leave an indignant comment if you think I'm a ridiculous nutter whose concerns about global capitalism are entirely overblown. I've never had an indignant comment before but would love one, in part to feel like I'm provoking debate, but mostly just to confirm that actual human people are reading these posts. Pfft.

On Being Nice

This book, from the School of Life (of Alain de Botton's work), is a really nice little turquoise hardback filled with short readable chapters about the various aspects of how to conduct oneself nicely* - a quality that is, apparently, lacking in modern society. Humans are social creatures, geared towards friendship and cooperation within communities - a trait that all genuine clear thinking supports the endeavour of and which even alien visitors feel compelled to partake in.**

   However, 'niceness' is only partly derived from this intrinsic bio-psychological drive in people to seek belonging and reciprocity with other people, and partly derived from a string of complex historical normative legacies. Our current western model of niceness has, according to this book's first section, been shaped considerably by Christianity (which emphasised other-centred action but also dampens vividness of character and ambition), romanticism (which emphasised spontaneous individuality as more valuable than predictable boring normal niceness), capitalism (which depends on people more or less getting along so they can operate as amoral cogs in its ever-growing empire of profit) and eroticism (which sort of built on the romantic spontaneity to characterise niceness as unsexy). The second section of the book deals with kindness - the importance of charitability in how we react to things, the importance of being reasonably open about our shortcomings and vulnerabilities (neither be a strong man or a tragic hero), taking motivation in consideration, responding gracefully to suffering, and cracking the delicate and multifaceted art of politeness. The third section launches into how we can use niceness to improve our own social lives and enrich the lives of others in it: being clear about the value of friendship, not being weirdly over-friendly, overcoming our own and others' shyness, teasing appropriately and affectionately, telling white lies, flirting to boost self-esteem, being warm and open-minded, being able to talk about yourself honestly and endearingly (without burying weaknesses, or ranting, or being needlessly boring), and listening properly to others when talking to them. The final chapter presents us with a challenge - the ultimate test of one's social skills: maintaining an interaction with a young (old enough to speak, and walk off if you bore or annoy it) child whom you haven't met before.

   There are parts of this book that I feel don't adequately map out the actualities of how to be properly adaptably nice,*** but the groundwork definitely seems to be present, and it's laid out in a friendly readable manner which makes the whole a rewarding and life-affirming reminder of the importance of being nice.

* I would like to offer a disclaimer that I didn't really learn much from this book that I wasn't already more or less putting into practice; as a friendly but still fairly culturally-typical Englishperson I'm quite good at being nice - though this stems more from my aim to live in a constant mindset of Christlike love and empathy than from the abstract wishy-washy humanism of the School of Life and such. Whatever. The reason for my reading this then is 'research' - one of the main characters in a big writing project I'm working on the plans for at the moment is just very nice, and what I wanted from this book was a systematic well-phrased exposition of the contours and nuances of Being Nice with which to pepper some of her deeds and comments. To this end, the book served me very well. However I imagine it would also be quite effective as a rough manual to the practice for people who are much better at deriving practical information from books than they are at empathetically and genuinely engaging in interpersonal relations. Probably don't give it as a present to people who need it though. Ironically, that would be quite rude.

** Four links in one sentence! I'm on a mad'un!

*** I mean, as a radically inclusive left-wing Christian with little respect for the charades of the bourgois echelons of British culture that the liberal humanists who wrote this probably inhabit, this should be no surprise, but still, this is a decent overview. It's not like I'm going to bother to dissect all the small nuances where I thought it should have said more than it did or where it made assertions that actually seem questionable under scrutiny in different contextual light - mainly because I can't be arsed, but also because it would be a petty pedantic scrabbling against a book which overall I think laid out a good picture of what modern secular niceness is.

the Age of Earthquakes: a Guide to the Extreme Present

This book, an innovative collaboration between Shumon Basar, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Douglas Coupland, is somewhat disorientingly like reading through a 250-page printout of a complex and idiosyncratic video essay - and is all the more arresting for its style. It taps into the subjectivity of the self-aware citizen of the contemporary era; the alarming rate at which new forms of media and technology are changing the way we think and act and relate, the consumerist-celebrity-enthused cultural shambles of political spectacle and public apathy and bemusement, the dizzying horrors of the Anthropocene's onset and development. Through a combination of well-chosen and well-modified images and bluntly thought-provoking short strings of text, it's like a kind of multimedia collage, as poetic and profound as it is relatable to everyday experience.
   I don't really want to add any of my own reflections about it as I feel this book (one which before flipping through it I had no idea really what to expect and ended up reading in one sitting) has enough depth of critical insight packed into its extraordinarily well-assembled pages to render pointless anything that I would add. It is an artistic experiment in exaggerative truth-telling, one that I think succeeds in mapping out some of the less-explored but highly-relevant and important contours of our extreme (and in large part unobserved in much critical detachment by those living inside it) present age. This book is a cohesive, wide-ranging, incisive and ultimately pretty bleak - the global zeitgeist in 2017 is one in which we all find ourselves weirdly sort of trying to catch up with who we are and what's going on, only to find that as soon as we get near practical understandings, things have already started changing in surprising ways. Technology, politics, social order, individual behaviours, and more, are becoming inextricably interconnected in strange and unpredictable ways - while this book is by no means a robust informational guide to these happenings, in looser terms it cuts to the heart of what is going on by presenting and subverting the absurdities that play out daily all around us.
   Would I recommend this book? Eh, maybe - people growing up in the world it describes may well share my reaction of both feeling like their own world was being aptly described and their [re-?]developing a deep sense of uneasy angst. Or, give a copy to a non-millennial if you want to make them feel thoroughly uncomfortable.