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.

the Kurds of Syria

This book by Harriet Allsopp is an in-depth exploration of the sociopolitical repression faced by Kurds in Syria, also comprising detailed portraits of Kurdish political parties active there and the effects of this repressive environment on their capacity for radical or vocal opposition. It would be a relatively useful read for anyone interested in the Rojava Revolution, as this book lays out a rich and complex sub-national historical context for the events that have taken place in northern Syria since 2011.

the Kurdish National Movement: its Origins and Development

This book by Wadie Jwaideh is an excellently thorough walkthrough of exactly the topic described by its title. Unfortunately, it is also pretty old - it was written as a doctorate thesis in 1959, two years before the guy who wrote the foreword to this book claims the Kurdish nationalist movement properly took off (and the PKK, probably the biggest player in the modern history of Kurdish nationalism, weren't formed for another nineteen years); so even if Kurdish issues fascinate you, frankly I'm not sure why you'd read this one compared to more recent books about their struggle - unless you were, like me, doing a super in-depth academic study with Kurdishness at the centre of it.
   Still, as you can probably tell by the fact that it's getting a post,* I found this informative, useful, and very well-structured - genuinely learned loads of stuff from Long Ago that still helpfully resonates with more contemporary developments. History is always great fun to read too - it's like going through current events on fast-forward, apart from the actual tone and caliber of those events subtly shifts the further back you go, because, like, history, innit. And so the grandeur of the achievements of great persons, placed into the immensely-grander complex webs of context in which they must invariably occur, seem so strange and small, enormous struggles condensed for brevity and laid out cold as mere memory, words on a page. If you want a small taster of this kind of Ozymandian ennui, just google (don't bother actually I'll wikilink it) Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji.***

* That means I read the whole book, which is not the norm for books I'm only reading for research for an essay. But dissertations, as I am finding, are different beasts entirely, if only due to scale; much like having gotten used to writing pickles and now having a full-size courgette demanded of you. Also, the topic is super interesting and I've got a month and a half left** so am taking the luxury of imbibing a ridiculously large quantity of source material from which to whittle out support for my arguments.

** As compared to my typical position when writing essays, which is to do all the reading in a week or two and write it up in a coffee-and-bread-and-humus-and-satsuma-fuelled thirty-six hour stint in the open-all-day library. But dissertations are way too long to do that. And the IC is closed over summer, which is probably just as well.

*** Regardless of how adept or inept a leader they may actually be, I find myself unable to not find something enthralling about historical figures who seem to make it their mission to cause as much irk to great powers as they can while going about their own aims. Not that Barzanji necessarily did, but from the way Jwaideh recounted his exploits, complete with snippets from the statements and letters of increasingly confused and irritated British colonial officers, he certainly did a bit.

the Kurdish Spring

This book by David Phillips is one of the many books in the pile I assembled over a month ago for my dissertation project about the Rojava revolution and its implications. It's also the first of these (so far*) that I've read all the way through, as it just kept yielding good points for my notes. It's also due back at the library TODAY, so excuse me for avoiding doing anywhere near a properly in-depth post about it - but since I'll be reading so many other books about the Kurdish question and its surrounding social, historical, ideological, and geopolitical contexts, there will be plenty of space in future posts to give this enormous and complex and fascinating topic more blogroom,** as right now my priority is to return this book to the inter-library loans bin so I don't get fined.***

   Anyway, the book itself. It's a pretty good introduction to the current state of affairs for Kurdistan as an overall region, but is largely focussed on the semi-autonomous Iraqi region in terms of in-depth considerations of context and prospects. The first chapter lays out a clear historical picture of how, in the scrabbling between Britain and France to carve up the remains of the collapsed Ottoman empire, Kurdish demands for national sovereignty were thoroughly neglected and they ended up as a split stateless minority, lumped between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The next four chapters explore how in each of these countries, since then, the Kurds have been quite consistently and horrendously marginalised, their ethnic and linguistic and cultural traditions suffering attempts by the despotic regimes that took root in the post-colonial Middle-Eastern world to be entirely stamped out and denied, and efforts by Kurds in each of these countries to assert their own identity and independence has been repressed (through political dominance, as in the Iranian theocracy, or through all-out guerrilla warfare, as in the PKK's clashes with the Turkish state since the late 1970s). Though things may be slowly changing: Phillips then considers the relative (compared to other nation state projects in the region) success of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, the relatively promising peace process being negotiated between the Turkish state and the imprisoned leader of the PKK, the ongoing (if tough) capacity for democratic reform in Iran, and the phoenix-like situation of the Syrian Kurds - who have, in the wake of the state collapsing into civil war, taken initiative (mobilised in large part by the PYD) in self-organising male and female militia forces, reclaiming as much territory as they can safely control from the forces of Daesh, and running it through bottom-up democratically autonomous structures that throw into question the entire necessity of centralised states. The final three chapters look at the potential future for the Iraqi region, which is arguably the 'most like' a currently existing independent Kurdistan, and consider how it may continue on its path to becoming this, and what challenges still may lie ahead.****

   Phillips writes accessibly and makes of an incredibly convoluted subject a book that most people already vaguely familiar with the current lay of the Middle East could get to grips with. However, I think his focus on the KRG rather than Rojava as the key locus of Kurdish hope for independence is misplaced, and though he makes some very balanced and reasonable conclusions, at the end of the day he's neglected the more radical and revolutionary aspect of the current Kurdish struggle, and in my view, if a genuine 'spring' of freedom and independence is emergent anywhere, it is from West Kurdistan that such momentum will be developed to propel the Kurdish people forwards.*****

* Okay, except Homage to Catalonia, but that was more like recreational reading that I managed to squeeze a few more-or-less relevant parallels from which I probably won't even end up using, rather than being an actual proper source.

** I might even upload my finished dissertation onto here as a pdf, since it will essentially be comprised of my thoughts on a load of books (well, and journal papers)... or is that needlessly self-indulgent academic whiffery? Probably. Dunno. I'll decide when it's done.

*** Apparently I went over my borrowing limit, and the library staff have been very nice and just let me do so as it's summer (and who else is going to be taking out thirty or so books about Kurdistan, ecofeminism, anti-hierarchical sociology, and the general muck that is Middle-Eastern geopolitics? exactly) but I still don't want to push it.

**** Spoiler: they include pretty much every other major regional power. And America.

***** The KRG has, in my view, made too many geopolitical concessions to regional powers (e.g. Turkey) who ultimately don't want the Kurdish struggle to succeed. Rojava has not and probably will not ask anyone any permission for any of what they're doing - why should they when they're fending off Daesh?

Homage to Catalonia

This book, an eyewitness account of a small sliver of the Spanish civil war told by George Orwell, is probably my favourite of his books that I've read yet. I read it because of the admittedly-not-as-extensive-as-I'd-hoped parallels between the circumstances of Catalonia's workers' revolution (driven as much by anarchists as communists) in the midst of a complex civil war and the current situation in Rojava - and, somewhat appropriately, read the bulk of it during four days spent at a grassroots environmentalist training camp last week.
   It is an enlightening and intriguing perspective on an aspect of one of the 20th-centuries' defining conflicts often airbrushed out of historical remembrance - the Spanish civil war is framed in mainstream memory as a straightforward conflict between the established republican government and an upstart traditionalist proto-fascist general; as Orwell so deftly explores, the reality was immensely more complex and convoluted than this,* but one of the largest precipitating events in the situation was this worker-led revolution in Catalonia - in which locals rejected what they perceived as the stagnant exploitative hierarchies of centralized organised religion and industrial capitalism, instead establishing secular egalitarian communities where decisions were made  and work was done (down to the voluntary formation of militias to join in the fighting against Franco's forces) and resources were shared collectively - is not as widely known, despite being a key aspect of the scenario. Noam Chomsky argues that mainstream academia of the Spanish war neglected to pay sufficient attention to this part of the story because they were writing in institutions to some degree tied up in the perpetuation of nationalist or capitalist or otherwise status quo hegemonies - and so even mentioning anarchist revolutions, not least ones in which "one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable... a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism"; where George Orwell along with tens of thousands of Catalan and Spanish and international volunteers answering the conscience-call of solidarity had, if for only several months, and in the midst of a destructive and treacherous civil war (against not only fascists but against the machinations and subterfuge of other factions ostensibly on the same side), truly felt that they had breathed the air of equality that was the immediate aftermath of revolution, where all previously unquestioned structures of power and inequality had been levelled and there was nowhere to go but forwards, to win the fight against Franco and continue developing an experimentally bottom-up democratic socialist society, as hand-in-hand projects - obviously this isn't the kind of thing that mainstream academics would want to pay attention to for fear it inspire its recurrence, or even simply remind people of its possibility. Anyway, as expected, Orwell writes with an incisiveness and clarity, with a humbly-grounded-in-subjectivity yet attempting-to-make-substantive-claims-about-overall-situations approach to his perspective that is frank and honest and as educational as it is forthright; his descriptive and reflective passages on the nature of the conflict itself are lyrical, brutal, and bleak. One is left with a powerful and unpleasant aftertaste of the utter dank futility of war - yet also, in certain horrendously final circumstances, of its utter necessity. This was not straightforwardly a war of fascism against democracy - there are far too many twisted corners to the historical context for it to be framed as such - but ultimately Orwell, in this book, shows us the simple human grandeur of what we can achieve together when we try and how it is worth fighting for,** even when those efforts feel pointless given how far they are stilted by the actual fighting and despite the experiential drudge and vague terror of the fighting itself.
   I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, well-written eyewitness accounts of under-reported events, anarchism and democracy and socialism and fascism and whatnot; anyone who's read either of Orwell's best-known works*** will see just to what extent his experiences in Catalonia (especially the paranoia-inducing days spent floating about between rumours, misinformation, and secret police during the Barcelona fighting and the later repression of the anarchist militia) shaped his political consciousness, lending a great deal of colour and shape to what must have been an incredibly formative time in the life of a man who went on to write some of the most poignant fiction-fable takedowns of totalitarianism ever penned.



* Two chapters dealing in-depth with the twisted 'plague of initialisms' that became of Spain's political landscape during this time, and the endless spewage of rumour and treachery and propaganda between and about each of these, forms a helpful appendix.

** As a pacifist but with a fairly similar political outlook to Orwell in certain respects (at least chiefly those that form the thematic and topical nexus of this book), I was brought a few times into quite introspective consideration of what, if anything, I would deem worth fighting (in an actual violent warfare sense) for - and I'm still working on this answer.

*** I can't remember what they're called. 1973 and Animal House?

Dethroning Mammon

This book by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is one of those that so well brings together and consolidates differing major strands of my emergent (striving to be holistic) system of general thought that the best way to do a blog post about it entails buttloads of links to other books I've read, so settle in for a final paragraph more or less entirely comprised of these.
   First though - the book itself: it's a very straightforward critique, from what should be a pretty uncontroversial mainstream Christian perspective, of the idolisation of money and power and materialistic status (i.e. 'Mammon') in contemporary Western society. Welby walks us, in engaging, readable and non-complicated terms, through the central knots of what is spiritually problematic about the way most people in our socioeconomic setting live: valuing only what we can materially quantify, becoming controlled by it, insisting on primacy of individual ownership, enshrining it in our hearts and minds and value-driven behaviours, losing out on the eternal and moral gains to be made from being selfless and quick to share - and so losing out on joy as we become cogs in worldly schemes designed for short-term profit without respect for people's intrinsic worth. It's a book that I think is extremely timely, and should be as widely-read among Christians (especially Conservative ones) as any book can be - Mammon is the world's most pervasive, most collective, most insidious, and most successful idol, having risen to hegemonic dominance over more or less the entire global political economy - and the fact this is so un-discussed by the Church is a matter of extreme spiritual as well as sociopolitical concern. We have a duty as servants of Christ to, in seeking and working for his glory, not only evangelise and serve others, but also to stand and testify against idols running rampant through our cultures, and while there are many of these, Mammon is one so big and dominant and unchallenged (at least in spiritual terms from mainstream Christianity) that we absolutely must reject and fight it, and work to open people's eyes.
   Why is this important?
   Well, let's start with God, who being in absolute and ultimate a community of love, made us to emulate this love in the way we live. This is human nature as told by the biblical narrative, and that sets Christians in a radical light in a world that is not, by and large, shaped along these lines. We live in a world where billions are left to suffer and die in poverty, ignored by the rich, who have secured so completely their grasp on power that economic 'wisdom' itself is determined by their interests, enabling richer nations to bully and exploit poor ones as they strive for global dominance, even to the degree that our short-term economic endeavours threaten to dangerously destabilise the self-regulating biosphere. And for what? This materialistic striving doesn't make us happier, it just makes us competitive and angsty - allowing our individual and communal spiritual lives to wither, neglected, as we're all too busy chasing the gravy train, all the while finding our societies' ills perpetuated by the socioeconomic insecurities internalised by those living in highly unequal systems. In the Bible, we repeatedly see idolatry and injustice entwined together - and the same is true today. To be truly loving requires that we engage people spiritually and pragmatically: our pursuit of cohesive justice and our witness of gospel truth to others must go hand in hand. People forget that economics originated from moral philosophy - the social systems of production, distribution and exchange today are so complex, interdependent and verging on incomprehensible that trying to take a moral or religious perspective on them seems almost absurd - yet this we must do. But first we must disentangle ourselves from the web of apathy, misconception, and unquestioning conformity that surround Mammon: as salt and light in the world, we must not allow ourselves to be reshaped by the values of our idol-saturated culture but only by that which we know to be developing us as we help build each other up in the likeness of Christ - and having been socialised into accepting as natural and inevitable the machinations of a social order that glorifies affluence and marginalised those who do not, or cannot, attain it, that means first sharpening our critical thinking. Question things; question each particular usage of political or economic power as they are often neither moral nor legitimate, and do not be afraid of open reasonable discussion - as this is the life-support soil of civil society in which much intellectual Christian evangelism takes place and in which the seeds of progressive change are sown. Consider the impact and optimisation of your work for the service of these ends; educate yourself about the yes-complex-but-oh-so-important fields in which change needs to occur; open your eyes to actual circumstances of less-well-off communities; as an individual and through your influence on political decision-makers (am assuming most readers of this blog are lucky enough, like me, to live in democratic societies) try to promote the pursuit of an agenda that is inclusive and abundant rather than focused on hierarchy and scarcity - reframe your moral priorities around helping and empowering those most in need, rather than enabling those least in need to continue helping themselves. Oh, and if voting for this doesn't work, there are lots of other ways of making a robust point...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

This book, James Joyce's 1916 quasi-autobiographical novel, was utterly sublime. I read the bulk of it on the coach to and back from Glastonbury last month* and oh my goodness that asterisk-comment was not intended to run on so long.

   I should probably talk about the book.

   It's about Stephen Dedalus (who also appears as an adult in Ulysses) as he transitions, over the course of several years, from childhood to youngmanhood, in ways stilted and tilted by his incorrigible aesthetic leanings - from Jesuit boarding school to Trinity College in Dublin, we see Stephen grow and become alienated from almost everything and everyone held in the suspension of normality - questioning his religion, his family, Ireland itself, finding clarity and solace only in the abstract constructions of philosophical and literary thought as he delves into books as his escape and his direction into the possibility of new avenues for life and thought. Exquisitely written, the stream-of-consciousness aspect that characterises Joyce's work is not as impenetrable as in other works, and so (other than semi-regular phrases in Latin) this works as a fairly accessible bildungsroman of the highest quality, bringing the reader squarely into Stephen's head as he tries to make sense of the world around him. There's really not that much I need to say. If you like incredible literature, you'll like this, especially if you yourself identify as an artist and have felt, growing up, like something of an outsider - there are passages that rang so deeply true with me that I was left feeling profoundly astonished at the sheer capacity for similarity in the turbulent chasms within each unique human self.

* Fitting, since Glastonbury last year was where my own budding intent to become an Artist was cemented in the strangest of ways. I'd been brewing my ideas for a novel, or possibly series of novels, for just over a month, and was toying with the idea of instead of trying to do a PhD and get into a political-economic think-tank after my Masters to just find a random day-job and focus on creative writing - and somehow, the core idea for the characters and story arcs that would eventually unspool into the eight (ikr) books I have since planned around it just fell, as if from nowhere, into my head, and it was there, in the Glade stage that Thursday afternoon, listening to a tune that I could neither remember nor remove from my head for the next four days, that I realised "well, okay, so that is what I am going to do."
   This conviction was only bolstered two days later (strap yourself in, this is a long weird anecdote but I'm going to tell it anyway because why not) when I insisted on going to see Madness despite none of my friends wanting to. I have a tendency to wander off or just get separated from the group at festivals and on nights out, and if you lose your friends at Glastonbury (with a dead phone, a festival site the size of a small city, and two-hundred-thousand flamboyant revellers slowly grinding their way from fun to fun in six inches of squelchy mud like herds of migratory wildebeest) it's unlikely you'll find them again before it's evening-time and you're meant to be heading to Shangri-La - and so, when I was set on travelling to the Pyramid Stage while my crew remained at The Park, it was decided that a pair of friends-of-friends** would accompany me to make sure I got there and back without getting lost. However, they really annoyed me, exuding as they did a glib air of condescending snobbery and detached ungrateful poshness that was not at all in the spirit of Michael Eavis nor Madness nor whatever level of vibe I was on at the time, and so I hatched a plot to run away from them as soon as we reached the Pyramid Stage - and so, as we neared, one of my appointed guardians told me as one would an unruly toddler "okay now don't lose us or anything", then checked their phone, I seized my chance - and bolted. I ran as fast as I could (given wellies and deep sticky mud and dense milling crowds) for about thirty seconds, then stopped and laughed, realising, almost shocked, that I was alone - and had no reference points. Fortunately, these were plentiful - lots of people at Glastonbury take flags to help them find their tents or each other in crowds, and so I decided that as a reference point I would simply head towards whatever nearby flag resonated most with me - which as it turned out was a Yorkshire flag about a hundred yards away, but I never reached it.
   Halfway there, I stumbled upon one of the most exuberant and refreshingly strange geezers I had ever (and still have ever) seen: a middle-aged man with tobacco-yellowed teeth and scruffy grey stubble, shiny black aviator sunglasses, a tweed flatcap with an unidentifiable feather in it, a heavy sheepskin jacket, a t-shirt which struck me as eccentric but sadly as of now I can't remember what was on it, a kilt, and sandals (at Glastonbury 2016 - as such, his feet and legs were caked thickly in wet and dry mud up almost up to his knees); he had half a spliff in his left hand, a can of Polish lager in his right, and was beaming like a maniac as he belted out the lyrics to Parklife (though he was not alone in this - they were playing it on the big speakers, as they do in between acts). I decided that this gentleman made a far better reference point than a mere flag, identical to the one flying proudly as a translucent second curtain in my window at home - this character was pure Glasto: he had an aura of ridiculous yet vaguely respectable straightforwardness about him. Anyway, we spoke for about twenty minutes, in which time I learnt that he was the manager of a furniture and household appliances warehouse in Bognor Regis - and that he was a self-proclaimed Madness mega-fan, having previously been a bouncer who'd lucked his way into working with the band for a stint in the 1980s.*** Then the band came on (he asked me, "where're your mates mate?" and I told him they didn't want to come and see Madness and he bellowed, "tasteless bastards!") and played as hilarious and heartwarming a set full of classics as I could have hoped for, my new acquaintance whose name I never asked for singing and skanking along with me and the tens of thousands of others present.
   After they finished, I turned to him and said that I needed to go and find my friends, and wished him an excellent remainder of the festival - he asked me if I had a spare cigarette before I went, which I didn't think I had, but remembered I had earlier forgotten that I was looking after a packet of Camels for a female friend who had no pockets, and found it crumpled at the bottom of my tote bag, with only a single slightly-bent cig left. "Last one!" I said, fishing it out and handing it over, adding without much thought, "that's poetic innit?" At this, he raised his shades onto his cap and crinkledly squinted at me with fisherman eyes, almost regarding me with suspicion, and asked, "are you a poet?" to which I replied, "no,"**** confused, and he said, through a mouthful of cig-butt as he struggled to light it in the wind, "well you fucking should be kid, you've got the, the, whatever it is," at which I laughed, thanked him, and upon then returning to The Park found my friends surprisingly easily and made absolute mincemeat of trying to recount the story, fresh as it was, to them.

** I hope they're not reading this. They probably aren't.

*** This was quite a revelation. I asked him, "what's Suggs like to work with? I bet he's a reyt character!" and he made a noise that sounded like a pig coughing that was probably intended as an affirmative chuckle, and said, "yeh, yeh he is, a proper laugh."

**** This is no longer strictly true, of course - and though since starting writing poetry I have felt it to be a fairly organic process, not triggered or catalysed by any particular event or experience, this is such a good anecdote that also happened to happen before I properly started writing that I may as well claim ownership of it as my Poet Origin Story.

the Boy Who Built a Wall Around Himself

This book by Ali Redford and illustrated by Kara Simpson is more or less explained by its title. It's about overcoming childhood trauma and becoming vulnerable enough to develop real and meaningful relationships, grounded in trust and kindness, with other people, and its straightforward metaphorical slant on this works pretty well. Probably a good one to read with emotionally-repressed kids of five to nine or so.

   Sorry - I keep reading really short books as a brief escape from the heaviness that is my dissertation and then find myself compelled to write a blog post about them. This book was also pretty heavy to be fair but I've been reading about Daesh all morning, so in comparison...

   Okay fine no more super-short books. I feel vaguely guilty for artificially-inflating the little numbers in the right-hand column of my blog. Unfortunately, while I am working my way through an average of two or three books a day for Project Öcalan, none of these books are actually finished or read in full - just relevant chapters and sections. Some of them probably will be. Irregardless there are several in my (over summer considerably smaller than usual) Currently Recreationally Reading Pile that I'm towards the end of, so if the next post on here is also about some random kids' book that took me about as much time to digest as it takes me to have a normal-size/consistency poo, then I no longer deserve my loyal readership. Oh wait - there isn't one. I will read what I like. But frankly the stuff in my CRRP* is way more fun for me to read, and however wholesome this book itself may be to the stable development of emotionally-damaged children, it's not the kind of book I can mull over and say interesting stuff about either,** so to the purpose of generating quality content, I'm sticking with the CRRP and will stop perusing items on my parents' bookshelves willy-nilly.

* Now there's an initialism I can get behind. So many posts when I'm referring to stuff I'm currently reading of my own accord I have to tap out some fat selection of words - now condensed into a mere four letters! This truly is the future.

** I mean, if I really wanted to give it a go, I'd probably be able to extrapolate some points about fragile masculinity and how it takes root even in childhood, also the utter fundamentality of childhood care and loving nurturing environments for proper self-realisation - but that would be to stretch the purpose of the book which is to deconstruct the walls of the children being read this book, and I said that in the first paragraph and I reiterate this book probably would work quite well as heavy-handed metaphor in building those bridges, assuming it's being read in a context of stability and kindness so the child can let down their walls in complete trust - whatever. There are other books in the CRRP that deal with this in greater depth*** so I will discuss it in the posts about those.

*** Actually come to think of it, there aren't - but there is another pile of books with the specific designation of purpose being that it is comprised of items that will be added into the CRRP once I have finished items in it. This procedure is fairly non-standardised, and the limits of the CRRP are generally determined simply by how many bookmarks**** I have readily to hand; finishing a book means rotating its bookmark into a new item from the pre-CRRP pile (let's call that one the Pre-selected Upcoming Reading Pile, or PURP) and, obviously, adding it to the CRRP - though sometimes I will follow spontaneous personal whims or recommendations of friends or the necessity of impending due-back-at-library dates, and bypass the PURP to add such items directly into the CRRP... how did this get so complicated!? Anyway, there are items in the PURP that deal with, in proper depth, the potential non-fiction discussion topics thrown up by this book.

**** I ostensibly have eight of these, but the CRRP's average size tends to hover between eight and twelve items at any given time. There are several things that I've been using as bookmarks for a long time which are definitively Not Proper Bookmarks, once hopefully once I whittle down the CRRP to seven***** items (this will happen over summer, as the PURP and the contents of my entire bookshelf are in storage - all I have (except for a bag-for-life full of library books which I am not going to read all of because they are for Project Öcalan) are the CRRP as it stood at the end of June, and a half-dozen university library books which I plan on speed-reading), these can be relieved of their duty, and rotation can ensue with consistency. Writing it out like this makes it sound like I've given this a lot of thought, though I literally don't think about it at all (giving them initialisms makes it sound like a deliberative process); the CRRP and PURP are entirely organic circumstantial sets, and quite often books will sit in them for Long Times without my attention while I breeze through shorter or for-whatever-reason-more-appealing items that have passed through neither pile.

***** One of the bookmarks I'm not fond of. It's metal, which means it slides out of books (especially paperbacks) really easily, and it has engraved on it a list of fifty of the 'greatest books of all time', and while it does list some quality titles, it also lists Moby Dick - and moreover I have always been vaguely suspicious of efforts to rank and quantify things that are essentially qualitative, subjective, and aesthetic.

the Little Prince

This book, apparently* an incredibly-widely-loved classic by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - is one I didn't really know what to expect from other than probably a child-friendly tale with a vaguely uplifting message. It was exactly that, in the purest and most gorgeous form I've read in a long time - it is clear why this book is so massively beloved. It's about a pilot who has crash-landed in the Sahara Desert, and while trying to fix his engine, makes friends with a little dude who claims to be the prince from a really small planet far away. The prince asks questions, induces a roaring campfire of penetrative conversation about what really matters in life (clue: what is beautiful), and tells the pilot stories of some of the other tiny planets he's visited out there, and the somewhat-zany yet profound and poignant characters who live on them - and of course, he tells of how he came to Earth, and found it so much larger and emptier and lonelier than these other planets, but eventually settles upon learning things that help him appreciate timeless truth and beauty wherever he is. It is a story about uniqueness, about enjoying - nay, loving - life to the full, about the rampant absurdities that grown-ups, irrationally and inexorably, force upon themselves and children much to the efficient collective productivity of society at large but at the real cost of hampering our childlike ways of thinking about things that can truly make them still seem magic, unique, beautiful, wild and free. I don't know. It's pretty flipping magical. Tears may well up. Also it's got lovely simple little illustrations by the author. That's all I can be bothered to write as it's late and I've just read this in one sitting and I have to get up early to go to the library tomorrow** to continue speed-reading loads of political theory and stuff and while I do love my subject it's never as magical reading non-fiction as something like this. If you know anyone under the age of thirteen buy them a copy of this and read it to them because childhood is magical and grown-ups are pretty good at making the world suck - and the general thrust of this book's core message, I think, treads a pretty good line at compromise-guiding how we can emerge into the real grown-up world without losing our sense of wonder at the sheer unfettered majesty of life itself and all that is beautiful.

* Have a look at Wikipedia's list of best-selling books; this was the only place I'd ever heard of it before. It's apparently super popular in continental Europe, and we English-speakers just tend not to get as excited about things that have to have been translated. Like, I didn't even ever particularly intend to acquire or read this - a German family who have been staying at my parents' house left it to us and I saw it on the arm of the sofa and thought 'hey, if I remember rightly, that's on the Wikipedia list of worldwide all-time best-selling books, and it's pretty short, why not?' ~ and am glad I did.

** Well okay, today.***

*** Happy 4th of July, if you're American, or just anyone else who may care.

Where Cats Meditate

This book, edited by David Baird, is basically a purrfect (get it, perfect but with cat noises haha) little gift for someone who fulfills the following categories:

1. Buys into the whole mindfulness thing
2. But doesn't take it too seriously
3. Loves cats, obviously

   So basically it's one of those books that you would either read once and think "yeh okay" or retain upon a coffee-table or somewhere in the bathroom and you'd whip it out whenever you needed a dose of meditative feline wisdoms. It's literally just pictures of cats looking contemplative, counterposed against a pretty well-curated selection of lines of poetry, haiku, quotes from philosophers or profound thinkers, deep little apothegms - all in the kind of cat-like spirit of their sort of shambolic happy-go-lucky individualistic zen. It was neither as weirdly satirically-slanted nor as vacuously feline-cuteness-centric as other similar books about cats that I've read* - in fact, I feel it matched up to the brilliant depth of the feline spirit as presented and explored most wondrously in Sóseki Natsume's classic novel I Am A Cat; if you know what I mean, you know what I mean, regarding the nature of cats.

   "Letting the world be: I'm a monk, having an afternoon nap."

   Anyway, this would never have been something I would have typically gone out of my way to acquire - it was in a 20p bargain box at the Socialist Worker's stall at the Sharrow Festival on Saturday and in hindsight it was worth every penny. Chiefly because it's nice to have been able to read something entirely pointless - because now, until more or less the end of summer, it's hardcore dissertation time, so I'm going to be plunging my way through bits of dozens of books and finishing quite a few as well** - all non-fiction, all pretty heavy, and I am thoroughly excited by the prospect. You don't care about this, you probably didn't even read this paragraph when you noticed I'd stopped talking about the funny inner-peace-aid that is this cat book.
   That's okay.

the waves sound sometimes
close and sometimes far away
how much more of life

* There does seem to be a disproportionate numbers of books I end up blogging about that largely concern cats.

** I've had a handful of books out of the university library for literally months (years in a couple of cases) and obviously once I finish my dissertation I'll have to return them whether I've read them or not - so alongside actual research reading, I've got a short stack of dench political-economic bookage to practice my speed-reading on...